Lone Signal

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  • Revisiting Netrunner

    In her Run Better tip on the Fetal AI website, Ohio-based competitive Android: Netrunner player Ellen Biscotti writes:

    Play your tournament decks consistently. … I usually play terribly the first few games with a new deck. After that, I play it pretty well, but it takes many games before I start to really feel confident with the nuances of a deck, like scoring windows, ice placement, or timing my runs. If I didn’t stick with decks, I would never know how well I could do with them.

    Since diving into earnest Netrunner play around a year ago, I’ve been playing the same factions and roughly the same decks. Biscotti’s advice agrees with my own experiences and underscores one of the things I love about the Living Card Game (LCG) format and Netrunner specifically: Unlike games like Magic: The Gathering, datapacks in Netrunner have standard contents, meaning players theoretically build from the same card pool. There are no “chase cards” or pockets of extraordinarily powerful/rare cards accessible only to players with the cash to spend, the occasional unavailability of certain data packs notwithstanding. As such, Netrunner game outcomes aren’t determined so much by specific cards or decks as they are by players’ piloting abilities; a beginner armed with a Tier 1 deck isn’t guaranteed a win against a Worlds Top 8 player who’s using subpar cards.

    I point this out because, as I’ve said earlier, I’ve been playing the same decks since starting Netrunner a year ago. This includes using an NBN deck that runs the Making News identity, which comes with the Android: Netrunner Core Set.

    NBN: Making News

    Agenda (9)
    3x AstroScript Pilot Program
    2x Priority Requisition
    2x Private Security Force
    2x Project Beale

    Asset (8)
    2x Daily Business Show
    2x Jackson Howard
    2x Marked Accounts
    2x PAD Campaign

    Upgrade (2)
    2x Red Herrings

    Operation (16)
    2x Closed Accounts
    3x Hedge Fund
    2x Midseason Replacements
    2x Psychographics
    2x Punitive Counterstrike ••••
    2x Scorched Earth ••••• •••
    3x Sweeps Week

    Barrier (3)
    3x Eli 1.0 •••

    Code Gate (6)
    3x Pop-up Window
    2x RSVP
    1x Tollbooth

    Sentry (5)
    3x Data Raven
    2x Guard

    15 influence spent (max 15)
    20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
    49 cards (min 45)
    Cards up to All That Remains

    Deck built on http://netrunnerdb.com

    NBN as a Corporation faction has been one of the powerhouses in the recent meta, especially with the rise of NEH: Near-Earth Hub (an ID from the Upstalk datapack) and the attendant kill decks. The release of Data & Destiny also introduced new NBN IDs, each of which has seen frequent use and even the development of certain archetypes (see: Spark Agency and its brand of econ denial). My point is that there’s a wealth of decent-to-good NBN IDs out there, and — due to my limited card pool — I’m not using any of them.

    Has that harmed my Netrunner experience?

    It’s 2015 and I’m still Making News

    No. In fact, my Corp deck has had a good win rate since I’ve started using it, which I take as an example of how forgiving Netrunner is to people who play despite not having all of the released cards. Mine is not an optimal deck list by any means. My core strategies – score easily advanceable agendas, and/or kill the Runner who tries to steal them – aren’t novel or groundbreaking. I’m inclined to think this deck would work better with, say, a few agenda swaps, Fast Track subbing for Red Herrings, maybe even just a switch from Making News to NEH. But I’ve still won many of my games with this deck, and I cite that as one of the reasons why I love Netrunner. It’s a well-designed game, and the proof is in how players are allowed their successes even without having all of the cards (and certainly not all of the “good” ones).

    Granted, I’ve mostly played against the 3-6 friends with whom I’ve established a weekly Netrunner group (this doubles as our meta), but I’d like to think this situation also illustrates the truth of Biscotti’s advice. Thanks to our regular games, my opponents have seen all of my deck’s tricks and have had the opportunity to tech against those tricks. I’ve managed to keep winning because, in that same period, I’ve also had the opportunity to suss out the nuances of playing this particular deck and figure out how to play it beyond relying merely on unknown/unexpected cards.

    There’s a healthy competitive scene in the metro, and I’ve actually been to a Game Night once, though only as a spectator. I’m hoping to change that this year. I’d like to take an NBN deck, and will likely be taking this one, give or take a few tweaks. The addition of newer datapacks and deluxe boxes to our group’s common card pool gives me more options for improving this particular list, so I’ll be working on that. Keeping Biscotti’s advice in mind, though, I don’t think there will be any fundamental changes to the deck’s core strategies in the near future.

  • The drip, drip, drip of existence

    I’ve recently started catching up to Season 3 of Elementary. The series remains great – brilliant, even, especially when we consider the self-assurance and deftness with which it ventures into topics and themes beyond the usual scope of weekly procedurals.

    The Eternity Injection, one of the episodes I watched yesterday, demonstrated this fearless precision well in a standout scene between Sherlock and Joan. Near the end of the episode, Joan asks Sherlock about his recent skipping of Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and Sherlock answers with an explanation that opens the way towards a thoughtful, nuanced dissection of addiction.

    The problem, it turns out, goes deeper than the run-in Sherlock had with a fellow NA attendee in a previous episode, and I’m glad the show actually went out of its way to acknowledge and highlight this. When he finally opens up, Sherlock laments the endless grind of sobriety, describing the process as the constant, tedious attempt to fix a leaky faucet. “Is this it?” he says, a question that encapsulates the underwhelming “triumph” of staying sober.

    I found the scene immensely powerful, as much for its emotional resonance as for its sheer objective accuracy. As someone dealing with mental illness – depression and severe anxiety, to be exact – I saw, in Sherlock’s despair, a clear reflection of many of my own struggles with getting better.

    There’s a euphoric moment – which, for me, occurred some time after I’d first started therapy – when you first notice significant improvements in your condition. I can actually get better, I’d thought then, staring blankly down the hall outside my therapist’s office, dazed from the strong and sudden blow of hope that hit me upside the head. “Better” is possible. Well. It’s not that the idea is wrong; it just glosses over the everyday realities that constitute “better.”

    The thing is, “better” is not an endpoint. It’s not a place you reach, one that you’re then guaranteed to occupy for the rest of your life. As I’ve discovered (and wanted to cry about many times), “getting better” is a long, often difficult, certainly tedious crawl, and there’s no definite end to it. There’s no point where you can plop yourself down and stop trying, content that you will never be at risk of anxiety attacks or depression again.

    Staying “better” will never be completely effortless. I developed good routines, but these will need adjustment as my circumstances change; some days, no matter how closely I stick to my “game plans” — all these little measures that add up to help keep me healthy — things still go wrong and I find myself unable to breathe, wholly paralyzed by a mind racing away from me at the speed of frenzied, burning thought.

    This doesn’t mean the effort to “get better” is futile, of course. There is immeasurable value in trying to keep hold of the ground you’ve gained, as there is in striving, always, to gain a little more.

    But sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Sometimes “better” isn’t that first joyous, expansive burst of possibility, that realization that you can have a future that is actually worth looking forward to. Sometimes “better” is having just enough energy to roll out of bed when you couldn’t even bring yourself to consider it before – and of course, sometimes moments like those don’t feel like they’re enough, don’t feel like they ought to qualify as improvement. And sometimes, as happens to me quite often, you’re doing okay, but you realize that you still need to perform all these dull, tedious, repetitive tasks, just to ensure the possibility of “doing okay” tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.

    That’s when it becomes tempting to ask, “Is this it?” That’s when it becomes tempting to, as Sherlock puts it, surrender to the drip, drip, drip of existence.

    What I found impressive about The Eternity Injection, beyond Sherlock’s eloquent and strikingly precise description of this struggle, was the characters’ – and the show’s – acknowledgement that there are no easy resolutions to this problem.

    Faced with Sherlock’s answer, Joan at first tries to offer answers, reassurance: “You have your work. You have me. You’re alive.” But as Sherlock points out, these sources of reassurance won’t always carry the same potency. One can remain appreciative of these things, even as one reaches the point where these things have been turned to so frequently that they lose all meaning.

    Well, what do you say to a problem like that, then? I love how perfect Joan’s response was: simply asking if there’s anything else she can do to help, and then taking a step back, to just be there.

    From my own experiences with friends and loved ones, there’s often this expectation (an insistence, even) that there is a ready answer just waiting to be found, some perspective or other that one need only discover and cleave to for this problem to be happily and permanently resolved. But it’s true, it’s not always as easy as, say, simply reminding yourself of the good, fulfilling things in life. Because who hasn’t done that, who hasn’t attempted this way or that to save themselves in those precarious moments of possible relapse? Receiving the same attempted answers from others rarely changes these answers’ effectiveness, or lack thereof. As Sherlock and Joan’s exchange illustrated so well, sometimes the best “answer” you can receive in such a situation isn’t a frantic search for reassurances, but a simple, quiet affirmation that being well is an unending process that you will nonetheless never go through alone.

  • Words and Phrases (Not Quite) Legally Defined

    “Words are the currency of law,” our professor said, capping off our block’s introduction to legal history. Who gets what, when, and how — that, he said, was the meaning of power, and it was a meaning that law could write and change with mere words.

    I was riveted. As a recent literature graduate just two weeks into an exploratory semester of law, hearing the field cast in the frame of language felt like the answer I thought it would take months, if not years, to find.

    Consequently, I left law school soon after.

    In the days that followed, a good bit of my time was spent explaining why. Growing up, I had a steady diet of words. I was active in campus journalism; I dabbled in creative writing; my mom regaled everyone with stories of the ridiculous methods I used just to read books in the shower. In college, I studied literature, and I loved everything from the endless readings to the printer-killing papers. The natural next step, people often told me, was law school. It made sense: law is a field built on words. Words, in a way, were my life; but as I have come to learn, the reverse is truer, for me as for everyone else.

    Our lives speak for us, too. Without saying a thing, someone who rises from poverty to become a titan of industry tells us of hope, grit, and perseverance, just as college dropouts who go on to change the landscape of technology tell us of innovation and possibility. When I was a kid, people would ask me if I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. Many children, at one point or another, get asked the same. “A doctor, so I can heal others,” we might have said; or, “A lawyer, so I can defend people.” Often, though, what those questions really want to know is: how will your life speak of achievement, of distinction, of success?

    Medicine or law? Engineering or nursing? College or searching for a job? Whatever the options, to pick one or the other (or to select something different altogether) is to communicate your circumstances, beliefs, values, and aspirations in distinct and specific ways. Word choice matters, whether we’re writing office memos or the stories of our lives. And hearing law characterized as words that day in class, I knew—those were not the words I wanted to write my life with.

    Choices, like any language, carry their share of clichés: familiar, established expressions that we can use to convey certain notions or impressions with ease. In writing their lives, some people deploy these phrases deliberately, consciously, purposefully. That’s thoughtfulness and self-awareness, and that’s worth admiring. But many others, myself included, don’t put as much thought into it. Instead we punch in these ready-made phrases, driven by an unexamined belief in their certainty and value.

    Clichés are clichés because they are everywhere; they are everywhere because they worked well enough to have been accepted as the default. But that, I’ve learned, is what makes clichés so dangerous: they’ve become automatic. They’ve become the options and paths that we can (and often do) take without thinking; they’ve become the easiest way to pad our autobiographies without having these mean anything to us, let alone to anyone else. In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, the author David Foster Wallace discussed the notion of “default settings,” noting that these were insidious not because they were evil or sinful, but because they were unconscious. This same lack of deliberate engagement blinds us to our potentially habitual surrender to the automatic, and leaves us with a vocabulary of choices that has been reduced to the most limited of entries.

    “What is the ratio?” another professor once asked us, trying to steer our block to a more thorough discussion of the rationale for a court decision. “What is the ratio?” He’d paused, looked out the window, and grinned. “‘What is the ratio?’ When I die, I’ll have them put that on my tombstone.” It’s a memory I’m going to carry with me far beyond the bounds of law school, for two reasons.

    First, it’s a good reminder of what a life written through deliberate choice sounds like. Here was someone who chose, every day, to teach students how to think, no matter how vexing the task often got. That is, here was someone who knew what message he wanted to send, and who affirmed, every day, his choice of how to say it. Whether or not our professor did put the question on his tombstone, it was something that his decisions and actions would continue to ask long after he’d carried them out. In a way, we are all our own epitaphs.

    Second, there is the question itself. What is the ratio? Why do our lives say what they say, and why do they say it in that way? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to answer this with complete certainty. But to even ask at all is to recognize that our lives can convey something valuable.

    I know I want to build a life that speaks of service, honor, and excellence. Others have done and are choosing to do so through law, as others will also choose to do in the future. But I came to law carried along by my default settings, and no one can communicate service, honor, or excellence by simply living out a cliché. After all, if we want our lives to speak with fluency, meaning, and conviction, then our work doesn’t stop at finding something worthwhile to say. It’s equally important to consider how we choose to say it. What we convey and embody, and how: that, it seems, is the meaning of character—and as my brief stint in law school helped show me, it is a meaning that demands to be written and shaped by choices made in nothing less than the grand manner.

  • Running by myself

    Most people in my neighborhood equate a good fitness regimen with waking up bright and early. Peering out the window at 6 or 6:30 AM, it isn’t rare to see people dressed in singlets and shorts walking back home from the nearby track. Such early starts make sense, though: many of these people are in their thirties, forties, or older, and a good number of them likely have jobs and other responsibilities slated for the rest of the day.

    Recently my dad has been trying to establish a healthier lifestyle for himself, and he’s been inviting me to join him on his walks. What ends up happening is that he walks out the door at 6 in the morning and I wake up just in time to welcome him back at around 7 or so. He often ribs me for this over breakfast, but that’s okay; I think having something to be smug about helps keep him on track. 🙂 I draw the line when he starts insinuating that my inability to work out in the early hours is a major flaw in my fitness routine, though. Just because I’m not sweating before the sun rises doesn’t mean my routine is any worse than anyone else’s.

    An early-morning routine has never worked for me. Mostly this is because I don’t always sleep as early as that schedule requires; if I want to get enough sleep and still be up for a workout at 5 in the morning, I’ve got to be snoozing by 9 PM, and this almost never happens. Instead, I work out in the late morning, afternoon, or evening. On the days I’ve alloted for strength training, I do bodyweight exercises before I head out for lunch — and as for cardio, I run in the late afternoon or evening, before I buckle down on the work I need to do for the next day.

    This makes for some great moments, like those times when I’ve got the glare of a coming sunset in my eyes and a cool breeze messing up my hair.

    Because the regular crowd are usually done by morning, I often have the track to myself. The silence is one of my favorite parts of an afternoon run: there’s something soothing about hearing the steady rhythm of your own feet on the track and feeling as though you’re moving through a world that’s content to stay still and let you pass.

    A lot of people have compared running to meditation, or found strong connections between the two. When I’m out running at five in the afternoon, chasing after the deepening orange glow on the horizon, that’s when these ideas click for me. Running can be an energizing way to kick off the day, and sometimes it does that for me when my schedule permits. But a run can also be a comforting, calming thing — a balm for a bad day, or a gentle close to a good one. I’m thankful to have experienced that side of running so early in the program, and I’m looking forward to the days ahead.

  • “Underwear collected”: Anxiety and running

    I started the Couch to 5K running program today. I’m using the C25K app in tandem with the excellent Zombies, Run! (which really only means I have both apps open at the same time during a run), and so far the combination of music and continuous item collection has helped keep me motivated.

    Gamification as a fitness approach appeals to my nerd brain and to my neurotic, anxious, track-everything self, so Zombies, Run! seems to be a good way to harness my mental and psychological quirks and use them to further — instead of hamper — my health goals. There will always be another item to collect or another building to repair if I want to survive the zombie apocalypse, and those are helpful goals to hold onto on those days when I don’t feel like sticking to routine.

    I’ve asked several friends, both offline and from various online communities, for advice on establishing a running habit. One of the first tips most of them gave involved mindset: Find the right motivation, something that will help you gain discipline instead of fizzling out. In my case, “losing weight” or identifying a specific number on the scale to aim for aren’t good approaches, because (1) I’m not really running for weight loss anyway and (2) it encourages a fixation on numbers rather than the overall fitness/health aspect of things. So my sustainable goal/motivation is to improve my cardiovascular fitness. This means my benchmarks will involve things like pace, endurance, and overall strength as opposed to how much I weigh per week.

    Aside from this, I’ve also started an Instagram account, where I post photos of things/people I encounter during my runs. Hopefully this will be another non-weight-related way to get enthused about going out for a run. I want running to be something more than just an activity I “have to do,” and making it a project of discovery and exploration seems to be a good way to go about that. Zombies and supplies aren’t the only things I’ll be running into, after all.

    Today’s run was an okay start for the whole program. I haven’t had the chance to replace my busted earphones yet, so I made do by using my phone speakers and just setting the volume to acceptable levels. Thankfully there was no one around while I was running, so no stares for the girl whose phone issues intermittent notifications that she’s just picked up new zombie apocalypse supplies like a mobile phone or a pair of underwear.

    My glasses had also snapped from last week’s aikido class, and I’ve yet to get replacement frames or contacts, so I was also running almost-blind today. Not much of an issue, though, because there was little foot and vehicle traffic along the roads I ran today. It’s a bit troublesome to run when you have barely any idea what you’re headed towards, but luckily my vision isn’t so far gone that I can’t spot lampposts from a few meters away. I used those as landmarks throughout my run, and I got home okay.

    It’s easy to be discouraged by a first run done under such sub-optimal conditions. Now that I’ve actually finished the run, though, I’m feeling oddly motivated instead: if I can finish a run while nearly blind, and while straining to hear both my music and Zombies, Run! commentary through crappy phone speakers, then certainly I can get out of the house and keep running in better or worse conditions.

  • Zottis Classic Low-Fat Yogurt

    I opened up a tub of Zottis Classic Yogurt this morning, and as I savored that first cold, creamy spoonful, a thought popped into my head: “I miss Bulgarian yogurt.”

    And then, on the heels of that sentiment: “But I don’t even really remember what Bulgarian yogurt is like.”

    It took five minutes and a couple more spoonfuls of reflection to recall the taste of the 400-gram yogurt tubs I used to eat during my exchange trip to Bulgaria last June. Strange, how something that used to be routine can feel so distant. I could nip down to the convenience store on the opposite end of the block and grab one of the many, many varied yogurt tubs in the dairy section in less than ten minutes — twenty, if we factor in the time it would take to browse the snacks and baked goods, and wonder if I should also buy some dried figs or mushroom-and-cheese banitsa.

    Now it takes the same amount of time to recall the technicolor labels and stark fluorescent lighting that I supposedly miss.

    Can we really miss something we don’t remember? I should be ashamed for not remembering more than I do right now, really. The trip to Bulgaria was outrageous, at least for a college student who would have to spend months in a country where she knew absolutely nobody, and it wasn’t the overwhelming, life-changing experience I expected it to be. I’ve avoided thinking about it because of that — because of the fear that, after all that time and trouble, maybe the trip wasn’t worth it.

    Mostly I just walked around and took photos and wondered where the rush of wonder was hiding. There were small moments, quiet but sublime: the wind trying to push me off the cliffs of Kaliakra; the hush of the controlled environment built to house some Thracian ruins; the prickle of sun through the fabric of my shirt on the sands of Varna. But those aren’t the things you gush about to your relatives back home, are they? It should’ve been exclamation points all around: Scuba diving in the Black Sea! Bungee jumping off a busy metropolitan bridge! Spelunking the craggy headlands of the Balkans! Nobody is moved by a grainy video of seagulls whirling around a spotlit cathedral at midnight — at least, nobody who wasn’t actually there to see it in person, and even those who were might well be too ashamed to admit to anything.

    The metrics of remembrance are strange. As I mulled over this morning’s yogurt — a tad creamier than the plain one we usually get — I remembered the fresh whipped cream that topped off the one sundae I let myself have in the self-proclaimed land of wonderful dairy. Maria, my host, told me that the Japanese like the specific qualities of Bulgarian yogurt so much, they take great pains to import Lactobacillus bulgaricus. The typical grocery-store yogurt here uses L. d. bulgaricus; Zottis doesn’t specify. In any case, Zottis — while creamier — doesn’t taste close to the yogurt that I sipped on the overnight trains to Sofia, to Plovdiv. Similar rickety trains brought us improvised games, the splattering of Oberyn Martell’s head in Game of Thrones’ eighth episode, and conversations with strangers from Plovdiv’s suburbs. As for the sundae, it was a tall glass of raspberry, and similar glasses gave me and my fellow interns something else to have in common.

    Maybe that’s the takeaway, or one of the takeaways, at least: that the things you learn, the things you eventually hold onto, the things you take home, they’re not always the ones that you expected or planned. My fellow interns included beer-guzzling former track stars and shisha-seeking frat boys. Most of the time, I felt like the people who occupied the circles that exchange led me to occupy just weren’t my crowd. And maybe they weren’t, but that same beer-drinking track star bonded with me over Japanese music and anime and shared temperaments; the same people who invited me to try a hookah also talked to me about French literature and Game of Thrones and nerd culture; that is, the same people who weren’t my speed turned out to be, well, kind of my speed anyway.

    That still isn’t something you write home about. Especially not the beer-guzzlers and the hookahs.

    Neither is the sentiment — which it has taken me this long to even allow myself to articulate — that sometimes you’re really just chasing the feeling of no one here knows me. Yesterday, my parents and I watched That Thing Called Tadhana, the one movie this year that will probably be responsible for the sudden exodus of soul-searching twenty-somethings out to the mountains of Baguio and Sagada. “Ito na ang buhay mo ngayon,” Mace said at one point, and okay, maybe that was part of the Bulgaria trip’s value for me. For all our unexpected shared interests, none of the people I came to know there would ever be part of my regular, day-to-day life back home. That was freeing and depressing in equal measure. No one here knows me. In any case, it became my life for months, and it gave me the space to do my own thing.