Nick - Additive and Multiplicative Forces

When I started playing Animal Crossing, I would fish vigorously until my inventory was full, run to the store, and repeat until I was able to pay off my first loan. Such is the way that Animal Crossing is played: make money, spend money, get things.

I got pretty good at catching fish. I figured out where I should go fish to make the most money in the least amount of time. I knew what fish were profitable, and sometimes even what time of day I should fish to earn the most money.

It got to the point where I knew a ballpark estimate of how long I would need to play in order to reach my next financial benchmark. And as you might guess, it gets pretty tiring to look and see that it will only take four more hours of catching fish until something happens.

So I started looking for other ways to make money, and I happened upon an old lady who sells turnips, which can be bought in bulk and then sold for a different price that fluctuates day-to-day. Pretty soon I was playing the game way less (because I didn't need to fish as much) and instead checking the prices every day on the turnips I had bought with my sizable fish-fortune. And I was making way more money than I made while fishing.


All this to say that I've been thinking about finances and investment recently, probably because I'm paying rent and using my bank account a lot more often nowadays. We see my Animal Crossing experience mirrored in the real world: people add to their money until they have enough to multiply it.

Retirement plans and whatnot work because money is put in over time, and then it accrues interest. With the magic of compound interest, money set aside for retirement grows pretty substantially.

We see the same principle happening with billionaire investors. They never start poor and make their fortune in investing; they start with money and then they multiply it, and their gains become more significant as they accrue more capital to invest.

I would love to see some research into how investment education and knowledge correlates with wealth.

-Nick.

Nick - It's Definitely Time For Conor To Shave

Listen, I know I'm probably wrong about a lot of things. And I'm okay with that! For example, I couldn't tell you much about the probability of a meteor hitting the earth within the next few hours. I'm sure there are experts who know all about that sort of thing, but I am not one of these experts.

In fact, there aren't a lot of things I consider myself an expert at. I read a lot of political science literature, but I wouldn't call myself a political scientist. There are plenty of people who know more than me. In fact, there are probably a lot of misconceptions I have that I don't even know I'm wrong about. There's just a whole lot of uncertainty.

There is one thing, however, that I am absolutely not uncertain about.

It's time for Conor O'Brien to shave.

But my stubble totally says 'party!'

I do consider myself an expert on Conor O'Brien's facial hair. I've seen it in various states of growth. I've seen it during the harrowing final weeks of no-shave november. I've seen it blossoming onto his face like a heinous insect shedding its larval skin. And if there's one thing I can tell you about Conor O'Brien's facial hair, it is this: avoid.

I'm not sure you're getting the full effect from that picture up there. Click on it and take a closer look. Go ahead, click.

Actually, don't worry, I've got you. Let's zoom in.

Don't you wonder what my whiskers would feel like against your soft lips?

Oh boy. Wow. I hope that isn't too much for you.

If I were to describe Conor O'Brien's facial hair, I would say it's kind of like a carpet made of pubic hair that is also balding. Sometimes you're talking to him and you catch a glimpse of it and you just lose your train of thought.

Conor O'Brien's head-hair is just looking better and better these days. He's playing a lot more Pokemon recently, which I think is cool. And, ladies and gentlemen, I want Conor O'Brien to be the best that he can be. If you're out there, Conor, I know this may seem harsh. But everything I do, I do out of love.

Yeesh.

-Nick.

Nick - Fuck You, I've Written 119 Classic Brians

And I went through and tagged all of them.

(Minus one about jellyfish that Blogger has, for some reason, decided shall never be updated, edited, deleted, or otherwise amended.)

Remember when Eliot posted this? Ohohohohoho! The foolishness! While Eliot was contemplating who had got to 100 first, I was sitting comfortably at 107.

"While it is unknown as to whether Nick or I have accumulated more blog posts over CB's existence (it's certainly turned into a two-man game of late), let's just pretend that I own the lion's share." - Eliot Sill

Ha! Man, I am so hard working.

You might think that just because I've missed a few posts, I'm out of the game. Don't count on it, bitches. Daddy's home.

-Nick.

Nick - And Look

I'm writing another one right here, JUST BECAUSE I CAN.

In Which Nick Talks About Politics

Fair warning: what is about to follow is little more than an unsubstantiated and undirected discourse, fueled by unabashed partisanship and proliferous naivety.

We won.

But hold on, I'm not talking about the presidency. The victories I'm talking about are in the margins; behind the scenes, where they can easily be missed. The election is a giant box of circuitry, a complex interactions of millions of parts, which at the end of the first Tuesday in November every four years outputs a "0" or a "1". A "D" or an "R". But I'm more interested in what's going on inside.

The first game changer that this election brought about was Nate Silver. For those who don't know, Nate Silver is a statistician, New York Times columnist, and speculatively a witch who has been forecasting elections with frightening accuracy. But despite the jokes about sorcery, what Nate Silver is doing is actually removing the smoke and mirrors from politics. In predicting the election almost perfectly, he dispelled the myth that elections are governed by some indefinable "will of the people" or the mysterious power of "momentum." Elections all boil down to numbers that we can study and understand. I'm hoping that (and here's where the naivety comes in) we are going to see this sports-style punditry fall away, and replace it with a new kind of political commentary. One that focuses on facts.

The second thing is diversity. We are finally, finally, in the year 2012, starting to see the house and the senate get just a teensy bit more diverse. Wisconsin elected the nation's first openly gay senator. Hawaii brought in the nation's first Asian American woman. On top of that, this senate session will have a record number (20) of women serving.

And then the last thing, and this is really where the naivety comes in, is a demographic shift the nature of which has never been seen before. Mitt Romney won seniors. All of them, everywhere. And whites. And men. But we're finally getting to the point where the woman vote is just as important as the man vote; where the black vote is just as important as the white vote; and where the young vote will be the deciding factor of the future of our country.

In Colorado, they voted to legalize marijuana. Seniors opposed the measure by a 2-to-1 margin, but it still passed. The same happened in Washington. Maine and Maryland voted to legalize gay marriage. And many of these measures had been attempted before in these same states. The fact of the matter is that the median voter is not the same person that he or she was 10 or even 4 years ago. The millenium generation has arrived, and they are socially liberal. If I'm right about this, then this trend (despite fluctuations) will continue to develop for the rest of our lifetimes.

Maybe I'm still just high on the knowledge that my candidate won; but I'm excited about the future.

-Nick.

Nick - We Had The Magic All Along -OR- The Future Of The Shadow Of My Footprints -OR- Make It A Priority To Learn: A Reprise

You know what's cool? Statistics. Statistics are so cool. This year I'm taking a class that involves writing a very light junior thesis (only has to be around 20 pages) on a topic of my choosing relating to the politics of international development. And before this year, I thought statistics were math on a piece of paper.

I know a guy working on his PhD, who once told me that I should "take more statistics. Statistics is like magic for grad students." Well, Robby does not lie.

When you want to do research and actually contribute to the field to which you have dedicated your life, you need the tools to evaluate the world. Evaluate the world in a way that can easily be translated to empirical numbers and facts. And to do that, even though sometimes it's boring, you need to know your math.

I feel like a lot of political science majors don't really get it. They don't learn anything and they spend their entire undergraduate career in courses about theory and political philosophy. But hold that thought for a second, I'll come back to it.

Today Monday night improv was cancelled, and I had some free time. I discovered Khan Academy, which is a great place to go if you want to learn things. And it helped me figure out all the statistics trouble I was having.

I think that with all the great free resources we have available to us now, we can move to a new generation of higher education. A generation that is more focused on research than theory, more focused on learning practical skills instead of leaving it up to you to put your skill set and the real world together. I feel like I stumbled into a tract of the political science department reserved for a few brave and lucky guinea pigs; here's hoping that the people of the future will get this opportunity earlier and more consistently.

I want to see higher education advance. I want to see people understand more, instead of just learning more. I want to see students learn how to do research instead of how to look at it.

I'm rambling, so I'm just going to cut myself off here and end on the same soap box that I ended my first ever Classic Brian post on: make it a priority to learn. Before this year, I didn't know that empirical research was a thing that one could study. There's a whole world of material out there you haven't even heard of yet.

-Nick.

Nick - How Does Graphs

Apparently I can't use graphing software

Nick - Julie Brady

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Julie Brady. A little while ago I said, "guys, what should I write a Classic Brian about?" and Julie Brady said "ME!"

So here we are!

Above is a picture of Julie pretending to be a whale in an improv show. Julie is very good at improv! But I don't think she knows very much about whales.

This is me and Julie. Julie and I are in two improv troupes together! Also I live with her. Julie Brady plays guitar for DeBono and is also in PK Barnjam.

Julie is very good at improv and at guitar! Julie Brady is not very good at circulation or doing things. She is always cold. She is also a cynical bastard. Sometimes Julie Brady plays really mean characters. I'm a little afraid of her.

Sad Julie

I never call Julie Brady "Jules." That name is reserved for Giuli Bailey, who is sort of like the anti-Julie Brady in a lot of ways. (Including her name.)

Even though she likes taking busses and she always complains about the temperature of our house, Julie Brady is a good friend and a good teammate. Right now I'm sitting in her room and we're all talking about our parents. She has really good taste in music, and she is totally punk. Yesterday she taught me how to play the beginning of American Idiot on guitar!

One time I walked into my room and she was wearing my girlfriend's clothes. She spends a lot of time watching me play Animal Crossing. She is very pretty, but refuses to wear skirts or dresses. And these are only a few of the reasons that she is the best.


Julie Brady, will you marry me?


-Nick.

Nick - The PK Barn: A Virtual Tour

For those who are unaware, I am living with my improv team this semester.
 

Reviewers have stated that my room is "sexy," and that the curtains are "the color of wine."

Nick - Skeletons In Our Closet (A PK Barn Story)

I found myself outside of our house, swallowed by a night so muggy and humid that I could swim to the back door faster than I could walk there. I stood near the back of the driveway and stared down my opponent: a pile of trash which could nearly match me in height and weight. It stared back, and didn't blink.

Kate, my usual partner in crime, and Julie, the laziest of my roommates, stood behind me in a mix of their night clothes and whichever shoes were closest to the door. Julie was the first to step forward and attack.

This monster was the product of our own laziness and inadequacy. We had, in our zeal to move in, set up internet, electricity, and water (in that order) and called it a day. Garbage collection never entered my mind until I finally read that letter from my landlord nearly four days after move-in. Of course, by then it was too late to have garbage pickup until next week.

Julie and I each grabbed two bags, holding them at arms' length, while Kate took up one particularly nasty-looking one and attempted to wrestle it into some configuration which would keep it as far from her as possible. We marched them somberly down the driveway to the curb.

This pile of garbage didn't accumulate over night. It started with the boxes. Robel and I moved in and unpacked our furniture. The remnants were several cardboard boxes. "I've just been setting them on the side of the house," said Robel. I was happy to comply. The side of the house seemed so far away. So out of mind.

"It's leaking! It's leaking!" Said Julie in her distressed voice. We could only keep marching as she was sprayed with liquid, the nature of which we hesitated to question. We reached the curb to find that there was, in fact, a garbage collection bin there. Good, this is good. Better than setting the bags on the curb in our lawn, as was the original plan.

A cardboard box is a harmless thing. It can be set in the grass on the side of the house, with all of its various contents inside, to be picked up at a later date and tossed into the garbage, or the recycling if you're really feeling wild. But after two weeks of garbage buildup and nonstop rain, a cardboard box becomes a very different sort of thing. No longer a contained entity, it splits into several smaller creatures which cannot all be picked up easily with one hand. It wore a crown of about 10 kitchen bags, filled with all the things we wanted to get out of out house as soon as possible.

We wheeled the garbage bin back to the cardboard-toothed monster, and began the daunting task of moving each bag roughly three feet into the bin.

"Maggots! Maggots!" screamed Kate, as she unveiled a second fermenting layer of garbage bags.

We peeled back maybe three layers, each more disgusting than the last, having had time to mature out here in the wild. Finally we reached the bottom few trash bags. They were slimy. They had not been tied shut, and their contents threatened to spill all over the grass were they moved in the wrong sort of way.

"Well," said Julie, gesturing toward the remaining bags, "You're a man, Nick."

They both looked at me. My mind wandered to the missing members of our family. I wish I had made Robel come out here, even though he was clearly trying to get some sleep before morning classes. Where is Anna? I haven't seen Anna since practice. If only Paul were conscious, I would drag him up from the basement and have him move these last few bags.

But I guess it's on me.

I carefully transplanted each bag, grabbing them by as little as I could in an attempt to minimize my exposure to their secretions. I took the flashlight from Kate to keep it steadily on the bags, making sure nothing could jump out and take me by surprise.

Finally we slammed the lid on those awful creatures (A lid that refused to fully close) and dragged the garbage bin back to the curb. As we headed inside, I took a remorseful glance at the cardboard base of our resident monster; the bin was too full to accommodate the last of the creature. Though we had taken the day, it was still there, waiting for us. It would grow back. It would be here next week.

An uneasy victory.

-Nick.

Nick - In The Arms Of God

All kind deities cast aside
In favor of some shadowy appendage
Reaching across the sky to bring me to this moment

To cradle me in darkness
And soothingly assure my restless heart
That heaven would hold no sway through its reign

And all the bright shimmering believers
Will be cast down by this cruel god

Safe in its reach I ascend the steps to hell
Finally rewarded for my oozing soul

Knowing what fate awaits
How many good citizens would defect
Casting aside all love and goodness for salvation

And aware of evil's triumph
Would there remain any paragons
Who sacrifice their soul to ignite some fleeting kindness


-Nick.

Nick - True Stories About Jellyfish, Part 4

So last week I went to Shedd Aquarium, where the current theme is Jellyfish. Interesting, they call them Sea Jellies instead of Jellyfish. (They aren't actually fish, after all.)

The real reason I'm writing this is to show you these guys.

These are Jelly Blubbers (neither of the videos get their name right), and they are fucking awesome. That video is a minute long, but you only have to watch a couple seconds to understand.

Their movements are... mesmerizing...

I'm going to throw you one more video. I want you to watch the back of the tank, because at about 6 seconds one of them goes careening into the bottom of the glass and just sort of bounces off.

I mean, what else can I say? Jelly Blubbers are awesome.

Nature, man. Fuck.

-Nick.

Nick - True Stories About Jellyfish, Part 3

We went to Virginia Beach a couple years ago, my family and I. Age 16. We stayed with my aunt and uncle, who had two kayaks. (Kayaking is and always will be one of my favorite activities.) They also lived directly on the beach.

One morning I was building a sand castle, and there was a group of little kids freaking out, so we headed over to see what was up. When we got close, there was this huge ol' jellyfish just swooshing around in the shallows where people swim, and the kids were all scared / intrigued by it. So my dad gets our net and fills our bucket with sea water (we're experienced with catching sea animals) and he puts the jellyfish in. The kids all gather round to check it out.

"What are you going to do with it?" one kid asks my dad.

"I guess I'll bury it in the sand," said my dad, "because I can't let it go here where people are swimming."

So the kids watched it for a few more minutes, and then they sort of lost interest and went back to playing.

"Don't worry, I've got this." I said to my dad.

I went and got the kayak.

I filled the jellyfish bucket with more water and then strapped it into the back seat of the kayak with those stretchy cables that people use in cars. Then I set out.

I battled my way out for more than half an hour, way past the pier. I was so far from the shore that I had no idea where I had set out from; the entire stretch of beach I had ever explored was just a short line on the horizon.

Then I put the bucket on my lap, and looked in.

"Goodbye. Stay out here, okay?" I said aloud to the jellyfish, and then dumped it into the water.

It danced around in the sunlight for a moment, as if to show me that it was really grateful, and then it disappeared instantly beneath the water. I started heading back toward shore. It's way harder to go back than to go out. I thought about my new jellyfish friend as I began the very, very long kayak ride back to the beach.



A couple minutes into the trip, it hit me: I had forgot to ask its name.

-Nick.

Nick - True Stories About My Wisdom Teeth Surgery Yesterday, Part 1

So yesterday I got all four of my wisdom teeth removed, the most interesting part of which was the anesthesia they used. Basically I don't remember anything that happened after taking two small pills when I woke up.

I got up early, at 5:45, and came downstairs to take my pills. (No breakfast; no food or drink 8 hours before surgery.) I brushed my teeth (without swallowing any water) and downed the pills. I went downstairs and started reading a GameFAQ on Super Smash Brothers Brawl. (A Pokemon Trainer player guide, specifically.)

I kept thinking that I didn't feel anything yet. And then I sort of had that feeling where you think it's working but you know that it's only because you're thinking about it.

Finally my mom called down that it was time to go. I stood up. As soon as I took my first step I felt like everything was moving very very quickly and I just wanted to slow down. I very very slowly made my way to the stairs, almost missing several steps along the way. I tried to turn the door knob and I fell backwards down the stairs, almost giving my mom a heart attack.

The interesting thing was, in my head I was still certain that the medicine wasn't really affecting me. I felt completely normal to myself.

I remember getting out of the car and walking into the office. I tweeted this, but I don't remember it. I remember the doctor nodding in my direction as he came into the office. I remember him putting the IV in, and it pinched but I couldn't say anything. I remember that I was mad that the surgery was over and there was nothing hooked into the IV but the needle was still in. Somebody took it out. I woke up on my couch. I think I played Super Smash Brothers sometime in between coming home and waking up on the upstairs couch. I don't know.

Anyway, my mom made me a milkshake and gave me the medicine I was supposed to take. I drank it, took my medicine, and immediately threw up.

This story doesn't have a very good ending; my mouth is still bleeding. It's not full of gauze anymore, which is nice, but I've got an ice pack on it. I think I'll go try to eat some noodles. (I had ice cream and yogurt and milk and anti-inflammatory for breakfast this morning.) I don't want to take my painkillers because I'm pretty sure they'll make me throw up again.

I have the week off of work. Games I'm currently playing:

Animal Crossing
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn (1 hour in, unlikely to continue)
Final Fantasy IX (With Conor and Classic Brian)
Final Fantasy XIII 2 (With Classic Brian and not Conor)
Super Smash Brothers Brawl (By myself or with Ben Dietrich or Classic Brian)

Wish me luck.

-Nick.

Nick - True Stories About Jellyfish, Part 2

When my dad was in college he had a poorly-assimilated Chinese roommate. (The only part of this story that would still likely happen today.)

He also had a black and white TV. For Christmas, his parents got him a brand new, state-of-the-art color TV. Which was a huge deal at the time.

My dad gave his roommate the old black and white TV, and he was so grateful that he invited my dad over to his parents' house for dinner. They were very traditionally Chinese, and also didn't really speak English very well.

My dad was then assaulted with a bunch of very, very strange foods which he could not refuse because he was trying really hard to be polite. Not the least of which was jellyfish. Raw jellyfish.

I think this is an actual picture of jellyfish but I have no way to verify

Luckily my dad is more adventurous with foods than I am. I don't know if this story has a moral, but I want to tie it to my broader theme of not understanding human eating habits.

-Nick.