All Thoughts Being Equal

This post is third in the Summer camp for "adults" series: See part 1 and part 2 . How long can I go in critiquing another, more transparently corporate-retreat-aspiring "summer camp for grown-ups" before giving up and yelling "fuck off"? Read and see! I. At the end of last summer I wrote two posts about Camp RAHH, "Seattle's summer camp for adults." And my feeling by the end of it was less rage than bleakness and despair, except for the one hopeful fact that they were paying money to their host camp, Camp Kirby, and that Kirby is a lovely place that deserves all the money it can get. Now I've come to learn about the broader trend of adult summer camps, and I'm angry again. I think I have a Facebook sponsored ad to thank for this, but first, here's a TIME article from 2013: Like cartoons and cupcakes, summer camp is becoming one of those things adults just won’t leave to the kids anymore. “Glamping” — that is, stay...

Source: Travis Walton / WikiMedia I used to really like UFO stories, pretty much ever since I watched E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind , but then especially after picking up a book called Alien Encyclopedia in a third-grade book sale. It was great because the author presented both "real-life" stories and fictional characters with pretty much equal weight, so I learned about paranormal stuff and lots of science fiction at the same time. For a kids' book, it affords a surprising level of literacy in close-encounter stories (that is, stories from either abductees or contactees )—everything from Grays to Project Blue Book to Reptilians. At least, I thought it was surprising. Then I learned that pseudoscience is actually kinda boring . I'm still interested in those stories—for example, I listen to Coast to Coast AM —but more because I'm fascinated by the social phenomenon of telling close-encounter stories than the stories themselves. For exampl...

This post is a quickie follow-up to: Excessivisms, cargo cult politics, and #GamerGate In my previous post I posited that there was something odd about "gamer culture": Hm. There's a problem here: it feels right, like there's an analogous statement for this sort of potentially-toxic cultural attitude. I'm just not sure what the actual connection to video games is. It's not simply owning a lot of games: I own a lot of games (thanks for nothing, Steam sales) but I haven't played most of them (yet) and moreover I don't consider myself a "gamer" per se . It's not simply enthusiasm for games , at least not just any kind of game: one sort of has to be highly enthusiastic for a definite class of games, and maybe even make a show of disdaining other classes of games. And it's not simply skill at playing games , though that is a sort of factor: certainly "gamers" tend to be into the more "hardcore" games. Here...