Personal

I watched a Q&A video recently featuring Adam Savage, a special effects expert best known for being on MythBusters, a show where, according to Wikipedia, they “used elements of the scientific method to test the validity of rumors, myths, movie scenes, adages, Internet videos, and news stories.” It was precisely the focus on the scientific method that made it one of my favorite shows, combined also with how playfully the two hosts interacted. In this particular video, Adam responds to the following viewer question:

“As a mentor/teacher, how do you get people to believe in themselves and to encourage them to take those first steps into a new process and skill set?”

You can watch his response below – it starts at 2:50:

In case you can’t watch a video right now, and also for the sake of commentary, I’ll include specific quotes here – but the video is a far richer experience if you have the time. I also added bold styling below to emphasize a certain part.

“You know, I once wanted to learn a new skill, and I had a friend who was a master practitioner of this skill […] and I found a version of this thing that I wanted to try out, and I told them, I texted them and was like, I’m gonna learn this skill, I’m trying to learn this skill and I’m trying to learn it under this framework. And they were like “That’s not the framework – that’s the wrong framework you’re using” – that’s not the right way to encourage somebody. That is the wrong way… because I immediately felt shame, I’m talking to a master of this craft and they’re like, “WRONG.” That’s bullshit. I don’t have time for that.”

Boy, does Adam ever see things exactly the same way I do, in this case. There’s enough negativity in the world as is, the last thing you need when putting effort towards trying something new is even more negativity. Even if I don’t understand why someone is passionate about something, I know how incredibly powerful that kind of enthusiasm is when it comes to productivity, and deeper than that, how it might play a role in discovering what a person really wants to do in life.

I remember back when I lived with my parents, I was becoming really fascinated with the one computer my father had, and I would try to learn about it whenever I could. However, he did quite a bit to prevent me from pursuing this interest. The classic quote I will always remember is “a computer is for work, not for play” – what he failed to understand, of course, is that it was by playing around on the computer that I would become more familiar with it. He also failed to consider that perhaps my unrelenting interest was a sign of something deeper within me, a natural compatibility with the field. I also think part of his opposition had to do with him not understanding or anticipating the prominent role that computer science would play in the future – to him, it was a waste of time.

My father delayed my growth, there’s no doubt about it, but eventually, I learned to code on my scientific calculator in high school, thanks to a supportive friend of mine, Dan, who had already ventured into that territory. (The moment I learned how to write something as simple as an “if” statement on my calculator blew my mind, and I will never forget where I was and what it felt like.) Eventually, I also managed to buy my own computer, largely eliminating the barriers I had at home, thereby accelerating my learning to the point where I was far ahead of my class by the time I was in college – I was coding in languages that weren’t even covered by the curriculum.

I still wonder from time to time how much faster I could have taken up the craft, and how much more advanced I would have been, if not for my father’s opposition. Needless to say, should I procreate, I will be especially attentive to these “tells” – where interest, enthusiasm and passion reveal something deeper. It wouldn’t be about me, at all, but instead, a moment where I can support another human in the exploration of their interests, and getting that much closer to understanding what they like and don’t like, and what they may want to do for a living. (To be fair, I should say that when I was in my late twenties, my father realized the error of his ways and apologized for not understanding what I saw in computers early on.)

Though not exactly the same, you can surely see how this relates to Adam’s anecdote. I’m like Adam – I think those negative responses are awful, and I fully agree with what he suggests instead – which starts at 5:11:

And again here’s the transcript if you need it:

“That’s like “you could do it that way, but you’re WRONG”, as opposed to, I love your enthusiasm, that trick, that thing that you want to do, that technique you want to learn, it’s a little beyond you, you don’t see that yet, let me shepherd you through the early stages so that you can understand this technique. Or, yes, go try it! Come back to me after a while, when you’ve learned exactly why this isn’t the right thing for you to start with.

And there’s so many frames, but in improv, in comedy improv, the central ethos of comedy improv, […] is yes, and. And that’s the opposite of ‘no, but’ – “yes, and” it takes everything in, and it adds to it. That’s how potentially you can start to help people believe in themselves.”

And that’s exactly it – rather than strip the person of their enthusiasm, one of the most potent propellants, why not add to it? And that, my friends, is one of the key principles I stand for in life – I will always support passion and enthusiasm.

One of the best pieces of art I have ever seen/heard/experienced.

By RenMakesMusic.co.uk

Thanks to Phil for sharing this with me.

Not much to say for this one… simply watch and enjoy.

Every now and then, I encounter something that’s the perfect combination of brilliant and ridiculous – this is one of those cases. Check the video below and you’ll understand the brilliant marketing at play. And it’s not fake!

Hi! Welcome to the new MattRefghi.com. To understand the significance behind this re-launch, I need to go back a bit into the past to explain how I got to this point. 

Back in 2008, I discovered Jeff Atwood’s blog titled Coding Horror, a blog focused largely about software development. I was working as a web developer at the time, so naturally the topic was quite pertinent and interesting to me, as I was living the subject matter day to day. After following Jeff’s blog and being inspired by the quality of what he offered, in January 2009, I decided that I too would launch a blog. It started with technical posts, but since then, the content has diversified and I’ve since published approximately 250 posts – a mix between written and video content.

Now, the missing piece in the story is that back in 2009-2011, I also created my own PHP web platform in my free time as I learned more and more about web development. I named it Hyperion, and since then, I never stopped working on it. As a result, that platform eventually grew to the point where I began to host it through my corporation and license access to clients. Then came 2021, where I increased my development efforts to a new level, releasing 2 large update packages in a year – altogether bringing forth a bunch of improvements, changes, and new features. 

This increase in development is best explained by the fact that I was having fun. And I liked that whatever I did on the side would often also benefit my clients – they too would receive the same updates and improvements. I was also able to pursue features or updates that I personally felt passionate about, which further boosted my productivity. So as 2021 was coming to an end, I had a thought… what if my blog ran on my own software? What if I used Hyperion as a blogging platform? 

The first server-side scripting language I learned was ASP, back in my early college days working alongside my buddy Joe. And I remember quite vividly, to this day, how it completely changed my view of the web. Once I “clicked” and understood how those languages worked – I felt like a whole world of possibility opened up to me. I realized I could do almost anything I wanted, I just needed the imagination and the time to design it.

So that’s exactly what I did. What you’re seeing isn’t any old re-launch of my blog, it’s the first time that my content, written in English, is going to be exclusively available on my platform, written in PHP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. It would be unfair if I failed to mention that I was at least partially inspired to do this by seeing Ye’s Stem Player project. 

While I can’t say I was facing any kind of oppression, I did see the immense potential when it came to dogfooding – by turning myself into a regular client of my own platform, I would have even more opportunity to spot areas for improvement, and to come up with interesting new features. And if I wanted to add something to the platform, I could do so fairly easily – because I knew exactly how it was built. And again, my clients would benefit from anything I fixed.

And so that’s the story. At the moment, MattRefghi.com is live, but I’m not fully finished transitioning from the old blog – much like Early Access games, and again, much like Ye, who continues to update his albums after they’ve been released, I decided to release it a bit early as I continued to migrate content and add features. It is nonetheless one of the most exciting chapters in my online presence, and I can’t wait for what’s next.

Note: While I mention Ye twice in this article, I do not condone any form of hate speech. I firmly believe that deep down, Ye has good intentions and simply continues to miscommunicate his ideas… expect an article from me at some point where I explore this.

Update 2025-02-11: I’ve historically demonstrated significant patience in the face of Ye’s mental health issues. There’s a lot to be said for separating the artist from the art – I’ve been very clear when I disagreed with his words and actions. That said, on this day, Ye decided to sell hateful t-shirts on his website. As a result, I have reached my limit – and I will not, and cannot, support someone who takes his hateful ideas that far. I’m deeply disappointed, and can only wish this individual the best in mental health treatment and care.

It’s been a while now that I’ve been observing the news, especially those written by Canadians outlets. And one thing that gets on my nerves from time to time is when I see articles written with a heavy Canadian bias in relation to world affairs. Consider a CBC article from today, as an example:

Yes, let’s focus on the minority of Canadians bracing for impact rather than the massive numbers of Bahamians and Americans facing that same danger – that’s a great idea. The news of Hurricane Dorian makes me immediately concerned for everyone affected…. whether they are from the United States, the Bahamas, or Canada is completely irrelevant. I consider it even a bit insulting that such an article would focus on Canadians when they are mere pebbles in a sea of affected humans. Are Canadians worth more, CBC, by simple virtue of being Canadians? Must you explicitly mention that Canadians are affected to elicit an empathic response in your audience? Or is this an attempt at making Canadian citizens feel like even they, as individuals, have a chance of appearing in a CBC post one day? (The fact that the CBC is a federal crown corporation is not lost on me.)

Though I can’t speak to exactly what they were thinking, I’m guessing that this was simply an attempt to capture a different type of reader – but if that’s the case, count me concerned. Regardless of borders, we, as humans, are all in this together. This type of article emphasizes our differences during a moment where they are especially unimportant. And because of that, in my mind, this article does more damage than good.

It’s fascinating how you start to see people differently when you have kids. And I say that loosely, as I haven’t exactly spawned minions of my own – my experience stems from fulfilling a stepfather role, years ago, which came quicker than I expected. I mean sure, I had certainly thought of a hypothetical future that might involve kids, but there’s no way I thought that would happen in my 20s. In my mind, I wasn’t yet good enough at managing multiple aspects of my life, such as my finances, certain aspects of my business, etc. It wasn’t that I was bad at these things, but more so, I didn’t feel I was good enough. It thus felt ridiculous to even consider raising additional human beings… I wasn’t, in my opinion, even a great example for them to follow, at least not as much as I wanted.

Certainly, I can see now that perhaps my obsession with being the perfect example was a little extreme, an endless pursuit of machine-like efficiency. Over time, in other areas of my life, I calmed this aspect of my personality, and instead started believing in the idea of reasonable perfectionism.

You can drive yourself batty trying to do the absolute best job possible, or, you can do a very good job based on your experience, but not obsess to an unhealthy, unreasonable level.

This was a great milestone to reach psychologically-speaking, but it didn’t quite soothe my belief that I didn’t have the required amount of self-management prowess to take on the challenge of raising kids. But that, altogether, represented a whole lot of rational thought, and while that generally drove me quite well, emotion was another factor that couldn’t quite be controlled as easily.

And so I found myself living with a girlfriend and her two kids, a boy, 2, and a girl, 5. Not only had I not expected to take on a parental role so soon, but my background was one where I basically had a total lack of experience with children in general. While I had a bunch of family and cousins, my parents would often skip family gatherings – and as such, I would rarely see the younger generation of our family while growing up. This lack of exposure to kids made it challenging for me to feel confident in how I approached and interacted with them.

I had also gotten used to having total control over my environment and its associated levels of cleanliness and order. I can’t say I was a germophobe, but I was conscious of germs and was pretty careful to keep things clean and orderly, at least to a reasonable degree. As you might imagine, when I came face-to-face with the two-year-old, who often had a drool and bits of food on his face during key moments in his meal, I quickly realized that the world I knew was going to be very different. Soon enough I was sharing drinks with these kids at amusement parks and the food and drool mix during mealtime was just another element of life.

And then, there were the diapers. Can you imagine what it was like for a sort-of germophobe to change diapers? I would be lying if I said the possibility of wearing a full Hazmat suit never crossed my mind. But, ultimately, I found a procedure that worked for me.

I’d carry the child to a suitable location, mostly clear of external objects, to minimize collateral damage. I’d have two plastic bags with me (one in the other), and a container of wipes. I would then open the diaper, and use wipes to progressively clean up the waste, while depositing them in the bag as I went along. While I could have technically done this with just one bag, I knew that there was always a chance that one bag might have an undetected hole in it, potentially allowing the poop to escape. Suffice it to say that my method was in no way environmentally friendly, as I would go through a ridiculous bunch of bags and wipes cleaning up the child from his own excrement over time. But, I did it, in the end, despite having my own weird approach. His mother, on the other hand, had unquestionable diaper-changing skills –  she had the ability to change a child’s diaper in such a way that she barely needed any wipes, and ended up with this wrapped up ball of a diaper, mostly safe for handling.

Of course, there was far more to the step-father experience than learning to purge the concentrated evil that was regularly produced in a child’s diaper. For example, I learned to appreciate aspects of human life that I had ignored before. I took note of things like parks and playgrounds, and recognized their potential at helping raise the kids. I made use of restaurants where the kids could eat free, or paid, but with nice features for kids. And, in a similar but yet different way, I learned to fully appreciate the grocery store shopping carts in that had toddler seats built-in. The 5-year-old was well behaved, for the most part, but the “issue” was really the 2-3 year old, and containing his inevitable abundance of energy and semi-frequent mischief. I say issue in quotes because at that age, there’s only so much order you can expect. That said, at times, the prospect of entering a store without such a cart was too much to bear – it really depended on the day. Other times, I could pick up the two-year-old and walk around with him as I did some shopping, interacting with him as I went along. These were some of my favorite moments with him, actually – because it was a fun, cooperative kind of experience that I knew I could only have with him at that moment of his life – he would soon grow bigger, and seek more autonomy.

And that’s the thing – there were always good moments, even if for the most part things weren’t necessarily easy – and not just because of the kids. In the midst of relationship troubles with their mother, I still have very fond memories, some of which I know I will never forget. I remember, for example, one particular day when I noticed it had started hailing all of a sudden, and I immediately ran to get the daughter, to show her something I always found so fascinating, despite it being a simple aspect of our world. She shared that enthusiasm, and the resulting experience of us catching hail in our hands, will forever remain burned in my mind.

So despite my lack of exposure to children and my somewhat abrupt immersion into a parental role, I have to say that it was an extremely enriching experience. And when my relationship with their mother met its unfortunate but necessary end, the sad reality was that it also meant a severance from the two kids that I helped raise. I can imagine in the future that it might be possible to see them again, but in my mind that can only occur if I can guarantee the absence of hostility and turbulence – the last thing I’d want to do to them is inadvertently introduce another stressful moment in their lives.

Before this entire experience, I would walk around treating people as they appeared at the moment I encountered them – that is, I based myself on their current age – they were either a child, an adult, a senior, whatever the case. This was, of course, the most literal interpretation of reality – but it was Joe Rogan, of all people, who ultimately uttered words that would cause a significant shift in my perspective, via his podcast. Put simply, he explained that having kids helped him realize that the people he encountered on a day-to-day basis were babies once, and he was just meeting grown-up versions of those babies. This, he suggested, helped foster empathy and compassion right off the bat. Everyone faces their own paths and challenges in life, but they are still a version of that baby from the very beginning… innocence as an origin. What happened to that little one to make them into the person you’re seeing today? Perhaps more empathy is in order?

And furthermore, if you had any kind of quarrel with a person, would you regret anything if they died the next day? I recently had to face the harsh reality of losing my father. And, given our general tendency of avoiding family gatherings, as you might imagine, there was no one else (other than my mother) that I knew quite so well and for so long. Though undeniably horrific and painful, it still brought crucial realizations to my mind – both sobering and transformative. I realized how so many things were completely not worth arguing about – because when a person is gone, none of it matters. My list of regrets surpassed anything I’d ever listed before. And yet, my rational mind knew that I had done reasonably well considering the circumstances – and that ultimately, nothing could be changed but my path forward.

If I had more deeply understood these ideas in the past, I wouldn’t have made as many mistakes in my overall interactions with other human beings. I would have had more empathy, patience, appreciation. It wouldn’t have necessarily changed the outcomes, but the overall journey would have likely been more rewarding, enjoyable. However, in the end, there’s no re-writes. There’s just an abundance of memories and a whole lot of lessons to be derived from them. And though it’s really unpleasant to affirm, it’s often after being completely destroyed that we can rebuild ourselves, and do better moving forward. And in between these so-called moments of destruction, that, is where the finest moments of life can be had, only enhanced by the knowledge that they are fleeting.

So I’ll cut right to the chase on this one. On Friday the 10th of November, at 6:15 PM EST, I received an odd Facebook message from a friend, one that I’ll call Jane for the sake of this article. At first glance, just from the thumbnail, her message seemed like a risky thing to click on. Here’s what I saw:

UPDATE December 7, 2022: I blurred the image quite a bit more.

Now, I knew Jane pretty well, so I knew that she often said and did things that weren’t particularly appropriate – but it wasn’t a constant thing, it happened from time to time. So, even though the preview to this video concerned me, I reasoned that perhaps this wasn’t what it looked like. After all, it could have been a play on the word “cock,” whereby some dude positioned a rooster in such a way that it could, ostensibly, be perceived as an appendage of sorts. Not something that I would personally find funny, especially given the probability of a misunderstanding occurring; however, I felt Jane deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Unfortunately for me, and unfortunately for the chicken, this video was 100% what it looked like. To my shock, the video depicted full-on bestiality – there’s just no other way to put it – some depraved, demented human was having sex with a chicken, and enjoying himself. I think it’s safe to assume that the chicken never gave consent.

Realizing the seriousness of what I’d been sent, I immediately sought a way to report the message as being inappropriate through Facebook, so that they could remove it from their servers, or at the very least, my message history. Reporting, of course, is part of life on the Internet – sometimes, inappropriate content gets through the filters, and it’s up individuals to raise the necessary flags. And while the definition of “inappropriate” or “offensive” may vary, I felt that an explicit video of a dude sexually violating a chicken was a pretty good candidate for deletion.

Here’s the problem. While Facebook has some tools for reporting posts, comments, pages, profiles, and conversations, it doesn’t have a great way to report a single message for being offensive/inappropriate. If you press the gear icon next to a Facebook conversation, and you press Report, it immediately returns this message without giving you a chance to intervene:

We’ve marked this message as possible spam. If you’d like to report threatening or abusive messages, please visit the Help Center.

I mean, that’s good in case you’re getting spam from a random Facebook stranger, but what if this is a friend that I normally don’t have issues with? I didn’t think it made sense to flag her as a spammer.

The only other option I found was reporting the message as a threat, which is ultimately what I went for. I didn’t feel Jane was threatening me, but I found no other way to communicate the problem to Facebook. When writing the report, I made sure to specify that it was entirely possible one of her friends got a hold of her phone, and sent it without her knowing. I provided a screenshot, and figured that they’d respond rather quickly. 

That was at around 7pm EST. The case is still open, and it only features this:

Their initial auto-response.

How long will it take for Facebook to remove something like this? Isn’t it a little bit of a concern that they can’t react faster when someone reports this type of content? I mean, to their credit, I assume that if it was an actual threat of violence against a human, they might be quicker to respond. I also imagine they’re probably pretty busy overall. But still, isn’t this still an important thing to remove? Shouldn’t Facebook be better at responding to these types of issues? I realize they might not be able to bring the guy to justice, but they could at least remove the video and prevent it from being uploaded again.

I’ll update this post when they reply to my support ticket.

UPDATE: Took them a month. Video still in my messenger history.

Photo credit

Photo by Daniel Jurena

On a particularly normal morning a few weeks ago, I was preparing to leave for work. I had a small pizza cooking in the oven, one that I planned to eat for lunch – it was not a standard small pizza, more reasonably-sized. When the timer rang, I opened the oven, took the platter out, and placed it on the top of the stove. I then tried to do my usual next step: lifting the pizza from the aluminum foil. To my surprise, on this day, the pizza was very much stuck to the aluminum foil, making for a complicated task – I had to separate the pizza from the foil without comprising the structural integrity of the crust underneath.

Now, what’s important to know here is that I very rarely put oil on the aluminum foil to ensure it doesn’t stick to whichever pizza I’m cooking. That’s because in 99% of cases, I never have trouble with the pizza sticking to the foil – and if I do, it’s usually stuck at one specific contact point, maybe two. (Something I could very easily resolve.) But this particular pizza was hanging on for dear life – clearly, it had been given a glimpse of its future, and had no interest in being consumed. We’re talking 5 or 6 contact points… it was putting up a fight. Even though I’d cooked hundreds of frozen pizzas in my life, I had never seen a case this bad. Thus began a delicate, complicated operation.

Unfortunately, the pizza didn’t survive. By the end, I had a mangled mess of a pizza, a shattered image of its wonderful, tasty self. While not catastrophic on a cosmic scale, the loss of my pizza served as a bit of foreshadowing for the day that awaited me. See, up until that point, it had been a great morning – I was in a good mood for no particular reason (other than being alive), and was looking forward to going to work. The pizza incident kind of took me by surprise, a random frustration that I didn’t expect.

And so I went to work, and within an hour or so, a co-worker called me to her desk to show me something on her computer. While I sat next to her watching her screen, she casually mentioned that something had gone well for my ex-girlfriend, in terms of her education, and that she would finally receive a certificate she had long since wanted to receive. My colleague mentioned this because it was related to our employer, and she knew I was aware of the issue from the past, while we were still a couple. Now, while I was glad to hear that this particular thing had gone well for my ex, I don’t think my colleague realized that mentioning my ex-girlfriend was probably not the best thing to do – we hadn’t been in a contact for months, and there were reasons for that.

As an after-thought, a few moments later, my co-worker decided to flat-out ask me if my ex and I were still talking. I responded quite honestly, but bluntly, that I could only see that happening in a matter of years, not anytime soon. I wasn’t happy with how this came out, but I did recognize the complicated nature of the situation, and that my reflex was at least pure in its honesty. I had reasons for having this stance, reasons that I didn’t necessarily want to share at that moment. And yet, there I was, faced with this topic at my place of work.

And that’s the thing. This happened at work. In the past, I was strict when it came to keeping my personal and work lives apart. I only revealed very limited details to carefully selected individuals, and that method worked well. And then, somewhere along the way, I tried to be more open about what was going on in my life. I would say that this likely had a lot to do with the fact that I worked with lots of women, though it’s not strictly a gender thing. In any case, I started sharing more, as my colleagues did, and I must say, there were a few times in the past couple years where doing so made me really uncomfortable. I should have paid more attention to the signs – it was clear that I wasn’t truly comfortable with the change – and I’m a big believer that above all, one’s comfort is the key. My old method rarely made me feel discomfort, and when it did, it was incredibly low impact.

But this particular encounter quickly devolved into jokes from multiple colleagues within earshot, and a further question about my personal life. The jokes were surely said with the goal of lightening the mood, hopefully lessening the discomfort of what had just happened. I could certainly appreciate that, if that was actually the case, but despite the effort, I was still quite simply not comfortable with what had happened. Though brief, I felt that my private life had been invaded, more than I felt comfortable. As bad as the day had become, however, it led me to a very good conclusion – that I should return to my previous policy. Personal life and work are two completely different worlds, and that’s how they should stay – for me, anyway. Perhaps others are comfortable with mixing the two together, but in my own mind, given my own experiences over the past two years, I discovered that by allowing myself to be more open about my private life, I’m opening myself to pointless discomfort, with very little positive return for doing so. If talking about my private life was a hugely positive experience for me, and it enriched my life, then perhaps the negative aspects could be overlooked. But this was not the case. Only one method truly worked, and it involved being more selective in what I said, and who I chose to say it to.

And so despite how horrible of a day it had become, comfort-wise, I had to cherish it for its positive attributes – finally, I experienced enough discomfort to make a change for the better. No longer would I allow my personal life to mix with my professional life. In fact, just the idea of restoring that policy outright relaxed me, made me feel better, and that is how I know that it’s the right decision – the compass I’ve come to trust.

Note: The following is a reading response that I wrote for my Mass Communications class, earlier this year. I’ve added photos, links, and formatting to make the content a little more readable online, but other than that, it is identical to the version I submitted.

In “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism,” author Anderson (1991) explores the idea of a nation being both a political and sociological construct. In the first three chapters, he starts by defining nationalism in abstract terms, then proceeds to analyze its cultural roots, and finally, he reviews the changes in society that made a national consciousness possible.

While reading the text, the concept of nationalism being “imagined” interested me. “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1991, p. 6). I could think of various instances in video games, for example, where I took on a certain nationalistic alignment to fit the narrative of a fictional world.

Some games have obvious lines set in the sand – players are either with faction A, or faction B. More interesting to me is a crime-based game, Grand Theft Auto (GTA) Online, which has no pre-established separations between players. It has the concept of “crews,” akin to gangs, but generally, these facilitate the same group of players playing together, rather than instigating crew versus crew conflict. I recently joined a crew tagged “SAFE,” one which shares a unique governing ideology – no player-directed violence is to be tolerated against its members.

GTA Online was not created with this type of cooperation in mind. Its structure is one where multiple 30-player limited sessions exist simultaneously, where random players can join at any given time, and player versus player combat is enabled by default. To achieve its goals, SAFE makes use of the game’s “kick” feature to remove players that refuse to follow their rules. With enough numbers, they can effectively take over a session, turning it into a kind of self-policing nation-state, reflecting the overall SAFE collective’s vision and ideology, despite lacking any pre-established or geographically-set boundaries to their influence.

Membership in SAFE results in a powerful symbolic association – the mere sight of the SAFE tag evokes a certain sense of camaraderie. Yet, while I may not meet all members of SAFE, I know that elsewhere, other members are reinforcing the nonviolent, cooperative nature of the whole – an imagined sense of nationalism ensues.

Anderson (1991) lists three fundamental concepts that had to fade from society to make it possible to “imagine” a nation – I will mention the two most relatable to GTA Online. First, “the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centres – monarchs … who rules [sic] by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation” (Anderson, 1991, p. 36). Indeed, in GTA Online, which mimics a contemporary American cityscape, there is no clear, overarching monarch figure to which players can pledge servitude. Second is a “conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical” (Anderson, 1991, p. 36). Within GTA Online, the world and its history are, by necessity, taken at face value.

 Combined, these ideas rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence (above all death, loss, and servitude) and offering, in various ways, redemption from them.” (Anderson, 1991, p. 36). This brings us to the crux of my comparison. Though GTA Online is by nature a virtual world, it too reflects humanity’s core desire to live while evading death. SAFE takes this to another level, with further emphasis on avoiding in-game death. This philosophy, I would argue, facilitates members seeing SAFE through a nationalistic lens, as what the author calls an “imagined community.”

References

Anderson, B. O. R. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Photo credit

First photo by BagoGames.

Second photo by Bryce Womeldurf.