Kazaam!  This movie from 1996 staring Shaq as a giant genie earned a whole 4% on the tomatometer, but it was pretty near and dear to my heart.  How cool would it be to have a genie to kazać?  How cool would it be to have a Kazaam to kazać?  Kazałem Kazaamowi …  Kazaam został kazany …

Imperfective looks to be rozkazać which is also pretty easy to lock in your greyskull, because genies rise from lamps, and the past tense of rise is rose.  Sounds like roz.  You see what I’m doing here? Get it? Kazaam!

For a long time I was mostly focused on learning Polish nouns. I think this was mainly because nouns at the time were the things I needed. Herbata, kawa, mleko, cukier, szynka, ser, chleb. Tea, coffee, milk, sugar, ham, cheese, bread. Then after some quick baby steps to mieć (to have), potrzebować (to need), and chcieć (to want) you are in business. Add a poproszę for the sweet cherry on top and you’ll be the greedy and eager man-that-talks-like-a-kid at the grocery store getting things done.

I tend to learn best by developing some deep, often strange visualisation or mnemonic of the task at hand. This is what I mean by getting cozy with a verb and future posts will only highlight a bizarre connection I’ve set in my mind that links my lizard brain with the byzantine Polish language.

So without further adieu lets get cozy with kopać.

Kopać actually has two meanings. The first being to dig or dig out, and the second to kick. Combine those two together because we don’t want to remember two things and just make it more like “kick a hole” which in your brain can work for kick as “I’m about to kick a hole in that motherf**ker” or for dig as “I’m about to kick a hole in that motherf**king earth”. On the kick side, kopać is also easy to remember because it looks like Batman kicking down a bad guy with the gigantic frame-ripping letters “KAPOW” – oh yeah, batman totally kopał-ed that guy. Oddly, kicky kopać has kopnąć as its perfective form, which to me isn’t that perfective because I’m not a big fan of verbs than have pnąć at the end. If I could write that in English its something like puhnontch. Say puhnontch a couple times. How is it that it kicks air out of your mouth and nose at almost the same time? Gross. Diggy kopać has wykopać as its perfective form and it turns out that wykopać is in some weird verbal three-way with wykopywać as wykopywać can also be used as the imperfective form. In an ideal world three-ways are nice, everyone gets theirs, basks in the afterglow with some Serge Gainsbourg tunes. In our world, people get jealous, jealousy leads to violence, and violence leads to people getting buried. But first you need to wykopać the grave.

But what if you are looking for a longer ride? When I first got here it was pretty tough to find updated resources via Google in English and lead me to think that they just didn’t exist. I was looking for that long, mostly uninterrupted, smooth ride. With a little Polish-language Googling I came across this awesome interactive warsaw bike path map created by the community over at Rowerem.tk.  Because the whole thing is in Polish only I am embedding the map here and translating the map legend to the best of my ability.

Legend:
Red Lines – Paths with brick or cement tiles / sidewalk
Black Lines – Paths with asphalt or similar pavement
“P” symbol – Bike parking
“Wrench” symbol – Bike stores and repairs
“Person” symbol – Bike rental locations

The colored paths are distinct rides and in the full interactive warsaw bike map you can turn them off and on using the checkbox to get a better picture of how they work and what the path is made of.

The main ones are:
Green – Route Obwodowy
- I still need to explore this route in full so not much to say about it now.

Blue – Route Wisły
- This is the Wisła river route I mentioned earlier and it varies in scenery quite a bit. Sometimes it can get pretty crowded and the actual marked-bike path often isn’t as smooth as the pavement next to the steps along the river but there is generally less people-dodging.

Yellow – Route Słoneczny
- This is on the side of the river away from the city center. It is generally nice and way-less crowded than the other side but also not as scenic and has far fewer places to stop for a drink.

I hope this is helpful and I will add more as I explore more myself.

So what to do with dry eye?  A quick google gives a couple tips for how to avoid getting dry eyes.  This page is pretty generic as the advice, as it should be, is totally basic and can be boiled down to two items: 1) lubricate your eyes more, and 2) spend less time in front of the computer.  The first piece of advice is easy.  Use eye drops, blink more often, work in intervals, drink more water, etc.  The second piece is a whole different beast…

As a normal kid I wanted to be an astronaut after seeing space films, a paleontologist after visiting the dinosaur museum, a professional hockey player.  Aside from hockey, which I played for 14 years, I did almost nothing serious to pursue those other careers.  In the meantime though I pursued computers, not with any kind of intellectual drive, but just because there was this new thing I could do new things with.  In grade 5 I had a loose collective of friends “coding” HyperCard choose-your-own-adventure games.  In grade 6 I bombarded my Dad with a presentation about why the Internet was important to our family and was needed in our house.  It only took one borrowed public-school Mac and an enormous free-trial of AOL bill, and they conceded.  Our phone became permanently busy, and my Moms voice regularly came through the modem speaker over  a scree of dial-tone noise.  “Are you SURFING THE NET AGAIN?!”  Oh, I was hooked and an IRC and a BBS later I was “hacking the planet” and starting my own hacker collective to be cool like Cult of The Dead Cow.  I was trying Denial of Service attacks on major sites, reading 2600, and thinking that one day I could make it out to Defcon to hang with all the major players.

Of course, I knew very little beyond how to regurgitate the tricks I had read and use the software with the menacing skull icon.  The point here is that from a very early age I was deeply fascinated, and more importantly, psychologically involved with the Internet and its seemingly endless supply of cowboys, visionaries, punks, nihilists, weirdos, and maniacs for whom normal personalities were only for the outside world and a truer manifestation of their personality lived online as “mut3″, “s4v4g3″ or “BongWizard”. Details aside, I believe this is a rather normal coming-of-age experience for someone growing up in similar middle-class circumstances with a home computer and an internet connection.

Personally, my involvement with the always-on, international community the Internet provided was compounded by puberty, a move from a small town in Western Canada to a nowhere suburb outside of Atlanta, Georgia and the crushing limitations of being a car-less, income-less teenager, in a yet-to-be-built southern neighborhood.  The computer was flexible, could be modified with free or not-quite-free software to fit any needs I had, and when paired with the Internet could provide a seemingly unlimited source of inspiration, and an audience – far more receptive than anything local – to present any creative output to.  Without the hard-and-fast limits of physical presence the only limits to involvement in this world were software skills and abilities – knowledge which was provided for free by various benevolent, idealistic, often-anonymous personalities. Personalities like “BongWizard”.

Throughout all of this I never wanted to be a software developer, my current line of work.  Even after being one of the 5 or 6 guys from my high school to take the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam it never occurred to me that I should stay on that path and go to University to study Computer Science.  To me, it wasn’t something for people who liked computers.  It was for people who liked science. And by people I mean male-only people.  The creative writing program I enrolled in had a very favorable ratio and I refused to see myself as a nerd or even worse, “computer person”.  I actively avoided the image, and during my first two or three years at University I think I tried everything I possibly could to live completely on the loosely-typed side of things.

For better or worse, a large part of your personality isn’t something you can just ditch and watching a friend flounder in front of their computer as they wonder why it isn’t reading their mind is just plain cruel.  During University this leads to dialogue like, “Hey dude, no worries. Saving a PDF is for nerds.  Nobody knows how to do that shit!”  After University it leads to situations like, “Not a problem, Boss. Maybe the software was broken.  I’m surprised I got it to work!” and then *facepalm*, you can get paid for your computer skills, and certain skills are worth more than others. Simply put one foot in front of another down this path and your full-time job – 40 precious hours of your life every week – are dedicated to being that person with those computer skills – voila, you are a “computer person”.

You don’t have to be a computer person to be a computer worker and if I think of the many different career paths I could’ve taken most of them would’ve ended up sitting in front of a computer for a very large chunk of my waking hours 5 days of the week.  While I have quite a few friends who are free from using the computer (butcher, waiter, retail, teacher) for the entire day, I would say the majority of my friends are generally in front of some kind of screen.  As our social lives and work processes become more and more reliant on and entwined with the computer it seems like that balance will shift more and more to computer work.  For me and probably those like me – a generation with a psyche and skill set deeply connected to digital information – it’s almost hard to imagine myself pivoting at this point and working in something so analog and so completely different.  Is there something with similar interesting mental challenges, freedom of place, and value of craft that wouldn’t require completely retooling both psyche and skill set and starting over?  More importantly, what are the unknown effects – far beyond bad posture and dry eye – of spending so much physically sedentary time navigating virtual moveable spaces?

The right person will be able to do character design / sprite animations / and other backgrounding  and scene elements for the game.  This person is professional, but fun to work with, and brings an original style to the table.  Artists that I like include:  Jon Bergerman, Tado, Peskimo, Tokidoki, FriendsWithYou, Skwak, McBess, and on and on.

Ideally, the final format for hand-off would be rather large character frames made in Adobe Illustrator which I can scale to various sizes and export for use in sprite sheets.  This will be an iterative development process so some flexibility is required.

If you are located, like me, in Warsaw that would be a major plus.

Please send your rate and links to previous work to darrell.stephenson@gmail.com