Primordial Chaos

Craig David - Fill Me In


Oh, Butter, how you amaze me. Better known as Darington Hobson, he's the Lobos not so secret weapon. He got the nickname Butter because some guys were joshing him about how his game is so smooth and he is tall and light skinned like a stick of butter, and the name stuck. He leads the team in average points scored and rebounds. But the kid is a true team player and also leads the team in assists. Watching any game, you can see that even if he gets a great chance to show off or score, he'll share the damn ball with the rest of the team more often than not. That's probably my favorite thing about him, he could ball hog all he wanted, but he doesn't. He has a lot of confidence not only in himself but in his teammates. He took a long and hard road to get to UNM, and when he got here and got to his room, he just broke down and cried for a couple of hours because he was THAT happy to be here. (I break down and cry for a couple of hours because I'm that UNHAPPY to be here. :P) And damn if ABQ isn't happy to have him here, The Pit goes wild about him and he loves it. He's started showing off and performing a bit during home games because he just fucking loves his fans and wants them to have a good time. But in person he is REALLY down to earth, not egotistical, and credits his teammates, including the Ro Show AKA Roman Martinez, for helping him improve and play not just basketball, but LOBOS basketball. This is my favorite moment of him:


And The Pit goes fucking batshit moreso than usual. :P I remember one game we were struggling (damn it's almost like every game lately, jesus) and The Pit wasn't really into it, not a lot of people standing and cheering. Hobson, in the middle of play, uses his arms to signal everyone to get the hell up and do what The Pit does best, and most of The Pit jumps up and gets to cheering to boost morale. He said later on he and the rest of the team really needed the crowd that game, and we wound up winning. :) He gets EVERYONE involved in the game, from teammates to the crowd, and he's just an amazing player overall. I like this kid, here is a fantastic player without a massive fucking ego who loves the game.

To speak of a former Lobo who had a massive fucking ego and I wanted to slap, JR Giddens. Hobson was compared to JR a lot at the beginning of the season, but Hobson is a class act. JR is not. Besides shoplifting from Walmart and starting bar fights that result in his getting fucking stabbed, he has an ego that makes me look modest. Strangely, JR and my brother used to play for the same AAU team in Oklahoma, so I've had my fair share of interactions with the little shit, and he was a brat back when he 14 or so and insulting as all hell to me. Even weirder is my brother was at UNM the same time JR was out of coincidence, and Jess never liked JR in the first place. But JR had some "thing" for Jess and was always trying to hang out with him, tracked down Jess a couple of times on campus and Jess said it was just fucking creepy. JR used to look up to Jess, not just literally but about basketball, and still did at the time. Always wanted to reminisce about them playing together. I remember my brother swearing about it. Now he's a pine rider for the Celtics, and sullying my lucky number 4 with his 4 jersey. Apparently they kicked his ass to the D-league for a while then recalled him. This makes me laugh.  They should kick him back so someone who I don't want to kick in the groin can wear #4. JR is still talked about here in ABQ and at UNM, which is bleh. That's time that should be spent talking about Butter and Ro, not wasting breath. :P

Despite Jess' departure and distancing himself away from basketball, he's been watching Lobos games with me. He usually just yells about what the Lobos are doing wrong, though he'll grudgingly say that was a pretty good play every so often. Jess damn amazes me with his insight and how much he still knows about bball. In high school, he was on varsity as a freshman, I was a junior saxophone player in band. The band would play at home bball games and I always volunteered to go, mostly to see Jess play cause that's my motherfucking brother making varsity as a freshman and kicking ass thank you very fucking much. And now Jess is a programmer for Sandia National Labs, makes 92k a year, hates his job because he was supposed to be programming for satellites but they have him cleaning up other people's messes and rewriting code for mundane shit, and frighteningly, even though he's had his master's about 2 months and has worked in his current position for that long, he's now somebody's MENTOR. Something he did not sign up for and does not want. So now Jess has to come up with shit for this kid to do and basically spend time and socialize with this guy. He hates this. Of course, because he's now a project lead and makes most of the damn decisions on his projects, he also started showing up on the list of people who should mentor. He can be a turd, but I'm proud of Jess. He's proud of me too. A year ago we hated we each other. Now he stays up if I come home late to make sure I'm ok and to talk before bed, we're always talking to each other about random shit, though code is probably our most frequent topic and one of his favorite things to do is make me laugh, bonus points if it's while drinking something.

Ha, I haven't yet talked about myself this post! I sure had lots to say about other people though. :) It's my turn though.

My sense of loyalty is god damn sabotaging me. UNM has thrown all kinds of cool opportunities at me, just racked up my 6th honor, basketball (nuff said)...I feel a strong sense of loyalty to UNM. Hell, I'm front and center in the giant poster of UNM's birthday celebration they had last spring, a poster that's posted smack in the middle of the student union. I have 2 UNM/Lobos shirts, my red hoodie, 2 hats, basketball shorts, 4 pairs of UNM socks, not to mention all the cherry red gear I got to match with that stuff, like my red Converse. I am entrenched in this shit. My friends are here, family, I know the city really well, hate the dry climate but eh...but I'm still missing what I need. I'm currently Psychology/Computer Science major. However, all the artificial intelligence and other such classes the CS dept DOES offer DON'T count except as electives, which I don't need. My Psych classes are all theories and treatments for this disorder or that, not really my field. I'm not happy with this. I've been reading books and such from other universities' undergrad cognitive science programs. I'm missing out on SO FUCKING MUCH. I'm absolutely not being prepared to go head first into my field for grad school. And it's my end goal that, in the long run, matters so much. I don't want to have to get to grad school and then fucking backtrack to undergrad stuff before I can start on the real shit. Waste of money and time. If I stay at UNM, I'd be happy in the short term, but regretful in the long term. If I leave, I'd be much happier in the long term, but kinda depressed in the short term. However, I think I'll find a school that gives me at least most of what I want and need, and hell, most of my honors transfer. I'm sure I could get into another school's university and departmental honors programs. But I don't care WHERE I go, hell they could be whoever wins the national title this year or something, I'll still be a Lobos fan and I'll definitely plan my visits back to ABQ when there's a home game. :P My point being that I'm really kind of torn over this. Impulsive says stay, long term rational says go. It's not as easy as I swore it would be, and the closer we get to decision time, the more and more I start to feel my split loyalties, which is really the problem. I'm loyal to my dreams, but I've racked up some loyalty to UNM too. Loyal to a fault, always will be.


I realized in the past couple of days, I keep talking about my field, and I mention cognitive science, but I haven't really defined what exactly I'm into. Hopefully I can somewhat explain it. My specific area of interest is affective computing. Not effective, but affective. :P Basically, it's artificial intelligence that can detect/interpret/empathize human emotions and/or replicate human emotions. The irony of me going into something dealing with emotions is not lost on me. Anyways, it's a hybrid field of psychology, computer science, AND cognitive science. Holy fucking shit that was made for me, lol. Artificial emotional intelligence is another way to say it. I know I said I was going into autism research, so let me make the bridge before people get lost. One of the latest ideas is using technology to teach autistic people social skills, how to recognize body language and emotions in other people, how what they do affects others' emotions, etc. Kind of hard things to learn without interacting with people. Oh right, autistic people aren't really fans of that. But if we use artificial intelligence/robots to do the same thing, there's not the whole issue with uncomfortable interpersonal communications or even in a controlled settings using a real human being such as a therapist. The current method is to have a therapist, through their actions, teach different facial expressions or tone of voice. The problem here is 1) interpersonal communication and 2) these emotional actions have to be exaggerated to make the initial point. Overemphasized smiles, excessive melancholy tone of voice, etc. What gets learned is the exaggerated expression, and not all the nuanced and subtle ways an emotion is expressed. So if you're not grinning like a clown, then they won't know if you're happy or something else. That's how I learned, and I learned (and am still learning...) the nuances and such through fucking shit up with other people. I don't recommend it. With AI, it could be taught repeatedly over and over with the nuances and details without the worry of upsetting another human being or the exaggerated examples.

The technology exists, but it is young, not even as advanced as Data from Star Trek who couldn't recognize a lot of the nuances of interpersonal behavior. So even the technology can be improved, but also ways to implement or apply this AI are out there to be discovered too. Super cutting edge kind of field right along with cognitive science.

So that's my area of interest and curiosity, which I think is pretty cool. Making Star Trek references is not. :P

~A.