The Graph of Owl City

A friend once told me that there’s a graph of Owl City. He told me that the x axis was years and the y axis was how much he listened to Owl City, and the graph had two peaks. One in 2009 and one in the year he met me. I often recount this to new friends because I believe it is the optimal way to characterise myself. Also I like analogies that I can visualise with MATLAB code.

I struggle to define my music taste. From an objective standpoint, my top three music artists seem to be geared toward Christians – despite being a non-Christian myself. I once left my Youtube on autoplay and returned an hour later to find it had settled onto “1 hour of the world’s greatest worship songs.” Spotify recommends a playlist to me called “Christian Alternative.” With that being said, I don’t think I would define my music as being Christian, though I do enjoy an occasional hymn. At gunpoint, I would say my music taste is Owl City.

But why Owl City? It’s not something I can slur over a pint or mumble in the office print room as we indulge in birthday doughnuts. Even in the comfort of my own blog and word document, I still struggle. I feel pressure when asked this question because frankly, I don’t have an answer that will satisfy you. As a people pleaser, this is a source of great stress to me and I often practice the conversation in my head just in case it crops up. But that usually leads me down a rabbit hole to panic; so I just end up listening to Owl City instead. So in an effort to avoid my problems by using the internet, take this blog post as my warm up and stretches for the next time I’m asked the question. Also the only way I know how to communicate is through a series of overly exaggerated anecdotes – so here’s the spiel.

In my early years, I remember listening to music because I felt I had to. Thus I jauntily hopped along to Rihanna at school discos in baby pink jumpsuits. (Evidently, whilst I felt that I had to listen to what everyone else listened to I didn’t hold the same viewpoint on fashion.) Then in 2009, a charming soul first introduced me to Fireflies. It was like someone had recorded what the inside of my head sounded like and mixed it into synth beats and boops. I devoured the entire discography and it soon became the soundtrack to my life, loves and losses. I rode the mothership to weird and wonderful lands that few dare to venture to. Over the past ten years my gradient has been ever shifting. Sometimes it’s positive, sometimes negative, and it can grow and shrink in great measures. But for all this time, my +C has always been Owl City.

It has led to movie magic moments. Sunsets from Houston to London, escapes to New York City, and even a backdrop to falling in love. It has seeded the best friendship I could have dreamed of and provided me with comfort whenever I’m staring into an abyss. So whilst I never can eloquently explain to you why it is so special to me, I’m confident I won’t stop trying.

Double clicking the mouse

So it’s 2am, and I’m trawling through IEEEexplore and Google Scholar looking for relevant papers for a report due on Friday. Through a completely unexpected turn of events I stumbled onto this paper about intimacy in the World of Warcraft. I’m completely fascinated because whilst I never played WoW, I did play Runescape. One of the things that shocked me on that game was that I was often propositioned by other avatars as we waited for the mobs to respawn in the cow field. Mostly one would assume that these sorts of antics would just be from 12 year old kids who had somehow acquired unsupervised internet access. However I did wonder, if grown adults actually did that…like attempt to form actual relationships and date through online games. Then if we’re playing under the rule that anyone should be able to do whatever they want as long as they’re not hurting anyone, I’m struggling to see the reasons why not.

One of my favourite series is called The Guild, which details the adventures of a group of friends who game together in an MMORPG, (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game,) and decide to meet in real life. Two of the main characters Codex and Zaboo are part of an unrequited love story line, where Zaboo insists that they have undeniable keyboard chemistry. Their relationship seems to have developed through winkies and 2 bit blue roses through the many months spent on this game, but when they meet in real life, it soon fails.

As someone who used to frequent several online MMORPGs, I’ve witnessed these pixellated romances. I’ve also heard of some pretty wacky stuff such as people cheating on eachother on an MMORPG, with eachother. I don’t think anyone ever predicted that the modern day ”It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” would become “buying gf 2k. “ Maybe this is why we often hear the “Love is dead” trope, because soul searching has now become soul swiping. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for applications like Tinder. I don’t see it as an invalid form of love questing at all. After all, (the majority,) of profiles on there are real people and I don’t see why it couldn’t work. Sadly, it’s only left me with an irrational fear of the Victoria line.

With the rise of anthropomorphic robot sex dolls, are humans approaching an era when flowers and chocolate are replaced with coitus with souless droids? And whilst I don’t know anything about love, I do know about robots. To some people, humanoid robots are nonsensical because a robot is first and foremostly an appliance. They are tools used to augment the quality of human life, and the human experience. After all, you wouldn’t give your toaster a face, why should a robot have one? Well, the obvious answer is the familiarity and warm tingles we get from human interaction. I don’t think I’ve ever received a more than mediocre hug from my laptop, even when it’s CPU is overheating.

When you think about the disadvantages of cyber dating, they are few and far between, if we’re talking about that famed intangible love that we are all programmed to crave. You can get into those wily 3:15am conversations with someone through the glint of your computer screen and satisfy that craving. You can even make some pretty decent trade deals for iron ore at the same time. Finally, there’s a pretty minimal risk of STDs, but please if you’re cybering, don’t accept trojans.

But who knows, technology is advancing extremely fast and people speculate that one day robots will be able to love. Then maybe one day the phrase “double clicking the mouse” will come into a new meaning.