Final E-mail to Comcast over HBO

So I've been fighting with Comcast over trying to get HBO for The Game of Thrones. I have a cable box with the most basic of plans because it's 2 dollars a month cheaper then just getting broadband alone.

I don't watch television through my cable box at all.  Don't even think it's hooked up at the moment.

Comcast has a service called XFINITY, which is their streaming service of movies and television shows. I can watch stuff on there right now, and I do. I even had BBC America streaming for a while to watch Top Gear, even though I didn't pay for the service on cable. (Something I brought up with one of the reps I'll detail below, and I can no longer get it streaming. Which is fair, I'm not paying for it.)

With Game of Thrones on HBO, I was more then willing to upgrade my account to get HBO for the duration of the series, thinking I could just access it on XFINITY. And since I didn't want a cable box, all Comcast had to do was flag my account for digital + HBO, I could start streaming XFINITY immediatly, and no need worry about the cable box at all.

I soon found that this is out of Comcast's wheelhouse. The process for upgrading includes an onsite service visit to upgrade the cable box to a digital one, hardwired into their process.  Can't skip it.  Which is what I wanted to do.

After using Comcast's chatroom assistance (which was better then I expected, to be honest), a few calls, and begging on Twitter, I was directed to send an e-mail to an address that warrented a response from Corporate Escalations in the Office of the President. I'm not sure how official that title is, but it did sound impressive.  It was here that I found out about the process being hardwired into upgrade of service, and that what I wanted would simpliy not be.

I know what I want is non-standard. I get that, and I'm not surprised that what I wanted is not available. But this made me realize first hand the change in industries occuring. Comcast is so focused on their cable output, giving lip service to their streaming options, that they're missing a seperate revenue stream, one that other services are quite filling for me, if only delayed by months at a time.

Here's my e-mail when the Office of the President responded to me for a followup. 

I still think it is very odd that you require a cable box to activate an account when trying to push the digital streaming abilities of XFINITY.  I have resigned myself to not getting HBO for this season of Game of Thrones and waiting for the DVDs because of this.

I understand what I want is untraditional, cable service without the cable box or television. But if you really want to make XFINITY comparable to the other streaming services, you have to realize that people like me no longer watch shows on televisions, or televisions alone. Many of us watch everything streaming on our computers or tablets or phones. Many who cannot get the service streaming how they want resort to torrents.

I've never been a fan of that, so rather then pay Comcast and HBO money for switching my account on to a premium service, flagging it as able to stream HBO content through XFINITY and the cable box be damned, I'll just wait for the season pass on iTunes, or DVD to be released, or stream it over Netflix.

I know I'm being stubborn, but these are the choices available to me in this day and age. I wanted to work with Comcast to get HBO, but as I was told time and time again your system is not set up to handle what I want. I understand that, and I thank you and all the various call staff I've dealt with for being patient with me. But please understand I'm not the only one who wants the system to work like this, I'm just the only one who decided to press as far as I did.

I am going to get the content I want through Comcast's wires, it's just a matter of how and when. Either by getting it streaming through XFINITY now or streaming through Netflix in a year's time. One way you get my business as a broadband consumer, the other broadband and cable.

Again, thank you for your time.

I don't want to hate on Comcast too much, their internet service has been stellar since moving here to Pittsburgh, and everyone I talked to on the phone or in chat was actually polite and willing to help with my odd request.

But it's almost comical to watch an old industry try to adapt.  They seem to have everything moving in the right direction, have a streaming service and accounts set up to meter it, only to be tripped up by the legacy issues everyone is stepping over or will learn to step over in the next few years.

Yo, I heard you like text, so I put text in your podcast...

Update: Make Room for Kids is ending for the year, after already meeting its goal and then some,  so my new charity I am championing for is Child's Play.

Today is day 2 of the I Am Your Champion game. Our task for the day, think of a task we can create that will help generate money for our cause. Now, in most things, I like to think myself as a bard: jack of all trades, master of none. I can write, but I'm not going to write a novel for you. I can code, but I'm not going to write a webapp for you.

So I started to think what I could do that involved the mundane, basically apply my hours in a day doing something easy that most people don't want to do or like to do. I was listening to a new podcast, Sword and Laser, and checking out the extra notes of the podcast when it hit me. 

I can listen to audio.

I can understand English.

I can type.

So, to the world I make this offer: I will offer the following 2 services to podcasters of any type:

• For 5$, I will listen to up to 2 hours of your podcasts and provide shownotes, formatted how you want. It can be just a summary or it can have time indexes, links that you mention will be in the shownotes, etc. This can be ten 30-minute podcasts, five 1-hour podcasts, or how ever you want to slice it. If you want me to go through your archive to update your original episodes or just send me the audio before you release it, we can work it out.
• For 30$, I will transcribe, word for word, an hour of your podcast. There are services out there, and there is software that tries to do it, I'm just a guy with a text editor and headphones, but I'm doing this for charity. You just got that awesome guest and you'd like a typed recount of your interview with them, to make it easier to search for things from the conversation, I can give you the raw text of the interview.

Now, I can only speak English, so all audio will have to be in that language only. Drop me a line at psychopez (at) gmail.com to let me know if you're interested or not.

Reality, I am your Champion

So it's been a weird few weeks where the confluence of a few separate things have created something interesting. And yes, being from Pittsburgh I'm required by law to use the word confluence 70% more of the time then people from elsewhere in the world.

First, a buddy of mine, Sam Van Eman, linked me to a TED talk give by Jane McGonigal on how gaming can make a better world. You must go watch this video right now. If you haven't, in a nutshell Jane says that games, if used in the right way, can transform the many ills of the world into something better; that gaming is in an infancy as a vehicle for good. It may sound like lofty ideas, and some of her theories do seem that way, but she presents a good case. I bought her book, I found she was speaking at Pax East, and having decided 3 days earlier I had the money to go but it would be better spent elsewhere bought a ticket to Pax and found a hotel room.

I self identify as a gamer. It's not what I do, it's who I am. Almost all of my friends I have today I either met through or reinforced my friendship with though games, online and off. Maybe Jane's theories are too far out there, but the truth of the matter is I want, I almost need her vision of the world to be true, as it validates my hobbies that many in the world would otherwise simply see as a waste of time.

Then today I came across a post on the blog A Terrible Idea titled I Am Your Champion. I am writing this Monday night, so all I know about this game is this: pick a cause, a non-profit of some sort, and publicly declare your intention to be their champion. More rules to come every day for the next week.

I have no idea what is to come. I don't know if this is a scam of some sort, a publicity stunt for the blog's other games, or an honest social experiment game to see what people are willing to do to support a cause they believe in, a cause they feel they deserve the title 'Champion' for. But I have gone and picked a cause, Make Room for Kids, that puts game systems, games and videos into the local children's hospital for a few reasons. First, making a kid of any age who has to lose days of their childhood hooked to machines smile, to allow them to forget what ever sickness or disease is thrust upon them and remind them, is a noble cause. Second, I am already involved in something to support Make Room for Kids this Friday, earning one of the late night slots to play video games with Chachi, who is gaming for 24 hours as a fund raiser. And third, in some poetic way, playing a game to make people more aware of a program to get games to children who need it most just seems right in some grand cosmic scale. 

Or maybe it's just the way I unlock some sort of universal achievement, but still, the point is made....

Update on Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 8:12PM by Michael Hasko

Make Room for Kids has met its goal for the year, so I am going to chamipon Child's Play. Same idea, games for sick kids, larger scale.

Where were you then? Where are we now?

It's September 11, 2010, and this question is being asked a lot.

For the record, I was in a philosophy of knowledge class in the Palumbo Center at Gannon University.  The classroom was windowless, in the back of the Honors Program department on the third floor.  I had gotten there early to finish some reading, around 8:00a for an hour and a half class that started at 9:20a. 

So my first reaction was, "Oh, a plane hit a building in New York City."  I'd not seen any video, just heard things from the people who came in and had heard and seen the news.  The professor came in, said a few words about having to go on, and we did.

Later, a bit after 10:00a, someone went to the bathroom, and came back saying that one of the towers had fallen.  It really didn't shock me as much then, I didn't really know anything about the World Trade Center, even as a college senior at that point.  Most of my knowledge in those buildings were wrapped up in the one episode of The Simpsons and remembering it had been bombed before in 1993.  (I even remember where I was when I heard about the 1993 bombing, in the back seat of the minivan listening to the radio as my parents were driving out for their weekly meeting with their Amway sponsor.) 

Once class was over and we left, the main halls of Palumbo had couches and televisions mounted on the wall.  It was impossible to walk through, because everyone was just staring at the TVs.  That image, of everyone just frozen in place, enthralled at the looping images of plane crashing into tower, then tower coming down, lather, rinse, repeat, is the first that I associate with that day.

Last weekend, I flew to Seattle for a convention.  Talking about that trip was going to be this blog post, but as much as I wanted to post that, for some reason I felt I had to talk about the attacks today; that I'd be branded as some sort of anti-American heretic for refusing to talk about the 9/11 attacks on the anniversary. 

9 years ago we constantly said we'd never forget.  I tend to think more often than not these days we forget about 300 days out of the year, then flash remember as August starts to wain and September double digit days draw nearer.

The big news of the past week was not about the attacks, but of some church pastor who said he was going to burn Korans to make a statement.  Sure, it's protected free speech in this country, but actions have consequences, positive and negative, and odds were great there would be some dire consequences had that action gone down.  Then today comes around, and everyone is doing like I'm doing, remembering the heroes and the sacrifices. 

Maybe it's good we all still have this gut reaction to this date in history: it really seems to be the only time we can remember everything and reflect back on what's happened.  It'd be really bad if we started turning 9/11 into a Memorial Day or Labour Day, when we vaguely reflect on the reason for the day off and instead party through a 3 day weekend.  (Something I'm perfectly guilty of at times myself, just so I'm not pointing fingers at others I can't point at myself.)

I'd still like to have to not take my shoes off at an airport and be able to bring a full water bottle on one of these day though.  There's bound to be some point between vigilance and remembrance, and silly over reactions.

Make it so.

I am posting this from an airplane. 

I am soaring 37,000 feet above the surface of the earth at hundreds of miles per hour, able to wirelessly connect to a world wide network that allows instantious communication with people in different countries and different cultures from the other side of the globe.  I am listening to independantly produced audio fiction from authors in and genres I'd never would have been interested in if not for said network on a device that can store more music than 9000 CDs.  The flash storage device in my pocket can store thousands of the greatest written works of mankind.  My cell phone, another pocket device, has more than double (at least) the processing power of the transport that took people to the moon and back.

I live in the future.

I vow never to take any of this for granted, ever.

Why I love Pittsburgh...

Why I Love Pittsburgh

So here's the TL;DR version of the past 30 years of my life.  Born in Cleveland, parents move to Buffalo, at age 16 move back to Cleveland, go to a college in Erie, PA, move back to Cleveland after college in 2002, move back to Erie a year later, then move down to Pittsburgh in March 2006.

Around October 2006, I realized that I'd fallen in love with the city.

Now, I'll be the first to admit there might be another reason why I love the city that isn't wholly based on the city itself.  I had moved to Cleveland in the middle of my high school years, so I had have a good reason to dislike the Ohio city, and Pittsburgh is an entire city that doesn't traditionally like Cleveland.  

So yeah, I am a little biased.  But that alone isn't why I think of the 'Burgh as my home.

The thing that really hit upon me was the attitude and sense of identity of the city.  Of the other places I've lived, Cleveland and Buffalo both have an overarching mood of 'woe is me'.  Which to be fair is merited.  All four of the Rust Belt cities I've lived in have already had their Golden Age during the height of American manufacturing, which is long past in this global age.  The two big Lake Erie cities are generally like the former high school jock who now works some soulless, demeaning service job; always talking about how good it was back in the day and lamenting the fact that things have changes and the world has moved on.

Pittsburgh's identity is drastically different.  It has had its own devastating industrial crash as well (I think there is one steel mill still functioning in the Iron City) but the folks here don't seem to lament the past but revere it.  It's a small difference -- one recalls history and longs for a return to it, the other recalls history and honors it for what it was -- but it is a powerful one.  One looks back, the other looks forward having learned and improved.

I live in a section of Pittsburgh called Shadeyside.  It's a nice little slice of the city, with a bunch of older, mixed style houses and a main business drag with a lot of small coffee shops and eateries.  Right next to me is Bloomsfield, sort of the 'Little Italy' of the city, with its own main drag of Italian eateries and what not.  Lauranceville, Squirrel Hill, North Shore, Friendship, all of these are parts of the same city that have such a unique feel, but are 10-15 minute drives.  If you're from a larger city like D.C., L.A. or New York, this may seem a bit pedestrian, but none of the other cities I've lived in have had so many unique feelings and locations all within the same metro area.

I guess the simplest way to explain it is this.  Driving from the airport to the city, you have to go through one of the many tunnels around Pittsburgh.  When you emerge on the other side, especially at night, you get one of the best views of the city.  A lot of 'Burghers talk fondly of the times they've brought their family and friends through the tunnel for the first time.  As you cross the Fort Pitt bridge, you see the heart of downtown Pittsburgh right in front of you, lit up if it's night.  There are a lot of older brick buildings standing among the shinier steel structures and castle-like glass spires of PPG place.  It's not as sexy as New York City's skyline, or as iconic as Paris or St. Louis', but it doesn't claim to be.  If you can see the appeal of it as it is, not as others want it to be, you can instantly see what make Pittsburgh attractive to me as my home.

Baby come back...

A few weeks ago I played around with a story about where characters go when they're not remembered anymore, when they're not wanted or needed.  It wasn't my intent to make it morbid, and I hope there was a sort of wistful happy note, an F or maybe a B flat, at the end there.

The reason for that is all this enforced blogging has stirred a lumbering beast within my psyche.  Once spry and energetic, able to leap into action with nary a moment's notice, this creature has been slumbering deep within me, and is slow to wake.  This elder being, Write-clthu, The Scion of the Infinite Story, is starting to rise again in me, and there are plenty of sacrifices that must be put upon its alter before it can return.

Sever years or so ago, I had dreams of writing a novel.  I had enough friends tell me I was good at writing characters, and I thought if I could just focus enough and bang on it, I could have...something.  It was a time when I was out of college but not working yet, an adult in body but not in mind or spirit, and I could afford such delusions.  I practiced, honed my skills.  Slowly taught myself how to create plot along with characters.  Studied how others created people, objects, worlds, universes, and what worked and what didn't.

Not too long, though, and it was no longer fun.  The release of jumping into an unfinished world of my creation, making and connecting the next series of dots diminished every time I tried, until at one point I just set everything down and walked away.  It was no big deal, I tried to console myself, I was no longer having fun doing what I did, so just move on.  Sort of mirroring my Pez hobby interest as well.

But like Pez, writing's now again in the forefront of my life, and 'Super Sally's Diner' was my apology to the characters in my head I'd abandoned.  It might sound odd if you've never written fiction before, treating my characters like they're real and have honest emotions.  It's not that I believe the characters are real in the sense of them being able to talk and converse with me.  That's just crazy.  Rather, it's that characters, good characters, the one you want to populate a book with and create a scaffold of a world around, giving them a plot to go on their merry little way, have a spiritual substance that is tangible, made up of the same whipsy threads dreams are made of.

That feeling you get when you finish a good book, or during the credits of a long movie series or an epic video game, the sense of loss?  A mourning for not being able to hang around or observe any more?  That is the spirit of the character(s) leaving you, returning to the aether.

When I write, the good characters do all the story telling for me.  If I can craft them fine enough, once I drop them into a situation and trigger an action (The war starts, the baby dies, the teleporter goes haywire) they act on their own.  All I have to do is have enough stamina to listen to everything they tell me and mark it up in neat ASCII characters somewhere.

These characters of mine, five adventures from a world they know exists but one I have yet to finish putting in words, three teenage super heroes each with their own secrets and their super villain arch nemesis who is also their math teacher, a merfolk priestess, and a young adult finishing college with an odd ability to talk to ghosts, these folks and more have been trying to grab my attention for years.  And I've been the rude guy who bought them flowers  and took them to a nice restaurant on the first date, but hasn't called back and is blocking their calls.

The least I owe them, and owe myself I guess, is to know that characters don't die when no one believes in them; they simply hang out in an old 50's diner telling their stories to everyone else stuck there, and having a good time there.

And maybe in the next few months and years, I can slowly start listening to them all again.

Hold my hand, but not too tight...

This week it looks like I'll be getting a point. 

A few weeks ago, a fellow Dungeons and Dragons twitterer Scott aka TheAngryDM mentioned how little he updated his blog.  This is something I knew all too well, having said back in May or June that I was going to try and update once a week, and following that off with not updating once a week.

So I floated an idea by him.  We keep each other accountable to updating our blogs.  One post a week, 500 words minimum, due by Saturday midnight every week.  You miss a week, you get a mark.  Who ever has the most marks at the end of mid-December donates 50 dollars to Child's Play, if we're tied, we each chip in $25.

Since then, Scott's pumped out a few amazing posts on D&D.  I've...written a story about where imaginary characters go when they're not wanted any more.

But he sent a tweet out earlier today saying he's not going to make it by tonight.  This is the first time either one of us have had hints of missing, and where our buddy system of blogging accountably meets its fist test.

This is on my mind because I've been using this system of "let's suffer together to get stuff done" more and more recently.  A friend of mine in merry olde England is trying to get an 100,000 word novel done by September.  He's set up a thread in the forums we use to track his progress, to help keep him honest, help track his count, and to share bits and pieces with us.  At work, I saw a co-worker had a C25K schedule up.  I mentioned it to her, saying I'd tried it once but stopped when things too tough, and asked her if we could do it at the same time, keeping the other accountable.  Word spread, and starting Monday 15 people from my company will all be starting this.  The e-mail list is already set up to nag and bug each other to stay honest in this.

The hope of this is to be a crutch; a tool to help get me into the correct habit, and that once a certain time is reached I'll be able to remove it and continue on without the need for it.  And I can see some of the good habits already starting to filter their way into my daily routine.

I went pretty much sixteen months without writing, with a failed attempt at a NaNoWriMo the only exception.  I stopped writing, stopped pursuing the ideas, it all just left me.  Now that I have a weekly blog post here, as well as at least 2 posts a month over at RPGMusings, I'm noticing my mind is paying more attention to ideas I would have otherwise let flitter on by.  I have a notebook and pen on me at all times so I can jot down ideas (or record them via voice).  I'm starting to pay attention to all the little This American Life-like moments I'd witness, the narrative structure forming in parallel to witnessing the triggering idea.

But I was like this months ago, and I stopped.  I needed a kick start to get me going, and there's no guarantee it'll stick.  My fear, to extend the feeble crutch analogy, is that the broken bone will never mend, and I'll require a crutch permanently if I wish to continue these desired traits.  It's not a bad thing in itself, I just need to leave my ego at the door and ask for help.

It's the thought that I can't do this on my own that gets to me.  And now that I write it down, maybe it's not a bad thing.  Writing is a very solitary activity, one of the reasons I tend to avoid it is that I'd rather interact with people instead of stare at a monitor in my free time.  Adding the pseudo-social elements into it lessens the isolation factor. 

At any rate, Scott, here's hoping you get all the gremlins worked out and can get back on the saddle next week.  Don't worry, I'm going to miss the week of PAX at least, so things are not bleak.

Update: Scott just made it, we're still even, and things are gonna be interesting 'round PAX time.

Super Sally's Diner

Waning Harvest drained the last of his coffee.  The bitter ichor that Super Sally served at her diner could hardly be called java, but one didn't waste the days away at Super Sally's for the quality of the goods served there.

"Where ya think you're going, honny?"  Sally's uniform looked as if it were stolen from an Americana daydream of what 50s diner waitress would wear, and mated with a super hero artist from the same era.  Modern folk often confused the combination of kitsch and tights as some sort of fetish wear, but the real patron's of Super Sally's hardly blinked an eye anymore, least of all Waning Harvest.

As an older, forgotten super hero, his bright yellow spandex outfit was as out of place as that of the super powered waitress.  Looking around, Waning Harvest looked at elves and wizards dressed in all sorts of medieval grab, plenty of dapper men in sharp suits, space rangers in metallic clothing, ray guns holstered at their side.  Everyone was out of place here, so no one is.

"Same place the rest of us are going, Sal.  Lord knows we ain't leaving any time soon."  Sally smiled, pouring a fresh cup of the disgusting swill.

"Oh honny, I remember when you first came here, you would've had to been three flaps to the breeze to have said that way back when?"

Harvest pulled a long sip, letting the brown acid, cream and sugar, burn its way down his gullet.  "Yeah, I think everyone goes through that, though, at least when they first get here."

Sally turned to put the coffee pot back on the burner.  "Oh, You got no idea, honny.  I've it all from the folks when they get here.  Most just order a cup of joe, thinking they'll be getting their little hineies out of here lickitey split.  You were like that.  Some come resigned to being stuck here.  Ain't ever seen someone come in happy, though, you got that right."

"Not even you, darling?"  The exaggerate drawl got a giggle out of waitress.

"Quit it, you.  And even lil' old me didn't like it when I got here.  'Mazing Mandy was running this place though, and she was more delighted than a sack full o' sunshine when I came here.  Not many of us waitresses who get forgotten to begin with, and a super hero one at that?"

They shared a laugh at that.  The door opened, an a blocky approximation of a person walked in.  Everyone in the diner did their best to look at the new comer without looking like they were looking.  Waning Harvest waved the new guy over.

"Video game, I take it.  Don't get a lot of your kind around here, seems like no one forgets you guys these days.  Have a seat, if you can."  He motioned to the garish orange stool next to him.  The video game character was made of distinct colored blocks, from across the diner it gave a relative image of a man but up close the difference in the pixels were jarring.

"Uh, thanks, so, this is it, huh?  Super Sally's?"  The voice had the soft crackle of electricity.

"Bless my heart, he knows.  You doing alright, son?  Oh, wait."  Sally strode over to the window to the back kitchen.  "Put the bytes on, Franky.  We got us an 8-bit."  Waning Harvest grinned, the smell of the byte fryer was one of the highlights of being in Super Sally's.

"Sorry, sugar, gonna be a few before we can serve you something you can get down.  What'cha want, and I'll put a rush on it."

The video game character's face froze at first, trying to process this new bit of context.  "Burger'll be fine.  Will remind me of an old buddy of mine...".  He spun on the counter stool, scanning the diner as if his friend would have ben unlucky enough to be there with him.

"You don't want your old friends showing up down here...er, what's your game again, son?"

"Just call me Iggy."  His voice soured as he spun back, dejected at the failure of finding his desired target.

Waning Harvest set his coffee mug down and leaned closer to Iggy.  "Waning Harvest, also known as Sullivan Moon.  So, you want to talk about it?" Iggy looked up at where Sally was, but saw the waitress already moving down the counter to check on the other customers.  "Don't have to say anything, son, if you don't want to, but talking helps."

The super hero and video game character sat in silence for a few moments.  Around them the clattering of mugs and plates were staccato accents on the concerto of a million diner conversations all happening at once.

"32 year old graphics designer.  He was the last one, the last real one, you know?"  Iggy spoke up after many long moments.  Waning Harvest nodded.  "He'd play 'Iggy's Runabout' at least once a month, had for the previous 5 years after finding the old games in his parent's attic.  He died in a car crash a few months ago.  I think I knew once he was gone it was only a matter of time, but it seemed like others still thought of me."

Waning Harvest nodded.  "Yeah, I ended up here pretty much the same way.  Me and my sister, Waxing Harvest..." the super hero pointed to a booth were a lady in her mid 20s sat wearing a similar yellow spandex costume.  She waved when she caught the glances of her brother and the new guy pointed in her direction.  "...yeah, we've been here for a while.  Only had a few comic books to our name, but we were some of the first black super heroes in print.  We weren't the first, though, and since we never stuck around long enough."  Waning shrugged.  "One guy was really into all the old African American comic heroes, he kept us around for a long time.  Cancer finally got him, and in moments, boom, here we were.  Forgotten."

Iggy processed that for a moment.  "You don't seem bitter about it."

"I was, son, for a long time.  Was just saying to Sal before you showed up, everyone here is bitter, there'd be something wrong with you if you were.  We were created to entertain, to be characters in someone's work, and when you're officially forgotten, when no one's thought of your or cared about you, when you end up here, yeah, that's right bound to make one bitter."

Waning stood up, motioning to Iggy.  "Let me show you around, though.  We have plenty of time here, unless your game gets remade, or my comic gets turned into a movie we're here forever, Super Sally's Diner of the Forgotten.  But it's not as bad as it sounds.  Plenty of folk, always a new face to see.  It may not be what you wanted, but it's the best way to spend never being remembered again!"




(Where do ideas go when they're not being thought of anymore?  Where do all the characters in our stories, movies, games, books, what happens to them when we don't feed them our imagination?  I'd like to think they're at Sally's having an eternal last drink)

Going home again is pretty sweet.

I went to a reunion of sorts last weekend.  Other people called it a Pez convention, but I know better.

I split my high school years between Buffalo, New York and Cleveland, Ohio.  But I grew up on the Pezheads email mailing list.  Way back in 1997, as I was entering my senior year of high school I started my path down Pez collecting.  The story behind that is really innocent, it happened at band camp.  (Yes, innocent and band camp can happen, despite what certain movies may have you believe).  Tradition stated that any package sent to kids at camp had to be opened up in front of everyone, so parents would send silly things to their kids to embarrass them.  My parents sent me Pez, because I had found 2 or 3 from my younger years and started setting them up on my desk because they looked neat.

So our band director opened my package, had this WTF look on his face when he saw Pez.  Me, being the quiet and subtile creature I was back then, screamed PEZ!, ran up to the front of the auditourm, grabbed my candy dispensers and ran back to my seat. 

Everyone got a good laugh.  But people started calling me the Pez man because of that little outburst.  And because I was such a confused, lonely kid looking for any kind of identity back then, I embraced it.  I started buying dispensers at grocery stores, people started giving me their old dispensers, things were good.

Then I got online to find out more info about my new hobby.  I didn't really realize what I was getting into.  After learning about vintage Pez dispensers, pieces of plastic that instantly became objects of my covetous desire, I found the Pezheads e-mail list.

Now, now a days, e-mail lists, or listservs, are reguarded as old in internet terms, grouped in with the Moasic browser, Kermit file transfers (Which I used in the Lynx browser), and the Gopher protocol.  You subscribe to a listserv, and a message sent to a single address will be sent out to everyone on the list.

Pezheads was a medium sized list at the time, and I lurked there for a while before starting to join in the conversations there.  I soon realized I was a young 18 year old punk kid surrounded by adults and even in some cases grandparents. 

This came as a bit of a shock to me, as back in 1997 I didn't know anyone over the age of 22 who could easily use things like e-mail or the internet.  Even more shocking was how people treated me.  With the shared interest and only screen names to go from, I felt rather accepted among these adults. 

Not to say that I was not the most mature among them, I still was an selfish asshole of a teen.  I eventually translated that goofy behavior into things like Pez song parodies and jokes.  In the midst of normally serious discussion about Pez variations, new releases, celebrations of finding a $500 dispenser at a yard sale for 25 cents, there I was posting conversations between myself and Celes, my talking snow(wo)man dispenser in a Letterman-esque dialog and parodies of American Pie and One Week revolving around Pez.

I also discovered that there were Pez conventions, and wouldn't you know it, the world's largest one, Pez-a-Mania, was held in Cleveland, my backyard, every year.  For five years, from 1998 to 2002, I went to Pez-a-Mania.  Every year I went, the amount of people I wanted to see, and who want to see me, grew.  I was never a social creature by any stretch of the imagination, except for my yearly Pez prom in Cleveland.  My Pez friends were also surragate aunts and uncles.

After I graduated college and moved back home, my little Pez illusion was shuttered.  I couldn't display my collection like I once had, I didn't have the free time to keep up with the e-mail list, and I didn't have as much extra cash as I did in college, silly things like rent and food and those other real life bills taking away my Pez budget.

So for a while, I went dark to the Pez community.  I never got rid of my collection, it was too much a part of who I was, who I still am today, but they sat prisoner in plastic bins for years until about 2 years ago.

It was a casual immersion back into my old life.  The loose dispensers came out first, those were the easiest to set up.  My carded dispensers took a bit more effort, so they went up next.  Then I started lurking on the Pez list again.  The first posts after my return were, I am not kidding, a 4 part story written in second person based in the Cthulhu mythos, blended with Pez dispensers.  It involved Celes, my talking snow(wo)man dispenser and was the origin of the word Haskonomicon.

All this lead to me going to Pez-a-Mania in 2009, but I got there late, could not mingle with as many people, and leading to an over all less than stellar experience.  But so many things had changed that it was still worth it.  I was able to learn the layout of the hobby from the shadows, who was still active, who wasn't, that sort of thing.

This year, July 2010, was my real homecoming to the Pez community and the convention.  So many times during Pez bingo, during room hopping, and during the time in the dealer's room on Saturday, people would stop my, say, "Oh my god, it's Mike Hasko.  Look at you, how've you been?"  And I'd catch up with all these people I used to admire from afar.  But it was different, before I couldn't grasp the rigors of adulthood, working, bills, sacrificing the things you want to do so the things you need to do are fulfilled.  Now I could chat about my job, honestly listen and care about theirs.

I had grown up, they had remained the same. 

A few friends of mine and I would always joke about the people who would return to their high school and college homecoming events.  It seemed really sad that some people would care so much about those times to willingly want to return and relive it.  But I think I understand it now, having had a homecoming that honestly spoke to me.  Sometimes you need to be reminded of what you were to see just how far you've come, how certain things that were once important are now trivial, and the little things you didn't focus on were the ones you should.

For a lot of people, all that is the innocent trappings of high school.  For me, it's my Pez collector family.