This is the time of year when blogs talk about their top posts for the 2009, the most important issues in their area of interest and otherwise reflecting with great insight on the past year or decade. I promise this blog will continue its long held tradition to avoid insights at all costs. So forward, forward I say.
But what to natter on about? I don’t have much interest in the debate about the military/cultural anthropology “conversation” any more. People have made their calls on a personal and professional level, and will go about their business as personal conscience leads them. The grassroots are wiser than the self-appointed protectors of the purity (read: ossification) of the field. It was fun to poke a stick at people for a while, but you can only make self-righteous people dance around and screech for so long before its boring again. Now, if they screeched something different every time, that would keep my interest. But, sadly it’s the same reason video games don’t keep my attention… not enough variety. They are sort of like watching Glenn Beck, you don’t need more that a couple of minutes to get the gist of it. Then it’s like watching Seinfeld.
I’ll still write about design and innovation from time to time.. I was in the field for 15 years as a design anthropologist and still enjoy it. But what else? I am not doing anything the looks like ethnography anymore and there is not much pissing me off these days, my life is pretty damn dull. I do a lot of book research and some consulting. I still have my “what am I issues.” Am I an anthropologist, yes… am I doing anthropology these days… no.
Here is what I have been working on for the last few months, as a hobby not a job mind you: Learning and playing Texas Hold ’em poker. A totally fascinating, difficult, frustrating game filled with a combination of science, individual heuristics and folklore. But that is what I do for fun in my spare time these days. I play very low limit games (for example, what some would call penny ante and very low stakes tournaments). I pour over my hand histories, read books on strategy and mostly gnash my teeth over my routinely poor play. I am not getting any better, so we will see how long this lasts. The Ordinary People Project lies fallow for the moment for no reason other than laziness.
But there are other bloggers here and they add their interests and we will be adding new bloggers soon.
What would you like to see more of?
