Pancake and Waffle (Part II)

He was really hoping to earn the hamsters before Christmas, and it was already November, so he started practicing.  He was frustrated at first – his fingers didn’t seem to want to go where his brain was commanding them to go and hitting the correct string without looking down was “impossible”. 

But he stuck with it.

After a while he became a bored with playing the two games (he managed to get 500k in String Skip Saloon and about 1 million in Ducks Redux) so he started playing a couple of the easier songs.  “Next Girl” (Black Keys) and “Angela” (Jarvis Cocker) were slow and simple enough, but he was only scoring in the mid-30-percents for proficiency for each.  I encouraged him to practice parts he was having a problem with using the Riff Repeater tool – a feature of the software that allows you to gradually improve on sections of a song you are having trouble with. It didn’t seem to be helping at all.

And then it happened: the “click”.

We’ve all experienced the “click” at one time or another.  It’s when you are struggling with some seemingly impossible task when, suddenly, the light switch is thrown, the scales drop off your eyes, and the third metaphor you are looking for to tie up the end of a run-on sentence presents itself suddenly.

He quickly climbed up past 90% on both songs.  Since he, like his mother, has music “in his bones” I wasn’t all that surprised.  I, on the other hand, have to “fake the funk” pretty much constantly and often quite literally.  Nothing really sticks.  I just don’t “get it” on the same level as real musicians do.

He started playing “Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones) and wasn’t doing all that great – even on a ¾ size guitar his hands are too small to keep them in one place that high up the neck of a guitar.  In mid-December he went back to playing the games and managed to get 7 million in String Skip Saloon and a whopping 19 million in Ducks Redux.  For reference, you get a special achievement in both games for scores above 10 million… so, you know… not bad.

He got the hang of switching between easy chords by playing Dawn of the Chordead and Star Chords but he hated (still hates?) both of those games.  I guess it was a “too much, too soon” thing.  I dunno.  Regardless, that practice seemed to help him switch between phrases fast enough to start to do really well on it – routinely hitting in the low to mid 80%’s.

Christmas came and went hamster-free (bummer) but he was still on Winter Break so he practiced – he wanted to tell his classmates he got them when he returned to school. He went back to his easier songs and was able to hit Master Mode for a large portion of both. 

Master Mode?  Oh… It’s when you have nailed a phrase or phrases in a song well enough for the on-screen notes to gradually fade to nothing, forcing you off the crutch of visual cues and making you rely on your ear and you memory. He scored above 100% on one of the songs, but I can’t remember which.  It was pretty cool to see those notes disappear like that.

He decided to end the night with one more go at Satisfaction.  The pic on the left shows the result.

He smiled hugely and then stopped.  “Wait,” he said.  “You guys are both here.  I just got through playing my other songs above 90%.  I just got above 90% on this one.  Does that mean I get my hamsters?”

My wife looked at me and I looked at her.  She grimaced lightly.  I shrugged and smiled.  “Yes,” I said. “A deal’s a deal. Congratulations!” 

It was Saturday evening, January 4^th.

To be continued...

Pancake and Waffle (Part 1)

Oh! It’s-ah… Pancake and Waffle! Pancake and Waffle! Hamster services! [record halt sound] Wait… that’s not right.  Let me start over.

I think I described in the past that I wrote a Book of Challenges for my son.  In case I didn’t mention it, the book is a list of accomplishments (outside of the usual “make your bed” or “get good grades” or “please for the love of God clean the toothpaste off your sink – the hammer and chisel are in the usual place”) that he could do in order to earn rewards of some kind. 

Picture earning a merit badge except usually much harder and/or more time consuming.  The harder the challenge the larger the reward. A one-star challenge would earn something fairly cheap while a five-star challenge would have a more substantial payout.

Examples?  Sure.  Back when he was five he wanted Minecraft because the older kids at school were playing it.  In order to earn that one he had to be able to ride his bike well enough to circumnavigate the church twice without stopping – this involved transitioning from his usual comfort zone of freshly paved roads and cul-du-sacs to dealing with hills, grass, mole-holes, sand, and gravel. Thusly, Minecraft poofed into existence on the Xbox.  Other challenges have included solo-riding a fairly intense rollercoaster, earning various colored belts in karate, sinking 50 free-throws in a single basketball practice session,  and running a mile fast enough to earn the Presidential certification at school.

Get it? Got it.  Good.

One day this past fall he asked if he could get some hamsters for Christmas.  I groaned a little and struggled to come up with a way of saying “Pfft. Nope.” that resulted in no follow-up questions or begging. I was moderately against it just because I figured it would be a hassle. The wife immediately started publishing a highly pejorative and unnecessarily foul-mouthed Anti-Hamster newsletter which she then distributed to the neighbors while getting them all to sign a “NIMBY” petition against any future rodent ownership by my son.  She was just about to take out a full-page ad in the local paper railing against quote plague-ridden stink-bags unquote when I said “Look, let’s just make this a challenge – if he earns them he earns them.”  She tentatively agreed.

Since he hadn’t touched his guitar in years I gave him the challenge of completing three Rocksmith 2014 songs of his choosing at a 90% or higher level.  Once he learned them to that level of goodness he would then have to play them all in one night (a mini concert for me and the wife) while hitting 90% on all of them.

Up until that point the only thing he had experience with on that game were two practice arcade games.  “String Skip Saloon” teaches you to hit different strings (no fretting) in order to shoot banditos coming to wreck up your bar, and “Ducks Redux” is a game where you play the right notes order to shoot electronic ducks.  But, like I said, that was a couple of years ago. I told him not to jump into the songs right away.  Create a new account and start from scratch.

(To be continued...)

A Really Good Book

So…  Nice to see you again…  You’ve aged well.

My plan for this blog was to slap a big ol’ ABANDON IN PLACE notification on it and just walk away.  Which I did.  Later, my son, then nine years old, started reading it.  I can’t remember the exact circumstances of “how” of “why”, but I seem to remember showing him a few things like maybe his old drawings from when he was two or three. He says he thinks he started reading it after telling him about how he used to play with his Noah’s Ark playset when he was a toddler.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. 

He liked to go to the site occasionally and read (or re-read) about himself as a baby and about him growing up through the years.  He shared the articles with his classmates and with his teachers and they all got a good laugh.  Makes me smile to think about that.

After a while he asked if I could start writing again.  I said “Maybe… I don’t know.  There’s a lot of other things I’d rather be doing.”  He understood but he would still occasionally ask if I was going to ever write any more articles. My response was always semi-positive but non-committal.  The maybe-est maybe I could muster without implying “no” (because I just didn’t know) or giving false hope (because I just didn’t know).

So nearly three years of maybe-driven non-writing pass.

The night before Christmas 2019 my son hands me a gift to open.  It is large and heavy.  Hmmm. Clearly a hardcover book.  I open the wrappings and see the pic there on the left.

He had somehow found out that you could turn someone’s blog into an actual book.  It is over 400 pages long and covers the period from August 2007 through December 2012, which is why it says “The 36th Lock Volume 1” on the cover.  The binding is solid, the pages are glossy, and the print quality is superb.  It is really amazing to feel “time” made solid as I riffle back and forth through the pages.

But that’s not the best part.  Not by a longshot.

The best part is the Dedication:

The signatures are those of his classmates and of his current teacher.

Feels, little dude.  Feels.

It is 12:03PM Sunday, January 26th, the Year of Our Lord 2020.  It is 49 degrees and sunny.  I am listening to my wife talk with the 11-year-old as they sit together on the sofa downstairs. He coughs occasionally (some sort of bug going around at his school, we guess). The low rumble of a hamster wheel is just audible from a room off to my left. And I am writing.

This is awesome.