Essays | David Branstetter

Nov
8thBroken

Almost the minute I posted my last essay on Pokemon Go, I stopped playing. I had just risen to level 21 which took almost an entire week to reach from level 20. My goal was to level up maybe once a day to catch up with all the other players who had been hitting the game hard since day one. But as I progressed through the game each level became more grueling. Level 20 seemed like a good goal post because of the new Pokeballs that you could unlock. I also got a full time job and Pokemon was definitely not high on the priority list. So it sat there for a few weeks. Meanwhile Niantic kept issuing updates and occasionally I would check in on them. I heard through the interwebs that the Halloween update would give out free Pokemon candies and the ghost characters would be more prevalent. I was excited to play again but the game just kept crashing. I had grown used to the idea of not evolving my pokemon because there would be a 80% chance the program would crash. But it was getting worse. Now the app would shut down without cause. It had become almost unusable. But I did want to take advantage of the Halloween update and so I pressed on. Quite frustratingly I had just dropped my phone and cracked the screen. It was still functioning and I didn’t let that stop me. But finally the program made itself unusable when […]
Aug
16thLest We Forget

Here’s another Pokemon Go post, but this one is designed for the historical purpose of documenting the moment. You see Pokemon Go is so big right now that it astounds me how much it’s effected our culture and lifestyle. As I previously wrote, I’ve been walking like crazy. But I want to take a minute to just document the early days of Pokemon Go so that when my children ask “What was it like” I can give them a solid answer. I believe that it’s impact is so revolutionary that people will be comparing it to Beatlemania in the upcoming years. It began with a mild curiosity. My daughter was smitten with the Pikachu character because it was cute and yellow and cute. So for Christmas I bought her– and yes I mean her– a copy of Pokemon yellow for the Gameboy. I was hoping that it would encourage her to read and that we could play the game together and bond. We started to play it together but she started to lose interest. I think partly because I was controlling the game and secondly because she would have to listen to the games repetitive text. But I became hooked and we played the game for many weeks. While my interest in the game waned Ava was still smitten with the Pikachu character. So much so that she was in absolute hysterics when she saw her first genuine Pikachu stuffed animal in the wild. Now at our home we’ve absolutely […]
Jul
19thPokemon Go

(or How I learned to Love the Outdoors and Stop Worrying) This summer has been the most I’ve been outside since I was a young man mowing lawns with my parents. In fact I swore that I would get an education so I’d never have to be out in the heat again. This posture has decayed a bit over the years. When I became a homeowner I took a hidden joy that I would be required to own a lawnmower and maintain my lawn. I can’t help but reminiscence about the time that I spent with my family working in the oppressive sun, getting up in the wee hours to avoid it, and the comfort of air-conditioned restaurants. As a kid all I could focus on was the intensity of the work. It ate up my summer. I didn’t get to do anything fun. I wanted to be free! While I knew how to work hard from the years I spent in the family business I was happy to take a break at my first opportunity. I think that’s what college was for. And the years following that. And a few more for good measure. I got my degree and I had now insured that I wouldn’t have to be out in the sun again, a fact that I was proud of. The funny thing about life is that you don’t know that it’s started until you’re a few years into the race. Or as Roger Waters so elegantly stated, “No […]
Jan
27th2013: My Musical Journey

2013 had some incredible bright spots for me. I was able to find new music from new artists and relived some classics. My first obsession of 2013 was actually Tears for Fears of all things. One morning I woke up singing a melody that I could not shake. The only words that came to mind were “head over heals” which didn’t really seem to make sense to me. I wasn’t sure where that had come from. I googled the lyrics and quickly found that not only was I right but the band was Tears for Fears. Around 2004 Tears for Fears put out a new album and it was generally well received. I thought that it was time to give the band a shot and delve deeper into their catalog. Bit by bit I started sampling different songs from their greatest hits album Shout: The Very best of Tears for Fears. I soon found that I enjoyed almost every song equally on the disk. I consider myself a Radiohead/Thom Yorke fan so I purchased Amok by Atoms for Peace. It took me a while to get into and I never really took to the album like I thought I would. It was a dud, but not a total waste. The real problem for me was that I received an advance copy of Random Access Memories to write for the Fiddleback. I quickly dropped Amok and began to swoon over Daft Punk. The song that really stood out to me was […]
Oct
17thThe Proximity Problem: A Case Study in Evolution

When discussing Evolutionary Theory, we must take into account the proximity of mating between two pairings of two sub-humans at the moment that both sub-humans pass on their identical genetic mutation. For Evolutionary theory to work, we must first assume that human life originated from both a male and a female sub-human. As we understand reproduction today, it takes both a male and female to create offspring. Let us assume that the male chromosome is actually a damaged female chromosome and a mutation. If the first human was female, then she would have to reproduce asexually until the male mutation appeared so that her offspring could mate to perpetrate the species. While some cases have shown in nature that females can spontaneously reproduce (i.e. frogs and sharks), it is a rare event. The rarity of the event would not take place in one lifetime and so therefore it would be impossible for a female to reproduce asexually. In addition to that, she would have to reproduce often and create the vital male chromosome through an extremely unlikely mutation. Therefore we must eliminate this possibility of evolution from our theory. This is important because we must establish that male and female pairings had to spawn the first human. The proximity problem comes into play because every mutation that is passed down from each successful pairing must be able to be physically passed down from one generation to the next. Yes we can assume that accidental changes in DNA can happen and […]