What the Hell is Journalism Even: part 2 – Zachary Jason’s Struggle With the Concept of Time

In part 1 of “What is Journalism Even” we managed to call bullshit on roughly 4 sentences of the Boston Magazine article before having to take a break. Now that I’ve managed to surgically remove my palm from my face, we can continue.

Of note in the previous post, was that Zak seemed to think the first date between me and my ex happened at Veggie Galaxy. But he also thought the first date happened at a dive bar.

We might perhaps excuse this as shoddy writing.

Or maybe a subtle attempt at dramatizing my choice of venue for the interview, so as to play up the “obsession” angle (remember, part 1 made the article into a drinking game on this premise).

Or perhaps a completely understandable confusion as to what “first” means.

This strange confusion as to the nature of time, we will see, actually pops up again and again throughout the piece. The gist of which, to whatever extent it relates to me, can be summarized as “You know Khan, from Star Trek? Eron Gjoni is like if he and Spock had a baby. Trust me, I’m a journalist.”

The article continues:

Gjoni is a highly cerebral, 25-year-old software developer who was recently fired from Massachusetts General Hospital’s robotics lab. He chooses his words deliberately, spending much of our time together describing the month after his breakup with Quinn: how he extracted details from her Facebook, text, and email accounts; how he tracked her movements and shadowed her conversations.

1. MGH doesn’t have a robotics lab.



2. Zak would apparently prefer I choose my words accidentally.

3. The only extent to which I “tracked” anyone’s movements was the extent to which I held off on publishing until they were out of town. Just in case shit devolved into doxing.

4. How I what? I didn’t extract any details from her facebook, text, or email accounts. I do not have access to these.

The process he described to me sounded as if he were gathering the pieces of a horrible machine, with each component designed to be as damaging to Quinn as possible. Eventually, the machine would have a name: “The Zoe Post,” a 9,425-word screed he published in August.

1. Yes, the pieces of some horrible machine. Assembled with my “precocious mathematical mind” (we’ll get to this). Upon the completion of which I go on to don a cape and sit in the throne left to me by the previous tenant of my shitty sublet, to wreak havoc upon the world.

2. The machine had a name. “The Zoe Post.” But please, if you feel like you’re on a first name basis with it, just call it “The.”

We are left to imagine the brave, heroic victim of this horrible machine – the victim of “The,” screaming in anger into the night.

“KHHHHAAAAAAAAN”

Neither Gjoni nor Quinn was particularly good at dating. He’d had a handful of flings in college and she’d had a number of short-term relationships. Both seemed stuck in adolescence—the types of young adults who tend to burn hot and flame out fast.

My first relationship (the one in college) lasted two and a half years. It was comfortable, but lacking in passion. Zak was well aware of this, but seems to think that amounts to burning hot, and that two and a half years amount to flaming out fast.

It might be this two and a half year relationship is discounted so as to discredit the seriousness of the concerns that brought me to publish TZP by painting them as the inevitable result of a short and overly impassioned relationship by someone with a history of short and overly impassioned relationships.

It might also be that this two and a half years was not understood by Zak, because he is struggling to understand the nature of time.

Possessed of a boyish face despite his shaggy beard, Gjoni has brown eyes and a skeletal 6-foot-1 frame,

I identify more with “Heroin Chic,” but okay.

and speaks in a matter-of-fact, deadpan monotone.

This is partially because I am speaking about matters of fact. Though I do tend to get monotone as conversations lose novelty.

His friends describe him as “extremely methodical,”



Spock.

“a very intellectual person with semi-decent people skills,”

Spock.

insular,



Spock.

rational,



Spock.

and almost preternaturally calm.

Spock.

Benjamin Hitov, a childhood friend and fellow programmer, told me he once beat Gjoni in the ninja fighter game Dead or Alive “100 times in a row, and he didn’t change his expression once.”

Spock losing to Kirk in 3D chess in the first episode of Star Trek.

Of note here though, is that Ben’s quote was in the context of his thoughts on the claim that I was violent. Ben has known me since 3rd grade, and he offered that anecdote to show that I would never get mad enough to resort to violence. Zak, instead, uses it to paint me as some inhuman creature. For as anyone who plays Dead or Alive should know, it’s a game where tempers run high, and friendships often hang in the balance of those hilariously unnecessary boob-physics.

More importantly – we played 100 times in a row (I had a project I wanted to procrastinate on), and Ben only won two thirds of the time, so there.

Moving on!

Born in Albania, Gjoni migrated to Worcester with his family when he was six to escape the Kosovo War. “Moving here was like a big reset button,” he told me.

When I was six, the year was 1996. The Kosovo war didn’t start until 1998, two years later. Questions remain. Am I like Khan – deeply affected by and forged of the horrors of war, or have yet another two years mysteriously vanished, because Zachary Jason does not understand the concept of time?

Growing up, Gjoni struggled to assimilate, but with a precocious mathematical mind, he found solace in computers.

Perhaps I am not quite like Kahn. Perhaps I am more like Spock, after all.

Though – a precocious mathematical mind? This is interesting, and I am flattered. I just wish someone would have told that to my highschool algebra teacher, who gave me a 47. Or to whatever graded my SATs, so it would have been more lenient about my not bothering to learn what a prime number is.

The thing about “precocious” is that it implies I became good at something much much earlier than generally expected. But I didn’t learn math until much later than I should have, and for reasons that had little to do with any inherent interest in math.

The only thing Zak seems to base his view on, is that there was, in fact, a program I’d crafted in highschool (for the purposes of my artistic endeavors) which, to the casual observer, might imply a deep understanding of mathematics. But if anyone were to probe the underlying code, it would impress upon them horror at the monstrous attempt to make sense from an absolute dearth of formalism.

That code would look like it was written by a highschooler who didn’t entirely understand what he was doing. That code, was, in fact, written by a highschooler who didn’t entirely understand what he was doing.

So, I learned math really late. Zak seems to think I mastered it really early. Zak is a journalist, and so we might suppose on his part such an inadequate understanding of mathematics as to render plausible his awe at my paltry accomplishments.

Or we might posit that this is merely intended as a diversion for the empathy of the reader. So that if the reader is to question “why would anyone behave in this implausible way,” Zak need not offer the truth for explanation – but merely affirm that “there is no sense in understanding such sinister minds echelons above and so very alien to our own.”

Or perhaps – and we are accumulating evidence now – the distinction between “early” and “late” is lost on Zachary Jason, due, again, to a deep-seated confusion as to the nature of time.

School, he says, was “almost bizarrely easy,” so he dropped out of a computer science program at Worcester State when MGH poached him during his senior year.

Well THAT was out of context. Here’s the context reproduced below, as the relevant question was asked via email. (with emphasis added)

School was especially tricky. The lessons were almost bizarrely easy compared to the curriculum in Albania, and I picked up on the language easily enough after a few months, but the culture was filled with incomprehensible gotchas. Wearing pink shirts with Nala on them wasn’t okay if you were male apparently, and at 20 pounds too light for my age and 1 year too young for my grade you can imagine kids weren’t especially inclined to let faux pas like that slide. I’d make friends, but just a few here or there. Most were from outside of school. Neighborhood kids, usually other immigrants in the same crappy part of town.

We see that this description of “bizarrely easy” was relative to the curriculum in Albania. Of which my experience was limited merely to the first grade.

Zak seems to extend that description all the way to college, and goes so far as to say it’s why I left college.

Is Zak attempting to paint me as an arrogant genius – as Khan. Or, given the huge temporal gap between first grade and college, do we have more evidence of Zak’s struggle with the concept of time?

Gjoni fell for her hard—maybe too hard, given how brief their relationship was. He began idealizing Quinn as “this perfect ethical thing,” he says, and less as a gifted and flawed woman who battled chronic depression.

Lol, no.

The context of the “this perfect ethical thing” quote was not in reference to how much I idealized anyone. It was in reference to how much they demanded I think of them in that way, and the ways they would punish anything resembling an assertion or suspicion to the contrary.

There were flaws I was encouraged to accept of course. But they were all of the form “my life has been so difficult, and I am stronger and more compassionate for it, I deserve your sympathy and adoration.”

If you have read TZP, you’re well aware that anything else of substance was met with a “how dare you.” And there were some very important things that were left undared.

Quinn often traveled to speak at gaming conferences, and they saw each other at most once a week.

After just five months, they broke up. But Gjoni wouldn’t let go.Months later, his slinking obsession compelled him to write Quinn what he called a “giant” email begging her to get back together with him.

1. There’s that word again. “Obsession.” Take a drink.

2. As Zak was made well aware, that email was not written of my initiative. It was solicited from me by its recipient in what that recipient pitched as a mutual exchange. The exchange happened over a month before the plane ticket. Zak chooses instead to frame this as some compulsion born of my “obsession” with someone who I was quite uneasy about continuing a relationship with.

3. The e-mail in question is actually the exact opposite of what Zak claims here. In fact, the concluding paragraph of that email amounted to “We don’t really need to get back together that much. It would be nice presuming the last month or so has been a giant messed up series of confusions (which I hope your response letter clarifies). But I’m good either way.”

Though Gjoni stubbornly suspected Quinn had cheated on him while they were dating, he hoped to salvage their relationship. In a moment of weakness, she gave in and bought him a plane ticket from Boston to come see her in San Francisco, where she was at a games conference.

What moment of weakness dude? The plane ticket was like a month after the email. We’d been dating again for almost a month.

Quick run-down of how time works: It runs in a single direction, at a constant rate, agreed upon by all observers in the same relativistic reference frame.

If you’ve been dating someone for the last month, and they are not in a spaceship experiencing time-dilation as a result of relativistic acceleration, why would “a moment of weakness” come into play when they ask you to skip work and fly out to San Francisco? They have been dating you for almost a month. You are both in the same reference frame. You both experience it as the same span of time. What exactly are they “giving in” to?

For anyone who has read tzp, the proper timeline in it shows the sequence was

email -> non-exclusive relationship for a couple of weeks -> dating again for almost a month -> I am yelled at for being friends with Rachel -> a few hours later I am guilted into not being friends with Rachel any more -> a few hours later I am pressured into flying out to San Francisco for reasons that one might suspect have something to do with my spinelessly agreeing to not be friends with Rachel anymore.

Unfortunately, my palm has yet again merged itself with my face. So part 3 will have to wait until after I go do things remotely worth anyone’s time. Which, again, Zak, if you’re reading this – runs in a single direction, at a constant rate agreed upon by all observers in the same relativistic reference frame.