And I’m not talking about people in the journalism industry. I mean the opposite. At least twice this week, someone I interviewed assigned me a view I don’t personally hold. Their reason is often because I’m part of the “liberal media.” If not that, I must be a neo-con pushing my ideals.

It really makes me not want to have opinions at all so I can’t be accused of having an agenda — even one I completely disagree with. Maybe that’s the best place for a journalist to be though.

The craziest part: that 800,000 isn’t even including the broadcast numbers from South Korean TV, where the guy actually played and it was broadcast to millions of viewers. He’s probably the most famous guy ever to professionally play a videogame, a man who women throw themselves at and millions of Koreans aspire to be (no joke).

But anyway, cable TV numbers for a livestream of a guy playing a videogame? There are either a lot of nerds in the world or it must actually be something pretty interesting.

PC Gamer seems to think so too: “Professional gaming is finally fun to watch“

E-sports are boring, I’ve always felt. I wanted to follow them, have a favourite team or know who any of the players are, but almost every time I watched a game, I just couldn’t keep up. It looked like there was skill involved, but I couldn’t really relate it to my own experience of those games. But the scene has changed, and I’ve changed my mind. I think professional gaming has come of age.

The last time I looked into the competitive scene thoroughly was for a feature on it in 2006. I was sent out to the E-Sports World Cup in Paris, not to cover the results of the tournament, but to watch the games, interview the players, and just tell you guys if this was something you’d enjoy if you got into it. I came away impressed by the talent, intelligence and even personalities of the players I met, but no more able to actually follow a tournament match and understand it.

4 years later I’m sitting on a train, transfixed by my laptop screen, pulse racing. I’m watching Cool play oGsTop on Kulas Ravine, and I care more about the outcome of this game than any I’ve played myself in months. Top has a screen-filling swarm of Thors, mechs the size of buildings, streaming in to Cool’s base. Cool has nothing. But Cool has just done what Cool does, what you can never let Cool do if you ever play him: he’s hatched 12 Ultralisks.

The resulting battle actually makes me gape. I don’t think anyone on the train notices, but if they did they probably wondered what the hell I was watching. What else can you watch that makes you sit bolt upright, mouth agog? Pro gaming isn’t just a good spectator sport, it’s now one of the most exciting and entertaining ways to waste your time.

So, before you say this is just a bunch of nerdy hoopla, remember plenty of people would say the same thing about the NFL, MLB or NBA. Sabremetrics anyone?

Maybe people are realizing just how close sports and videogames are. Well, let me rephrase that. Maybe people are realizing how close watching sports and watching videogames are. An armchair quarterback isn’t that much different than an armchair gamer.

That’s all of my nerdiness for tonight.

See? In New York your dreams do come true.

I think I’ve been under-appreciating the fact that I’m writing for a blog with a huge worldwide following. Traditional journalism is still my forte, but blogging for a major name in the industry is a fun little experiment.

There is the paywall approach and the pacing approach. The options are to force your readers to pay for traditional newspaper-like content or do anything it takes to keep your online readers: never miss a beat, never miss a story, never let them think they need to read another website.

The New York Times just wrote an article about burnout in online news. It’s the young kids, the ones willing to wake up at 4 a.m., make a bad salary and constantly contribute to the never-ending news cycle they grew up with. And they must because if they don’t get there first, hungry eyeballs are going to devour another site’s content. It’s employers like Patch and Politico paying less for more because it’s all they can afford.

Apparently journalism is much more stressful than I was taught in college. I honestly don’t believe this is a viable solution. It’s an unsustainable pace for quality journalism. It’s a viable medium for entertainment for fluff, but it can’t produce real reporting. After all, it doesn’t produce enough page views for how much it costs.

When reporters receive bonuses based on how many people read their stories, it’s no longer about journalism, it’s about being sensational enough to get paid. Young journalists are going to learn to fight for the stories that will produce click, not the stories that will produce change.

The closest comparison is trying to catch someone’s attention by sticking out at the grocery store checkout line. Bleak.

But there’s another way, the Murdoch way. Rupert Murdoch’s latest paper charge for content is The Times of London. Surprise, surprise, it lost at least 65 percent of its online readers. Looks like Murdoch’s plan is pointless, doesn’t it?

Not quite. In fact, both these strategies are almost the same. Both are aimed at retention. Both are looking to keep readers, just different kinds of readers.

Politico, Gawker, The Huffington Post will all take any reader they can. It’s part of why they so often have to aim for the lowest common denominator. They pump the content that will get people to the site. The Times and other pay sites are aiming for consistent readers. It’s not elitism, it’s simply trying to cash in a demographic that’s valued more than fleeting eyes.

As GigaOM puts it:

… blocking casual readers — who are seen as less valuable to advertisers because they don’t spend as long on the site and aren’t regular visitors — is just one by-product of having a paywall. And even generating income from those readers by convincing them to sign up for a monthly subscription is only a by-product. For many newspapers, the main driving force for instituting a paywall is to keep print readers from migrating away from buying the physical product (which still generates the majority of advertising revenue at most newspapers) to reading for free online, where their eyeballs are worth less than they would be in print.

So they’re both desperate to keep readers. They come up with different solutions to the same problem, but neither of them can solve it.

There has to be a middle ground, one where quality journalism is still produced, but the producers actually profit. The shining example of quality news free online is the New York Times, but now its paywall looks inevitable, so the closest we’ll have to free quality reporting are non-profit institutions like ProPublica.

So what’s the the third option, a startup that only produces investigative reporting and sells it to newspapers? In the end, the money has to come from somewhere.

In the end, I’m siding with quality over quantity. Be right not first. There needs to be something new, something with enough credibility to demand the advertising or even consuming prices newspapers used to demand.

All I know is I want to write a real story on a real deadline and have people read it. Now let’s figure out who has to pay for it, the advertiser or the consumer.

I work in a neighborhood smoothered in trendiness. Something feels oddly amiss if I ever arrive without walking past a boney, scraggly bearded, 20-year-old man sporting a man-purse and denim cutoffs. Visual illustration of what I’m talking about: www.latfh.com.

As you can see…there are some drawbacks to the neighborhood too.

But man, that food. It definitely outweighs the negatives. So far, the pizza, cuban sandwich and other random lunches have been unbeatable. And that’s just the hole-in-the-wall spots.

I should have taken it as a sign when the person interviewing me for this internship spent a good five minutes talking about WD40 (it’s a restaurant, not a lubricant) and the freeze-dried polenta he had there. I wish I had the budget to eat at a major restaurant like that every once in a while.

The city, the food, the people are all starting to feel normal. Riding the subway is no longer a novelty. Every once in a while though, I looks up at the fire escapes; decades-old, fading billboards painted on brick buildings; see just a dab of sky peeking through; and realize I’m somewhere totally different.

I’ve become more attached to my gadgets now that I really have to rely on them. In California, I could show you some neat little tricks. I could stream some video, control my laptop and—hey if I really wanted to—download the latest fart app.

It was my techno-junkie, entertainment hub. I had a huge amount of fun at my fingertips, but, honestly, I didn’t use it that much.

It’s the opposite now. I’m starting to realize the genius of Apple. They didn’t just build a toy. These days, I’m constantly copying PDFs to my Dropbox because I know I’m going to need them somewhere I can’t whip out my laptop. Or I’m actually doing something useful while I’m riding on the subway. Or I’m plotting out what lines to take while I’m walking to that subway. It just occurred to me that’s probably a lot safer than opening Google maps while I’m on the freeway—not that I ever did that.

And maybe it’s just because I’m new, but there is so much more to discover. In L.A. I could pop open an app like Around Me or City Search and find one or two cool spots withen a few miles. Here, each block looks like a pincushion.

Technology is cool. Mine just got more useful. I just wish it had more battery life.

What happened? Where am I? Hello?

I have a bad habit of sitting and concentrating on something. Two hours later I realize it’s 10 p.m. and I’m sitting in the dark by myself, working, staring or just thinking.

I don’t notice my surroundings until I’m suddenly aware of them.

This time it’s not just dark. I’m in New York. I’m starting a new internship. There are about three things in my life that haven’t changed.

On May 20, I applied for an internship at Gizmodo. On May 21, they asked me to interview, but since I had week of school left before I could even think about leaving California, I figured I didn’t have a shot.

Silly me. They still wanted me, so that day I bought my one-way ticket. I packed, and I went. I got here on May 31. I basically moved for just an interview. Good thing I got an e-mail this morning telling me I got it.

In the span of less than a month, I applied for the internship, I graduated college, moved from L.A. to N.Y., and started a new job—that part comes Wednesday.

I think this whole week is going to be one long moment of looking up and slowly realizing where my life is.

But, hey, sitting there in the dark isn’t so bad. It only happens when I’m intent on something. Guess I’ve been pretty concentrated on getting here.

At 9 p.m. on a Sunday, more than half the stores up and down the block were closed, and I was the minority. There were people 20, 30 and 40 years older than I am walking around. There were kids riding their bikes down the steepest hill and toddlers running through the church courtyard on the corner; anyone my age was absent.

I don’t mind. I get to live in a quaint neighborhood in the middle of a ridiculously busy city. It does make it all the more obvious I’m alone though. That one’s new. I never even had a room to myself until a few months ago.

My dad has always worked in the L.A. Area, and I was homeschooled my whole life. That means my friends didn’t change while I grew up. I never had to deal with moving to a new town. I never started attending a new school where I knew nobody. I’ve had the same friends since kindergarten plus the others I’ve accrued through college and working at newspapers.

Any career prospect out here, any journalism assignment, will be nothing new. I’m overly prepared to jump into a newspaper, blog, magazine, publishing company, whatever. The adjustment is going to come on the personal level.

There’s nothing like knowing there isn’t anyone I know within a few thousand miles.

OK, now to watch something comforting on TV because 1 a.m. still feels like 10 p.m. and I can’t fall asleep. Star Wars? That’ll do.

On Saturday, I graduated. Getting a bachelor’s degree concluded that chapter of my life, but I didn’t think the next one would start so soon—no time to be a bachelor.

I booked my ticket to New York on Monday. I’d been applying for jobs and internships for three months prior, so you’d think I’d be prepared when a blog asked me to fly across the country for an interview.

Here’s the issue: in three days, my whole life started fresh. I’m tempted to say from scratch, but that would be a misnomer; everything has led up to this. My parents, my education, my beliefs all gave me a base to start from. Now I get to jump down and start running, but it’s still a beginning.

With that beginning, there’s pressure to start off right. I’m hitting the ground sprinting but to where? Am I making the first step in the right direction? Is it leading me to the right place—writing profiles and news features at the New York Times?

I sound like an angsty teen, and nothing frustrates me more than that. What do grizzled 60-year-olds think of the 20-somethings wailing about how they need direction in life? Maybe they think a purpose is a luxury when life is really something you fall into, dictated by your responsibilities. There’s not a huge sense of duty for people my age.

We want some epic story we’re a part of that doesn’t require much work. Or we’re content to wallow in purposelessness. Well those both suck. I’m going to work hard for my epic story.

That’s why I need to grab something and run with it, not wait for it to fall into my lap. “Good things come to those who wait” is too often a justification for laziness.

I have continually less sympathy for anyone complaining about the world not handing them a plan complete with a timeline.

In short: do something. Do anything. That’s why I’m moving. There’s no time to waste.