I don’t think I’ve made a tumblr post about GodVille, so this is my post about my entire experience with the game.
I failed to be engaged by this game at every level.
Maybe playing it as a Google Chrome extension would have been more fun, but I don’t use Chrome that much and I wasn’t engaged enough to want to open a browser to play it. That is, I wouldn’t open my browser solely to play it. I would, absolutely, open my browser and do nothing but play BvS. I open my browser just to play EchoBazaar multiple times per day. If I remembered GodVille at all, it was as “well I’ve got five seconds to waste.”
After the first few days I stopped reading those amazing journal entries. I just checked my hero’s equipment, healed him if he needed it, then went off. Even generic facebook games engage me - for whatever brief period of time - more than GodVille did. I just felt absolutely no reason to “play”. As an iPhone app - something I would have instant access to, anywhere, any time - it might be perfectly acceptable. Tolerable for a few minutes per day. But when I try to go for a PvP fight - the most involving part of the game - and it takes half an hour, with no signs of stopping (both the other player and I had stocked up on healing power), that’s bullshit. You don’t spend half an hour in a single PvP fight in a real game, and you shouldn’t spend half an hour in a PvP fight in a game that otherwise involves no real “gameplay.” I wasn’t sitting there watching the stupid fight, namely because it is stupid, but I tabbed over every once in a while to click heal.
I think there’s some kind of passive bonus if you’ve on the page (“watching your hero”) during a PvP fight? But essentially what it amounts to is a big waste of time for two people, when the fight could move 2-5x faster and nobody would be hurt.
So I quit before the fight was over and decided I didn’t care who won, but I went back a few minutes ago to tick the “pure Zero Player Game” button. For the record, I did not check to see who won the fight. But what the pure ZPG button means is that my hero will revive himself and continue doing the exact same thing he had been, until their servers go down or they implement inactivity deletion.
The true lesson is that a game needs to be engaging, as opposed to “immersive” or “good” or any of these other things. Vael said it in a post about Echo Bazaar - it’s not like the gameplay is very “good”, it’s just so damn interesting that you can’t give it up. Its interactive story, unique to it as a game, makes it engaging. In Billy vs Snakeman, the basic form of engagement is character progress - get more shiny stuffs to power up your character, do more content, get more stuff. I’ve reached the very tip of the shiny stuff iceberg, and I’ve stopped playing my daily stamina. I go on the weekends for BillyCon (in-game conventions, which are amazing) but aside from that I’m just not engaged anymore. I was more engaged in the game while grinding stats than I am with my current stage of “throw stamina at monster, hopefully get reward.”
So, engagement. Something browser based games have to work really hard to create. I’ll also note that I haven’t logged into MurCity or MonBre for months, even though I would only need to go on for thirty seconds. Again, no engagement anymore. I’ve tried a few skill builds and that’s that, unless I were to try a different race.
I’m not really going anywhere with this, but there you go. Stay tuned next time for similar ramblings about the current “console generation,” which will likely become an outdated term in a few years when the Wii 2 comes out!
This was referenced in an otherwise unremarkable TEDTalk I watched (Jane McGonigal’s Gaming Can Make a Better World) and I think this is probably the best thing. If you put in 10,000 hours at something, you’ve mastered it. Ten thousand hours into WoW, you’re god-tier. Ten thousand hours doing linguistics, you’re uber linguist. In the TEDTalk she said “ten thousand hours before age 21”, and while I haven’t read the thing I’m linking to, it probably explains the idea decently well. Whether the age thing is a factor or not, I don’t know.
That being said, I have very little time left to accomplish ten thousand hours at one specific thing. Reading books and using a PC, perhaps. No particular games or talents, though.
Anyway you can look up the TEDTalk or read the above link, or do neither because the sentence “putting in ten thousand hours to something means you’ve mastered it” pretty much sums it up.
I may/may not have mentioned that my psychology lecture is given in the largest theatre at my university, but it does. This theatre also happens to be a literal theatre, and so I see posters for events on a regular basis. There were advertisements for a play called Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is an interesting name, and the poster had people in dark clothing and white makeup looking dramatic so I figured it would be interesting. I didn’t want to go by myself, but had no one to invite really, except for my brother - and so we went tonight, to the last showing.
There were… a couple dozen people there. Kinda disappointing :/ I’m not sure how to describe the play. It turns out it’s eighty years old and it has a wikipedia article, which describes it as “a satirical tragicomedy,” “part of a movement in the early 20th century called theatricalism or anti-illusionism,” which means it’s like a play concentrated. The best analogy I can give is to “true” avant-garde music, the kind that stops being pleasant to listen to. It’s a great mental exercise to write and discuss, but not all that great to experience.
This is a great story, and you’re going to love it, so I’m glad I wasted two hours there. First of all, the play is about a play, and so when the actors in the play take a twenty minute break, you, the audience, sit there for twenty minutes. It’s not really an intermission. There just isn’t anything interesting happening. Two actors get on stage and improv a silly argument, but that’s it. There’s another ten minute breaking, so a quarter of your two hour experience is you twiddling your thumbs.
The basic premise is that these characters have been abandoned by their author and need a new one, and want the director (character in the play) to write their play for them. But they won’t allow themselves to be played by actors because then it isn’t truly their story, it’s the actors’ interpretations of their story, and they insist that they as characters are more real and alive than human beings because at least they’re well-defined.
But two of the six are dead (this isn’t a spoiler - in my case, they were dolls, rather than actors, so) and the rest are varying degrees of crazy, so you get insane screaming and outbursts and things like that, complete with unpleasant background music. The story of the characters is revealed bit by bit, so you’re always interested (except during the “breaks”) but at the same time it’s very unexciting and weirdly unsatisfying to experience. It’s like if I tried to tell you my life’s story, but half of it was cut out in transmission. You just want more from it.
That being said, the wikipedia article has a link to the text, and mentions two film adaptations. I’d be interested in seeing how they handled it as a film - as a play, it’s limited in what it can portray, but editing magic could make it great. Check those out if you’re interested.
I wasn’t going to post about this add-on at first, because if I posted about every firefox add-on I find, we’d be here for a very long time. However, I found out how useful it is last night when I spent a few hours browsing the web and relaxing, so I think it deserves to be posted.
Side note: FF 4 has a built in feature similar to this, though BarTab has more options for customization, so it might be worth using if there’s an update.
The basic idea of BarTab is that you don’t really need to keep a tab in memory when you aren’t actively looking at it. So the main draw is the feature to “unload” a tab after a user-specified period of time - if you don’t look at it for a minute, or ten minutes, or 30 seconds, then it will be unloaded from your RAM or however firefox keeps track of your tabs. When you go back to the tab, it refreshes the page.
You’ll notice a huge performance boost when you’ve got dozens of tabs open with BarTab and without it - while the tabs are still there and available for you as soon as you want them, you’ll be running just as fast as if you had only one or two tabs open. Because that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s actually really, really nice in action, even if you don’t typically open a lot of tabs. The one time you do, it’s pretty great.
That being said, you’ve got more options than just unloading tabs. You can tell firefox not to load a new tab until you focus on it - I found it slightly annoying because it literally doesn’t load the tab at all, so all you see is “lifehacker.com” or something and don’t know what the tab is supposed to be. I prefer to just set the unload time fairly low - I had it at five, but I’m thinking I might go lower and add exceptions.
Adding a domain (www.tumblr.com, www.facebook.com, etc.) to your exceptions list keeps tabs from that site from being unloaded. You can manually type them in the add-on options, or right click a tab and pick “keep pages from www.tumblr.com loaded”. So my thought is to lower the unload time to a minute or two and then add exceptions for sites I don’t want to lose. While I’m reading a feature or review on Destructoid, the others I opened will unload until I’m ready to read them. On the other hand, I won’t lose the posts I’m working on or the conversations I may be having on facebook.
Check it out, it’s quite neat. Even if you don’t think you’ll notice much of a difference, it really isn’t intrusive and it works quite well if you ever spend more than a few minutes in a single tab.
Note: I’m just writing this to validate the many hours I’ve wasted checking this stuff out. Hopefully somebody thinks some of this stuff is cool. I actually feel better than I did though, because now I’ve resolved the issue, as opposed to spending hours and having no results. Plus I really haven’t suffered anything for it. I’m practically running ahead of schedule in terms of school. You’ve been warned, anyway.
So after finding Rainmeter a few weeks ago, feeling like I didn’t want to fiddle with it, running around looking for all kinds of ways to do stuff, I went back to Rainmeter and realized the default Gnometer skin had everything I wanted.
I tried Snarl, and using it requires installing plugins and keeping your program open - so if you want to know that you have new e-mail in Thunderbird, you have to keep Thunderbird open all the time. You want notifications from something else? That’s another program running idly in the background.
I read that Growl for Windows uses more resources than Snarl, which is frightening, because Snarl uses twice as many resources as Rainmeter is using right now. Plus running whatever programs.
So I had to start using Gmail because it seems far more popular among Rainmeter folks, and I may have to fiddle a little to get perfect access to stuff on the top of my screen while running Rainmeter, but aside from that everything is good. So. My current technology set up:
- Google Calendar for tasks and events - desktop access via Gnometer (Gcal pop-up)
- Gmail for e-mail - desktop access also via Gnometer (Gmail pop-up)
- Gnometer’s iTunes pop-up for knowing what I’m listening to
- GReader on iGoogle - keeps me from checking shit all the damn time
- Aerofoil, which turns off Aero Glass when I switch to battery life - have yet to test if that’s beneficial at all
So I’m uninstalling Thunderbird (e-mail with calendar add-on - I’m not going to waste my time teaching it to send e-mail) and SpiceBird (Thunderbird+) and that’s all well and good. It’s not like I need a dekstop program to access my internet contents. I’m going to check out Remember the Milk, Teux Deux, and Toodledo to see if I like any of them better for managing a to-do list.
Now I’m off to eat lunch, brush my teeth, have a shower, and go meet a researcher to talk to her about being in french immersion :D I wrote a paper about it, she was about to start doing research for her Master’s, I approached her to discuss, and now I am a subject. Neat!
I haven’t fooled around with this too much, and I also have the issue of having a billion things I want to do on the internet on a regular basis, but this is pretty neat anyway. Maybe you’ll find a use for it. Maybe I’ll find a use for it!
Here’s what it does: Adds a button under the tools menu for Firefox (the desktop version probably works differently) for you to make a little icon on your desktop, taskbar, etc. that will go directly to the site you’re currently viewing. By default, you get the site - that’s it. No address bar, no navigation buttons, no distractions. So you take your Gmail inbox, you take your calendar or to-do list manager of choice, and you get little icons to open them up. Facebook, maybe tumblr, whatever.
You get out of bed, check your stuff (inbox, new posts, things to do today, whatever), interact a little (reply to an e-mail, make a quick tumblr post, add an event), go to work, the end.
Chrome has this feature by default, and Prism is a firefox extension for it. I guess it just depends how you want them to be rendered? Bubbles, for Windows, renders it in IE. If you actually want that. Aside from that, I’m not entirely sure what differences there may be in performance. If you’re using Chrome, the “create application shortcut” option under tools will do that for you. Firefox says “convert website to application.” As far as Bubbles goes, I’m not sure.
Looking at Bubbles, it has extensions that allow notifications for specific sites. That may put it above Prism and Chrome, because you really only want to check your e-mail when you know there’s something there. At any rate, check ‘em out, do some research if it sounds useful. You expect me to do everything for you?!
———————————————————————-
edit: looking at Bubbles some more, it’s pretty ancient, no posts on the site or anything for months - probably best to skip that one, but that leaves the notification issue unresolved
edit2: guess Prism makes its things in a dumb way, so use Chrome’s thing - I don’t think you need to use Chrome at all or anything after you’ve created the application
edit3: Looking at Snarl and Growl to fix the notification issue. Yip allows access to these through Firefox. Research continues.
edit4: Yip seems more or less dead - the download link isn’t working, anyway, and cursory glance at google results didn’t turn up an alternative download. I question the need for these notifications in your browser when you already have Snarl/Growl providing desktop notifications.
Snarl is, from what I can tell, developed for windows - Growl is a port from Mac, and this means it has great iPhone support. If that’s your jam. Both seem to have a number of useful add-ons to support whatever you want them to support, so yeah.
Though this brings us full circle and makes the site-specific browser entirely useless. I mean, it would probably load faster than opening a shortcut in your browser. But when would you use it? *shrug*
Just for you, vael. Just for you.
Here’s a neat little thing. Wizmo lets you create shortcuts to do useful stuff like change your system volume and turn off your monitor. This is probably more important to me on my laptop than to any of you folks (because I think all but one of you use a desktop) but you may find a use for it anyway.
And for Glob’s sake, make sure you use the quiet command. Pure Windows 2000 thinking that a program should play a noise every time it does something.
My only gripe with it is that, as an .exe, UAC is all “are you sure you want do what you asked me to do” and I have to say that yes, I am quite sure. Brb trying to find a way to disable that for specific programs. Yeah I missed the “always ask for this file” check box. In fact, in all of the past few months that it has been popping up, I never read it once. Sue me!
edit six months later: Nircmd is a way better program to use
Saturday was good - I finally managed to take notes on chapters 5 and 6 for psych, which I had been “working on” for a month. Then I popped them onto my Kindle and chapter 6 turned out really well - no conversion errors at all. Sweet.
Sunday morning, I get up at 5 am. Have breakfast, brush my teeth, get dressed, wake up my mom. Then we drive to the bus station, buy the ticket, and I sit down to read psych notes.
Get on the bus at 7 am, read psych notes for a few hours. Finish Voltaire’s Candide, read The Art of Manliness guide to Building Your Resiliency - highly recommended, in fact moreso than anything else I’ve read lately. Continue reading psych notes. Get stuck in a detour trying to get to the bus station - turns out sunday was the Santa Claus parade. So we spent half an hour getting to the bus station, when it was like right over there.
So anyway then I walk from my bus station over to Union Station and meet Lily, after many texts of “I am at this place, where are you” and “ok wait I’ll go where you are.” Our plan for the day was as follows: Get hot-chocolate at some place called Soma and go to Honest Ed’s, then go to Kool Haus (not a horrific carnival fun house, luckily) at 5 pm for the show. By “the show” I mean Bring Me The Horizon (eh) and August Burns Red (yeah) playing with Polar Bear Club (woo!), This is Hell (??), and Emarosa (?). Which is something I was planning on seeing with Lily for a couple of months but it turns out I didn’t mention it to anyone. So yeah! I did that!
So we got a map inside Union Station and walked on over to The Distillery District, which was a wonderful little place and I hope to find somewhere similar closer to home. You know how the little villages were in FF VII, with little brick houses and pipes and metal stuff for decoration? I mean, they were kinda like that. At least the place Cid lived was like that.
If you don’t know what I mean, think 19th century village. Brick houses. Metal pipes. That’s the defining features. They had metal sculptures and “art” here and there - a “Christmas tree” made out of pipes with light bulbs in the ends, two ends of a bridge that don’t connect, stuff like that. There were people with fancy cameras everywhere, so I assume it was a cool place to be.
It was also an expensive place to be! We were there for a few hours, went into two? places, and I spent like… $35 or something. First we went into the chocolatiers place, which is to say they make chocolate and sometimes turn it into a drink, and got some Mayan hot chocolate. Which had a pretty strong after taste that burned your mouth. $4.19 for that. I also got four tiny chocolates, which were $9 total. So that was all well and good and we hung out there for a bit to chat while drinking hot chocolate.
Then we go off to find something to eat - I got a chicken club sandwhich (pretty good, $7 or something) and an Italian cookie/bread thing with almonds in it that was dipped in chocolate - $3. After sitting there for, hmm, an hour/hour and a half, I also got some caramel cheesecake for $3.50. So $15 for lunch.
After checking the time and checking the map, we decided we didn’t have time to go to Honest Ed’s and decided to go see Kool Haus to scout out the area. This was around 3:30 PM and there were already people in line - like hell I’m going to wait outside on a cold day for an hour and a half. There was a market area nearby so we went there, but it was just flea market stuff because it was sunday and the parade was going by there. We worked our way back to Union Station and got food from a dude in a cart for $4 (each-ish). Worked our way back to Kool Haus not long before 5 PM and listened to increasingly desperate scalpers try to sell tickets.
On the way in, there was a bag check - I had my pockets full of electronics and maps, Lily’s bag was full of books, the security girl was o.0. Drop off our coats for $2.50, go out into the main room - surprisingly big, actually. Huge crowds around the Bring Me the Horizon and August Burns Red booths, proving who the cool bands are, and absolutely no one over by the other three booths. I got a Polar Bear Club hoodie ($40) and a tour shirt ($10) and they’re pretty sweet.
At 6 PM, the first band comes on, doesn’t announce themselves until a few songs into their set. Their singer was not that great, their guitarist (or bassist? I can’t tell by look) was a better singer and the best part of the band. He would jump into the air and fling his legs out in opposite directions. I got Lily onto my shoulders (with some help from the bar) so she could see but we were too slow and he didn’t do it again.
But all was not lost! For Polar Bear Club was up next and that should have been great. Except their singer was as bad live as I have heard. I caught, maybe, one piece of each song they played - except their last song, Living Saints, which was recognizable. Hell, even when they announced the songs I had a hard time knowing what was going on. Barring the occasional signal from the music, I was essentially lost, and I knew most of the songs by heart. They played Light of Local Eyes (which I wrote my mock valedictorian speech about), Our Ballads, Boxes, something, and Living Saints. There may have been one more song, but in that case, they played two songs where I stood there for five minutes and had no clue what I was listening to.
Interest was relatively low for them. Sad, but when they play that way… It wasn’t really their scene anyway, but even so.
Emarosa comes on, they’ve got a keyboard, I’m like oh no… But it wasn’t actually that bad. I was bummed out after Polar Bear Club but I’ve filed them away to check out later.
Up until now, each of the bands was getting set up in 15 minutes and playing half hour sets. Opening bands and stuff. August Burns Red also got set up in 15 minutes, and played for an hour. While waiting for them to get set up, I was kinda falling asleep.
That didn’t last for long.
The first three bands were all pretty restrained, jumping around and stuff but mainly playing in the middle of the stage and thus being invisible to Lily. August Burns Red were not like that. They brought out a bunch of boxes to put over the speakers and spent most of their time up there and encouraging the crowd. Not only were they more interesting to watch than the previous bands, they also played really, really well. The polar opposite of the other bands, if you will. Everything sounded right, and that was great, because I knew them well enough to recognize a few songs, if only by the chorus.
So August Burns Red was a highlight of the day. Then we wait for half an hour for their royal highnesses Bring Me The Horizon to get their shit set up. I was pretty apathetic about them from the start, but to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with… Half the people there had already seen the band seven times. I heard it from a chick talking to a fat dude. At least she was there for her eighth time, and as one of the two people I eavesdropped on, that is half of everyone.
They also had a *SURPRISE* GUEST SINGER OMG! Some girl comes out in the middle of one of their songs and everybody screams “OH MY GOD THERE SHE IS AAAAAAH” and I’m like oh, ok. Now it all makes sense. Yep.
So she sings for a few minutes and takes off. Wikipedia doesn’t say they’ve ever had a girl in the band or in the credits of any of their albums, so I have no idea who she was. Attractive, probably the one doing all the female electronica stuff in their songs, but if she’s not credited with anything…
So after their half hour set up Bring Me The Horizon played for 45 minutes, then tossed their shit out into the crowd and left. A brief chant for encore died when it became clear that they were thoroughly done with us. Cue the stampede for the doors.
We go back to Union Station, I buy a vanilla hot chocolate and a cookie from Second Cup (the first time I’ve ever gotten anything there, actually) which were pretty good. I drop Lily off at her bus stop place, then go off to my own bus stop (around 11:45 PM) and get in line for my bus - which was leaving at 12:30 AM. I popped some ear plugs in and slept for pretty much five hours straight, which was pretty nice.
So that’s what I did! And now I want to find a place with cafes and dumb art to go with a friend, except that it isn’t five hours away from where I live. Vael, we’re going to find one of those places, and enjoy it immensely in the summer.
Now available: Consciousness (mainly interesting because of sleep) and Learning (entirely interesting). This is good stuff, folks. Very good stuff. Extremely good stuff, even.
Don’t let the learning chapter go by - read that .pdf like your life depends on it. You’ll be a better parent, you’ll be a better person, you’ll be more productive and you’ll be better in bed. Maybe.
Then there’s this gem:
The problem with delayed punishment also explains the ineffectiveness of punishing a pet hours after it has misbehaved, when the owner finally returns home. For instance, it won’t do any good to hit your dog with a newspaper while shoving its face in the feces it previously left on your carpet. This common punishment doesn’t teach your dog to stop defecating on your carpet - it teaches the dog to keep its face out of its feces.
Did I mention reading this would make you a better parent?
Here’s some great science for you folks. This iPhone app tracks your movement throughout the night, which differs based on the cycle of sleep you’re in, and uses that to calculate the optimal time to wake you up. I heard about it. I considered it. I realized it would work because I am spending lots of money to learn SCIENCE! And then I decided to file it away in case I ever get an iPod Touch.
Then I waited a few days and decided to write a tumblr post about it.
There’s plenty of stuff on their site, and in this review, about how it “works” in terms of the waking you up bit, but none of these have explained the coolest part - how the hell does it work? Here’s the thing - when you’re in the deepest stage of sleep, REM, your body is basically paralysed. Maybe so you don’t act out your dreams or something. At any rate, should you wake up during REM sleep, you’ll feel awful. You cycle through the five stages of sleep in around 90 minutes, so the alarm has a 30 minute leeway before your scheduled awakening to wake you up. If you enter the lightest stage of sleep in that period, it wakes you up. If you’re in REM, it’ll wait for you to pass out of it.
Gosh, isn’t science fun!?
Also cool are dawn simulators. Yet another thing from Lifehacker, this site allegedly has a good dawn simulator for $40. Or they would if they weren’t sold out until january 2011. I know it looks horrible, but it probably is legit, all things considered. Just bad web design. If you’re too lazy to read the page: “slowly lights a bedside lamp to simulate dawn. This simulates sunrise and tells your brain that it is time to get up and start the day.” So I guess you plug your lamp into it or whatever which is why it’s not big and fancy.
I’m kinda tempted by the 205 model though, for $20. Couldn’t hurt. It actually does suck waking up to complete darkness. But. Eh. We’ll see.
edit for bonus SCIENCE!: The dawn simulator isn’t strictly a light-based alarm clock, rather it’s meant to keep your biological clock ticking properly, which is what leads to Seasonal Affective Disorder Syndrome. AKA you get depressed during the winter because light hitting your retinas makes your body secrete melatonin, which gets your body going for the day - and winter is dark so you don’t get that. Thus the dawn simulator, which serves to get your body producing melatonin at the right time and prime you for waking up.
This also extends to light getting to your eyes before sleep - it’ll keep your brain from knowing it’s night time and that you need to sleep, getting you all out of whack. So keep your monitor brightness down and stuff.
geni:
Dear Count Victus,
I have come across a “distraction-free” writing programme that sounds like your cup of tea. It is dark, minimal, and uses the power of technology to keep you away from distracting technology. It will correct your spelling, and it supports a number of tweaks for writing pros. It…
This is good. Reblogging so I remember to forget to download this, then ask someone what the program was using bad descriptions based on what I barely remember.
It is called Q10 and you can go to lifehacker.com/search for Hive Five distraction free writing to find it.
Also I wrote my second essay (three full pages) in half the time (1.5 hours) my last one took (3 hours) using this thing. I’m not even kidding. It needs a hell of a lot of work, but I’m scared. Very, very scared.
Dear Count Victus,
I have come across a “distraction-free” writing programme that sounds like your cup of tea. It is dark, minimal, and uses the power of technology to keep you away from distracting technology. It will correct your spelling, and it supports a number of tweaks for writing pros. It can also make typewriter noises as you type, giving you the authentic experience of writing in a dark 20th century attic.
It can be downloaded here, though be advised that the version with spelling correction is only available as a portable application. The other versions fail to install.
Sincerely,
Baron Demi
Compassion to animals? The harvesting of wheat kills and crops kills more rabbits and field mice than it does to eat farm animals and fish. What is more humane? Getting shredded to bits by a harvester and having guts sprayed all over the wheat and crops or killing an animal quickly and eating it? If vegans want to be compassionate then the only thing they can do is grow their own crops for themselves, surely the effort in that is worth the lives of the animals killed with harvesting, no?
Animals aren’t dumb and they learn pretty quickly not to be where the killer machines are. It’s called observational learning. You don’t need to be murdered by a rumbling death-machine to recognize you should stay out of its way.
Even if they did, stupidly, live in the fields, and didn’t hide underground to avoid the harvester, then I’m pretty confident there would be less “meat” (by weight) murdered by the harvesting of crops for x meals than eating meat for that same number of meals. Like, say you can get fifteen meals out of a dead cow. Harvesting that many meals worth of pure grains/whatever kind of products would kill less than a cow’s worth of field critters.
Rabbits don’t even live in crop fields anyway!
Also, it costs far more money and food in order to eat meat. Animals have to be fed with grain until you kill them and the investment doesn’t pay off. So even if you were to harvest a cow’s weight in wheat, and kill thirty field mice, you would get more food (you can’t eat every part of a cow) and you would save money.
edit: oh right, I did mention that you have to kill critters while getting wheat to feed the meat, but I didn’t emphasize it enough - so here’s your emphasis, you monkeys
9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors is a game for the Nintendo DS. It is something that might actually be worth emulating on PC. It combines the text-focused story of visual novels (PC games) with the puzzles of an escape game (PC games, generally flash). The puzzle segments, of which there are 16, take about half an hour each. That’s eight hours of content. Aside from that are sections of pure text - some as long as an hour. I’m going to estimate a dozen hours of content.
So basically this is a choose-your-own-adventure book with puzzles and music, and interjections of science that would be cool to know about, with a story that makes sense. And is good. And the puzzles, apparently, aren’t as horrid as the kind escape games normally feature.
Are you interested yet? Please be interested.
It’ll probably be port throttling, if you can upload on an uncommonly used port then you should be fine.
Give me an uncommonly used port and tell me how to figure out what ports I have been using in FileZilla/FireFTP. And also what ports I am using in Steam and xfire.
geni:
Super alternatively, there’s FireFTP, an FTP client/addon for Firefox. I never use it because I’ve never had a reason to have an FTP client in my browser.
If you’re just looking to back up files, you can use Mozy or Dropbox, or Gmail Drive, which, well, creates a drive out of your Gmail inbox. I wouldn’t use that if your files are really important, though, because Google could cut the cord anytime they wanted to.
FireFTP has the same issue. Starts off uploading fine, then my upload speed drops to below 1 kb/s. I guess they block pretty much any outgoing FTP traffic. Though I wonder if it’s different for people on the residence network. But I can’t get on that.
As far as Mozy and dropbox and stuff, what I’m making is less a backup for myself and more of a repository for others to see. I.e. I upload the awesome notes I have yet to take about my new psychology chapter (learning) and everyone learns some awesome stuff. Also for giving my notes out to people who couldn’t come to class. So it has to be publicly accessible.
vael:
$10/hour, starts Monday at 9. Hours are 9-5:30. Get a boost in wage after three months depending on how well you do. Wear collared shirts and no jeans.
WEEEEE HEEEEEEE HEEEEEEEEEE
They’re going to have me on “development” side at first, which means lots of PHP. The boss knows I “prefer”…
omg he got the job I so happy for you
edit: also to people in the know, FileZilla is failing to transfer files for me 80% of the time on my school network, any other options? If I could do some kind of magical drag-and-drop within firefox itself that would be like the ultimate in convenience, plus I’m pretty sure it would get through the network
Though I guess at that point I may as well just have some kind of public dropbox-y thing (note that I know nothing about dropbox because it didn’t sound immediately useful) but anyway.
vael:
Cameron practically begged me for a Christmas present this year, and he said he wanted it right now so I spent the last two days coding this. Finally, after spending much time researching the most modern (and ancient) trolling techniques, I bring to you Camsult Beta.
Oh god I love you. We should fling these at Cameron for a few hours.
This is post #200, and I thought I should do something good with it. So I’m finally writing this post. Except now I know I don’t need to write as much as I planned. But that’s the end of this whole thing, so let me start at the beginning.
I finally finished Persona 4 this summer, and I started over and played through the beginning a bit. I was really inspired to write an amazing essay for Destructoid about the game, the journey of the main player, and just the themes of the game in general. If I were to do that, though, I’d have to replay the game and get quotes and refresh my memory on things to talk about, so I lost the will for it. But I’ll write a little bit and introduce the game. I don’t remember how much this stuff featured in Persona 3, and I have no idea how much (if at all) it’s featured in Persona 1 and Persona 2.
Everyone in the Persona games has a basic alignment with one of the Tarot deck Arcana, and the main character is always aligned with The Fool. Igor, the master of the Velvet Room who opens your powers to you and guides you on your journey, describes The Fool as “zero,” “empty yet full of infinite potential,” one who could become anything at the end of their journey through life. What this means is that you can be whoever, and whatever, you want to be throughout the game - taking whatever personality you need at the moment to help other people out. As the infinite potential goes, your character is the only one with the ability to “change” Arcana in such a way - everyone else is restricted to their innate Arcana, but your main character simply starts as the Fool and can change Arcana like one changes a mask.
Everyone also has an innate Persona that represents their inner strength, which is aligned with their Arcana. Some people go blindly through their lives, never coming to terms with the strength they have inside. Perhaps they’re carried along by negative emotions, and never able to overcome them. Maybe they’re too apathetic to reach their own potential. Throughout the game, you change masks as you need in order to help other people reach that potential. It’s just a part of your journey through life. You don’t take any credit, you don’t make a big fuss about it, you just stand aside and support them so they can do what they need to do. With your general social links, you just help people along and at Rank 10 things are more or less resolved.
It gets a lot better with your party members, because they also unlock the powers of their Personas. Igor describes the power of Persona as (something like) a mask worn to face the hardships of life. Persona 3 had a different system for unlocking Personas, but in Persona 4 everyone had to face a dark, mutated version of their Persona in order to unlock their inner strength. This dark Persona represents the big conflict in their life, something they need to overcome in order to get on with their lives. A weak person might give in, but to accept their problems and acknowledge that this darkness is a part of who they are represents true strength. After facing this part of themselves, they unlock the power of their Persona, and join your party. It might not be perfect, but now they have the strength to face their problems - the strength of heart to face themselves.
So I thought to myself that I ought to write about a problem in my life that I might not have otherwise faced, and challenge everyone to find the strength of heart to face themselves - if they haven’t already. At first I wanted to write about the breakdown of my relationship with Britt, then the end of my relationship with her (which didn’t end up happening - we’re all fine now), then about my general status with girls. Then I thought about it some more last night, and I thought about the problems the characters in Persona 4 had, and I realized that to claim I needed to face myself would be stupid. I’ve already done that. My big challenge, the jump I needed to make, was the initial overcoming of my depression and associated problems. I’ve already done that. Sure, I’m not perfect yet, but neither were your party members in Persona 4. They still had growing to do, and so do I. That’s just how it is.
I’ll need a few more level-ups before I’m as good as I’ll get. Maybe at Rank 10 (maxed social link in Persona ¾) I’ll get a shiny evolution. But I’ve already reached Rank 1 (just after facing themselves), and I’m working my way up. So yes, I’ve found the strength of heart to face myself. Have you?
I know a lot of people use torrents and they’re easy to use but now ALL OF LIMEWIRE is going to pretty much migrate to torrents, there’s enough of these people that don’t seed and who bring too much attention to torrents (like with piratebay being DDOS’d and like people going to court for crap.). Stupid people are a plague on the net with stuff like this, we’re going to pretty much lose torrenting websites in a few years, it’s not cool.
Update on TuneUp: it has a limited number of uses of its useful features, and they want you to pay for the full version and stuff. Woo boy. But it’s awesome when it works.
Moving on to Cameron: Trackers are nice and all, but everyone and their mom has their own little walled complex tracker and you get these torrents with 50 different trackers in the list because it’s all over the damn place. I can’t wait until they disappear and we get a nice, unified system. Likely I’ve misunderstood completely, but I could have sworn magnet links were supposed to do that. Thus far, I haven’t gotten shit from magnet links. Which I have been using because I can’t download .torrent files on my university network. Don’t ask me how that works.
Anyway torrenting websites are a pain in the bum and if we could all play in the same sandbox it’d be great. I love my private trackers and all, and I love finding stuff, but what’s worse is not finding stuff. Which needs to end.
This just in: uTorrent supports apps, meaning the world has gone crazy. I haven’t used them yet, but…
Oh look, now LimeWire is down the torrents are being dumbed down and changed to fit the needs of idiots, GREAT. Now in one or two years we won’t be able to use torrents anymore because of the sheer amount of unseeding, big mouthed, lazy twats that are going to be using torrents. These people ruin everything. Welp, time to back-up as many files on to usenet as possible so we don’t lose everything due to idiots and too many people torrenting.
It’s like you’ve never met anyone over the age of 40. This has already happened, just so you know. EVERYONE TORRENTS. Moms and dads download movies for their kids and buy R4s for their 5 year old kids. Torrents are already incredibly simple to use - install your client, go to piratebay, type in what you want, click download. Done.
Dude, reading you say this stuff makes me sad.
Moving on, TuneUp does absolutely nothing with uTorrent lol. It’s just free advertisement for them or something. However, for what it is doing with my iTunes, it is doing amazingly. A fifteen minute scan turned up 310 albums missing cover art, and it downloaded them all for me, and now I’m just clicking “yes this is right.” Wonderful!
This just in: uTorrent supports apps, meaning the world has gone crazy. I haven’t used them yet, but I downloaded:
This could be good. TuneUp in particular seems like it could be great. I remember dreaming up a service, years ago, that would tell you about concerts and new albums coming out. Which may sound ridiculous if you can be bothered to follow this stuff, but every once in a while I have to sit down and check every damn band on wikipedia to see if they have a new album. Pain in the ass.
I went out a couple of weeks ago and saw a poster for an Unexpect show. It was October 23rd. The show was October 22nd. Nooooooooooo!
So TuneUp could be the solution. Anyway uTorrent has apps now so if you use it go grab some. And if you look closely you’ll see a uTorrent 2.0.4 skin if you don’t like the new look.
It is not - as it seems to many women - that men are bums who seek to deny women authority. Many men are inclined to jockey for status, and challenge the authority of others, when they are talking to men too. If this is so, then challenging a woman’s authority as they would challenge a man’s could be a sign of respect and equal treatment, rather than lack of respect and discrimination. The inequality of the treatment results not simply from the men’s behaviour alone but from the differences in men’s and women’s style: Most women lack experience in defending themselves against challenges, which they misinterpret as personal attacks on their credibility.
A very interesting quote from an article in my applied linguistics class about gender differences in language. The author, a woman and an expert in her field (sociolinguistics), cited various examples of men controlling conversation - even men who knew nothing about linguistics trying to challenge her authority.
Then she cited a study where pairs of men, pairs of women, and mixed pairs were videotaped while discussing the effect of television violence on children. Before the discussion, some of the subjects were given extra information on the subject - basically, making them the experts in their pair. Men, when confronted with a male expert, would often gain the upper hand in the conversation. When confronted with a female expert, the men would control the conversation and the woman - despite being more knowledgeable - would spend MORE time agreeing with the man than they normally did. And when the man in a mixed pair was the expert, he would control the conversation from beginning to end.
I felt this was a very utopian quote, despite the whole gender imbalance thing. Or maybe even because of it. I wouldn’t say that being a utopian is “a male thing” - rather, I’d say that it’s all the more impressive for a girl to hold her ground against this kind of jockeying for position. And, I think, that it would be good for we Y-chromosome folk (men) to be conscious of our tendency to take control and quell it somewhat to level the playing field.
Case in point: There are a lot of girls in the fencing club, especially among the beginners, and even moreso among the foilists. There are, by my count, three male beginners fencing foil and… five or six girls. You know what happens when two guys fence? Intense competition. I fenced a guy last night who’d been dominating in his bouts against a few of the girls, and destroyed him - the score was 5-1. We shook hands, and he told me I was the “king of parrying.” Funny that I didn’t parry once the entire time, except to counterparry (ok, the distinction is kinda important) his ripostes.
When I fence the other guy, who’s less competitive with me but more aggressive against the girls, it’s more or less the same - we’re always testing each other to see who will win this time. But as I said, when he fences one of the girls, he goes nuts (which is poor technique) and tends to win because they back off. Case further in point: when two girls fence each other, it’s pretty much an even split.
Case further in point, the girls fence each other on pretty much even footing. When I fence one of the girls, I try to give constructive criticism so they can beat me next time. I try not to use the same trick over and over, but if they do fall for a nasty one, I’ll show them how they can stop it. But, yes, I do try to control the bout. Why? Because the person in control is the one who gets to attack, and I want to practice and learn what works and what doesn’t. When I started fencing, I thought I could be a master defender and win through perfect reactions, but I lost every damn time. I know winning doesn’t matter, because it’s all for practice, but half-assed practice is almost worthless. So I go all out, and occasionally, that does result in a one-sided bout. I love to lose, though, because then I get twice as much experience. I can learn what they did well on the offensive, and I can learn what I did poorly on the defensive.
However, I admit one failing in this - the extremely aggressive girls were told to fence sabre (slashing weapon, run at each other and swing), and the tall girls were told to fence epée (long pokey weapon, touch them before they touch you) so that left the submissive girls on foil. Also the girls who were too meek to insist on fencing a different weapon. So, yes, there are girls who dominate the dudes, and guys who don’t try to compete against them. Just not among the ones I fence with.
Spoiler for those too lazy to click the link: He gets fifty cents from the sale of a paperback and two bucks from the sale of a hardcover book. From a $10 paperback, he gets 50 cents, and $2 from a $25 hardcover - 5% and 8% respectively.
In short, don’t publish a book unless you expect to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, because it will take you years (the time you spend trying to get a deal) to get to a position where you’re able to owe your agent and publishing company hundreds of thousands of dollars. They pay you in loans, after all, and just hope you’ll get rich.
A compelling argument for self-publishing via the internet, though you’d have to get some damn good press. Paypal and your choice of delivery method would obviously take a cut, but even if you’re getting $4 out of the sale of a $5 eBook, you’re doing pretty good.
edit six months later: wow lol why would I link to a twitter account and expect people to be able to find the tweet I’m talking about
It’s like the Sunday Something, but slightly in advance. Yay! I just can’t contain my excitement for you to be excited about these things that are exciting. Plus I hate a cluttered bookmarks toolbar. that’s why Read It Later is perfect for me, because I never have to remind myself of the things I’m not doing.
Extra Credits via Escapist Magazine - Brilliant, absolutely brilliant series of videos. They’re about six minutes in length each, and if you watch three in a row every day or something you should plow through them in no time. They are all worth watching, because each examines a worthwhile issue in an enlightening way. Let me backtrack - basically a couple of people with experience in different parts of the industry make a brief video each week talking about some aspect or another of video games. Some highlights include God of War 1 as a Greek tragedy, the psychological basis of any proper survival horror game, and the term “gamer.”
I planned on only watching a few today, and ended up watching every single one. There’s only 15 actual episodes, with a few PAX 2010 videos you should probably watch and a few you may not bother to watch. They’re as good as any podcast or essay you might find on a gaming blog, but a fraction of the length.
Winter Voices: Avalanche - An episodic strategy RPG, the first episode of which is currently available on Steam for $5. Further episodes are supposed to released every week, but it looks like they have a vague definition of “week.” At any rate, RPS tells you a lot of what you need to know about the game, and why you may or may not want to spend $5 on it. In terms of gameplay, the battles are metaphorical representations of you taking on your inner demons, your skills are coping mechanisms like Denial or Imaginary Friend. The game has some horrible flaws, but for $5? You’re not risking much.
I have bought it, but I have yet to play it. I want to enjoy the games that I play, and I don’t want to waste my time with a bad game - hence why I tend to avoid flash games these days. I hope, though, that the premise and everything else can overcome the poor gameplay, and more than that I hope the gameplay gets better in later instalments. If it does, and you’re not convinced on this one, believe me - you’ll find out, and then you can buy Episode 4 and it’ll be great.
“Another clever aspect of the combat is your character’s Memory statistic. When you’re allocating stat points after you’ve levelled up, you can increase your memory to boost the rate at which you gain experience (because you learn more from each talk and encounter), but it also causes the demons you wrestle with to grow in strength (your sad memories gain clarity).
All it amounts to is a completely seamless dynamic difficulty slider. Want more skills and more complex battles? Crank up your memory. Or is your character breaking down as she runs out of energy during every single fight? If so, you leave your memory well alone. You try and forget.”
God, this game deserves its own post. If that last paragraph isn’t some amazing game design, I don’t know what is.
Touch screen material to run out by 2020 - That article contains a link to a much, much longer gizmodo article which I wouldn’t recommend unless you really like rocks and stuff, but the single sentence “modern touch screens are made with a rare material, which will only last until 2020 if we’re lucky” is all you really need to know. It’s a great reminder of how we treat our planet, though. How long have we really been getting into this touch screen stuff? I doubt the DS uses this particular material, but I’m sure the iPhone and your Droid phones and all that stuff uses it. So, at best a few years. And we’re tearing through this incredibly limited resource like there’s no tomorrow. Suddenly the post-apocalyptic world of your choice is ushered in by the demise of the amazing touch screen.
You enjoying that iPhone? I really hope so. There’s only a billion of them in existence. Very rare. Rare enough to kill for.
Did I announce this yet? I don’t think I made it official. I ordered it last night at 10 pm, so I guess not.
I have more important and interesting things to say, but those will have to wait. Why?
Because I just bought a digital copy of a 1.1 kg book I own - for those of us who don’t think in metric (pretty much everyone because we’re all overly American), that’s a little over two pounds. I’m not going to lie - half the reason I haven’t finished the book is because there’s no comfortable way to read it. I seriously cannot manoeuvre it/my body into any position that will allow for extended reading. It’s not even like a good workout. It’s just a gradual build-up of pain, until I get so distracted I can’t keep reading.
I don’t know whether it’s pathetic or awesome that I spent $10 to re-buy a book I already own in order to actually finish it. I don’t feel guilty about it, and in fact I’d buy a dozen digital copies if I knew the money would be sent directly to the author, but it’s just a very strange and very significant event.
In other news, I have 125 books in my Kindle library, only one of which I paid for. To transfer these to my Kindle, which I do not yet have, I ask my computer to e-mail them to my @kindle.com e-mail address. When I turn on my Kindle and connect it to my wi-fi, they will be downloaded automatically and synced to where I left off reading them on my PC. I can also e-mail text documents, .pdf files, and .jpgs to my @kindle.com e-mail address and they’ll be converted and added to my library.
I’ve already downloaded the books I need to read for my courses, because you’re always reading the classics, and the classics rarely have valid copyrights these days. I’m not saving much money, but I’m saving backpack space (valuable) and it’s convenient (also valuable).
I don’t even have the thing yet and I’m already debating which books I care to physically have in my library. I imagine that at the age 45, when having a library should be cool, people will laugh at me for having physical copies of books.
vael:
Here’s a pet peeve about school.
Language and identity have three connections - symbolic (language says who we are), instrumental (language enables us to do things), and constructive (language can be used for creation)
When you know a language well enough to express yourself in it, you can re-interpret yourself through the use of itREALLY?! Whoa! I didn’t know that if you know a language well enough, you can, uh, re-interpret yourself through it! Good thing I learned this obvious fact that I will throw away but be tested on.
Not so much re-interpreting yourself just by using ANY language, but that if you learn Spanish and start speaking exclusively Spanish, it’ll change your identity the more you use it. This doesn’t sound like much, but for the Kurdish bloggers he was studying (while I didn’t take notes on it, it’s basically illegal to use Kurdish in every country where it has a native population), to publicly use their mother tongue is a huge thing for their identity.
This class is pretty slack and we don’t get tested on stuff like that. We had a fill-in the blank section on our test (pick one of 14 words to fill 10 blanks) which was worth as much as the two short answer questions. We had one question on the other guest lecture we had on the test, but it was just a random thing.
The idea, though, is to give free marks to people who show up and don’t sleep in class. Sad but true. The more obscure you go with your questions, the higher you’re aiming those free marks - like, you’re either rewarding the people who show up, or the people who take good notes, or the people who take PERFECT notes.
This is also fodder for the papers we’re going to write in a couple of weeks. Whether for quoting or for expanding on.
And, truth be told, stuff that I jotted down like that was just poor note taking on my part. Grabbing what’s on the slides instead of what comes out of his mouth. But he kinda rushed through that part a bit and I was like eh well I’ll describe this as best I can… But I’ll be trying to fill things out when I get his slides.
So that’s my response which doesn’t change anything but there’s what I have to say.
I’m about to run to class, so I can’t say much about this, but here are the notes I took on an amazing presentation by a super smart guy. I’m going to e-mail him and get his slideshow for you guys and ask him a few questions so let me know if there’s anything you’d like to know!
He knows about all kinds of things, including trolling and griefing, so don’t think your question has to be solely related to blogging. At any rate, his main domains are identity construction and language, so relate those to technology and come up with some things you’d like to ask.
Or you could just e-mail him yourselves but that might be a bit weird.
edit: I mention trolling and griefing to say that he knows about internet stuff in general and he’s not like a stuffy dude in a suit who doesn’t really understand what he’s studying
This is an absolutely brilliant piece to introduce you to and discuss the upcoming Atlus game Catherine. There’s basic introduction to it and its general themes, as well as some symbolism stuff that I had no idea about. Really a great read. Even better, the game has since been licensed for release in Europe - which is a pretty strong indicator that it’ll get a North American release. Even if it doesn’t, you can just import it.
Even better than THAT, is that it’s being released for 360 AND PS3, meaning pretty much everyone will be able to play it. Spring 2011 for the European release. Look forward to it.
I don’t even have anything to add to this, really, so just go ahead and read it. I would say this is a must-read if you like video games, sex, Japan, or… anything. So yeah, read it.
(is that a bad joke about post-partum depression, I hope not)
Alright so back from class, here’s how my weekend went after the party. This is some reaction to it, and some funny stories about Halloween.
I slept in a bit on saturday, got up feeling like I sincerely did NOT want to be in my room. I figured I should sit in my room and study, but it was just not going to happen. My laptop was in the living room, by the couch, so I sat down there and booted it up. All well and good, then my mom gets up and is on her laptop and turns on the TV. Oh no. Television. Much as I hate it, it is there, and I end up getting distracted by it constantly. I spend a few hours doing stuff on the internet and talking to Britt about how busy I am and how I’m not keeping my promises to her and stuff like that. Savin’ it for another post. Wait for it. Anyway, eventually around maybe 1:45 pm or something? I got off my butt and went over to my dad’s so I could be alone.
By 3 pm, I had showered and gotten my stuff organized, but no matter what I did I couldn’t really sit down and do any homework. My dad’s house just doesn’t have any place for me to work - I have no desk, the table is covered in crap, etc. I ended up accomplishing stuff by setting my laptop aside and using the piles of wood my dad had ordered as a desk. I knew, of course, that I could spend the weekend relaxing - but I needed to do work to keep myself busy while I was secluding myself, so I ended up taking notes on the fifth chapter of my linguistics textbook, doing the homework questions for it, and my french homework.
Sunday, Halloween, I… hmm… I didn’t do much for most of the day. The most notable thing is, of course, trick or treating children. My dad bought candy - two boxes of 94 chocolate bars (two to each child) and two boxes of 24 bags of cheesies (do real people say that, cheetos seems like such an awkward thing to say - anyway, one per child) - so that’s enough candy for 130 children. We had 12 trick or treaters. Four children, eight teenage girls. One teenage girl said she liked my Born of Osiris hoodie and I said “eh, they’re alright” because alright is the best word to describe them. Other than that people just seemed to walk around in costumes without going to any houses. So now we have a disgusting amount of candy and I’m not sure what we’re going to do with it.
My mom had at least 50 trick or treaters, when I last checked in with her, but according to my dad that was because she lives near a bunch of low-rent apartments - most of which are along the bus route that comes to Carleton. Huh. Well, kids. Around my dad’s it’s just old people and people with older kids. Does that mean he lives more in the suburbs than my mom? Ah well.
Oh, and sweet story about the Halloween party:
Near the end of the conversation with my coach and the two guys from Ottawa U, our hostess dropped by and flaunted her numerous assets for our benefit. But we would not be swayed from our riveting fencing discussion. After a brief lull later, one of the guys from Ottawa U remarked that we deserved a Darwin Award for spectacular failure to procreate.
“Given the choice of finding an attractive female to talk to, or talking to a couple of dudes about fencing, we’re like ‘oh man you could try this, or try that’ and there’s hot women like right there! Right there! And we’re like 'fencing, awesome!’”
edit: Oh and I watched The Trotsky (Canadian film) and the first three episodes of The World God Only Knows (subbed anime via Crunchyroll) while waiting for non-existent trick or treaters, and liked them both a fair bit. The Trotsky isn’t a must-watch, but I enjoyed it. You might enjoy it a tiny bit less if you don’t know french. The World God Only Knows is about a guy who’s pro at dating sims but has never even held hands with a girl, and he accidentally signs a contract with the devil to collect souls that are living in the hearts of girls by - of course - kissing them. If that premise sounds awesome, you should watch it. Otherwise I have nothing to say to you.
Alright, so now that I’m done recuperating, I shall post about the Halloween party I went to on friday - the first real party I’ve ever been to, to tell you the truth. It was the Halloween party for Carleton’s fencing club, and members from the Ottawa U fencing club were invited as well. I’ll try to run through the night in a relatively linear fashion or at least an interesting way.
This was the first time I’d been surrounded by so many people for so much time in a while, the last being my going away party in July. That was 8-10 people, and this was 16-20 people I think. The going away party was at a friend’s house, on a farm, so it was pretty spacious. This party was in a four-room apartment. There was a bedroom, a kitchen (drinks), a living room? (candy), and a side room that might have been a bedroom or a living room or… something (dance floor). A friend of a friend volunteered to DJ, so there was plenty of loud music to be had.
When I got there, around 8:40 pm or so, there were only a handful of people there. One of our coaches, the hostess, another beginner, a dude I didn’t recognize, and a girl I didn’t recognize. People trickled in as the night went on, and I introduced myself/was introduced to everyone by name and by weapon of choice. The only new people I remember are the ones who introduced themselves after we had been talking for a bit, which consists of the two people who were there when I first arrived. Other than that, I remember no names. I think I should feel bad about that, but at the same time, can you blame me when someone says “hey I’m x, I fence with y, see you later man” and then doesn’t speak to me again? I know the faces I saw, but the names just disappeared.
I spent most of the night talking to people I knew and the girl (Emily) who was there when I arrived, mostly because they saw me doing nothing I think. I was getting pretty bored around 10 pm or something and considering leaving, then got into a deep fencing conversation with the coach and a couple of guys from the Ottawa U fencing club, and that lasted for like 1.5-2 hours or something. So that was cool. Then our coach left, and “left me in charge” because I was one of the few sober people. A little bit after that I was asked to drive a couple home (they drove me home after fencing on thursday) and it took until sometime after 1 am to get the drunk boyfriend out of the party. Every time we’d try to leave, he’d get in the middle of a ten minute goodbye, and then wander off to do the same to someone else. But that was some good bonding time and anyhow I left sometime after 1 am.
So I was there for… about four hours, and I ate way more candy and chips than was absolutely necessary. Oh, and I was dressed up as Jack Skellington, from Nightmare Before Christmas! Man, that was an important detail. I’ll get some pictures up in a bit. However, getting my face painted and everything made my room kind of a wreck. When I got home in the morning I really didn’t want to clean it up, and I was really pissed off about it when I woke up.
That’s an important detail because I was pissed about everything when I woke up. I slept in a bit, but even that didn’t help. Maybe I was tired, or maybe it was the overload of junk food, but I don’t think it was either of those things - because this is exactly how I felt the next morning after my going away party, and exactly how I felt every time I had people stay the weekend at my place in junior high. True, any time those kinds of gatherings happened (I don’t think they really qualify as parties) I ate too much junk food and stayed up late, but I just think it’s too much time around too many people that really got to me.
Essentially, what I’m trying to say is that I consistently forget how introverted I am because it’s socially expected of me to do these things and then it destroys me for days. It’s like an emotional hangover, or whiplash. Or something? Insert your own good metaphor. The moral of the story is I don’t feel any better until I stop talking to people and seclude myself and generally I have a hard time doing work, which means a party on friday eliminates my productivity for most of a weekend.
I think vael has expressed a similar effect before, or maybe that was me. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this anyway. I’m just not sure if it was my idea or not. At any rate, it’s draining for me to spend time around people. I don’t know whether I’ll try to explain that or not when the fencing club inevitably asks me how I enjoyed the party.
I think this post contains everything I wanted to say, though perhaps with less explanation than I planned, but I need to go to class now so that’s how my friday way. I’ll post more things later I think. I just don’t want to have one humongous mega-post.
So my Hardcore character on Dragon Tavern (permadeath) just upgraded his equipment enough to stop adventuring cautiously. Today, he died.
Sad, sad day. Sad day.
I just got the title for spending 300 day’s worth of AP as well.
Sad day.
edit: For those of you that know the game, I took 31 hits from a single boss. I didn’t bother to check what my success chance was. It was my first adventure after returning from the tavern >.>
Also it’s like Echo Bazaar is just looking for excuses to throw nightmares at me. Not finding someone (Watchful challenge), thus not getting paid, gives me nightmares? Really? Explain that one to me, please.
I’m stuck on my ambition until I get Watchful 45/Dangerous 37, and I’m stuck on the Absconding Devil until I get Bohemian 3 again, so basically I guess I’m going to go be Dangerous because it’s the least dangerous thing I can do.
Derp.
UniNotes is slowly filling up with delicious, delicious information. Do you like to learn things? I do. I like other people learning things too. For your learning convenience, then, I present to you the first four chapters of my psychology and linguistics (actually linguistics chapter 4 isn’t up yet because we have an assignment due soon, don’t want to give out my answers) textbooks! On top of that, a month of lectures on the subjects covered in the textbooks. For ALDS, we just cover interesting things, so it’s more varied.
Chapter 4 in my psych textbook is Sensation and Perception, which you would see if you looked at the PSYC 1001 folder. It covers all of the senses, and lightly covers how we perceive these senses. It doesn’t delve hardcore into the subjectivity of experience, and the stuff that was there didn’t make it into my notes. Likewise with the proofs of subjectivity in the second chapter on Research Methods. But there’s interesting examples, such as giving the same replay of a football game to fans of the different teams. Each group of fans saw twice as many penalties made by the OTHER team. So if Team A thought it had 4 penalties and the other team had 10, Team B thought they had 5 penalties and the other team had 8. The recordings were the same, and yet they were watching different games.
Another example was a video created by laying the video of one basketball game over another. One had been edited to make the players black silhouettes, the other edited to make them white silhouettes. Or something like that. At any rate, the subjects were asked to try to follow both games at the same time.
When a woman with an umbrella walked onto the court, only half of the subjects noticed. When a man in a gorilla costume jumped in, only ¼ “saw” it.
The world is a beautiful place :’)
edit for bonus content: I’m reading Chapter 5 of my psychology textbook right now, and it’s about Consciousness, which basically means sleep, hypnosis, drugs, and a few other things. Anyway, awesome quote:
Americans spend so much time and energy chasing the American Dream, that they don’t have much time left for actual dreaming.
-William Dement
After examining everyone’s responses, I’ve decided that vael’s strategy of replying within the quote is the cleanest way to to this. Without further ado…
I made this little compatibility test. Nothing too serious… Just answer yes or no (unless otherwise stated :P).
- Do you like roller coasters? Eh. However, I am a manly coast-buster, and ain’t afraida no coasts, because peer pressure.
- Your favourite things to talk about are:
-events
-discoveries
-things happening with other people,
gossiping(that sounds bad but when I have very little about myself to say, other people get involved eventually for the sake of conversation)-funny things that happened in your day
-universe (though I prefer not to go that far out of myself)
-
your achievements-the mind
-feelings
- Do you like camping? Meh, but I’ve done my share for the family’s sake.
- Do you like going to the mall? Not by myself, no. I wouldn’t exactly invite someone to “go to the mall,” either. But it is something you can do to pass the time.
- Do you like learning? YES
- Are you religious? If not, what view do you hold (e.g. atheist, agnostic theist, etc.)? APATHETIC
- Do you bluntly state what’s on your mind? Not so much, no.
- Are you nosy? Nah. That would be rude.
- Do you like to compromise? Plenty!
- Do you try hard not to hurt/offend others? Yeah, because I feel terrible when I do.
- Do you curse a lot? Pretty much never.
- Are you jealous of me? Nah.
- Do you think you are better than me? Nope.
- Are you competitive or hate it when you lose? Not really.
- Do you think I’m lazy? No!
- Would you be annoyed if I flopped onto your neatly made bed? Would my bed ever be neatly made…
- When you hang out with friends, do you usually watch TV, go on the computer, or something of that sort? This is usually what my friends and I did when we hung out, but I doubt I’ll be doing this now.
- Do you joke with other people’s fears? (E.g. There’s a spider on you!”) Not in a mean way like that. Lightly tease, maybe.
- Are you patient? Very.
- Are you great at keeping secrets? I like to think so?
- Do you like to take pictures or get your picture taken? Hmm, not really.
- Do you like to make video skits with friends? Hmm, not really again.
- Do you like cats? *shrug*
- Do/did you talk a lot in class while the teacher is/was talking? Nevar. Except when I’m in 10th grade and everything is easy.
- Are you honest? Totally, it’s just the right thing to do.
- Do you care a lot about your social status and avoid doing things that other people might see as weird/lame? Heck no, I’m just too apathetic to go out of my way for most things.
- Would you get annoyed if I got upset about a 96? Nah.
- I don’t like being tickled. I hate it and let you know that. Would you tickle me to get me in a laughing fit anyways? No, I wouldn’t.
- Do you think I’m just looking for mental disorders to blame everything on? Or do you think that some mental disorders are just ridiculous and that doctors are making normal personalities into “disorders”? I have a hard time answer this question as it’s worded, because it’s a fairly loaded question. Do you like to find mental disorders that sound like they fit you? Yes, I would say so. Do I think doctors sometimes go too far in diagnosing and pushing meds onto people? Yes, I do.
- Does this quiz/how I made it/the fact that I made this quiz make you annoyed or angry? Nah, not at all.
vael:
Anyone with a decent brain should attempt to answer this question and post it to their tumblrs.
Is silence more like: a fever, a voice never heard, or a question with no receiver?
I’ll post my response on Monday. Wouldn’t want to persuade any of you to my side.
Also “it’s technically all of them!” does not count even if it’s the rightest. You are responding not to be the rightest, but to make your choice the rightest among the three.
I’d like to see everyone attempt this.
Back in the day, I used to write stuff like this (only two options though) for my personal message on MSN. I’d make up a new one every day. I stopped when I couldn’t think of anything else to use lol. But I think I kept it up for a few weeks.
I don’t want this to be a huge essay or anything, but I think between those choices… Silence is more like a voice never heard. For a long time, namely since I got to know Britt, this has been a focal point in my life, the idea that there are millions of stories playing out around us and few, if any, are ever heard. I find myself wanting to be the person to hear those stories. So that, at least the once, they’ll be able to feel like they have a voice.
There are two songs that have stuck out for me in name because of that, namely Voice of the Voiceless by Heaven Shall Burn and Rage Against the Machine (not even a cover, they’re completely unrelated songs) - that phrase, regardless of the individual song lyrics, is very appealing to me. A voice never heard, a person with no voice - relatively similar. I want to be their voice, then. Actually, that’s not quite right - I’m not really taking their problems to anyone else. I want to give them a voice, then. By stopping to listen, willingly giving my time when other people might not, it’s breaking that silence. Would things be different if their silences had to continue, left to fester and deepen? Would it broaden the gap between them and the opportunity to connect to people and find that voice?
I want to be there for those people. I want to make that difference in their lives. Of course, it’s not like I can just walk up to sad-looking people and introduce myself. But I do what I can, you know?
I don’t even know. Could be I’m making mountains out of molehills. All the mountains look like molehills in retrospect, though.