The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
This is where I will put the notes I take for my university courses. I didn’t want the name to be confusing, so I went with frighteningly blunt instead. I’m putting up notes for Introduction to Psychology I, Introduction to Linguistics, and Introduction to Applied Linguistics and Discourse studies. My other two classes this semester are french (no laptop use there lol) and introduction to object-oriented programming, in which case my notes are basically just extensive “note to self"s. They’d basically be illegible to anyone else.
I’m also including the name of the instructor in parentheses, because different professors do things differently, so I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone.
Different classes have different formats for emphasis, but in particular, the linguistics chapter notes use italics for keywords (the bolded text in the textbook - if you’ve ever read a textbook, you should know exactly what I mean) and I’ve tried to use indentation to keep things together. The lecture notes may be a little rough because it’s not like the professors have to make their lectures linear and well-organized, but I try.
Mad props to one Vael Victus who set me up with a slice of BCN bandwidth to host this. This plug is totally insufficient as thanks but it will have to do because I’m tired and uncreative at the moment. He’s a cool dude! He’ll help you out! He’ll post things that will entertain you! And he brought you this wonderful service by hosting it, so there you go.
I’m sure you were totally interested in my schedule (I know you weren’t) but I’m interested in my progress and it makes me feel good to remember I’ve accomplished something. So, for that selfish reason, here’s the homework I did over the weekend!
ALDS: I did my readings. Nothing crucial here, so nothing exciting to really report. However, my experiment did not lead to any interesting paper subjects. Oh well.
FREN: Watch my movie, read Voltaire, listen to music - and then write about all of those for my cultural journal. This was what I spent most of saturday doing. That’s four hours of stuff without the writing, which is kinda silly because I’d ALREADY DONE four hours for this project, but I decided they weren’t good enough so I started over. But hey it’s good now.
LING: Take notes on chapter 3.
Well damnit. That… looks like a lot less than it felt like. I know where and how I ended up spending time not working, but excuses are pretty useless. I know I’m not in trouble, I mean the next thing I have due is on thursday, and I could probably do it the day-of and print it off at school.
I do wish I had magically finished all of my work this weekend, but I was probably a little bit too optimistic on thursday. I’ve got psych and applied linguistics tomorrow, and since I won’t be starting on that paper just yet, I should get some solid work done on psychology notes. I’ve got from the end of my computers lab (11-11:30 at the latest) until 1 pm, then 2:30 until 4 pm, so that gives me three hours (minus eating lunch and time spent in transit and etc. etc.) to work. I’ll get at least one chapter done for psychology, and likely some of the second. Then that night I’ll do my linguistics assignment and check out my next computers assignment.
Riveting excitement here, folks. Don’t miss a minute.
And actually more applicable than I might even think when reading the textbook. Diagrams of how you breathe when you make sounds?! That’s so forgettable and not at all interesting to people who don’t have a Ph.D. in Linguistics, namely, the people taking intro to linguistics.
First, something I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of days: the schwa. Basically, it’s a mid-central laxly produced vowel - and it’s all over the place in tons of languages, though very few include it in their alphabet. North American english actually deletes it a lot (how do you pronounce chocolate - with or without an o? that letter o is actually a schwa), and that’s another neat thing about language - we’re optimizing for speed, so we throw away useless sounds and don’t pronounce things properly. Back to what mid-central laxly produced vowel means, it’s pretty much the very middle of your mouth. I’m assuming that would be the natural resting position for your tongue. So at any give time, if you were to just open you lips (no tongue movement allowed) and make a noise, it would likely be a schwa!
So the schwa is in tons of words because it makes them easier to pronounce, and a great example is foxes. Try to pronounce fox, and add a -zzz at the end for the s, WITHOUT any sound in between. Very difficult to produce, harder for the hearer to understand that you mean multiple foxes - so a schwa goes right in between those sounds as a transition and to make them more pronounceable.
I thought that was neat so if I explained it poorly just pretend it’s really cool.
Next thing is I’m going to write a paper about how communication on the internet is still communication. It’s a little bit rough because linguistics has proved that writing, whether it’s a letter or an “instant message” is not equivalent to pure language use, but I’ll just have to pick my thesis carefully. The reason I say “pure language use” as opposed to “speech” is because sign language is equivalent to spoken word, and actually ten times more amazing in certain ways. But suffice to say that sign language uses the language centric parts of your brain (a couple places in the left hemisphere) exactly like spoken language, AND it develops an extra part on the right hemisphere dedicated solely to understanding the spacial dimension of signed language. So, as far as your brain is concerned, speaking with your hands and speaking with your mouth are just as good.
What I want to somehow work into this paper is that communication over the internet is similarly equivalent to communication face to face - that’s not to say I don’t think there’s any point to meeting someone in person to discuss something with them, just that internet friends are as valid as friends who sit beside you in class.
Take vael’s post about a support system - who says a “support system” is restricted to people physically close to you? You want to see an internet support system, go to deviantArt or Gaia Online and see all the little peoples complimenting eachother and generally just making everybody feel good about being average. It’s as easy as that to prove. I don’t have the equipment to do brain scans and crap like that, but I’m willing to bet there’d be a lot of similarities between a kind word from an internet friend and a kind word from a friend in the same room. Maybe we internet kids (and don’t doubt that people who grew up on computers have differently developed brains from those who didn’t - look at 3D artists, a field requiring spatial knowledge that could never have existed before, and imagine trying to teach such a program to an older artist) connect avatars with our concepts of “others,” the vague sense that in fact someone does exist, as easily as other people connect faces.
This is what I’ve been learning at university.
This is optional reading, consider the post done, but what I meant by ‘concepts of “others”’ is by contrast to the concept of self. Turns out, concepts and exercises that relate back to your sense of self use distinct areas of your brain from ones that don’t. Which is to say that science is working on determining where in your brain YOU, as a person and an idea, exist. Based on that, I’d definitely say it’s possible there are similar areas in the brain related to other people, as concepts and as people with feelings and thoughts of their own, that I can guarantee would relate back to the monkeysphere.
The easiest way to test that would be to lesion someone’s brain and see if they stop understanding that other people exist just like they do. Easy way to figure out where I should try that would be to test people with severe autism. Now, I don’t necessarily need to cut/burn anyone’s brain for this (electromagnets and drugs can actually turn your brain off temporarily - god I love science - and see what would happen if we theoretically destroyed a part of your brain) but where would the fun be in that?
Line-up for electrodes in the brain starts to my right, folks. Don’t be shy, we’ve got enough for everyone!
I watched an indie film from Quebec today and it was pretty indie but in a french kind of way. I’ll write about it when here when I’m done writing about it for marks. Just wanted to share a quote:
“Tu es un poisson des grandes profondeurs. Aveugle et lumineux. Tu nages en eaux troubles avec la rage de l'ère moderne, mais avec la poésie fragile d'un autre temps.”
Direct translation: You’re a deep sea fish. Brilliant and blind. You swim in troubled waters with the rage of the modern era, but with the fragile poetry of another time.
Sorry guys but words in french are amazing to me right now. Brb homework.
Just got done checking out my syllabi (this is the plural of syllabus, which is the thing where your teacher tells you what they expect you to do and you say “like hell am I doing that”) and making my schedule for the next couple of weeks. Thought it might be relevant, so I’m going to show it to you! It’s a sheet of plain, lined looseleaf folder to a quarter of the original size. Nothing fancy here. For your benefit, bonus information will be added such as due dates and course names. Oh, and one side note, any time I say “read” I mean “read and highlight important information.” It takes a lot longer to read and pay enough attention to highlight things.
Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies (ALDS): Do readings before class (usually a couple of pages in length), write paper for the 18th of October (3-4 pages in length, and that is NOTHING - I expect to slap this together in very little time. It can be on anything relevant to our subject material, and the name should tell you that’s an extremely broad category. I’ve got a few ideas and I just need to find a few good citations and put it all together. This isn’t something I need to research for a week, I just have to write about a thing. My biggest concern with it is proper terminology - should I use L1 and L2 instead of typing “first/native language” and “second language”? I know that’s the norm, but I am an ENGLISH STUDENT and I DO THESE THINGS THE RIGHT WAY. Even if it takes six times as long to type!)
French (FREN): Watch J'ai tué ma mère (french indie film from Quebec, heard good stuff about it, I just need to spend time on french culture), write my cultural journal (due October 5th) about the movie (basic summary, personal evaluation, what did I learn or like about it), write my cultural journal about the Voltaire passage I read (some random thing of his that hardly anyone remembers, but it happens to be only a hundred pages or two and that’s far more palatable than Candide), read Cyrano de Bergerac (I did this during my public transit time today, which is great - just had to read the first act, and I’m in love with the language), do research on Gilles Vigneault (group presentation near the end of October, 10-12 minutes in length, and I’m researching his political life - it will be very easy to get behind on this, because I have a vague due date and nobody to report to. Will have to get some group organization going on so we can practice and stuff), write résumé (this is a summary of an article about “une phoque moine” which is a sea lion or whatever and it has to be 150 words long lol)
Computer Science (COMP): Assignment #2 (due October 13th, and we have yet to learn the stuff it requires, so while I could teach myself, why waste my time? I’ll check it out next friday probably)
Linguistics (LING): Finish reading Chapter 3 (Phonology), take notes on Chapter 3 (in OneNote, so this is my “studying” and will also make it easier to study for my midterm), do assignment #3 (due October 7th), study for midterm on October 14th (chapters 1-3, not sure just how much studying I’ll do - review the assignment questions for sure, read the notes I took on the chapters and lectures, but I don’t know if I’ll read the chapters themselves again… it takes a loooong time)
Psychology (PSYC): Read chapter 3 (accomplished this morning before class, the last few pages after class - this is what we’re covering next week), takes notes on chapter 1, chapter 2, and chapter 3 (this is for studying purposes, and will likely take a long time - but it’s important, because I have to…), study for midterm on October 13th (chapters 1-3, all multiple choice, worth 20% of final grade - will read review sections in book, personal applications (practice questions I think?), some stuff about how to pwn multiple choice exams, and check out past exams at the library)
I have no class on friday, but I am going to the University of Ottawa for a study comparing my first (english) and second (french) languages. Should be cool, actually! I’ll get a 1% credit for my final mark in PSYC 1001, and if it’s neat, I may write my first ALDS paper about it, or something related to bilingualism. I’ll spend the morning and early afternoon (my appointment is for 3:40 PM) working on stuff for french, because it’ll be nice to cross that stuff off. If I have extra time, I’ll keep reading chapter 3 for linguistics. Third LING assignment if I have time.
Saturday, I’ll probably take notes like a madman, and that’ll feel great because I like all of the things I’ll be reviewing and I like to have a fat block of text to look back at. If I wind up with extra time at the end of the night, I’ll pretty up my old notes and upload them!
Sunday, I’ll do whatever didn’t get done the last two days. Taking notes, ALDS reading, french projects, whatever. I know I won’t finish this all in one weekend despite my obvious optimism, so the goal is to make sure I have things for the following week done. Namely, the cultural journal for french, my LING assignment, and the reading for ALDS. So that’s not really a lot of work. The rest is all working ahead and that’s a very smart thing for me to do.
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Wrote that last night and tumblr died forever but someone revived it so we’re ok now. However two addenda (plural of addendum): one, I need to check out my lecture slides and copy stuff into my notes that I didn’t have time to copy, and two, I need to check out my french textbook so I can learn french grammar blah.
Also, it’s funny to learn linguistics and realize that bullshit grammatical rules have no value and then go to a class and have to force bullshit grammatical rules onto myself. “It’s just the way french is,” “It’s just what we do,” “It’s a direct complement so it does this duh,” like none of this makes any sense so don’t pretend like it does lol. At any rate science is working to improve language teaching courses so the future should be great for other people.
I haven’t uploaded anything yet, because I want it to be pretty, but I’m setting up a system where I’ll upload lecture notes and study notes to my own little BCN site for those of you who want to read them, and for the random people who bum their notes off of people. They’ll be in .pdf format from OneNote, though if there’s a demand I can put up the OneNote files themselves, but I plan on uploading individual lectures and textbook chapters. That way, if someone missed class on September 28th, they can get the notes for September 28th. If there’s a mid-term coming up and they haven’t so much as opened their textbook, they can grab chapters 1-3.
I’ll break it down by subject, then by course, then have one section for textbook notes and one for lecture notes. And I’ll even name the courses for those of you not attending my university, alongside the regular course codes for those in the know. You want to learn about phonetics, for some stupid reason (trust me, you don’t want to learn about phonetics)? Then grab Chapter 2, Phonetics, from the Introduction to Linguistics folder. You want to learn about the biological basis of behaviour? Chapter 3 from Introduction to Psychology I.
I’m excited about this stuff, so I hope you’re all excited to get my university education for free. I’ll link it when I’ve got everything ready!
Hoo boy. I read this some time ago, but I’ve never really felt like writing anything about it. I’m cleaning up my bookmarks today, though, so I’m getting this out of there and throwing out another, slightly related, link I’ve had kicking around. I’ll start with that one because it’s a lot shorter, then we’ll move onto the main event. As a cautionary measure, if my life bores you, you have my permission to skip this post and buy Recettear instead. It’s on Steam, and available completely DRM-free (if I remember right) through Impulse and GamersGate.
If you’re still here, the first link is something vael tossed out once upon a time, so it may seem familiar to you. It’s simply the wikipedia article for anhedonia, which is a possibly theoretical? thing suggesting a chicken/egg relationship between depression and not feeling happiness. Does not feeling any pleasure come from the depression, or do you get depressed because you don’t feel any pleasure? There’s not enough info on it to really say for sure, but at any rate it’s something that feels extremely familiar to me. Regardless of which came first, not feeling the kind of pure joy a lot of people get from, well, everything has had a huge effect on my hobbies and my personality. The games I play, books I read, why I do it at all - it kinda comes back to what I get out of it and how I can get motivated to play or read them in the first place. It sounds very depressing, but that depends on how much I’m enjoying my current project. At the moment, I don’t have one, because I’ve been working on homework and will be for some time. Ah well.
But back to the main link, which as I’m looking at it again… I think I might have mentioned it somewhere because I remember half of it making no sense. At any rate I will scroll through it and see what I have to say about it. I’ll let you know if it’s worth reading as well.
We start with some numbers, for the sake of referring to research, and it basically says “no one knows the truth about this, oh well!” That seems to be the purpose of all the numbers in here, so keep on truckin’ even if you have no idea what exactly you’re reading at the moment.
Anyway, the fact that depression in children leads to a lot of the symptoms of ADHD is interesting to note. Also the question of whether ADHD is even a valid thing or just a label we slap on kids when we don’t know what to do with ‘em. For the record, I’m no longer identifying myself as having had a learning disorder for official university purposes, despite the general idea that I was mega-ADHD as a kid. I’d have to get tested and have them tell me “no you are fine” and that would just be a waste of time. So, did I even have ADHD, or do I just have things that are associated with ADHD? Good question.
They mention externalizing (taking things out on other people) and internalizing (taking things out on yourself) disorders, and then make slight mention of the fact that, actually, people who are depressed and have other internalizing disorders might still externalize things. I can guarantee that’s true and I wonder if it’s possible to even classify things that way except for the most absolutely simple diseases. Well, by that I mean, anxiety is internalizing there’s no way you could bring that onto other people. Because you are anxious and likely having trouble interacting with them. Generally it isn’t that clear-cut.
Actually that’s the only thing I’ve found of note until the treatment issues part. Yeah, I knew there was a reason I hadn’t written anything about this article. What’s interesting about that is that they refer only treatment via medication - this being the Psychiatric Times, and not the Psychological Times. So their question is, when we’re sending them on their way with a bottle of drugs, how do we guarantee the maximum effectiveness before they come back in four weeks? No thought is even given to other forms of treatment. Which pill should we use… Hmm… Well this one is good for one thing, and that one is good for another… Maybe if we give them both…
Comorbid depression in patients with ADHD suffers from an “attention deficit” by both researchers and clinicians, compared with other comorbidities (eg, ODD, anxiety).
Yeah they said that.
On further review I’ve decided this article is kinda shitty. There isn’t much redeeming value in it aside from the idea that ADHD and depression could affect/cause eachother and really it’ll have to all come down to what I have to say about myself and the concept. What do I have to say about it? I’m not really sure, mainly stemming from a lack of motivation to say anything at all. I mean, ADHD and depression are two things I dealt with at a very young age. The depression is something that, clearly, I haven’t conquered permanently, but I hope I have a better handle on it now. Same with the ADHD.
I was diagnosed with ADHD, hmm, as early as 7 or 8. I couldn’t swallow the pills, or chose not to, or whatever, and likely that alone has strengthened my physical inhibition against it - I have to choose my medication (vitamins, or when I was getting my wisdom teeth out, antibiotics and whatnot) around the fact that swallowed pills aren’t an option for me. Actually, that’s probably why I never take ibuprofen or anything like that. They don’t tend to be available otherwise.
At any rate, I took my ritalin by sticking it inside an Oreo cookie and chewing that, which was still disgusting, but it worked. I took it for three or four years before I decided I didn’t want to depend on it anymore, and out of stubborn rebellion avoided taking it and learned how to control myself. This places us around fifth grade, meaning it coincides with my decision to be mature and quiet and generally get rid of all the things I hated about myself - most of which were things I was taking the ritalin for. I felt that I spoke too much (not really my imagination, people complained), that I was too excited all the time, too childish, stuff like that. I didn’t want to depend on the ritalin anymore, and I hated the side effects as much as I could bring myself to care while it was in my system. So over time I got rid of all of that, maybe even went too far in the other direction, but I didn’t need the ritalin anymore and for all intents and purposes my ADHD was miraculously cured in a very short period of time. It was amazing, the medication was so fucking effective that rather than controlling the symptoms it made them go away! Wow!
So the part where this article becomes interesting to me is the side effects of the ritalin. I felt nothing. No joy, no real sadness either, but then that’s just plain sad. It was emptiness, which was worse in a whole lot of ways than being a pain in everyone else’s ass. I didn’t start getting depressed until after I started taking the ritalin. After I stopped having fun playing video games, after I stopped laughing and smiling except in the best of circumstances. Maybe it was just a matter of time anyway, like I would be depressed now regardless of what happened then. But that’s some damn good timing.
It’s interesting, as well, that the games I fell in love with are all games I played not long after getting off of the ritalin and not being as deeply depressed yet. Final Fantasy IX, the Ratchet & Clank series (which I still think of as extremely fun, despite not enjoying them much anymore), even Final Fantasy X-2, and of course a number of browser based games. Heh, I used to spend hours, every single day, playing daily browser based games. Before you could pay for more play time, I’d just find more games. My current set of webcomics (18 of them) is about what I would have had for browser based games at the very peak. There were plenty of flash games as well, a lot of stuff that’s probably terrible by today’s standards but entertained me a fair bit at the ages of 10-12.
I think about that age range in years, 2002-2004, and think “where would I have found flash games that far back?” but of course Newgrounds was there, sites like AddictingGames were around, Armor Games might even still have been Games of Gandor (fact check: Games of Gandor existed from 2004-2005). Kids these days wouldn’t even know that all their bases are belong to us…
/nostalgia
Even though I own a physical copy of Final Fantasy IX, rented and played for 50 hours when it was initially released, then rescued from an EBGames bargain bin some years later (and finished with that same save file, thanks to the glory of memory cards), I bought it for $10 from the PlayStation Network so I could replay it eventually. No disc switching, no wonkiness, just ten bucks straight to Square Enix and (hopefully) a bundle of nostalgic joy for me. Will I get the same feeling for the game now that I’m more or less in the same joyless state as I was while taking ritalin? Good question. Will I still like the game without the pure joy of VIDEO GAMES flowing through my veins? Also a good question. I’ll let you know if and when I get back to playing it.
You know those magazine things that are all going out of business because nobody buys them and they make little to no money from the ads on their websites? I’ve started seeing a lot of them lying around in various bookstores or bus stop convenience stores here in The Big City. Used to be I’d never see actual, physical magazines. At any rate, I posted about something from the cover of Wired not long ago, and now I’ve got another sensational magazine cover to share with you.
This time it’s Psychology Today, with a cover promoting the “Revenge of the Introvert.” Sounds interesting, but once again, I ran home to look the article up online rather than drop cash on a magazine. Sorry, guys. At any rate, the article is wonderful, and there are too many great quotes for me to actually single any out. If I did, I’d have to pick out all of the good ones, and this post would rival the length of the original. But please do read the article itself, as you’ll get some good value out of it whether you’re introverted or not. Maybe you’re severely extroverted, but in that case, you’ll learn how not to bulldoze over the introverts in your life. If you’re introverted, I’m sure this will give you plenty to think about.
So go read it!
I’m going to assume everyone reads that. You’d better, because I won’t have any incredibly lengthy posts to keep you busy today.
There’s also the… “interesting” (and I write it that way for emphasis of it’s questionable value) Highly Sensitive Introvert Survival Guide. I didn’t know there were introverts and Highly Sensitive (abbreviated HSP…? Highly Sensitive Person, perhaps? Highly Sensitive Perhaps?) Introverts. But if you’re beyond regular introversion, maybe you qualify. I do know what she means by hating people getting in my space and ruining my planned relaxation time. Her suggestions are pretty good, though: get noise cancelling headphones, enjoy your alone time as much as possible. Go for a run if things get too hectic. This isn’t even on the required reading scale, so it’s just bonus material if you want. You won’t be tested on this one.
Did I mention there would be a test on all the awesome things I link to? Because there will be. So I hope your interests coincide perfectly with mine and you read absolutely everything I put up.
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Listened to Hollow Place by Polar Bear Club (not the song my tumblr’s title comes from, but a favourite nonetheless) while writing this post, and went to check out their myspace to see if I could catch them live now that I live in a real place. Turns out they’re playing in Toronto on November 21st and Quebec City on the 22nd. Both of those are very possible. Tickets are a little under $30, which is not bad at all, though transportation costs will be where the real expenses lie. They’re also playing with August Burns Red, who I do listen to, and a few other names I recognize but can’t remember liking. It’s possible I hate them. At any rate, there’s also Bring Me The Horizon, Emarosa, and This Is Hell.
The moral of the story is I might make plans to go to one of those shows. November 21st is a sunday, so I could do a weekend trip. That means the 22nd is a monday, which is a day I have two classes (and a tutorial) so that wouldn’t be possible would be a bad idea.
I guess I like living near interesting things.
I read both Destructoid and its anime-centric sister site, Japanator, on a daily basis. I learn and see a lot of things. This is one of those rare things that is so amazing I must share it with you.
Did you like Baccano? Did you like Inception? This has both. It was created by one of the Japanator writers (double checking reveals him to be an intern) and it’s great in every way. The credits and everything are all from the anime itself, so it is actually a “legitimate” movie poster style advertisement for Baccano.
But the tag line is the best part.
“A life of crime can last forever…”
YES!
Through my university, there’s some Microsoft thing where they can give us Microsoft software and other stuff for free, except Microsoft Office which they think we’ll be willing to pay for. So the end result is that I downloaded Windows 7 for free, and that’s great, and then I torrented Microsoft Office on the university wi-fi. At the time I didn’t install Microsoft OneNote (part of the greater Office suite) because I had no idea what it was, then I was at a bus stop yesterday and saw an ad for it. Essentially, it’s supposed to be a “virtual notebook,” allowing you to type wherever you want on the page, draw/write if you have a tablet, paste pictures, whatever.
I’ve been taking notes in WordPad thus far, just typing as my professor speaks basically, and so far this hasn’t been a problem because I haven’t actually had to read over my notes. I do have a folder for each of my classes, but each has a simple “COMP1005” text file where the class number and date are the only thing to distinguish where and when something happened.
As a form of self-promotion, I guess, and because it’s meant to be really useful to us, OneNote is offered for free through the school without any of the other Office programs. I guess I would have had an older version with the Office that I torrented, but that’s alright. I got it and installed it, and here’s the surprising part: it seems really damn good. I’ve seen Mac users with a similar program that looks a whole lot snazzier, so likely that’s where they got the idea, but either way: this is an awesome idea.
Here’s how it’s set up: you create as many “notebooks” as you like (which are a lot like folders, used just for OneNote) displayed along the left side. Inside each notebook are a number of tabs along the top, which could be your to do list or your different classes or what have you. Then inside each tab, you add as many pages as you like, displayed along the far right side. This sounds confusing, but imagine your notebook or binder: you may have one for each class, or each day of classes. If you’re well-organized, you may have separators (tabs) to separate your homework from your notes or something like that. Then each of those tabs has as many pages as you need. Currently, I’ve got two binders: one for my monday/wednesday classes, and one for tuesday/thursday. Then I have separators labelled for my classes in chronological order.
OneNote, then, managed to replicate that perfectly, with the bonus of to do lists per day. I could also have a universal to do list in a miscellaneous folder, for the long term. Or I could add in a calender. I can do this shit, unlike WordPad or MS Word. I add a new page for each day of classes (under the tab of the class itself) and go on my way. Add a tab for important projects. Tada! Everything in one place.
Moral of the story is that this is infinitely better than text files or .pdfs or whatever else you might have been using on the computer, and likewise it has many advantages over your physical pen and paper. If you’re allowed to take notes on your computer, this would be wonderful. If you can’t, that’s a shame. At any rate I love this program, and I never thought I’d say that about a Microsoft program. It uses nearly the same amount of memory as MS Word (20k), and about a third more than simple WordPad (15k), so it’s not like it’s a huge memory drain either. I just have to convert the notes I’ve already taken and then we’ll be golden.
GOLDEN.
Two things: one, I am busy sometimes because life screws up and homework piles up instead of getting done. Two, I am sad/tired, and this makes me forgetful and disinclined to write.
I had things to say but I no longer remember them because I’ve been away from the internet for so long because of life.
I don’t even know, man.
Actually, it’s cooler than you might think. Yes, BioWare is anonymously collecting data from you, without your permission or knowledge. But aside from being anonymous, the whole idea is to make Mass Effect 3 better. I doubt anyone will complain about that.
Weird that PC players all wanted to bang Miranda and 360 players all wanted to chill with Grunt. Note that I haven’t played either Mass Effect so this means nothing to me. That’s why I have nothing much to say about it. But it was worth linking.
Oh wait it’s the sunday something! Hey yeah alright one second.
Privates: It’s a game starring condom-wearing things who are specially trained to eliminate STIs and whatnot. What’s not to like?! It’s free, it’ll take you about an hour to play, and you get to see chlamydia as an invisible tentacle monster and shoot anti-herpes ammo at abundant amounts of herpes. Strangely enough, no matter which level you are in, there are swarms of giant sperm… Including a boy’s anus. You also have to deliver a morning-after pill in the form of a nuke inside the womb.
MORNING-AFTER BOMB. IN THE WOMB.
Also cancer of the penis. You don’t want that.
If you knew of GOG already, this will probably make you sad. If you didn’t, watch out for it when it comes back up.
I hope they didn’t run themselves out of business by being amazing. I hope they can still do the no-DRM thing. I can’t say I’ve seen GOG releases on torrent sites, but then I haven’t been looking for the games either, so the point may be moot. From what I remember, I think the policy on Blackcats Games (which has recently stopped being a walled fortress) was that they weren’t allowed to be uploaded. Not that they’re the biggest source of VIDEO GAMES on the internet, but I’d hope the same appreciation for the service would exist elsewhere as well.
At any rate, no matter what it comes down to, if they have the same prices it will still be amazing. Compatibility is less of an issue now that Windows 7 can mostly take care of things, but trying to get some of that stuff to work on XP and Vista would have been a nightmare.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Closure by Evergrey, from their album Monday Morning Apocalypse.
The whole album is great, of particular note being all of them. Alright, alright, check out The Dark I Walk You Through and Unspeakable. I want to quote them as well, and you can’t stop me, so hah! I post Closure simply because I just listened to it and couldn’t believe I hadn’t posted them before. Or, if I have, I didn’t tag it or mention the word “Evergrey” in the post. So somehow I doubt I have. Anyway, in order. First The Dark I Walk You Through.
Unspeakable:
HAHA SAD LYRICS I HOPE YOU ARE SAD
But no, I kid. I like Evergrey a lot. Makes it hard to choose one single song. Also I keep coming back to that image of “a fist full of tears.” I seriously loved that quote. So great.
Anyway things are very sad over in La Matt Grind. Specifically, it is very grindy. Maybe if a good movie comes out I can invite someone I’ve met to see it and then force them to be friends with me. But as charmingly as possible so they’re fooled into thinking they would want to befriend me. The poor fools.
Roughly two years ago now, my girlfriend of nearly a year and I broke up. The stress from school and what I was feeling because of that got to the point where I felt justified in giving up, and so I did. I caved under the pressure, and I let myself go for a long time. I can’t say, really, when it was that I collected the scattered pieces of myself. Maybe it was later that year (end of 11th grade), or maybe it wasn’t until the middle of last year (12th grade) when AP English grabbed me and shook me around a little. Either way, my average slipped in 11th grade, before ending strong in 12th.
Entrance scholarship money at my university is based on your marks for the first semester of grade 12 and all of 11th grade. Basically, my 90% average meant nothing, because their calculations left it in the 85-90% range. At 85%, you received $2000. At 90%, you received $3000. If that were a one-time sum, that wouldn’t be so bad. But it’s renewable every year, provided you have the right grades, and so that’s a “potential” loss of $4000. If I don’t manage the A- required to keep it (something like 83%, which I feel relatively comfortable with), sure, I decrease that potential loss of money, as if that’s a good thing. The end result is that I lost out on at least a thousand bucks because I wanted to be miserable.
I cried when Britt and I broke up, which is something I don’t do often. Never with anyone around, though, because I had to put on a strong face to keep people from knowing just how little they really knew about our relationship. Sure, they knew I put too much importance on her, but they didn’t know just how bad it was. So I didn’t let them find out.
I cried in public on saturday, and that’s something I haven’t done since I was eleven.
But I can’t afford to let myself slip this time. I know the stakes now, and I know the consequences for even momentary lapses in commitment.
I don’t expect I’ll go for professional treatment, though my parents have offered it repeatedly. It may be biased, it may be unfair, but I’ve always had a feeling that I don’t need that kind of stuff. In my mind, I think of it as meant for “other people.” There’s nothing wrong with the “other people,” really, and I have nothing against them. If that’s what floats their boat, then everyone’s happy. I just like to build my own little raft and set off into the unknown.
It’s rough learning this stuff on the fly, but experience is a wonderful teacher. I gots my little raft a-floatin’ just fine.
In retrospect, I realize that I hold an untraceable prejudice against psychiatry that has always been prevalent and problematic for the profession. It’s not something I’ve been taught or otherwise told, it’s just there in my head. I certainly don’t judge people who go for professional help, but it’s quite possible I’ve ultimately hurt people by unconsciously spreading my unrealistic philosophy of independence. Ho-hum. Something to think about.
Look, I know I should tell you what this is, but the title alone made me drop everything and read the article myself and I want you all to be that excited about it. Solely based on the phrase “quarter-life crisis.”
Are you excited?
Is there any one of us who looks back at life and wished we could have done something different?
Most of us realize this is a futile way of thinking and move on. But if we had incredible angst and the ability to time travel, our lives might look a bit like The Tatami Galaxy, noitaminA’s Spring 2010 anime series.
Alright, there. Now you know what it is without even having to read about it. Go on with your lives or check it out. I sincerely plan on watching it. Eventually. It seems great.
It’s been pretty lonely the last couple of days. The odd time I end up on the computer, nobody is around! It is very sad. I am busy, you are busy, everyone is busy. Terribly sad.
Using the bus and walking around campus, as opposed to driving everywhere, has been pretty nice so far. I am building copious amounts of muscles, which may or may not have easily recognizable names. They are the muscles involved in carrying heavy things on your back and walking up a lot of stairs, as well as standing on a bus and balancing your entire body via a pole above your head. These are complex muscles groups, certainly, but they will be very important in the days ahead.
Anyway, I’m going to fencing tonight at 9 pm. Might not be able to get a bus depending on when it ends. I have a drive if need be, anyway. Hooray! Should be a good time.
He’s got a shiny red American sports car, so the speedometer reads in mph with km/h underneath. We get onto the 100 km/h highway, and he goes 100 mph. This is equivalent to 160 km/h, which is like an instant loss of your license if you get caught plus a huge fine.
Neato!
It’s also time for the Sunday Something! I have two somethings for you this sunday. Both are from Art of Manliness, and this is basically the end of my reading list. I have yet to post the comorbid ADHD and depression article, but all in due time.
Our Disembodied Selves and the Decline of Empathy: Kids these days are assholes and don’t connect very well to other people. Once upon a time, kids were not like that. In those days, they had to interact with people in person rather than over the internet and that probably has a lot to do with it. Know anybody who forgets sometimes that the Internet has different social rules from meatspace?
How to Firmly Say No Without Coming Off Like a Jerk: Don’t be the person who says yes when they’re secretly screaming no on the inside. It’ll be useful eventually, and everyone can do with some good manners.
Also goddamnit vossk’s Sadurday. Goddamnit.
It did, however, add to the realization that few people probably want all the details on how my dog died. So I won’t detail the whole story here on tumblr, because putting it into words will probably only make it worse for me. At any rate, here’s the basic version.
Our six-year old black lab, Shadow, loved going for rides in the car. She also didn’t get much exercise, and so when she got outside and hadn’t had much exercise recently, she would make us chase her around until she felt like going back inside. The easy solution to this was to unlock the car and let her in, then go inside to grab her leash so she would come inside. It literally never failed, she knew she was about to be brought inside but she still held out hope that we’d go for a drive anyway.
Yesterday, we were cleaning the house (vacuuming the dog hair, cleaning nose prints off of the windows, etc.) and she got out the front door when I was bringing something out to the garbage. I let her into the van like I’d done a hundred times before, and she hopped right in to wait for a drive. This was sometime before lunch. I even put her leash on the seat so it would be right there for me to bring her in. I threw out the garbage, then went back inside and got distracted cleaning the house.
Sometime after 4 pm, my mom asked my brother and I if she was with us. We said no, and that we thought she’d been with her. I joked to my brother that she was probably hiding in his closet again, because I spent fifteen minutes scouring the house for her the other day only to find her in there. A few minutes later, my mom yelled down “did you get her out of the car?”
It was a hot day. Probably 30+ Celsius. You don’t leave anything that can’t get out on its own (babies, pets) in cars in the summer. But we did, because we all assumed she was hanging out inside somewhere.
It was far too late at that point. The body is to be cremated, and the ashes will be spread in a pet cemetery. We kept her collar. My dad, who hasn’t seen her a whole lot in the past year since he accepted the new job in Ottawa, agreed to gather up her things from our house and take them to his. Hopefully it isn’t painful for him to see her blankets and her food dishes.
In a weird way, I’m glad that all I had to do was sweep some corners in the basement to finalize it all. You’d be surprised where you find dog hair when you own a dog that sheds.
She destroyed the blind and drapes for our living room window, which spans the wall there. Something like a thousand dollars worth of damages. That was… Monday.
While in the van, she chewed through the three seatbelts on the driver’s side, so it’s illegal to drive until we spend at least $300 on the driver’s side seatbelt. $200 for the middle seatbelt, and $100 for the back seatbelt. However all we need are the belts themselves, which could easily be found at a junkyard. So the installation could be far cheaper, or it’s possible we could even do it ourselves. I don’t know what other damage there might be on the inside.
We were going to spend about $1500 on completing the fencing around our yard so she’d be able to enjoy the backyard without having to be on a leash or a chain. We never finalized the details, and it’s possible we may not bother now.
But the money doesn’t even matter. She lived with us from six weeks through to six years. She had easily that many more left to go. I still expect her to come running to the door when I come back into the house. I still expect her to lick my face and get me out of bed so she can go out to pee.
I loved that dog.
My mom says she doesn’t blame me, but I’ll never know for sure.
I’m crying, and I’m shaking.
You ought to know that’s a big deal.
Recently, an epidemic has been clawing its way through our glorious nation of the United Internets of The Web. It began slowly, in an isolated corner of the UItW. But one by one, new cases were discovered, making a clear case for a classification of this contagious new menace to our hearts and minds. Preliminary results are reproduced below, and have been submitted for inclusion in the DSM-V. Researchers around the nation are doing further research as we speak, and it is certain that much more is left to uncover about the disease tentatively titled “Utopianism Disease.” We can only hope that methods of treatment reveal themselves for inclusion in the print release of the DSM-V.
Utopianism Disease, or UD, has been classified as contagious, as it spreads from those who exhibit the most extreme symptoms to new, impressionable hosts. The symptoms are painted as positive ways to improve quality of life, and the new host seems to realize that they have always been there and put a new level of importance on them. Eventually, the symptoms take over their life, and they too become yet another victim of UD. As the disease progresses, they begin to spread it to their friends and acquaintances. Some even offer the disease to strangers, claiming it will bring enlightenment.
UD is characterized mainly by abnormalities of emotion and thought. Unlike many traditional diseases, the simple idea of it can spread it to others. No bacteria or germ is involved. It can be spread verbally, or it can be spread through written text. In fact, it can be spread by any form of communication. This is what makes it so terrifyingly effective, and so frightening to contain. No human being can reasonably be detained indefinitely, for the protection of all others. If they need to be guarded, eventually the guards may succumb. Treatment must begin with the worst sufferers and work down to those who hold the idea at arm’s length and avoid further infection.
Sufferers share no easily defined physical link, and so it must be assumed that no one is immune. No race, gender, or creed is safe. Age does not appear to grant any immunity; however, it seems that young people are especially at risk. This vulnerability makes it even more important than ever to protect our children from online predators. Freedom will only harm them. Glob bless the United Internets of the Web.
The list of symptoms has not been finalized, as UD seems to manifest in a wide variety of ways. However, a preliminary list follows.
It is very important that if you, anyone you know, appears to have any of the above symptoms, you proceed immediately to the highest-paid psychiatric help available in your area. If symptoms have yet to appear, you may still want to consult a well-paid psychiatrist to make sure you have the right medication to keep your family safe. Big Pharma Inc. has promised a vaccine will be available within the next few months, and it is expected to create a full immunity to UD. Waiting lists will soon be available on their website, and it is recommended that you pay by cheque or credit card to make sure you have early access to this life-saving vaccine.
Glob bless the souls of these poor, poor victims, and long live the glory of the United Internets of the Web.
Why, I’m so glad you asked without any solicitation whatsoever! I was just about to post about a few things I was told the other day during some presentations at university.
I’ve also learned that taking notes on a laptop is far easier than writing them by hand, but it can come down to personal preference as well. I plan on copying my notes out by hand when I start studying for tests and exams, as an initial review of what I’ve got before I start the real studying. I’ve heard from some people that they can visualize the notes they’ve written, down to the colour of pen used, so obviously taking notes on a laptop would be bad for those people.
So that’s what I’ve learned in one day of class and one day spent at various presentations! Actually going to the presentations put me in a draw to win a Kobo eReader so that’s kinda why I did them. But hey aren’t you all glad that I went?!
I love being a leader sometimes. To show people the light and stuff. When I got to my linguistics course, about fifteen minutes early, I saw a lot of people inside and assumed it was another class finishing up, as they run ten minutes apart. I didn’t want to walk into the end of a class and wait for the next one, and there were a few other people outside as well, so we all waited around a bit.
More people showed up, and seeing other people waiting outside, they assumed the same thing as we had and sat around. I realized before very long that it had to be people who’d arrived early for linguistics in there, but out of complacency I waited anyway. A minute or two before class would normally start, I picked up my stuff and walked in the door. One look at the screens up front was all I needed: they simply said “Introduction to Linguistics.”
All I had to do was lean out the door and soberly say “hey guys class is about to start so we should probably make our way in.” It was all I could do to suppress a big, idiotic grin.
I received this a while ago, but I’d been posting a lot of text so I thought I’d save it for later. Some quality e-mail from the fine folks behind Kingdom of Loathing, for sure. It’s too bad I got stuck in the midst of the endgame changes and can never go back to the game. I encourage you to check it out if you haven’t previously, though.
Dear [username],
Okay, I’m not good at this kind of thing, but I feel like I have to give it a try. So, here goes:
I was hanging out the other night, listening to some old mp3s, and I was just overcome with memories of when we used to hang out all the time. Remember? You were an intrepid, fearless adventurer, and I was the free-to-play, fun-and-funny online role-playing game that won your heart. Do you still remember those good times? I can’t stop thinking about them.
I mean, I know things got kind of messed up at the end, and believe me, I’m sorry. If I could take any of that back, I totally would. And I know people grow and change, and you’re not the same person you were then, but hey – I’ve changed, too! I thought and thought about how to win you back. I figured I’d make you a mix CD, but I couldn’t decide what “our song” was. So I just concentrated on becoming a better game for you, and here’s what I came up with:
Remember how much fun you used to have with your clan? Alternately, remember how you never joined a clan because you didn’t see the point? Either way, clans now have clan dungeons, group zones where your whole clan can work together. Crawl through sewers to Hobopolis, a vast underground vagrant vacation vista! Slide into the slime tube, and stir-fry sassy slimes!
I know I wasn’t the prettiest game when we were together, so I had some work done. Almost every interface got an interface-lift. You can even manage most of your inventory via chat commands! I also came up with a way for you to automate most of the things you don’t love about the game, so you can spend more time with the parts you do love.
Not only that, but there are way more animated .gifs than there were before. Don’t worry; I haven’t lost that low-fi edginess that you love, but I’m a lot easier to play with now.
You can also have a custom title now, just in case you didn’t feel like I appreciated what made you unique as an individual.
I should also say
Haiku Dungeon’s been revamped.
See what I did there?
Maybe you quit because you got sick of always adventuring above the water. I admit that seems unlikely, but I fixed that, too – there are a bunch of underwater zones with new food, equipment, mechanics, and challenges.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, trust me. I’m still the silly, clever, deceptively-complex game you fell in love with, only with about 95% more awesome.
So, I’m just sayin’, if you can find it in your heart to give me another change, I won’t disappoint you.
If you don’t drop by, I promise I won’t bother you again. I just really felt like we deserved one more try.
Love,
Here’s an interesting interview with the general manager from Eidos Montreal, the guys working on the new Deus Ex game. I guess the general manager is the guy who hires people or something? At any rate, he talks about the specifics of actually making a studio work, from hiring the right people to making sure the right people sit together for optimal productivity. It’s not the kind of details that often emerge about a studio, so if you’ve been absolutely strapped for info about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, worry not. I’ve got you covered.
I’m not sure how many times I’ve link dumped on a sunday, and I’m not sure if I’ll make it a weekly event. But it’s sunday, and this is something, so without further ado, I present several things for your reading pleasure. I’ve been cleaning out my Read It Later list, so for that reason you also get to read the things I’ve picked up over the last couple of months.
First we have a number of Gamasutra articles, beginning with MMOs and moving gradually into the mainstream:
Next, on an entirely different spectrum, we have an article about the future of books. However, there’s a hilarious quote from a man who doesn’t know video games other than them Grand Auto Thefts and Modern Wars, so for that reason it’s the logical follow-up to articles about video games.
Moving from books to writing for anime, we have a rant from the writer behind well-known anime like Ergo Proxy, Samurai Champloo, Eureka 7, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, and the biggest one of all - Cowboy Bebop. Then a roundtable discussion on his rant from the wonderful folks at Japanator. Following that is a discussion of the American meaning of the word “otaku.”
If you have no idea about my interests, there’s your crash course. Hope you enjoyed something up there!
“Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in games that arise from simple mechanics. For example, in many FPS games the physics of a rocket launcher will cause things to be pushed away from it. For years gamers have been using the propulsion of a rockets explosion below them to increase jump height.”
There’s a simple explanation, but the article goes on to really neat thing like AI and how awesome AI can affect how you react to the world of the game you’re playing. Hearing a guard talk with his buddy, then crawl away from you after you mercilessly begin gunning them down, makes a game feel less like a game and more like a world. When a game feels like a world, as in Far Cry 2 and STALKER, it lends itself to “living” in that world rather than merely “playing” it as a game. You can play Far Cry 2 as a game by messing around, reloading if you die, etc. etc. The usual stuff. You can “live” in the world by doing a perma-death run: if your character dies, you start over. No questions asked. So instead of just shooting rocket launchers at your feet, you have to pay attention, sneak through the jungle, and be sure not to piss anyone off too badly.
Simpler, linear games don’t lend themselves to this kind of gameplay. Could you really “live” in the world of Final Fantasy XIII? Not really. The story just doesn’t allow you to do that. You might look at a game with a modern setting, like Grand Theft Auto, and think you could live in that world - but when you try to follow the traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto, you suddenly realize that the game was designed for you to speed through traffic because everything is so incredibly far away. That’s why it’s so special that you can sit down with Far Cry 2 and simply be a mercenary in Africa. Whether or not it was designed that way, we’ll never know, but much like rocket jumping, chances are it wasn’t something the developers thought about as they were making the game. It’s just something that happened to pop up.
So the fact that Far Cry 2 and STALKER have that kind of gameplay are why, in his opinion, they’re some of the most important games of this generation. I absolutely believe that we’ll see more sophisticated games in the same vein, with even more random realism (like guards helping their wounded comrades, or freaking out when they see you and you suddenly disappear into the trees) where simple little pieces of code change the game in a huge way. It’s just a question of when. I don’t know if it will be the norm, though, because it takes a lot less work to carefully restrict a player’s control and influence over the world so that you know exactly what they’ll experience. Pretty much everyone who plays Final Fantasy XIII will have the exact same experience as I did. But no playthrough of Far Cry 2 or STALKER will be exactly the same, and it has nothing to do with things like picking a different character class, race, or gender in the RPG vein. Some people may rush through the game and just play the key storyline missions, while others will do things like perma-death runs and enjoy the game in completely different ways.
If you think about the way people react differently to novels, or paintings - socially accepted forms of “art” - based on their own personal experiences, you’d be hard-pressed not to qualify these games as art.
Well, it was inevitable, although I’m hoping to reverse it for tomorrow and the next few days. I forgot about my video games and got caught up in the internet again. You know what that means: link dump! I’ll try to provide a bit of a summary so you don’t have to read it all and stuff. I just can’t not share it, that’s all. And I have stuff I want to write for you and for someone specific but I can’t do that if I write an essay about the internet, so I’ll let the guys who wrote about it already take care of that. Without further ado, today’s topic is basically The Web vs The Internet.
The Web: Your Firefox or your Chrome or your Opera or even Internet Explorer, working through your desktop, or possibly your phone, or laptop, or other somewhat mobile device. This is the HTML and the websites, the facebook and the google and all that. Increasingly, people are just using iPhone apps rather than using their computers for the easy stuff.
The Internet: The stuff behind the web pages. The ability to transfer data, being connected, the thing that gets your iPhone apps and makes them work.
So Wired has a bright orange magazine this month declaring that “The Web Is Dead.” Despite the sensationalist cover (how could I possibly avoid looking at that?), when I went online to check out the articles (while I had to look, it was very easy not to buy - sorry, guys) I found out that their true headline was “The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet.” Their argument is that people using iPhone apps rather than an iPhone internet browser to get what they want (facebook, twitter, RSS feeds, whatever online content) proves that The Web is over and the infrastructure of The Internet is the true innovation. I’m not sure where I stand on that. I find the debate over open innovation (open-source, free stuff) vs closed walls (careful control, paying for stuff) much more interesting than their shambling almost-an-argument about how the simple iPhone and iPad somehow disprove The Web as a thing that has value. Read what you like, judge it yourself, and carry on with your life.
The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet - split into two columns of “we are to blame” and “they are to blame,” which probably looks really nice in print, this article tries to go at their argument from both (?) points of view. Blame ourselves for choosing the iPhone over our PCs, or blame Steve Jobs for being a big fat greedy jerk and making the iPhone. Or something. I don’t recall this even being a debate, or there being any point of view, so this article tries to say some things but ultimately it’s probably more valuable as a source of debate than an actual article. Maybe you’ll see some gleaming diamond of an argument in there that went completely over my head after an hour spent reading other articles.
The Web Is Dead? A Debate - an e-mail conversation/argument that circles itself, develops a third head, and yet somehow continues to be engaging throughout, this debate (article?) spans a whole host of topics from “open Web” and “closed Internet” to economic factors and the inability of old-school sensibilities to thrive online. I wonder if an important (or so I assume) magazine guy is the right person to debate a paid iPhone magazine app vs a free online website paid for by advertising dollars. He wouldn’t participate in their rush to make money off of an app if he hadn’t already been disappointed with the way TV advertising ideas have failed to turn a profit online. But that’s just a small section of this; I think the core idea is the “dance” or cycle between open and closed, innovation and profit, where too much of either leads to a surge in the other. Too much open, non-profit development and you get a lot of people making money on iPhone apps. Too much closed iPhone development, you get a lot of people throwing their stuff out for free and trying new things.
How the Web Wins - amidst a radical declaration that The Web is now archaic, one man steps out to let everyone know that people are developing The Web so that it can compete with those crazy kids in the app store. He says that The Web will grow from competition, and simply by knowing someone developing a browser-based game I know he’s telling the truth. Not to mention, as a player of browser-based games, I’ve seen stuff like Ruby On Rails that would boggle the mind of a boy who grew up on HoboWars and other html driven games. It’s a quick read, but he has a point.
So there you go. You be the judge. I don’t own an iPhone, and I probably won’t for a very long time, so I’m almost entirely removed from this big debate. I still use The Web, and I will for the conceivable future. I know that a lot of people are making a lot of money with apps, but that’s just the way that it goes. I like what I’ve got going here, and I’m not going to spend a large sum of money to change that.
I would title this post after the name of the article, but I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea. This post is, really, about The Witcher and that’s the important bit. The Witcher was a great PC RPG meant to hearken back to the “good old days” of PC gaming. The Witcher: Enhanced Edition was a free update for anyone who had bought the original game, making the game even better and working in user feedback. Now The Witcher 2 is meant to incorporate user feedback even more, to make a bigger, better game and give the people what they want.
In this case, the people seem to want an amazing story with nothing but grey morality choices. No good faction and evil faction, no karma system, no imaginary numbers that tell you just how terrible or nice you are. The first game did this pretty well. But it’s the writing that’s really special. They actually have writers writing this stuff, and writing it in the original Polish and in English more or less at the same time rather than slapping together a translation later on. I know big games like Mass Effect and whatnot have dedicated writers, but for these guys to dedicate their limited resources on some damn fine dialogue and plot sequences is great to hear.
I never buy PC games, simply because I find very few I want to play. It’s just not the form of input I grew up with, I guess. But I’m going to buy The Witcher 2 anyway because I want these people to have my money and make good games and listen to their fans and continue to be awesome.
Well, Rogers, you win. Your bandwidth limits have taken away my flash games, but admittedly I don’t really mind. Your bandwidth limits have taken away my torrenting, which is annoying, but I’ll find a way. Just you wait.
But this is the final cruelty. This is the one that hurts.
With bandwidth limits, I can no longer afford to have 12 characters in Dragon Tavern.
Or maybe I could. But they’re already gone. It’ll save me time anyway. I kept my original two, but the extra ten that I’ve been working on since the middle of april (almost five months o.0) had to go. Admittedly, the amount of time it took to use all my daily action points was keeping me from playing the game on a regular basis, but I’d managed to get them all up to level 35, only 20 away from becoming Immortals, which was why I created them in the first place. I wanted to see what all of the different paths had to offer. At the same time. Turns out, all I’d really get is a couple of cool paragraphs, but five months ago I figured, what the hell, it’ll be awesome.
I was a little sad when I started writing this, but the more I think about it, the more this comes back to me wanting to spend my time on things I actually like. No more grinding for hours in the hopes of having fun later. No more practising some dumb minigame just so I can unlock some ultimate weapon or whatever. Just play the damn content and enjoy it, or get it over with. If it’s absolutely horrible, quit and stop wasting my damn time. As Vael put it, if the chase is fun, who cares about the catch? Only I’ve come to realize there are a million chases, and hardly ever is the catch a sufficient reward. Five hours for a thirty second victory scene, and an item that only has value as long as I continue to play the same game I’ve been playing for a week straight? Even spending twenty minutes searching for treasure in the final dungeon seems silly, when you realize that the items you’ll find are no good to you when you take down the final boss. Even if there’s a New Game+ option or something, you probably already have all the good stuff before you get there.
So now I’m going to go play FF X-2 because I have so much fun with its class system and battle system. If something else grabs my fancy I’ll play that, but if not, I may replay FF IX and just enjoy myself.
And I’m not even going to worry about whether I’ve missed a 0.3% completion rate cutscene, because I can just watch the perfect ending on youtube if I miss some dumb conversation you can never access again.
Why the hell would I press X in the middle of a cutscene? Don’t you know that pressing buttons during cutscenes tends to lead to a “skip scene” feature? Screw whoever thought to assign completion percentage to such arbitrary and entirely forgettable stuff.
A harrowing tale of what it’s like to be a Microsoft customer. Strangely well-timed, come to think of it.
Do you like A Game of Thrones yet? I certainly hope so. However, if gigantic fantasy books aren’t your thing, HBO is working on a television series. Please watch it and then you will like A Game of Thrones and then you can come back to these links.
Alternatively if you really like languages you’d also be interested in these. The basic gist is that a guy was hired to create a language for the Dothraki people (which didn’t exist in the books per se) for the TV series. Many people are the kinds of nerds who’d want to learn a fantasy language (or probably another, to supplement their in-depth knowledge of Klingon), and so they have rallied to support this new and exciting language. One guy in particular wants to challenge those people by creating an inhuman language that breaks as many of the natural human language patterns as possible. Amazingly enough, the guy who created the language responded, basically just saying that it was too little, too late and also that humans should speak like humans. It wouldn’t really make sense to create an abnormal human language for normal humans.
Fantasy TV in the service of science (part one - the challenge)
The Dothraki response to a call for science in a created language (part two - the reply)
Life events which can accumulate into an illness.
The strange thing to me is the non-adult scale. By beginning to date, and subsequently breaking up (likely within a few weeks), you’re at 100 points already, thus putting you well on the way to illness.
Likewise, do the points magically disappear upon reaching adulthood? Ah well. Under-researched ideas tend to fall apart upon closer examination.
Let me make this abundantly clear: I want you to read this, eventually, if you have any interest in the gaming industry, or even any entertainment industry.
I don’t care if you don’t have time for it today. Bookmark it. Check it out tomorrow.
I haven’t been saying much lately but I’ll be back. I’m working on finally finishing FF X. It’ll be the third Final Fantasy game I stopped playing 10-15 hours short of its conclusion that I’ve finished in the past couple of weeks, and honestly, I’m kinda proud of myself. I’ll see how far I am in FF X-2, and decide from there whether I want to move to handheld games or finish that. FF IV Advance needs to be finished off, and I found my copy of FF V Advance that was lost in our couch for five years. I might actually finish them before turning 85.
Link dump for now folks. Post coming later. I’ll try not to make this too long, because there’s plenty for you to read here.
The Citizen Kane of Gaming: a debate that has been raging across the internet, though you may not have noticed because you may not spend time around people who care about Citizen Kane. Arguments on the subject have largely died down, and I haven’t read anything so amazing it HAD to be shared (in fact I’ve been avoiding the subject because it is a stupid argument often full of stupid people - METROID PRIME TRILOGY IS CITIZEN KANE OF GAMING, SERIOUSLY) but I’ll share these two with you today because they’re not dumb.
The Disc Is Not Enough: trying to combat used game sales by making a new game worth more than a used one, and how on-disc DLC is a nice bonus, but not the greatest solution.
Size Doesn’t Matter Day: indie devs declare that short games are good too, some even admit that they may be wrong and that it’s possible gamers at large really do think short games are bad and will hate any game that only lasts a few hours no matter how good it is. There’s a lot to read here and maybe your favourite indie dude wrote about it. Most of these posts contain links to every other post on the subject, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find others to read. I’ll link the ones I read, starting with the one that sent me off to read all of these things in the first place. Check out others and let me know if they’re great!
There’s what I read this morning! Now I stop reading for the rest of the day! Goodbye for now!
Apparently his underwear fit like a glove.
That’s pretty much the best thing I have to say about my white water rafting trip today. Literally I went white water rafting today and I’m just like yeah cool that happened. I went last year, and it was the same then.
Get up for 6 am, pick up the other people who are going with us, drive an hour and a half over to where we’re meeting our guides and everyone else going rafting today. Hop on a bus with a guy from Switzerland named Martin, who has an amazing beard. Have a long bus ride to where we’re getting into the river. Sleep on bus, fake it for the camera and get myself a moment of glory in our $55 DVD of the day. I’ll share when I get it.
Our guide, Matthew, was a pretty cool guy from South Africa. For the record, last year I was with a man named Kelly. He was here this year, according to our video, but I didn’t remember his name until it was too late. Anyway, our guide this year. He was the guy in charge of everything. So we left last, because he had to make sure everything was good to go.
Then we had to be FIRST in line, meaning we had to paddle hard all the way up to the front. I forgot how to paddle over the last year, so my biceps were sore when we got there. Then he taught us how to paddle (leaning backwards as you paddle to use your weight) and it was all good.
We went down some rapids, wee, we get wet, yay. It was supposedly 20 degrees (though at 9 am when we started, maybe not) but it was so cloudy you wouldn’t know it. The threat of rain has been very aggressive for the past few days, and it’s going to be bad when it finally starts. Not a very good choice of weekend, I guess. But by the time lunch time came around, my brother and I were freezing because we didn’t have wet suits or magic waterproof clothing like our father. We cultivated a fire, had hot chocolate and warm soup (as well as wraps and some other food stuffs) and just barely started to feel our fingers again and get dry when the call came to leave.
Probably around 12:30, we have a 45 minute bus ride back to the beginning so that we can run a different channel of the river now that the water levels have risen a little. We make a tour of the bus, shouting out our name, where we’re from, and a joke/embarrassing story (can be about anyone on the bus!)/whatever. Many people had nothing. I spoke my name and location loudly, and shared a story about a bus full of awkward people who couldn’t come up with anything funny off the tops of their heads. Some awkward chuckles were had and then we moved on. Eventually people started yelling out jokes, and that’s where that gem comes from.
Early in the afternoon, we begin the hard rapids. The ones where you have to paddle instead of hide in the boat. The ones where one side of the river is a bunch of pointy rocks and you don’t want to go over there. Starts off with one to get us nice and wet (great, now we’re cold again) and then a little bit later we get to The Butcher’s Knife. Inside The Butcher’s Knife is a wave called The Chopping Block. There are three options for proximity to The Chopping Block: far, medium, or close. My dad volunteered us for close. We went straight for it.
The wave “hit [him] like a literal punch to the chest,” and the left side of the boat plus the guy in the front on the right were all pushed off of the raft. I was nearly pushed, from the middle right side, off of the left side. I caught myself on the side of the raft and managed to stay in, leaving myself, our guide, and an incredibly tiny, incredibly frightened woman from our group behind to manage a rapid aptly named The Butcher’s Knife. He handles it like a pro, while I react instantly and rescue people as they appear. My brother pops up first, then my father, then another from our group, then the guy from the front right is rescued by my dad as I rescue the third person. Scared woman, not so much on the reaction times. We managed to keep all of our paddles and recovered quite well. Life went on.
The part where 4/7 passengers (guide included) fall out of our raft is on video, so you can see that in a couple of weeks. The rescue, not so much, because rescues are ugly and not good on film. But I’m proud of myself at least, both for staying in and being useful to the rescue. I paddled until there was no longer water beneath my paddle, and then I was almost dying and then I was rescuing. In the span of a few seconds. Some people might have been terrified, or felt an awesome adrenaline rush, or whatever. Nah, not me. I just liked the rescue part, from a strategic point of view.
We did some more rafting in the afternoon and went back and I didn’t have a beer even though I’d be old enough there, so one was available for me. It was across the border of Quebec, not that most of you will understand that, but the important thing is that I was in another province and the drinking age is 18 there. I drove us home because my dad figured, sweet, I can have some since we have another driver.
I drove us home, we had two bits of difficulty, but we got home safe and sound. White water rafting: completed. I’ve done my duty. The end.
It’s not that I’m a boring person, but that I’m not a physical, adrenaline person. I don’t need something more exciting than rafting to get my blood pumping. It just doesn’t pump that way. I could jump out of an airplane, or go bungee jumping, or go on a crazy hiking trip. I could do all kinds of crazy adventurous things, I’m not afraid of it, because I’ve faced my fears before and I have yet to regret it. These people are mega safe. That’s their job. It would not be an option for you if there were any serious danger. I just wouldn’t enjoy it enough to justify the cost, or even the time. I wish I could go adventuring for a living (as some of the raft guides do, and I’m not kidding) but it’s just not my life. Mother Nature won’t keep me company at night, unlike some of those dudes.
I’d love to do that stuff with a friend though. It’d be fun with someone else, especially if we’re both terrified. Or in the case of week long expeditions, starving and cold and devoured by tiny, tiny predators. Someone to keep me company, right? That’s more like my life.
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So with a move to a place with actual facilities comes the questions about why I don’t take advantage of them. Why not come to the gym with me? Why don’t you go bungee jumping? Why don’t you go ride the public transit around, as if that’s important when I’m not going anywhere? The problem is that I would rather be me, than go out of my way to please other people.
This is something that’s been on my mind recently, as my dad revs his Be Like Me Machine, and even more so the gym thing. My dad used to be tiny like I am. Then he gained a hundred pounds of muscle. Then his metabolism got old and he suddenly had a hundred and fifty pounds of fat instead. I don’t want that. I’m underweight, but I’m fit enough and I work on that in my own way. If I start going to the gym, and try to beef up like he did about ten years ago, I do fear that I’ll end up old and fat. My main issue comes back to preferring a leaner body for myself, and not feeling the need to go out and beef up at all. I don’t need fifty more pounds of muscle on my frame. I’ll do definition, so I look pretty, but I (me, as a person, Matt, Demi, the core of what is me) do not need to have muscles like my father, or even like a friend of mine with a similar build. He’s tall and lanky, but from all the physical labour and sports he’s done over the years, he’s lean and wiry. He doesn’t have bulging muscles, because of his height, but he has the strength. I’d be alright with that, but it’s not me. It’s not who I am. It’s not even something I need to be.
I’ve just come off of an argument with my friend Max about whether or not I’m fit, where he judged me to be unfit because I’m underweight and my ribs stick out. Instead, I should be doing those triangle push-ups and gaining weight/muscle mass enough to cover all (most) of my protruding bones (har har), in his opinion. He’s an adventure guy. He’ll go biking for hours and just love it. Run so long and far that he pukes, and just shiver from excitement. Or dehydration, but don’t tell him the difference. The thing is, that’s not me. That’s who he is. His definition of fit is someone who feels fat if they sit around playing video games all day, and gets so sick after doing that for a while that they NEED physical activity.
That’s not me. I will never, in my entire life, be able to cultivate a feeling like that in the core of my essence. I forget about not dong my crunches (didn’t have time for those today, but I don’t like to do it right before bed either because I have a hard enough time settling in to sleep as it is) far easier than I forget about all of the things I haven’t done yet when it comes to video games/anime/articles to read/whatever. Of course an hour or two each day, or even most days, is a paltry amount to dedicate to physical activity. Seven hours a week or something? There are plenty more in there. But how high is it on the priority scale? Do I sacrifice my workout (or gym time, which could be the same thing) or do I sacrifice whatever else I need the time for?
For me, it’s quite low. Low enough that making a dedicated routine would be pointless as it wouldn’t last. Not because I’m incapable of getting off of my fat ass to do it, because I did it for a long time, every single day, when I wanted to impress a special someone. Eventually I slowed down because I realized I wasn’t even doing it for my benefit, and she wasn’t really looking anymore to begin with. I just end up doing other things that I value and it’s like eh I’ll write a nice tumblr post tonight instead of doing crunches and flicks. Even though the tumblr post takes longer. To illustrate what I mean about the priority thing: I couldn’t convert tumblr time into workout time. I couldn’t dedicate the same amount of time to it. I’d just end up doing other things with most of it.
I spend, oh, half an hour to 45 minutes on the computer in the morning running through a routine of daily browser based games and a few news sites. Nothing super disruptive, and I can do it later in the day obviously. But if I stopped doing that, I doubt I’d convert the time into early morning workouts instead. I value the games for different reasons and I like to know stuff, but I value those on different levels than I value being fit when no one will even see nor will I need to apply the fitness. I can get by a day or two without working out. But how could I possibly miss a day in my daily games! That would be inefficient!
Anyway I hope I made my point. I already knew what my point was. But I wanted to think out loud a little so I can respond better to the inevitable returns to this subject. The basic idea (me trying to be me) was there, but I hadn’t needed it yet so I never really expanded on it.
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Also I just quit Opus Deorum (probably only took a minute per day, but I wasn’t getting anything out of it - just grinding stats) and Freewar (idle grinding a passive skill in a game I don’t care for - simply because I could) but I can’t bear to part with any others. Billy Vs SNAKEMAN, Dragon Tavern, and The Ruins Of are all games I spent money on for a damn good reason. I’m about to spend $50 more on Billy Vs SNAKEMAN to get myself 17 months worth of tiny bonuses. Nearly three bucks a month. Nothing wrong with that, and the guy deserves my money. I love the game and I have a friend who loves the game and we spend twice as much time talking about it as we do playing it, if not more. The Ruins Of is just a cool little thing, and for that the money spent on it is far lower ($10 so far, and probably forever - I doubt the future involves spending on it) but the guy deserves that too. Dragon Tavern is raking in the cash, and it’s also the heaviest time investment, and it’s also where I’ve spent the most money. Jeez. More than a hundred and fifty dollars, for sure, but I have no definite number. It sounds really bad as a lump sum, but at one point it was 2x the credits, and in general I’ve built up bit by bit. I don’t regret it, though. Psychological tricks though they may be, I’m ok with spending that money. It is nothing when you consider all of the money I have held and spent in the last two years-ish of playing it?
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Also my backspace and space bar keys are getting a little squeaky on my laptop already. Space bar, not sure about that one, probably just hitting it badly or something but it’s not like it’s been receiving heavy use. Backspace, though… Well… Just how I write, and this includes instant messaging.
edit: also I included the square brackets thing like a proper journalist because I realized what they mean. It’s when you’re rephrasing someone to put the sentence into proper context. If they say it, you quote “[the wave] was like” instead of using something unspecified, or in the wrong person if they say I or whatever.
Sorry here is the proper link! Tumblr broked on me.
I haven’t felt so much like an angry, rebellious teenager since my parents disapproved of my girlfriend in 9th grade. I want to act on that and rant and insult and fight da powah, but no. I am better than that now.
Instead, I will link to a Cracked article because that is how mature people do immature things. This article, 6 Of Your Favourite Things That Are Secretly Making You Fat, comprises my mother, essentially. Except the caffeine one. Especially the saving money one. But we’re getting to that.
My mother has begun doing her grocery shopping at Costco (BJ’s or Sam’s Club or whatever for you Ah-meh-ree-kan types) because now we live near one. As a result, it takes her three hours and hundreds of dollars to go out and buy some milk and a loaf of bread.
I mean, we had half a loaf of bread left. No milk, but we did have cereal. It’s not like we were going to starve.
And now we’ve acquired so much food, much of it will go bad, or be eaten simply because it WILL go bad, rather than for sustenance. “That chicken’s going to go bad soon, I may as well have another sandwich…” And suddenly it all makes sense.
I’m going to have to take over grocery shopping duties. Hopefully the responsibility doesn’t crush my will to live. We’ll implement a “grocery list” system whereby I buy the things on the list, and everything else is left in the grocery store.
Meanwhile my mother has 16 large plates (sneaky large portions) and 4 small ones, but it’s ok because we have a lot of big plates, right? And hey, are you already full? You didn’t take very much, you know, and there’s plenty left and it might not be very good as leftovers…
Then she watches Big Brother After Dark (in case you want to watch boring people sit around and be bored for your entertainment) all night out of boredom. Complains that the house is a wreck and nobody is helping her keep it clean.
PS: That article is a dirty lie because it says misery makes you burn calories, which is patently not true. Also try not to be overly offended by single, one-off sentences and forget the meaning of everything else that was written.
The point of that long explanation (last time, on my tumblr…) was to lead into my discussion of “worth” or “value” in terms of how free time is spent. As much as I try to do things like “relax” or “have fun,” the efficiency that has ruled my life so far can’t help but extend into my free time. It’s always a to do list of accomplishments, things to finish and then things to start after that. The two contributing factors to this are that the list grows far faster than I can work on it (12, 25, 40, 60, etc. hour games coming out before I’ve finished the last) and I’ve always been able to afford the next shiny game to release. Even then, I’ve looked for ways to make my money go further - efficient to the last - so that I can now download games for every system I own save the PS3. Well, and the Wii. So, theoretically, I have access to infinite video games, infinite books (assuming someone has uploaded them online), infinite amounts of manga, infinite episodes of anime to watch, infinite amounts of data and ideas to mentally digest… Never will I lack for entertainment, surely, but rarely am I truly entertained. The calculation of where to spend my time drains all of the fun from the media I consume voraciously, incessantly.
I try to see the world, and especially all the digital worlds I experience, with a little sense of wonder to keep from getting too jaded. It’s difficult to do that when I’m rushing from one game to the next, almost always picking the game to play based on how guilty I feel over not finishing it yet, and secondarily how much is left to play. When I finished Portal a month or two ago, when it was free for a couple of weeks on Steam, all I could think was “finally, I can say I’ve done it.” Most people will tell you it’s something you “have” to play, and I’d gone a long time without playing it simply out of indifference. I’d already absorbed most of its content through osmosis anyway, it was just a technicality that I hadn’t actually put my hand on the mouse and done it myself. I did it, though, but for me it just wasn’t the amazing, joyous experience I know many others have had with it. It was just one thing crossed off an endless to-do list, another example that I’m eternally catching up on gaming history. I think the fact that I saw two or three hours invested in Portal as practically a waste because there would be nothing new there for me is bad enough, but the fact that I played it and didn’t enjoy doing so says everything about the problem I have with my free time.
Portal is pretty much a sacred lamb of gaming at this point, but perhaps the worst offence I’ve committed as a gamer, in my mind, is to not like multiplayer gaming. Party games, yes. Local co-op with friends, yes. But competition against faceless strangers? Count me out. Not in an RTS, not in an FPS, not in an MMO, not in a flash game, not even in a browser-based game. Yet all of the most hardcore gamers thrive on these kinds of games. Final Fantasy XIII and Dragon Quest IX may be huge, expansive games, but when I finish them, that’s pretty much it. It might take 60 hours, or it might take 100. But StarCraft II, Modern Warfare 2, Team Fortress 2 - funny how they’re all sequels - as well as World of Warcraft and all the other MMOs, they’ll consume countless hours far beyond the sixty or one hundred hour mark. When the vast majority of the medium lives on the crushing - or being crushed by - your opponent, how could I possibly be allowed to simply “not like” multiplayer? It doesn’t help that I see very few people saying the same thing. It seems as though I must be wrong, spending my time finishing Persona 4 or actually playing through Final Fantasy X when I could be shooting people in the face day after day.
Yet this ties into my problem with having too much media available, and the question of what it’s worth to spend my time on something. Perhaps some people will get far more time out of their $60 purchase of StarCraft II or Modern Warfare 2 than I ever could out of the games I buy. Perhaps they only had $60 and had to find a game that wouldn’t just end. It’s hard for me, with my rather large collection of games, to imagine playing a game because I have nothing else to play. But then, would I really want to spend all of that time just to feel as though I accept the largest portion of gaming today? Would it be “worth” my time to be a master of unscoped headshots, or would I just be “wasting” my time when there are so many other things to experience? I wanted to write this as a way to find the answer to that, and yet I still don’t know. It seems almost rude to dismiss something as a “waste,” to say that a form of entertainment is completely invalid because I don’t enjoy it or don’t partake in it. In theory, to spend my time doing the same thing over and over again would be inefficient when I could be working on something shiny and new. In practice, fun is fun, and there’s really nothing wrong about finding fun in a different place.
If I hadn’t just rediscovered some small measure of why I love single player games and why I love playing through the beautifully crafted environments and stories that my $60 unlocked for me, I might still be worried about all of that. But now I’ve got things to do, and I have a stack of games in front of me that I could, if I’m lucky, finish before going back to university. It’ll take some dedication to righting my wrongs - how could I stop playing Persona 4 in the middle of the last dungeon in the entire game?! - but I don’t know when I’ll find the time again. So I’m going to use it properly and remind myself why I go hunting for PS2 games in the bargain bins in the first place. Why, you might ask? They’re games I can’t imagine I’d regret playing, and I want to give my money to anyone who will take it in exchange for them. I want more of these games to exist, and so even if I never even play this instalment, perhaps I’ll play the next. It would be a shame if we ever lost Atlus or Grasshopper Manufacture, or even Insomniac, so I will gladly throw my money at them. And I will gladly throw my time into their churning machines of glorious entertainment.
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On an entirely different level, but loosely related by the main “theme” of this post is the matter of writing, and this tumblr itself. Its value. The time I spend on it. I’m above a hundred posts now, at least a dozen of those long, rambling trains of thought much like this one. I’ve spent hours writing for a few close friends and a handful of their friends. Yet I don’t feel that it’s been wasted time. Perhaps it’s a legacy of my ADHD, but I don’t often sustain trains of thought as long as posts like this would have you believe. Writing makes the foundation solid enough for me to keep building, to keep writing and communicating and thinking instead of running in circles all the time. If I forget where I was going, I just scroll up. If that doesn’t help, either I stop or I forge ahead and let the words take their own course. But the act of sharing all of this, making it public and available for anyone who cares to read it, is a marked improvement in transparency for me. It used to be that I had few close friends, only as many as necessary to stave off loneliness and disappointment, and only they could know what really went on inside my head. Even then, I couldn’t always force myself to express what I wanted to tell them, and plenty of half-formed conversations went forgotten because I wasn’t satisfied that they would be… well, good enough. That by starting them in truth I would end up exposing something wrong or displeasing about myself and sour my few solid relationships.
So to write and share everything about myself is thrilling, terrifying, and satisfying all at the same time. I feel perfectly content saying that this tumblr is all of what I am. That it’s available to all, if they want to read it. I used to hide behind a plethora of personas, and now they’re unified across all of the content I put here. All of the facets of me, converging in one little part of the internet. If I try to put on an act of being “just” a gamer, or “just” a metalhead, or otherwise put the spotlight on any one of those facets - all it takes is this tumblr to shatter that illusion. I like the idea of forcing myself to change for the better. I like the idea of bringing more people into my Precious Little Life. If they don’t deserve to be here, chances are they won’t bother to read any of this, and the point is moot in the end.
I would bring up the matter of writing fiction, but then I do it so rarely that it would be… yes, a waste of time. I’ve only written two letters so far, and I’m supposed to be writing again, but I have yet to start. I haven’t been able to figure out what time in my schedule to dedicate to it. Soon, I’ll start. When I run out of things to write about for my tumblr, I think. But then I won’t have anything to put into the letter, so it may have to wait until the excitement level rises a little here in my new home. But then I already know that’s a worth investment of time, so long as I have something to write about.
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Like most of my posts, this one would be “selfish” if I believed you would all feel compelled to actually read it. Thankfully, I know that you’re a human being and will happily stop reading if you find it too long and boring. Like every other post I’ve written for my own benefit and shared for yours (at least if you want to learn more about me), I’m glad that I’ve written it. It comes as a result of several conversations with vael about multiplayer gaming (something he enjoys a lot), which tended to go in circles as he stated his case and I proceeded to ignore it and say what I really wanted to say. For the benefit of us all, then, I hope that I’ve managed to put that to rest for now. If you’ll excuse me, I have some beautiful ruins to explore.
