Shooters

So in between writing my final papers, and working on homework, I've been slowly putting in the minutes on Resistance 2.

I came to a simple conclusion. The only difference between a first person shooter and a rail shooter isn't much. In a rail shooter you hold on and let it run, where in a FPS you have to do the walking yourself. You're never allowed to look where they don't want you to be, you don't get to take any other path other than the one that they have, and the biggest decision you get to make is which gun you're going to shoot to kill the baddies.

The hallways are fun shapes, and sometimes they even look like buildings or cities, but in the long run in both rail shooters and fps's you walk down until you hit specific points, kill everything, then move on to the next point to get your kill on. There is an attempt to have some story line, but you don't actually tell the story, you're not a part of it, you just have to hit the right trigger points for the cut scenes to happen, and then the game takes control for the story to happen.

I get it, it's mindless, and there's not much you can really think about, and I see the appeal. I know that I'm missing out on a large chunk of the play as well because I avoid online competitive play. Sorry, but I don't want to deal with that.

Now, I will admit that there are some amazing graphics and sky boxes. I mean they are down right impressive at some points, but then you realize that as amazing as intricate as some of those sky boxes are, you'll see a cut scene where a guy's backpack isn't separate from their body, like they're welded together. Awe inspiring backgrounds, but what am I supposed to do with an amazing background when there's not a chance in the world that I'm going to ever actually go to it and see it, or have anything to do with changing it?

Can't wait until I get done with my FPS/rail shooters on my bookshelf. Only a few more to go (Resistance 2, 3, Bioshock 2, 3) and then I'll finally be done looking down a barrel of a gun with the main story line being- there's bad people- kill them.

PS- Much like the action game Devil May Cry and the fighter game Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, because this is out of my wheelhouse of gaming, do not expect me in any way shape or form going for 100% on them. I just want to get them out of the way, be happy that they're on my finished bookshelf, and then never see them ever again. Not a chance in the world that I would put the time and effort into one of these to try to 100% them. Doing the game on the easiest difficulty for story line is enough for me, I don't need to do it on the hardest setting, never save, or get the highest possible rank in online multiplayer to get the 100% trophy. No thank you. I'm here to get the story line, finish the game and walk away. 

Slow Driver

I found out a new pet peeve that annoys me a few days ago while at work, and I forgot to put it up here, but then I remembered while I was working on homework and typing.

As stated before (I think) I type fast when I want to. It's not like I'm breaking world records, but it's fast enough that people know that I'm typing and doing a dang good job at it, instead of just sitting by a keyboard and finding the letters that I'm looking for.

Anyways, yesterday at work, there was the problem of the new guy trying to type up his notes to a lead that he got. It took far too long. Everything about me wanted to steal the keyboard away from his hands and tell him that he wasn't allowed to type anything ever again until he got up to at least 50 words per minute. I mean it was PAINFUL to watch him hunt and peck around the keyboard trying to find the letters that he needed to write the most basic of sentences.

Just something that I remember, now back to homework.

Persona 4

The Persona series is a lengthy series to play through. We're talking Disgaea long.

It's a LOOOONG game, and I just don't have the time to play it, and with #5 comming out sometime around the time I should be putting a dent in my bookshelf list of games, I don't want to play #4 just to have #5 come out and have to play through all of that.

With that in mind, I've finally found something to catch me up to par, while bored at work, and to waste the next few days while staying awake making phone calls to random companies.

To be perfectly clear on how lengthy this game is, even on a Let's Play, it's 151 episodes long, with the average being 20 minutes or so long. Yeah, it's a big game, can't wait for #5 to come out!

Best Moment Ever

So, after a long-ish game session of D&D with friends online actually happening over the weekend, Alicia asked me how things went, "How did it go? Kill the dragon? Save the princess? Do all of that stuff?"

"Actually the zombie apocolypse happened and we're stuck in a city surrounded by mutant zombies."

"Wait, did you write that? That's different."

"Yeah, I made it."

"Why?"

I paused for a minute to try to explain in a logical way why I enjoy mapping, story line creation, world construction, and all things that are DM-ing. The best answer I had was, "Because it's fun." She just sort of nodded her head like that was enough information and it was a totally okay reason to do something so nerdy. I don't know which made me happier, that Alicia didn't poke any fun at it, or that it was a good enough answer for her.

Typing

When I have nothing to think about and I can write as much or as little as I want, I crank out the pages and it's shocking to me to see just how much work I can get done in an hour.

And then comes the time that I have like tonight where I have hours upon hours to get work done and really put in some damage to my thesis, and I spend most of my time looking at time wasting stuff online. However I would just like to remind you all of this amazing song.

Time To See If I Can Work This

Let's see if I can get this to work for Brenton.

B-Day

I love birthdays on facebook, it's the one time a year that I hear from people that I could care less about. Thank you random stranger that I haven't talked to in over 10 years, thank you for wishing me a happy birthday.

Good news though, Addison gets to steal all of the spotlight. Seriously, this is a good thing. Focus on the cute one that isn't jaded about birthdays. She'll laugh when you tell her happy birthday, I'll just look at you and go "seriously?"

Time To Do Some Work

Well, now that was fun.

Did it!

100% on yet another big game. You can 100% your pansy little games, but things like this are just fun to walk around and say that you did everything ever in it. The crazy part is that I could easily go back and put in a few hours trying to do a few useless things and grinding out even more levels, but I won't because it's late, I have to work on that paper, and I can finally move on to a different game! Happy days!

100

Yay!

100th post!

Yup, that's how bored I've gotten at work, I've managed to do 100 posts already. Sort of sad, but sort of amazing at the same time. 

Blank Stare

If you ever catch me giving you the blank stare

It means that you have bored me so much, that I'm doing something else in my mind instead of having to deal with you. I'm thinking about ANYTHING other than what it is that you're making me go through, and it's better than you.

Now, on first guess you're going to say that I'm nerding out and dealing with something fun, like D&D or games of some sort. Now this is true, sometimes, but not neccisarily the rule of thumb. If I give you this blank stare and then I start looking happy like I just solved a math problem in my head that's been bugging me for a long time, then yes, I'm most likely thinking about something like this.

For example, today in the flavor of boring that was hitting me I was trying to remember trigonometry so I could solve the question that if a ramp was sloped down at only one degree or even less than one degree for an entire mile, assuming that we're not taking into account the curvature of the world, how far down that would go. This mean that I started to draw a right triangle in my head with the hypontonuse being one mile, and then the angle being 1 degree and then working out what I would need to do to that to solve for the opposite and not the adjacent.

I can't remember exactly why I was thinking this, it might have had something to do with the sewer system in the D&D game and I wanted to make them run at a slight angle down to drain water, but I didn't want the sewage to get too out of hand so I was trying to figure out what the rise over run would be if the slope was only at a 1 degree slope.

The math for anyone wondering turned out to be


tan (1) = 1 mile (5280 feet) / opposite
1.557 = 5280 feet / opposite
opposite (1.557) = 5280 feet
opposite = 5280 / 1.557
opposite = 3,391.13 feet.

So at a slope of only one degree, a mile length of sewage pipe would drop roughly 3,391 feet which is almost two thirds of a mile drop (rounding up by a lot, it's actually 60% of a mile, but whatever). Needless to say, sewage pipes are going to now have a much smaller slope in D&D now. Yes, I'm a nerd, and yes I use trigonometry to answer basic questions about city planning in a fictional setting, and most importantly, yes finding the solution to that does make me smile just a bit.

Back to topic.

Blank stares, and me.

It's going to happen. And realize that when it does, I'm just trying to make myself not yell at you for things being so boring. Instead of yelling, I just remove myself from the situation. Now because I know that most situations don't work that great with me just walking out of the room during the middle of whatever is going on, I remove myself mentally. I'd much rather be vacationing in the sewage system of some not yet named city and doing city planing within it, than do what I'm stuck with you doing, so I blank stare. The best part about it, is that blank stares are where I get my best work done. It's in those boring moments that I come up with some of the best and most creative ideas. The more boring life is, the better I get at creativity, so thank you. Thank you for contributing to the fine art, and not so fine art, that comes out of my mind when I blank stare you.


EDIT- I just looked at my math and it seemed wrong, when it's not 3:30 in the morning, I'll give it a second look and work it out on pen and paper, I think I got my ratios wrong and did the trig wrong. Don't tell me the answer! I'll figure it out when I get bored at work!

Edit #2-
So I've come back to this problem, and the question is if we're focusing on 1 mile of distance above ground, (which would mean that we know the adjacent length, looking for opposite) or if we're talking about 1 mile of distance on the ramp (which would mean that we know the hypot length and looking for opposite).

With that in mind, we have two potential problems, both which deserve to be solved.

Problem #1- We know adjacent length, and are looking to solve for opposite.

This is where we would use tan(x) = opposite/ adjacent

You'll notice here that I did the math wrong the first time I did this and forgot the ratio of tangent functions. In the first post I had the ratio of tangents being adjacent/opposite, but now that I'm awake I can see the mistake and say that tan = opp/adj as we can remember from the little phrase, "SOHCAHTOA" so-ca-toe-ah.


The other problem that I ran into was that my calculations were in radians instead of degrees. This makes numbers look a LOT bigger, and considering that I'm starting off with one DEGREE I should be smart and make my calculator work in degrees.

With those changes done we get
tan(1) = opposite/ 5280 feet
5280*tan(1)= opp
92.16274 feet = opposite.

This means that assuming that the above ground distance of one mile, the sewage pipe at 1 degree only drops 92.16274 feet. This makes MUCH more sense than what I said before, and sewage pipes are resting a bit easier than the botched math that I was running before.

Problem #2, you have a mile of the pipe and want to know how far you drop in that mile (this should be less than problem #1 by knowing simple geometry, but we'll use trig to show you just how much of a difference.

For this one we're going to be using-
sin(1) = opposite/hypot
sin (1) = opp/ 5280 feet
5280* sin (1) = opp
92.1487 feet = opp

THERE WE GO! Finally, when I'm awake and know what I'm doing, I don't make as many mathematical mistakes.

Coincidence?

I find it almost a coincidence that things line up like this.

For the second or third semester in a row now, I'm just about finished with a game (Ni No Kuni, I have 5 more familiars to go and only item collection to finish up alchemy after that) and at the same time papers are starting to become a reality. I'm faced with the very grown up decision of either starting a new game, or working on homework and being a big kid.

Traditionally I've made the grown up decision and gone with papers over characters. It's for the greater good! It's just funny that they're lining up around the same time over and over again. let's just hope that the game ends soon so I can put even more effort into the papers.

Family

I know that it can be diferent when my family is my family, but as of right now, I was reminded quite clearly just how much family, in my mind is translated into annoyances and wanting to rip my hair out.

I'm not mechanically minded. I don't like working on a car, I know for the most part what to do with a car, but I'm in no way going to be the one under the hood taking everything apart and fixing it. It's just not what I do. I'd much rather deal with mario karts than I would with my car.

Now, with this in mind, my car has been acting up a little bit in the mornings. What does this mean? It means that when it's REALLY cold outside, and that no one wants to get up to do anything, my car doesn't want to do it either. I took this to mean that mechanically nothing was wrong. Mechanically speaking I was expecting maybe a starting motor to be a little old, but it's an old car, it's allowed to take things slow in the mornings.

My dad upon hearing this translated it to mean that I needed a new battery.

This lead then to the awkward assumption that I had tools.

HAHAHAHAHAHA
Funny. The chances of me having tools to work with for car repair is about as low as ever. What's even better is that the tools that we do have in the house. . . . are Alicia's. As stated in the V-Day shopping post, I don't do tools, but she does.

Step one- we had to buy tools.
This went into trying to go to the auto store and then looking at just about everything that was there to find just the right thing. Finding the right thing, and then realizing that the right thing is expensive and then trying to find the right thing at a much better cost if it was just a hair cheaper.

We then had to take out the battery. (Which at this point I'm still not thinking is the problem) With the battery out, another trip to the auto store! WOO!

We get to the auto store, get told that the battery is doing just fine and nothing is wrong with it, and then go back home to put the battery back into the car, and just go "Well. . . that was a royal waste of time."

Yeah. . . it's been one of those weekends, and it's only going to get worse. 

The More You Know

Now, I don't claim that I know everything. In fact, there's far too much that I don't know a single thing about. However, there are some things that I can definitively say that I know quite a bit about. In Swedish, I could very easily say that I "kan" some subjects.

It does not make sense to me when people try to play the 'who knows more' game. No one can or should play that game because everyone knows something different. No one has studied everything and knows everything about the world. No one has a perfect knowledge.

The thing that frustrates me the most is when someone picks at one particular thing and says that if you do not know that one thing, you know less than them, and they're your mental superior. Be warned about this, if you start the conversation with trying to prove just how much you know about topic X, I'll most likely agree with you. If you then try to show how much smarter you are than me about topic X, that's when it gets personal. You started it. You were the one that started the muscle flexing contest. You were the one that started to insult my education. You were the one calling me stupid. Don't be surprised when I try to defend myself. When push comes to shove, don't act offended after focusing how much you're an expert on X that I try to prove just how uneducated you are about topic Y. Remember, you started it.

There's never a winner, no one can ever say that they know everything, but if you start the peeing contest, know what you're starting and be prepared to face the music. 

As a kind reminder, I've spent the past 20+ years trying to become as smart as I could. There were some years that were better than others, and some classes that were entire failures, but as a general rule of thumb, I've done some serious work on trying to learn as much as I could about everything I could, and when I try, I get above average scores. It's the one thing that I'm proud about and also sensitive about. If you ever want to get me fired up and see my bad side in a split second, tell me how stupid and uneducated you think I am. I might be wrong, I might know less than you in every single subject, but there's no way that I'm going to sit by and let you insult me and 20 years of studying and work without saying a single word.

Weird Thought

While putting Alicia to sleep I was letting my brain wander (a dangerous thing to do but I allow it some free time every now and again) and I stumbled into a gem that's been in there a while that I almost forgot about.

I'm a mormon.
We believe that if you do things right, and the infinite time period of eternity is applied, we have the potential to become dieties. It's a pretty heavy topic, a lot of people think it's weird, but the logic is sound. God made us. We're his kids. We have the same potential as our Dad. He'll always be God, but we have potential to be gods like him, but just like in mortality we have to learn things one step at a time. You can't learn to become like your physical father all in one day, and the same thing applies to our Father that stretched from all eternity to all eternity, who is all knowing, all seeing, and all of those other amazing things that are idealized by the term "God".

Now, the thought is this- there are a lot of things out there that you can't learn from reading. No matter how much you try, sooner or later you've got to just put your neck out on the line and try it yourself. Even 'book smart' things like physics, math, and chemistry, sooner or later you've got to pick up your pencil and start crunching numbers or running experiments in the lab to learn it. You can teach a person that Potasium has volatile reactions with water, but until they see what good ol' K can do in a run in with a bowl of water, they don't understand.

With this in mind, there are certain things that I won't learn in mortality that I'm oddly looking forward to learning, and a lot of them are really physical activities. I've got a kid, I'm finishing up my masters, I've hit the point where I'm too old to learn some things for the sake of other people, but when the eternities hit, I've got a few really odd ones that I'm looking forward to.

Boxing-

Snowboarding-

 Rock Climbing-

And even the crazy sport of skeleton makes the list-

Even not so life threatening ones that I want to learn, but logic tells me that I'm most likely never going to ever need to learn them any time in the next few decades, like welding-

 I don't know, just something bouncing around in my head. If He knows everything, and has experienced everything, that means that He's got a pretty wild list of hobbies. Not to mention that whole supreme creator of the universe power over everything and everyone that has ever was or ever will be. You know, those small things.

Post Game!

I was talking to a person at work and I told them that after only about 40 hours of gameplay I finally finished Ni No Kuni, but I was no where near beating it. This lead to some obvious confusion, and so I need to clarify for everyone out there.

Finishing a game = the story is finished. You can walk away from the game at this point if you're not interested in it, or if you're a filthy casual.

Then there's the invention of post game content and the phrase beating a game comes into play.

Beating a game = you did everything. You get the stuffs, save the princess, kill the monsters in the arena, get all the Easter eggs, level up until it hurts, and generally make it so that if there is ever a conversation about the game ever you can say, "yeah, I did that." This, in RPG's, is REALLY common. There is your normal game, and then there's your post game, and then if you're really lucky there's New Game Plus (NG+) that also has post game in it as well.

This is part of the reasons that I enjoy RPG's so much. That you have your normal story that takes as long as other games, if not longer, and then you have EVERYTHING else that you can do. Just look at games like Skyrim. You can play the story line finish the game, and then there is the billions of options that you can do besides that. If your game has a golden saucer, a casino, a monster arena, mini-games, collectables that do nothing besides being collectable, or monsters that you can capture- you've found yourself a game that has post game content. Once you finish the game you beat everything at the golden saucer, win all of the monies at the casino, kill everything at the monster arena, set all of the high scores for the mini-games, collect all of the collectables, and make sure that you have at least one of every monster in existence.

Finishing the game versus beating the game is the difference between beating the elite four and your rival, and collecting all 151 of your best friends.

Finishing the game versus beating the game is the difference between killing Sepheroth and getting a golden chocobo, knights of the round, and killing all of the weapons.

Finishing the game versus beating the game is the difference between beating Lavos and face-rolling Lavos with your ultimate weapon. 

Finishing the game versus beating the game is the difference between finishing the Wu and Wei story lines, and then maxing your bond with every officer in conquest mode.

I finished Ni No Kuni. I have not yet beaten it. 

V-Day

Facebook friends and followees didn't disapoint with V-Day.Finally they stepped up their game and gave me some new content that was just amazing.

A+ to Gammer for doing this one. I feel like he cuts it short, but it's pretty amazing even with what he does.

https://soundcloud.com/djgammer/gammer-x-marvin-gaye-lets-get

Yup, he did that.

Almost Forgot

With all of the fun of the previous post, time to move onto something that I did last night, finished the story line for Ni No Kuni!

Oh the feels that the game makes you go through. Great game, great story, great sound track. I liked it. Honestly, a game that I will be recommending for people that like RPGs for a long time to come. There's not a perfect Freudian analysis of it, but if you stretch a few points you can make it work. Now, all I have to do is do the post game work, and then move on to the next game that I won't be trying to 100%.

That's right, my next two games will not be getting the 100% treatment, mainly because they're FPSs and I don't like them. I'm looking at you Resistance 2 & 3.

This is what I get for buying cheap box set games. I decided to give the first a shot, and then realized that I wasn't a super fan, and then had two more games that I needed to play through.

Curse you my need to finish story lines and wanting to know what the story is behind games!

E=mc^2

Let's do a little space time rewind.

Gwen's undergraduate graduation. I went to it, with my parents.
Gwen's masters graduation. I went to it, with my parents.
Big Adam's PhD graduation. I didn't go to, but my parents did.
Katie's undergraduate graduation. I went to it, with my parents.
Katie's masters graduation. I went to it, with my parents.
Scott's masters graduation. I didn't go to, but my parents did.
Alicia's graduation. They made it to if my memory serves me right. 

Even GRANDKIDS managed to get the grandparents out of their house for their accomplishments

Just talked to my dad, they're not making it to the end of my entire education, my masters graduation.

There is a metric ton of gif's from the internets that I want to use about this, but most of them involve heavy usage of four letter words, middle fingers, and lots of exclamation points.

I'll just stick to that, for now. 

I honestly don't know what to do with this one. I wish yelling and screaming was a valid, adult, mature option.

Screw you. Seriously, and in all honesty- mom and dad, screw you. You'd think I'd learn after 28 years of having to deal with not being Gwen or Katie that I'd get a reaction like this, but I'm beyond done. Screw you.

Okay, I'm not going to take the high road. At least not right now-

I honestly feel a bit better now.
*hits repeat on the youtube video forty more times*

Google Translate

We all know the trick with the beatboxing google translate, but then there's this one. . .

http://translate.google.com/#en/ja/%C2%A3%C2%A3%C2%A3...%24%24%24...555...%24%24%24...%24%24%24...

I NEVER KNEW!

In case you've never used the beatboxing google translate there's this one-

http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=TT#en/de/pv%20zk%20pv%20pv%20zk%20pv%20zk%20kz%20zk%20pv%20pv%20pv%20zk%20pv%20zk%20zk%20pzk%20pzk%20pvzkpkzvpvzk%20kkkkkk%20bsch

Fun things you can do with google translate.

Clean Up!

I saw this on my facebook and decided it was time to clean up the idiots from my list.

She then went off about how parents should never sleep train a child. Note this is the same girl who refuses to vaccinate her child. Are you kidding me? Seriously? I'm tired of logging on to see how friends/family are doing and getting stupid things like this instead, so I cleaned up my list.

I got rid of people that I could care less about and it felt great.

FF WTF

FF 13-3 Lightning Returns is out today in English, and it's one of those that when it finally goes on sale, I'm buying. However, I don't remember the story line for 1 or 2, so I was thinking about replaying it before I play 3. The problem with this is that each of those games are full length grind fests. Best case scenario they're 70+ hours each.

Then I ran into this video-
http://www.twitch.tv/beecreative/b/502409491

It's a guy watching ONLY the story and cut scenes. Let me be crystal clear, the guy is only watching the story, not playing a single second of it. All of the things that you can skip, he's watching to re-cap the game. For ONE game, the timer is about eight hours. Eight full hours of cut scenes.

Yay for having something to watch at work today!

What Will Get Me Through

Found something tonight that will get me through work tomorrow, and also help me type faster (seriously got some good work done tonight thanks to some DJ Gammer).

As unsure as I am about the structure of this thing, I put a good dent into the story tonight, they're starting to question what's real, things are starting to evolve I just need to get them to start to see the bad soon, and we'll be golden. From there it's just resolution. . . . sort of.

Interesting

This week for my thesis class we had to research and try to help things clarify the structure of what we were writing.

Just like in building, the structure to stories just tells you the bare bones of what is going on. There are a few generic, generally accepted views on structures and which ones you should use for an accessible story

and at the end of the day you can look at books and pretty well knock their structure down to a few things. We were supposed to look at the structure of our own stories, and see what other stories look similar to ours and figure out how they did it, so we could learn from them. It's the idea of if you're going to build your own sky scraper, look at the building next door that is already finished to get some tips.

In theory, this is a great idea. If you see someone writing a third person POV with an omniscient narrator targeted to the same audience as you, in a similar genre, you can pick up quite a bit about pacing, flow, and structure on how you should work your own piece. It's tricky to understand where your structure is for the first time, and so it's always a nice idea to look at some finished products and reverse engineer that down to something you can use. Great idea, until you run into my bat-shit crazy structure.

Apparently, from what I could research and find out on my own, and even with the research help of students in the class when I said I couldn't find anything (a weird thing to ever say when talking about something as broad as the subject as telling a story)- no one has ever written with this structure before.

There are structures SIMILAR to it

that have some structural similarities to what I've signed myself up for, but are missing one part or another of my flavor of insanity.

Now there's good news and bad news when dealing with this information.

The good part about this is that it's new. No one has ever been crazy/stupid enough to try something like this and make it work. It's one of those things that I can easily say that I came up with it, and it was my idea. I got inspiration from other people, but even down to the basic structure and framing of my story, was all me. This is a great thing if the story actually works. If the story makes sense and you can come out at the end knowing what I was trying to tell you, that's great! All the better if it sells more than 50 copies (I think I know enough people to get 50 copies sold just out of pure pity). It's a powerful thing to be able to walk into a creative setting and say that you've added your own creative twist on something that has existed for centuries, and it's not just a rehash of the same structure that's been around for a long time. I'm not just building another 3 bedroom two bath house here.




Bad idea? It potentially has never been done, or no one is using this structure because it's so difficult to write and so difficult for the audience to understand. It very well could be that the 20 people that I've talked to who are in love with books and words just can't think of any good examples about this because it doesn't exist because of the crazy structure. The reason that we don't have houses where the structure is made out of paper is because the structural integrity of paper isn't a smart move and doesn't work. It could very easily be that I get done with this entire process, look back at my structure and say, 'yup, there's your problem'.

It's risky. On one end I'm making something that isn't just another novel that has the same chapter and narrative structure as everything else out there, but at the other end of that balance I'm making something that has never been proven to work, and could easily not work just because I'm trying something that has never been proven to work. It's a weird balance, I'm still trying to come to terms with it after this week of studying.

It has begun

I'm up to 5 confirmed players for D&D, and it just so happens that with my HoN/D&D hybrid where I'm slowly leaking in HoN characters, that there just happens to be 5 people on a team in HoN

Coincidence!?!?!?

I think not!

Either way, with school wanting to make me blow out my brains, life making me want to punt people through windows, work trying to go 100 different ways at once, and then a second work starting to pick up like it's a real job and not just once a week for an hour, I'm looking forward to D&D.

It's something extra that I have to worry about, and it's something that is honestly time consuming, and super nerdy and has nothing to do with anything on my resume or what I want to be when I grow up, but I am looking forward to it, and its going to be a relaxing hour or three playing it.

It's sort of funny though, because the list of people that are invited and know about the game is the largest spread of people that I've ever worked with. Normally I invite a max of five or six people. I don't think I've ever DM-ed for more than six people ever. If everyone shows up that is invited, we're looking at a group of 18 people.

18!

That's insane!

I would have no clue what to do with a group of 18 players. Can you even imagine what the battles would look like?

33 MONTHS!?

This was posted on IMGUR with the title- "It took me 33 months, but I finally managed to achieve something I thought was impossible."

Seriously buddy?

33 months!?

Give me that pen and a spiral notebook worth of empty pages and I could empty that thing for you in a month. What in the world were you NOT doing for 33 months? I'm not impressed that he emptied it, I'm more worried that it took 33 whole months to do it.

As a person who takes pens, and empties them without thinking. In fact, when I was exclusively writing in pen I would buy a bulk box of pens when I would go shopping because I knew that I would use them up like candy, I really have to wonder what in the world was he writing?

Seriously, these pens with the grippy thing near the tip are still one of my favorite and most comfortable pens that I've ever written with, and I've used up a whole bunch of them. If you ever want to get me an expensive pen, don't. I'll use up the ink, and then get angry that I have an empty pen and don't know how to get more ink. Just get me a 20 pack of these and I'll be happy. . . . for a year.

Home Depot

So I live in a really weird world and family situation.

I was shopping at the Home Depot, and I sent Alicia a cute picture of Addison, because you know, Addison is cute.

Her response was- What in the world are you doing at Home Depot?

Now, truth be told, in the most atypical, unromantic way this is going to sound, it's actually not, but I was shopping for her. More specifically I was getting her exactly what she asked for, for the evil holiday formally known as Valentines Day. She was super amazing and told me exactly what she wanted for the day, to cut out any confusion about what I was going to get her, so that I didn't get the wrong thing, or mess the entire day up. (I'm 99% sure that I'm still going to mess it up somehow unwillingly, but I'm not quite sure yet. I just have to wait 7 more days and then I'll figure it out)

Now, me trying to be nice and not wanting to ruin what little suprsise left there is for her gift gave her a quick, blow off answer, with a prayer that she wouldn't push the topic any further than it needed to be.

She came home, and said something along the lines of, "Seriously, why in the world were you at Home Depot?" So I told her I was shopping for her.

Let's be perfectly clear on how atypical this relationship I'm in is.

I go shopping at Home Depot.
She knows that I'm at Home Depot, and wonders why in the world I'm at that typically masculine store.
I have to tell her that the reason that I'm shopping at the home fixer, masculine role filling, macho store of macho, is because I'm getting a gift for her and that solves all of the problems.

Me shopping at Home Depot for myself = weird, questionable, and not something likely to ever happen without needing a serious explanation.
Me shopping at Home Depot for my wife = romantic.

Thanks

It's not that hard!

After someone does something for you, especially if they're doing something entirely for you, just say thanks. It doesn't have to be elaborate, it doesn't have to be grand, but just a pleasant, "thanks" goes a long way.

The difference between being a generally nice person, and a person that I want to throw out of a window, is a simple thanks after I do something for you.

$15 Bin

I'm a sucker for the deal bin at stores.

PS3 games don't really get a "bin" like the one above, but they do get a shelf of games that they're trying to sell at super low prices. This makes games that are originally 60-70 dollars, after a few months of living on the shelves, much lower. That means that games that I'd typically walk by and never buy because I was only slightly interested in them, suddenly become worth the buy.

Straight race games like Gran Turismo or Need for Speed become worth the buy.
Stealth games like Hitman become interesting enough to give it a look.
Even games that only have a small little interest in my mind like XCOM, Ratchet and Clank, Catherine, and Dead Space 3, become worth it when I'm saving $50 a game.
It sure doesn't help my bookshelf, and my list is only getting longer and longer, but it's hard to walk by and disregard a game that I'm sort of interested in when it's on clearance.

Holy Cow! I have grey hairs!

So, I might be feeling a bit better. It's past 10:00 and I don't feel like I'm going to pass out, so I decided to spend some time on here writing a small little thing that I realized last week, but was too busy coughing up my lung to write about.

I don't know if I put it as self-actualization or self-realization, but somewhere in all of the mess that is my life, last week I realized a few things about me.

First- I've got a good chunk of grey hairs coming in. . . and they don't look half bad.

Somewhere in the mess of me coughing up snot balls that were really quite revolting in size, color, and taste, I noticed that my hair is starting to go grey, and it's actually sort of cool. I don't know what it is about it, but I sort of like it. It was a little weird to think that I was rocking enough grey hair that I could really notice, but at the same time I was rocking grey hair, I'm okay with that. We all know that my genetics are going to make me have a white head of hair by the time my body matches my soul (seriously, I'm a 90 year old man on the inside some days), so I'm glad that my hair's getting a head start.

Next- I'm freaking awesome.

Maybe it was just the drugs talking but right now I've got this going on-
- Part time job at ROI
- Part time job tutoring at New Haven
- Part time stay at home dad
- Volunteer at the library every week
- Teach priesthood lessons at church once a month
- Cook the majority of the meals
- Do the majority of the cleaning (dishes, laundry, general, and cat)
- I'm taking THREE masters level courses and passing all of them with a B+ or higher right now.
- I'm writing my masters thesis. MY MASTERS THESIS! You know, that capstone to my entire educational career? The pinicale of my ENTIRE education since kindergarten? I'm doing that!
- I still manage time to spend brushing Alicia's hair and paying attention to her. Last night I figured out I knew how to do a French braid! Suck on that Pintrest moms!

The best part about it? I'm doing it all!

All of those years learning how to do this-  (slight exaggeration)

leads to me totally and entirely rocking out at life right now. For a while there I was feeling down and depressed, but somewhere this week I snapped out of it. I'm kicking butts and taking names. I'm doing great in grad school, great at work (both of them), and still have time to get better. 

Sorry to toot my own horn for a post, but if you can't brag about yourself on your semi-secret blog that you haven't told anyone about, but they may or may not know about, where can you brag about yourself?

The only thing that I was thinking about today at church was that I'm not as spiritually strong as I used to be. It's one of those that I'm getting pretty awesome at everything else, but church wise it's starting to drop pretty low. I know that I can make time to get better at it, work at ROI is a brain waste so I could easily read conference talks or the scriptures there, I'll just have to put it in rotation with working on masters stuff. The only thing that I worry about with that is wondering if it's worth it.

Hear me out.

Every time that I dump time and energy into becoming spiritually stronger, really having the Holy Ghost with me 24/7, making my life really line up with everything, doing all the stuff, what comes from it? Little to nothing. I bust my butt, and the most that I've ever seen from it is slammed doors, offended people around me, and getting treated like I'm a freak, and honestly, feeling like one too. I KNOW that it's worth it, but at the same point I don't see it being worth it. I put in the time, the effort, (which is honestly, comparing it to this silly masters program not that much so I shouldn't even complain) to read, say my prayers, try to keep the spirit with me daily, serve others, use spiritual gifts as often as possible, yadda yadda yadda, and what happens? I find myself asking for more patience, and maybe a little bit of a break because Upper Management likes to pile it on when They see that I'm willing to help out. Oh, you look like you're willing to talk to Us? Here's your to-do list. Enjoy the social awkwardness of trying to help people you don't even know!

Then there's always the downside of being spiritually awesome, doing amazing things, and people's free will getting into the way. As much as I know it's a bad option and not the one that I sided for for all eternity for obvious reasons, some days I really REALLY like Satan's plan. He might be oppressive and sort of a jerk, but the man wanted to make sure no one said no and that everyone got saved. It's not a fun thing to look back at my score card and see little to no sucsess. I guess you could say with some of the people on the card I could put mild to moderate influence, but it'd be stretching it. It's frustrating for me to see people that used to be my spiritual rock, that lifted me up and I try to pretend that I helped them out doing things like this-

He's not doing anything "bad", he's just not being as awesome as I know he can be. It comes down to this- any person that I have put personal effort and time in trying to follow what Upper Management wants me to do has resulted in them either going AWOL from my life, or staying in my life and going slightly to entirely AWOL from the church. I just don't see it's worth it. I know that officially it's worth it because the time span for spirituality is a billion million trillion times longer than what I can see, but some days I just want some short term 'hey-look-I-did-something-good-and-it-stayed-good' action.

Side note- Zach, if for some reason you back track that picture and you end up here, do your thing man. I know that you've got some stuff on your plate you've got to sort out. Do you. Honestly, all things considering, I'm a bit jealous. The offer always stands though, you need me for anything, anywhere, anytime, you know that you've got me. I owe you big, and nothing you can do since you've helped me out can make me forget you helping.

I'm just rambling now.
I really should go back and re-read my mission journals. I think it would be interesting to see how crazy stupid naive I was. Seriously, blind faith is sometimes way more powerful than knowing what you're getting yourself into. Maybe that could be my way of getting back on the spiritual train, have old me try to motivate now me. It's worth a shot, and also probably worth a really REALLY good laugh sometimes. We'll see.

I don't get it

As an introvert who still likes being by himself, and literally reaching out to touch someone is sort of a big deal, I'd just like to say that if I do reach out and try to physically touch you, please don't make your first reaction be-

Because that makes me instantly pull back into my shell where it's comfy.