Choicless Choices - The Games I've Played

I'm going to skip forward a few games and just go with the games that I beat from here on out. You heard enough about everything from Skyrim to FFX while I was playing through them on here without them being part of a "The Games I've Played" so I'm just going to start back up with this one and then write a new one any time that I finish off a game.

This game has been on my bookshelf for a long while. It was one of the first games that I saw on the shelf when I first got my PS3, and a year or so later I finally bought it because I wanted to play it, but it's been sitting on my shelf ever since.


For all of the hype that surrounds this game, and even with the backing of the big game companies EA and BioWare, I wasn't impressed.

It sounds interesting that you can have multiple story lines, and you can start off in different places, but no matter what you say to the NPC's no matter who you make fun of 99.99999% of the conversation trees don't matter. Near the very end of the entire story line it starts to matter a bit about what you decide to do and who you let stay with you and who you'd rather see dead, but even that doesn't really quite change the story line.

Then came the ANNOYING skill interface and team AI. Just like any good RPG, you get skills, abilities, spells, and tallents, and what's even better is that your entire group gets a good long list of them with you. But, the catch is that you only have hotkeys for SIX (that's right) six of them for any character.

To explain how annoying this is, let's take my mage character Adrillf (shocker I know that Adrillf would do that). He'd start off any fight ever with a spell that infected a monster and slowly eat away their HP and then make them explode in a gooey mess infecting and damaging anything around them when they died. After that spell, there were a few others that I'd throw out, and low and behold, by the time that I got done casting everything I had hotkeyed, half of them were on cool down and I was forced to keep at least two hotkeys on the lowest ability levels that I could find so that I wouldn't have to go through the annoying radial menu to pause the game and manually force my character to cast a spell.

And then came the AI companions.

Remember that annoying gambit system in FFXI? Or was it XII? And remember how long it took to figure out how to get people to use skills when and how you wanted without derping around and not using the super-awesome-kill-everything spell they just learned? Yeah, it's like that, but more annoying. I finally gave up after a while, set the difficulty to casual because I was too annoyed trying to micro manage my companions with that.

I am sure that had I actually known what in the world I was doing, or if the AI had any basic programing sense at all, like if a character dies maybe the healer should try to rez them, my playthrough would be significantly less frustrating and more fun to play. I didn't know how bad it was until I restarted the game to clean up some trophies (one trophy for each of the different story introductions) and I played a rogue character that dual wielded and I was seriously shocked at the numbers of damage it produced at low level, and realized that the rogue I had who was dual weilding in my main game with Adrillf was doing almost NONE of what he could, but at least he was auto attacking and that was the most I could really ask for.

Side note- the relationship part of this is weird. Like, really awkward and weird. It doesn't fit into the story in any way, and it's just weird. Any time I would accidentally start talking to one of the team mates and they would get all relationshipy I'd just start spamming skip so I wouldn't have to deal with it because it was more comedy than it was romance.

It's an interesting game, but after a while you quickly start to see the railroads in the sandbox. You think that you have freedom and you can act whatever way you want, but in the long run it doesn't matter. You can pick just about whichever characters you want to be in your party, and it'll be okay; you can pick any side of any conflict, and you'll get the same results; and even if you really, really screw up your stat assignments, you can still kill the final boss without ever actually hitting him yourself with any gear that you brought to the final battle.


That's right! The final battle is entirely possible to win with no armor, maybe a steel dagger, and your entire team dead except for one character who will ocasionally chug down some health pots. It helps if you have a bit of armor and some fire resistance, but if you don't you'll just have to chug more pots. All you do is run away from the big dragon (spoiler, Dragon Age's final boss is a dragon) find a ballista, point it in the general direction of the dragon, and start hitting X. You'll notice that the ballista reloads at about the same speed as the dragon's flinch animation, meaning that you can flinch lock (yay for a RO term) the final boss with a siege weapon and never have to fire an arrow, swing a sword, or cast a spell at it to kill the dragon.

The story at first is interesting and even to the point where you want things to see what happens with the choices that you make, but after the fifth or sixth time that you're given a choice to make a response that could change everything you start to realize that it's all pointless. Your character is going to go down a specific path, is going to hit every single checkpoint, and that is the only way that the story is ever going to progress. You can try to do other things, and you can try to make the 'worst' ending possible, but there's ultimately only two different endings, and even those endings aren't really all that different when you get down to them. Compared to the dozen or so endings of Chrono Trigger, and the effects your choices make in that game for the rest of the game, this really doesn't compare.

Ultimately I could spend the 100 hours of playing through this game at least three more times with three seperate characters trying to 100% it three times (trying to hit level 20 with the different classes, as well as having all of the relationships (eww)) but I just don't want to. Once was enough, and for me, talking about an RPG involving magic, dragons, and blood spewing everywhere, that's a pretty grim verdict.

Summer Learning Series - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/4/vacations

Growing up, my parents loved a good educational vacation. We didn't frequent the amusement parks, we rarely went to anything that would require me to be above a pirate's hand to be on, but museums and natural landmarks were prime targets for us. Any place we went we had to find a museum about whatever we could find, even if no one had any interests in it, and suffer our way through the exhibits and learn something new.

Even while staying at home and not traveling for vacations, my summer vacations were educational. While most kids were out playing with their friends, or sleeping in, or doing anything that you would expect from kids, my family had theme weeks that we would do research on.

For example, one week was a solar system theme. On Monday we each picked out a planet that we would research from our solar system, and then we headed off to the local library to get books on our planets. By Wednesday we'd have a few facts about our planet on 3x5 cards taped to our door, and by Friday our bedroom doors would be full on science fair project complete with pictures of our planet, and details about it that we had learned from our books, and usually on Friday afternoon we would do some activity that a normal family might do during a summer break like go to a planetarium.

Every week while growing up it was like this, luckily it stopped as I got older and was in middle school, but I can only imagine what my oldest sister was thinking, who is 8 years older than me, while I was 8 years old and doing bedroom door research projects on the Boston tea party. They were great times, and I'm sure that I learned something from the entire thing, but that's just how vacations were, and still are, with my family. You never go someplace just for fun, there has to be an activity involved with it. You would never just go camping, you have to go camping with at least three books, one of which teaches you which plants are edible and how to identify 40 different types of trees. You don't just go to the beach, you go with a bucket and shovel and try to identify as many shells as possible with the book of mollusks that you brought with you. You never just traveled and visited someone, you always, ALWAYS had to find the closest museum and make sure that you read every single plaque that was hanging.

Now that I'm older, have a family of my own, and have the power to plan my own vacations, I don't know how to do it. In my mind, vacations always have to be educational. Any time that I'm on vacation with my wife and we're sitting and doing nothing (what most people I hear call vacationing) I get antsy and think that I could be doing something more like writing or reading, or finding some off the beaten path museum that specializes in salt and pepper shakers. If I'm going to sit around and do nothing, I'm not going to pay money to sit around and do nothing, I'm just going to stay at home and binge watch Netflix.

Ahhhh Man!!!!

*Sad face*

I've been going through the journals, reading through their websites, trying to see what they have for submission standards, and starting to think of what stories I will submit to them, or what I want to submit to them.

One of them that I was really looking forward to was a journal called "Stealing Time" which is supposed to be a motherly parenting magazine. I really wanted to be snarky and do one where I talk about raising Addison and being a part time stay at home parent, as well as a part time student, and a part time worker, and throughout the entire thing start to drop hints at how I wasn't a woman, and then at the end come straight out and say that I am a dad who was/is a stay at home mom.

There's been a few others that I was sort of looking for, but they haven't published anything or accepted submissions in a few years so I think they're out of business. Either way, if you're a person in charge of a journal, I would love to help you out with your slush piles. Every single one that I'm researching is at least a month behind schedule, and have response times to submissions that are "1-3 months". Do you understand how long that is? To wait 3 whole months just to hear that you're not getting published? That's insane. I'd gladly donate some hours into cracking into some of those stories and essays to let that response time get down to a better window.

The only thing more annoying than a journal being out of business is a business that sounds interesting and has an interesting statement about themselves, but then when you look into their submission process it costs you money to submit. I'm sorry, but I"m not going to pay money to get told no. If I wanted to that, I'd just start handing money over to Addison and asking her an basic question (she only knows how to answer questions with 'no' for now).

Poultry Slam - My American Life

What did I get myself into with trying to follow This American Life? This entire episode was all about poultry. Yup, that's right, an entire episode revolving around chickens, ducks, and turkey. Time to pull out some crazy from my life on this one.

Stuffing

Stuffing, cranberries, mashed potatoes and a roasted bird brings to mind a specific time of the year. You make stuffing, and you're expecting that somewhere in the background that you're going to hear a football game and all of the family arguing about something weird. Or at least, when you're a kid, stuffing only shows up for the holidays and you only get it once, maybe twice a year. Now during that one time that it shows up, stuffing is not to be trifled with. There are different forms of it, I've had it with cranberries, raisins, apples, and all sorts of other things in it, but the basics are always there bread, onions, and spices. You could have it 'dry' or 'wet' and either way it was delicious with the bird that had been roasted.

When I moved out, and ultimately when I got married, everything changed when I thought about stuffing. 

My wife, Alicia, was, and still isn't, the best cook in the world. She grew up in a home that didn't cook that much, so I shocked her by doing things like asking her to name whatever she wanted  and then popping out home made shrimp scampi without really blinking twice. However, there was one thing that she said early on in our marriage, that she loved stuffing. I don't know what brought it up, all I knew was that she went on about stuffing for a while and she couldn't stop talking about it. She loved stuffing. 

The next time that I was at the store, doing our grocery shopping for the next week or so, on the boxed dinner aisle complete with all of the 'helper' meals, there were also the boxes for Stove Top. I had never had stuffing outside of Thanksgiving, so I was a bit uncomfortable buying the box, but it felt better once I had some chicken in the cart as well.

I got home, put away the groceries without any fanfare, and later that week surprised my wife with dinner one night with baked chicken with sides of mashed potatoes and stuffing. It was my first time eating stuffing without Turkey or a holiday to eat it with, and apparently it was Alicia's first time without it as well, but for her I made her favorite meal and didn't even know she could ask for. 

"Are you serious? Do you like stuffing that much?"

"Yes! I love it! But, how old is the box?" You see Alicia, in all of her weird quirks, has a strict observance of any dates put on any box or can and follows them religiously. If a gallon of milk is even one day over the date on the bottle, it would find itself in the trash.

"I don't know, not that old."

Not the answer that she wanted to hear, you see I had tried to hide dates of boxes and other products from her before. I'd allowed milk to go past the date, and 'tried to poison' her from doing that, so she checked and saw a date that was months in the future. "When did you get this?"

"When I went shopping. You said you loved stuffing so I got us some."

"How?"

"It grabbed it off the shelf and put it in the cart. How else would I get it?" I wasn't doing well with answers, she didn't like the sass. 

"But stuffing is only sold during Thanksgiving."

"Your plate says otherwise, you can get it whenever you want." That lead to us always having three or four boxes of stuffing in our pantry at all times. We've had stuffing with everything. There was even once that we made a weird mashed potato, stuffing, and vegetable casserole. 

The worst moment of the stuffing obsession came when one time I went to the store to grab a few basic things (bread, milk, fruit) and on my way out the door Alicia said, "and grab me something to surprise me as well." I got her a box of stuffing. She liked it, but it wasn't the surprise that she wanted.

Submissions

So I finally got off my butt, thanks to Alicia, and started to look into literary magazines and submitting to them.

I've always been worried about submissions to these magazines, but the more I look at them the more I am starting to realize that I can dump in submissions of short stories and stuff into these journals and magazines, I just have to write them and find a journal that fits a specific story, or write a story for a specific journal.

Time to get writing short stories and pumping out the submissions.

I'm going to edit this one just because it's easier, and makes sense to edit, instead of writing more and more posts on this subject. So here we go, here are a few links to journals that I'm looking at, most of which allow simultanious submissions. This means that I can write one thing, and then mass submit to all of them, and see if I get any takers. The list is still growing so there's going to be more edits about this as I go.

http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/crack_the_spine
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/airplane_reading
http://www.pw.org/content/amoskeag_journal_southern_new_hampshire_university
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/artichoke_haircut
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/bodega
http://www.pw.org/content/bomb_magazine
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/burner_magazine
http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazines/write_place_write_time.htm
http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazines/first_line.htm
http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazines/frostwriting.htm
http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazines/gemini.htm
http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazines/literary_bohemian.htm
http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazines/cossack_review.htm
http://www.clapboardjournal.squarespace.com/

Whew, that felt good, that let me close a lot of tabs. I'll continue to edit as I find more things, but for now I want to write something, so I"m going to go open up a document, turn off Star Trek, listen to the next set in the EDC playlist, and do some damage to a blank page.

Okay, wrote a non-fiction/fiction piece depending on how you want to look at it, time to finish up the list of websites that I need to look into submitting into. I might submit to a few of them under Alicia's name. The reason why is that I've taken enough feminist lit classes, and I'd like to think myself as a feminist (not the crazy type, just your every day flavor) but I can't submit to some of the feminist magazines without being a woman, which is sort of ironic and weird at the same time, but whatever, I'll just say my name is Alicia . . . or maybe even Addison, and then work from there and see what I can get away with. Anyways, without further adue here's the rest of the journals that I was looking into and need to look a bit further into.

I'm 99% sure that this is as long as the list will ever be. I just went through something like 800+ journals and narrowed it down to these ones, so the list of where I'm submitting my works should only get shorter from here. Yay!

http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/revolver
http://www.pw.org/content/so_speak_feminist_literary_journal
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/spark_a_creative_anthology
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/squalorly
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/stealing_time_magazine
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/womenarts_quarterly_journal
http://www.pw.org/content/opium_magazine_29
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/palooka
http://www.pw.org/content/the_mom_egg
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/neutrons_protons
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/jet_fuel_review
http://www.pw.org/content/keyhole
http://www.pw.org/content/meridian
http://www.pw.org/content/folly
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/forge
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/fourth_genre
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/the_higgs_weldon
http://www.pw.org/content/hobo_pancakes_1
http://www.pw.org/content/inertia_0
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/fjords_review
http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/eunoia_review

And then I also submitted to This American Life, because as I progress in My American Life, I want to pitch them that as well, just because I think that it would be interesting and I've always wanted to submit to them, so I gave it a shot tonight. I doubt that anything will come of it, but at least I threw something out there of a story that I think would be interesting enough to get a few people to listen to, now I just have to see what I can do about tagging things on this blog because I was thinking that could possibly be a good thing. 

Ain't Nobody Have Time for That

Seriously!

Wake up.
Go to work.
Got home.
Made sure Addie didn't stage dive off of the couch while starting dinner.
Ate dinner.
Made sure Addie ate dinner.
Got Addie bathed and in bed.
Started to look at job applications, and even managed to put in a few job applications.
And now I'm supposed to write four cover letters, all for different jobs, all sounding personal, yet brief, yet have my own voice, but a professional voice, not the voice that I use here, AND on top of that I'm supposed to start reading through litterary magazines and publications so that I can figure out where I should start submitting my work to so I can start beefing up my resume on publications.

Did I mention that it's almost 10:00 and for some reason I'm yawning? I'm really hoping that I'm going to break through that first sleep wall and make it until my 2:00 second wall. For those that don't know about these 'walls' they are glorious things but can come back and bite you in the butt. There are two (sometimes three) walls that I have. If I go to sleep during one of them, I go to sleep, have a good nights rest and life is great, but if something keeps me away during them I'm awake and I can't go to sleep until the next wall.

My walls happen at 10, 2, and sometimes 4 if I'm lucky.

That means that I'll get sleepy right around now, but if I stay awake during the next half hour or so, I'll be awake until 2. Now the dangerous part about the two one is to realize what is happening and go to sleep, otherwise I get hit with insomnia and I"m pulling an all nighter unless the wall at 4 shows up.

I'll save the cover letters for tomorrow when I have time, for now I'll speed read my way through a few literary journals to see what's out there, maybe get an episode up of My American Life up tonight. As crazy as it is to go through those old shows, it's really nice to sit down and listen to them. It's relaxing.

Small Scale - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/2/small-scale-sin

Holy cow, how in the world do I even start with this one? This one is a tricky one. I'm not quite sure where I want to start with this one. There's a lot of tricky things to this one. Tricky, tricky, tricky. This one is all about morals, rights and wrongs, and trying to understand how you rationalize the small things that can build up to big things.

Considering that this is only the second in the series to this whole thing, I'm calling this one in and pushing it off on someone else and using a story of someone I know instead of myself.

The Miracle of Forgiveness

I served a full time mission in Sweden for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. For those that have never had this crazy experience, you have to understand that every missionary has a book of rules that they're expected to follow. The little white book stays in our pockets, and for two years it rules our lives.

It says wake up at 6:30 and exercise for a half hour - so if you sleep in and don't exercise, you're a sinner. 

It says take a half hour lunch break - you take too long, you're sinning. 

Your hair cut, the amount of time you sleep, the amount of time you study every day, who you can be with, what activities you can and can't do, and everything else in your life is regulated. Follow the rules, and you're a successful missionary even if everything else is falling in around you. You screw up, don't follow the rules, and you run the risk of getting sent home early and everyone at home knowing that you didn't do what was expected from you. 

Every morning one missionary studies for almost three hours. One hour by themselves, one hour with their companion (the guy that they teach with and they have to be with at all times), and then a final hour full of studying nothing but the language that you're learning. The only down side to this is to think that every day you're putting in three hours of studying, and in a place like Sweden where you're not teaching anyone, you can't study whatever you're going to teach that day, you can just read whatever you want. The bad part about this is that you run out of books that you're allowed to read really, really fast. 

On my mission I read the entire 'mission library' as a whole two times. There are some books in it (like the Bible) that I read cover to cover a few more times than just two. This gets boring fast, reading the same books, so some missionaries break the rules and get books that are 'good' books from the church, but aren't part of the missionary library.

Elder Wise (for two years you're referred to by Elder (or Sister for the ladies) and your last name, to this day I don't know what Elder Wise's first name is) was one of those people that decided to break the rule, and he read The Miracle of Forgiveness. The book is a heavy book, it pretty much levels out everything that you could possible do to sin, everything from sins to commission to sins of omission. From murder to lying about what you did during your day or not following the rules (like the mission). 

The thing about this book is that even for the most well adjusted person, for the most saint like person you can find, it still rattles you making you obviously aware of everything wrong that you are doing sort of like when you have no clean clothes in the morning when you're getting ready and you wear a dirty pair of pants and you're so self aware of the small smudge on the knee that you're sure that everyone thinks that you were practically rolling in the mud before leaving the house that morning. The goal of the book is to say that even though that we're screwed and we make mistakes that there's a miracle of forgiveness that can get you past the mistakes that you're making, but most people get so depressed while reading that they don't make it to the happy ending to get them out of the depression, like Elder Wise. 

Elder Wise was a well adjusted missionary. He wasn't over the top attached to the rules like some were, but he wasn't entirely flippant about them. It was, what most would consider, a healthy balance of understanding why the rules were there and living the spirit, rather than the letter of the law, but then he read the book. 

In a period of only a few weeks, that book sent Elder Wise over the edge into paranoia and OCD. Now, those words get thrown around a lot in the world around us, and most people don't understand just what it means because there's so many fake versions of it. Somehow in the world that we live in the term OCD has become that you get slightly irked if there's a pattern of tile on the floor that doesn't repeat perfectly. Sadly, this wasn't the self diagnosed versions of those, something in that book snapped Elder Wise and broke him.

The after effects of that book scarred him. Because he was so worried about sins of omission where he thought that he could be sinning if he wasn't understood properly, or if he didn't make something clear. You'd ask him if he wanted to go out and grab a kebab wrap, and he'd say yes, and then follow it up with a half a dozen extra times of, "When I said yes, you understood that to mean that I said yes and I would like to go eat kebab with you, right?"

"Yes, Elder Wise."

"So, you understand that we're going to eat at tre kronor, right?"

"Yes, Elder Wise."

"And we're going to leave in a few minutes to get it, right? The kebab that is."

You wanted to think it was funny, that he was playing around, that he wasn't suddenly paranoid about the world around him, but then you'd catch him doing something a little too weird. He'd put away a book, and it had to be in just the right spot, and he'd check that spot at least four or five times just to make sure that it was still in the right spot. When we stood up to go get kebab he'd push in his chair, and then check the chair, check the book, check the chair, check the book, check the light switch (which he turned off) then back to the chair, book, light on, light off, and one last chair check.

The rules became gospel to him, and I really mean gospel. Wake up at 6:30? Yes, every single day, no questions asked. Lunch for a half hour? Of course. Stay even a minute too long during lunch or dinner? Absolutely not, because his goal was to be as perfect as possible, to live a life without sin, and it ruined him. 

It debilitated him.  

Trying to live without the small sins turned him from a functioning, funny, well adjusted teenager into a man who was paralyzed in fear. It's a great goal to leave sin from your life, even the small ones, but sooner or later you have to realize that in some ways those small sins keep you sane. So yes, I'm not perfect, but I've seen a person strive for perfection and it ruined him.

Cramping my Style

Today while chopping up chicken I nicked my middle finger on my left hand. I was planning on typing a good chunk of DA tonight and really hunkering down to get closer to the finish, but this stupid band-aid is making my typing slow down by a stupid amount, and the accuracy of my typing has just about gone out the window.

Well screw you middle finger being sliced to death and bleeding a stupid amount which is far more than it should for such a little cut, thank you for throwing a wrench in my plans to write tonight.

New Beginnings - My American Life - Ep 1

www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/1/new-beginnings

Fitting that the first show is all about new beginnings, with this being the beginning of trying to keep up with This American Life and all, let's see what damage we can do to this topic. There's a lot within this one to think about, but we'll go with this. I'm guessing personal essay is going to show up the most while doing these, oh well, such is the nature of the beast.

Newest Beginning

I don't have any beginnings any more. I wish I did, but instead of being a master of the new and perfecting the start of relationships, I seem to have gotten dealt the hand that forces me to deal with long term relationships within my life that never seem to change and never have the possibility to. 

Graduation is supposed to be a great new beginning. We hear it when we graduate from high school from the teachers, we hear it from our validictorian when we grab our college degree, and you hear it just about every time you put on the robes and start hearing names read off that you have never met before. Graduation is supposed to be a time where you put your education behind you, where you take everything that you learn, and then jump into the new beginning of your life, your career. It's the biggest step that you can take as an adult, one from being a student, to being a member of society doing what you just spent thousands of dollars learning how to do . . . or at least that's the way it's supposed to be. 

For me, my beginnings lead to no changes, and the weirdest part about it is that it's not for lack of trying. It's not like I'm sitting at home playing video games for hours on end . . . okay, maybe I am, but the point is that when I'm not trying to save the world, I'm trying to change my life. I'm trying to do something with my life, but in the weird situation that I'm stuck in, I can't. You see, I'm married with a kid, and that's made everything at least twenty bazillion times trickier. That thing called a family, as great as they are, has managed to throw a wrench in the system of trying to get a start in my life. 

I'd like to think that it's just my family that's holding me back, making it so I'm not as mobile, limiting the ability for me to get a job that will pay me, but then I run into the other problem with all of this, I've applied for jobs within the area. I've submitted my resume to businesses, and  family aside, I'm not getting the position.

In this time that I'm supposed to be having a new beginning, this time in which I'm supposed to be doing something, I'm stuck. And I'm not even stuck in a place that I like. I'm stuck in a call center doing a job I hate, having to play back up in my family, and watch as everyone else, namely my wife, gets what they want. 

That's the part that hurts the most. 

I do everything I can to make my wife happy, but there are times that I really don't like seeing her happy because it reminds me of just how bad I have it. But the only thing that makes it worse is when she's angry. When she's angry she gets upset about the stupidest things. She gets upset because she has a job that she wants and it treats her how you would expect a job in that field would. She gets upset because she spends so much time doing what she wants to do as a career. She gets upset that she has to do what she went to school for. Sure, sometimes the girls she teaches are annoying, and there's not much you can do about that, but the fact that she gets to do what she wants, do what she has spent time and money to build up to outweighs just about any bad thing that she could possibly come up with, but she doesn't see it.

It's painful to watch people not see what they have. 

I'm fighting to even get an interview in my field of study. 

I'm putting every ounce of effort I can in trying to get something that's even sort of related to my passion. 

I'm sitting and having to work in a job saved for high school drop outs and meth heads waiting for the moment when I can sit down and work on something that I have actual skills in. 

I dream about my new beginning. 

I hope for my new beginning. 

I look at every single job posting like it's the last piece of cake that someone saved just for me, but fight for it like there are 30 other people all trying for that single slice.

It is close to impossible to have to sit through people complaining about their jobs, when their jobs are something that they went to school for and have, or at least had, a passion for. It is frustrating to hear people complain about the money that they are making to do something they love. Do you want to know how much money I've made in my entire life using any knowledge gained while at college? It's $0. Every dollar that I've made in my entire life has been gained while using basic knowledge or information that I picked up in high school. I could have gone through the past ten years doing NOTHING and wouldn't be paid an cent more than what I've currently made. This is going from personal essay to rant, oh well, we'll get better as we go on, I'm just peeved about this right now so this is what it's mutating into.

In this stuck position that I'm in I'm at a loss to know what to do. There are only a few options. The first is to think that it'll get better and to think that it's just a phase that I'm in, and the numbers will swing my way if I just keep trying. The next is to think that I'm screwed and just give up and submit that no matter how hard I try I'm doomed to be the over educated guy asking you if you would like fries with your combo meal. The final option is to make my family upset. To hurt the ones that I love the most in this world, and start looking for jobs anywhere else but in the nearest 40 miles around me.

The obvious answer is that my family will love me and that they will support me, but there's not a chance in the world that my wife is going to support me if I drag her away from her mother, and she is not close at hand when her mom dies. She can forgive me for a lot, but being the reason that she's not close by if/when her mom dies is not on that list and I don't want to deal with that. 

I wish I could see the world in a new light, to have a fresh take on everything and have that pure start, but for now my newest beginning happened ten years ago when I graduated from high school and moved out. Since then I've pretty much been singing the same song and trying to fool myself that I was doing something new.

This American Life

Found it!

I found what I'm going to be writing and using as my writing prompts - This American Life.

For those that have never heard this show, it's been on public radio for a while and is a really well put together, innovative show that takes one topic and expands on it for one hour. So hopefully, at least once a week I will listen to one of these shows (because I really enjoy these shows and want to listen to them) and then from one episode, I'll write my own story, segment, or whatever else that I think would fit within the show. There's over 500 of these shows, so I've got a whole lot of material to play with - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives#2014

On the off chance that Ira, or anyone at This American Life actually catches wind of this, please get in touch, I would LOVE to be a contributor to your show, I just have no clue on how to get my stuff running through my head to you.

I'm already looking forward to this. Yay! Now I just have to figure out how to work this together with finishing up DA and making that work.

I'm so messed up. Having multiple writing projects and feeling pressure to finish them with deadlines and stuff just made me feel more relaxed and in charge of what's going on. School has seriously messed me up.

The End. . . ? - The Games I've Played

I'm going to put this series on pause for a bit. We have REALLY hit closer to current games because next on the list are Bio Shock and then Skyrim. I've written quite a bit about every game I've played after that, so I'm going to put that little writing series on pause, and I might come back to it once I get a few more games under my belt and want to keep writing reviews about them. I don't really know what I'm going to do in place of that, I've been thinking about finding prompts of the day on a website for teachers or something like that and doing prompts for the day and just keeping my chops up with creative writing, but I don't know what I'm going to do, it's still up in the air.

All I do know is that it was sort of fun to go through the old games that I"ve played. It's sort of silly to look back and see just how many of them I didn't like. The only saving grace behind that is that the games that I loved Ive played some serious time into, but the ones that I couldn't stand I got done with the story line and then got out.

Side note, I'm pretty sure Dragon Age Origins is going to run into the category of main story line and then get out. to get 100% I'd have to play the ENTIRE game at least three times, if not more. It's a good game, but even some of my favorite games that I have on the list like Skyrim and FFX, wouldn't be able to get me to play through them start to finish three times to try to 100% them, and especially without New Game +, there's even less chance that I'd do it. I've played a few games (Tales of Graces) a few times through without really worrying, but that's because it had New Game + and I could completely trash the game in record speed. As far as I can tell there's none of that in Dragon Age and I'd have to start from scratch, and no thank you for that.

Either way, it's officially been long enough for me to get school out of my system, I need to start writing again and finish up DA. I'm right at the end, and I sort of want to cut corners to wrap it up faster than it should, but I'm going to have to go back and delete a few pages because I know I shouldn't cut those corners. I need to actually do the week in the castle where Britney goes insane before the ending, I can't leave that out, it's a little heavy handed with the foreshadowing, but hey, if you're going to do it, go all out with it, am I right?

Shocking - The Games I've Played

After playing the first game in the Infamous series, I was sort of looking forward to #2, and honestly, it didn't disappoint. I was a bit worried, because my history with series doesn't go that well, so I was happy that they didn't do some of the more heinous crimes when it comes to creating a sequel, like stripping Cole of all of his powers so that you pretty much have to start from square one all over again (I'm looking at you God of War!).

The story starts off with Cole (the dude from the first one who can control electricity) getting his butt handed to him by a giant monster and having to run from fake New York, down to fake New Orleans. They have different names, but we're all pretty set on which city is what considering their general lay out and themes. We pick up with Cole trying to survive in the new city, making some new friends, and running into the same themes of good vs evil and making sure that he picks the right choices depending on which color you want him to glow. All the time he's buffing up and getting ready for some serious big bads all to get ready for the giant monster to shamble his way down to the fake New Orleans for the final face off.

-Spoiler Warning-

The best part of this game is the ending because no matter which way you're playing the game you've got some serious decision making to go through, and what's even better is that the series respects those choices and keeps Cole dead. Yeah, I know, big spoiler that he dies at the end, but oh well, I didn't ruin much more than that. I know it focuses a bit on the next game in the series, but it's a refreshing take on things when you kill off a main character, and they stay dead. (Looking at you Devil May Cry!)

Anyways, game play is your typical sandbox/quest based game. There's people running around with exclamation points over their heads and you do stuff for them.

Of course there's also the random shards that are scattered around the city, and all of the other random things you can run into but it's exactly what you would expect from the sequel to the first game. It's the exact same format, just more of it, a bit better polished and stream lined, and a slightly different environment.

One of the better parts of this game are the powers. Where last time we got to see a bit of Cole really tapping into some electricity mayhem while charging up the city, in Infamous 2 he gets super powered.

Of course he gets the things we loved like the tornados-

but then he gets all sorts of other toys that he gets to play around with to blow things up with 1,000,000 volts, and let's not forget your tuning fork of a melee weapon that is all sorts of awesome to bash your way through groups with.

The story line is great, the game play never gets too boring until you start really trying to max out things by having to hunt down all of the shards, but even in shard hunting you're jumping and flying around the city so fast and the game actually helps you find all of the shards, unlike the first which gave you no help at all, that even that boring section while 100%-ing the game isn't that boring. It's a good game and if you're a fan of super powers, crazy explosions, and sandboxing, then it's a good game for you.

It's Scary . . . Right? - The Games I've Played

So remember how much I loved Silent Hill 2? As part of the HD collection I also got access to Silent Hill 3. The only down side to that deal is that pairing up an amazing game like SH2 is that you'll always make the other game paired with it look down right horrible.

Silent Hill 3 is what you would expect out of a survival horror, and it's scary at points, but the problem comes with the fact that Silent Hill 3 doesn't really get in your head and play with your subconscious and really just mess you up.

The story, like I said with 2, skips 2 and goes from SH1. This is when it is bad that I haven't played previous games within the series (which would traditionally be a negative point for the game but thanks to the movie that came out, it sticks pretty close to what the story of the game is so I knew roughly what it involved). All you need to know from #1 to play #3 is that the girl is screwed up and comes from Silent Hill from a crazy cult thing. Anyways, she got back to the real world, and now that she's a big girl, the Silent Hill crazy side of her is starting to push out and weird things are starting to happen.

The story is sort of interesting, but compared to #2 that it's boxed with, I can't really remember much of what happened. I remember weird things about it, like being stuck in the shopping mall at the start, a bit about trying to hunt around my way around in a subway, and ultimately running into the carnival, but I can't really tell you what actually happened, and I played it MULTIPLE times to 100% the game.

The other problem with Silent Hill 3 is that there was never a point in it that I was in the true survival horror feel. I guess what I"m trying to say, there was never a point in the game that I was afraid for my life, that I was clinging on to a flashing red health bar and trying to dodge around to keep my life as a monster from the depths of an insane mind chased after me while making a noise that would haunt me for at least a few minutes. Other survival horror games that stick with the idea of survival horror (Deadspace, Silent Hill 2) are scary not because things jump out and scare me, or because they're bloody and dark, but because you're trying to survive and that thread of a life that you have is horrifying. But instead of trying to make the game survival horror, it just goes into bad horror movie tactics and says, 'you know what's scary? lots of blood.'

Let me make this perfectly clear, I think that a good survival horror game could be set in a normally lit, close to reality world. If done properly, and actually given attention to the tension of trying to stay alive and the threat of what is lurking around the corner, you can have that feeling in a normal world. Putting a survival horror in a scary setting to start off with means that you should be able to blow the tension out of the water and really make the game/story jump through the roof with tension. Sadly, Silent Hill 3 sets it in the most typical of typical settings, like a haunted carnival, turns the gore up to 11, and then just sits back and hopes that the stereotypes of the genre can carry the story without putting any work into what is actually happening.

The only reason that I played through this game multiple times was because it was easy. After the first go around I knew exactly where everything was, I wasn't scared any more, and there was no sense of me trying to survive, but I wanted to get that 100% and get some of the different endings because they didn't seem that hard, and they weren't. One of the trophies is to beat the game in under two saves, by the time I was done with the game, I was beating the entire game in no saves. I could sit down and three hours later be finished with the game. I was using a few things like guns with unlimited ammo, but the paters of everything was the same, and so it became a running around halls simulator that I could do before going to sleep to help me doze off before going to sleep, instead of being a sit on the edge of your seat terrifying experience. By the way, for anyone trying to understand how to do this, just remember that there is a short list of monsters in this game that MUST be killed, everything else is slow enough to run around or locked in rooms that you can completely avoid them. 

Side note on a sad point - no pyramid heads in Silent Hill 3, they were replaced by these funky things that had nothing to really do with a subplot of guilt or insanity.

EDM at EDC

I'm slowly working my way through my EDC playlists each 24 hours long (because they cover multiple stages) and it's been fun to hear all of it without having to deal with any of the costs or crowds of EDC.

But with that in mind, there's one (newish) genre of EDM that I just can't get behind - Trap.

I'm assuming the name comes from techo+rap = trap and it's a bad mix.

Some say that Original Don is trap

 and it's a good little quazi introduction into trap, but after listening to a few sets of nothing but trap I can't stand it. It runs at close to the beloved 180 bpm, and then when it peaks instead of blowing up, it cuts into half time (90 bpm) with nothing but barely a bass rumble. I don't know what it is about the genre but it is just annoying to listen to.

For example, here's an annoying one - https://soundcloud.com/edmchicagorecords/borgore-live-edc-las-vegas-2014?in=edmchicagorecords/sets/edc-las-vegas-2014-live-sets Go to about  2:30 in, and you'll hear a nice, upbeat, D&B section. It's not exactly my flavor of techno, but it's at least moving enough that you can do something with it. Builds up to about 4:00 and then slows down to a crawl with the bass buzzing and the ANNOYING trumpet at the top of everything just blaring on.

That's how the entire thing goes. It gets into a nice pace, a nice rhythm and then just when it's about to get to the best part of a song it slows down and you're faced with a droning bass line and an ear piercing trumpet line all in the name of 'dropping the bass'. It's not as wubby as dubstep, but it's just as annoying. What makes it even worse is that the DJ's that are spinning it don't know how to transition between songs. I mean I've heard so many train wrecks between songs in trap that it's starting to get irritating. Just because you're playing a harder style does not mean that you can just hit play, you still need some skill.

Is there anything we can do for you?

Now, if you're a member of the LDS church (yes, I know that isn't the official name, and yes, I'm perfectly okay with using an abbreviated form of it because this is no where to try to call me out on being politically correct) the phrase "Is there anything that we can help you with?" carries with it a secret meaning. The only time you hear it is when two guys come to your house, they've overstayed their welcome and they don't know how else to get out of there so they're going to ask you that one question, you're going to politely say no, and then you're all going to move on and finish up the awkward deal that you just got yourself into.

Visiting teachers don't use it that often, but holly balls do home teachers and missionaries like to use it all the time. Now the proper answer to this question is, 'no, we're just fine'. That is to say that you've got your life in control, and there's nothing outsanding that you're going to need serious attention from members of the church to assist you with. You might have small things going on, but there's nothing big enough going on that will stop them from getting out of your front door, because they're halfway there and already folding their arms ready for the farewell prayer.

Now, the thing I don't get is that when you o say something that you legitimately need help with, why is it instantly considered a joke?

Okay, so maybe it's not a house that needs to be built or anything super crazy, but I honestly would like to start getting people on a list so that I can show them Dream Analysis. I honestly and truthfully need people to read through it and start telling me what they think so that I can start in on fixing it and ultimately trying to get it published. Is it really that hard to read a book and say what you didn't like about it?

I don't get it. Don't ask questions that you don't want answers to. As a quazi introvert (I like to imagine that I'm not full fledged introverted but we all know that isn't exactly true, just let me have my dream) just remember, don't waste my time with insignificant questions and chatter when you really don't care. If you honestly don't care a single bit about my job and what I do for fun, then don't ask. I find it much more polite and personal if you are honest with yourself and with me to make that realization and just keep your mouth shut. Don't say things just because that's what everyone does, say things that you mean and want to know.

Oh well, I'm off on a rant. TL;DR - Is there anything I can do for you before I close this post? Nope? Great, now who would you like to say the closing prayer?

Rage Quit - The Games I've Played

I started this game, and then had to restart two hours later because I came to the realization that I had made a mistake in the first section of the game and character creation that would make the rest of the game even harder than what it already is.

I lasted about 4-5 hours the second playthrough before I had to restart again realizing that I had made a mistake and had to start again.

Third playthrough, I spent a grand total of about 3 seconds 'making' my character, who would just turn undead and have zombie flesh for the rest of the game in the opening cut scene, used a glitch to get close to infinite levels so I could max out my stats as hard as possible, and then started the game. . . . and I still wanted to throw the controller at my TV screen because of how stupid the game is.

This game is one made attempt at how to make a game as frustrating difficult as you can. The only reason people like it is not because it's a good game, but because they want to brag about it. "Well I beat (INSERT BOSS HERE) with only (INSERT STUPID LIMITATION HERE)."

Simply - this game is not fun.

Dark Souls is made with the intention to be the most difficult, most unrewarding experience that you have ever had doing anything. You can try for hours to do something, and then one person who knows what they are doing will beat it in seconds. The most frustrating part about the entire thing is that the game doesn't even try to explain what it is that you need to do or where you need to go. They just hand you all of the spiky deathy goodness and don't tell you what's going on, where to go, what to do, or anything like that. Sure, you can say that it's 'open world' and 'realistic' but if I wanted to be smacked in the face for making poor decisions with no explanation of what was going on, I'd hop onto a plane to Iraq and try to figure out a way to stay alive without having money, contacts, or any understanding of the language. 

You spend a good amount of time killing things, but any time you heal at a rare save point- everything respawns. Any time you die, everything respawns. Any time you die you also loose all of your currency for the game (souls) and drop them on the ground. To get them back you have to run back to your death spot, face whatever just sliced your body to shreds, and then try to pick up your souls. Die while you're trying to do that, and those souls are lost forever.

Frustrating game play aside - the story is nonexistant. You have almost no clue why you're there, no one explains what is going on, what the goal of the game is, or why you're doing anything. If you thought the story line for the Devil May Cry series was bare bones, Dark Souls doesn't even have a skeleton to it's story. I'm still unsure why I had to kill the giant wolf with a sword in it's mouth to be able to not die while fighting the four kings, all I know is that I had to kill the giant wolf or else I couldn't even kill the four kings. Why did I have to kill the four kings? I have no clue, I just know that I had to, to get to the end of the game.

I talked to as many people in the game as I could (most which were either crazy or wanted to kill me) and I had no idea what the story line is. I'm 99.999% sure that the story line that people talk about online is borderline fan fiction because I could find nothing in the game to support anything of what they were talking about.

Dark Souls is not a well made game. It has horrible game play, pitch dark graphics that make it so you can't see what's two feet in front of you to give the game "atmosphere" (which is a horrible idea considering that everything can kill you when it's three feet away from you, so you're dead before you can see what is killing you), the story is non-existant, and nothing is explained. The only reason that it is so popular and has a fan base is because it is such a poorly made and horribly unaccessible game that it became popular for just how hard it is.

The only reason I played Dark Souls was to see what the hype was about, I would never recommend this game to anyone I ever talk to because it's not worth it.

EDC

Avoid the crowds, still get the music, save a few hundred dollars and your ears won't ring either.

https://soundcloud.com/edmchicagorecords/sets/edc-las-vegas-2014-live-sets
https://soundcloud.com/edmchicagorecords/sets/edc-las-vegas-2014-live-sets-1
https://soundcloud.com/edmchicagorecords/sets/edc-las-vegas-2014-live-sets-2

Each are over 24 hours long, and from the looks of things from work, they're all downloadable.

I know what I'll be listening to for the next few months as I slowly work my way through these.

I Have Problems

It's midnight.

I'm hungry.

I realized that today I haven't eaten that much, and so the more I think about it the hungrier I get.

I don't want to wake anyone up by making food.

Solution?
Ninja mode activate! Time to sneak out of the house, get into my car, drive to Del Taco, get soft tacos, a bean burrito, and eat it all in the safety of my car, just to sneak back in.

Seriously, I'm that hungry.

I need to stop slacking and clean up the kitchen so I can make dinner. I can only imagine how hungry Alicia is, as far as I know the only thing she had for dinner was half a microwave dinner and a few smores at young womens.

Either that. . . . or just be lazy eat bread and have a few bowls of cereal so I don't have to ninja stalk away. Ninja-ing takes so much energy, you know?

There's Only One Character in These Fighters - The Games I've Played

Typically when you play fighters you get dozens of characters to pick from. You get all of your favorites from Sub Zero to the Hulk to whatever else is in the franchise that you're playing. Then comes this game, it is practically a fighter game where you have to learn specific, complex, fickle button combinations to kill whatever is around you, but unfortunately there's only one character that you have to play as, and the entire game is a pain to get through.

I'm going to cover all three of these games in one go, because honestly, they're practically the same game, just with slightly different game elements within them. There are people out there (like the friend that recommended this game to me) that love this series. I'm sorry to say this to those people, but I can't stand this game.

Let me start off with the first one. I'm not 100% sure on this one, because I did start to zone out with the game because of just how amazing it was and I couldn't handle all of the amazing that was coming off of it, but the story goes a little something like this - you're Dante. Dante likes killing things. Oh look, you're at a castle. There's things to kill at the castle. Dante likes killing. Maybe you should kill things. End of the world is happening? Demons are coming? Whatever, they're squishy and they bleed blood, you can kill them. Keep on killing! Oh wait! There's a weird guy in a suit of armor. . . maybe you should kill him too. Okay, keep killing! Ultimatley you end up in an alternate dimension killing someone who you're not really quite sure who they are, how they work into the guy with the suit, or just about anything you had done up to that point, but he's squishy and is trying to stop you from killing things, so KILL HIM!

Now, weird story line that never explains much of anything that is going on, and you just sort of have to make it up as you go to the side, let's talk about the gameplay. Remember this guy from the N64?

Lakitu's the guy's name, and he's using a fishing pole in a cloud to be your camera guy but he still manages to not screw things up too bad for the most part because he's awesome.

Well. . . let's take Lakitu and give him a night out on the town where he can no longer pass a sobriety test, and then smack him on the head with an anvil or two just to make sure that he's nice and brain damaged and then ask him to try to keep up with Dante. Nothing too tricky, just simple things like not focusing on the wall while Dante is trying to walk anywhere else but into the wall, or even trying to  not skip between four different camera angles during a boss battle because each camera angle switches the direction you're walking so down no longer becomes 'down' but right then up then left then down. To put it nicely, the camera angles are part of the challenge to this game.

Let's move on because we need to cover more than just #1 in this rant.

I finish 1 and my hopes go somewhere along the lines of this - first games in series are always a little short sighted and limited in their scope because they're the first game. The company doesn't know if it'll be a big hit or anything, so they play it safe, and cut corners so that they can see if people would like a second. The game was and is popular enough to get a second game, so it hopefully will fill in some of the blanks (all of the blanks) of the first game because there were some big ones that it left behind.

Yeah. . . no.

It's a bit after #1, but it pretty much runs this story line - girl flirts with Dante, asks him to kill some guy who's trying to take over the world with demons but promises him that there's going to be lots of squishy bodies between him and the final boss guy thing, Dante can't resist and goes on a killing spree again.

Rinse and repeat from #1

You don't know what's going on.

You have a slight idea that you're at least trying to stop someone in this game a bit better than the first one, but it still runs the world of here's a room, oh no there are things in the room so all of the doors are now locked. If you want to keep going, you better get your killing on!

Seriously? Can we take a moment to talk about this thing that happens in Devil May Cry but also makes appearances in a lot of 'action' games? The barriers of death that won't move unless you commit murder? I have a guy that can throw his sword around and teleport to it at will, shoots bullets out of the air, and can hide weapons in his magical back pocket without having any issues ever with reloading or carrying capacity and a weird little door thingy is going to stop him unless he doesn't kill four things that he's already killed HUNDREDS of? Seriously? It got annoying after a while. It wasn't like the game was challenging me, it got insulting. It was like it wasn't paying attention to the previous room where I did the exact same thing with an S rank 70 hit combo where the bodies were expertly juggled between sword strikes and bullets as I flew around the room.

Back to the story of 2.

At the end, instead of a cliffhanger, they flat out kill Dante. I mean there's no coming back from it.

He gets sucked into a demon dimension with no way out and the story is over. Goodbye, goodnight, the hero is dead, all of that time you spent jumping around and leveling up is meaningless, you saved the world but he's dead.

BUT WAIT! There's a Devil May Cry 3? He must get out!

Nope.

Turns out #3 is BEFORE #1.

Remember all of those awesome things that you hardly understood but you learned how to really kick butt doing in #1 and 2? That hasn't happened yet! Remember some of the most awesome things like . . . I don't know. . . your sword? Yeah, totally not in your possession.

By this point I had given up all hope of any sense being made. Whatever story they fed me, I saw it for what it was, here's some monsters, how about you slice and dice your way through them?

Good?

Good.

Just like the other DMC games, there's rating systems that tell you how skilled you are in a certain fight. Keep things up in the air and do a ridiculously long combo without repeating moves? Get a better ranking! Does it do anything to get a better ranking?

Absolutely not.

So throughout 3, as well as 2 and 1, I just found out what combo was the easiest to do that would kill things the fastest and spammed it any time there were bad guys anywhere near me. Who cared if I got a C on my fight? Everything died so I could finally go to the next room to get another C.

Get all of the upgrades, get the weapon that is actually a guitar (no joke)

and don't forget to keep on killing, and I was happy when it finally came to a close.

These games are one of those that I will never go back to. I didn't 100% them, I didn't try to get perfect scores on every fight or even try to touch the games on any other difficulty than easy, and I'm perfectly okay with that.

The story is horrible, the game play is annoyingly difficult to do too little, the characters are annoying, the graphics are dated (even with the HD version which said it was 'remastered') which is sort of important to have good visuals on a game which has so many attempts at visual flairs and 'wow' moments, which made the entire series one that I rushed through just so I could said that I had finished it and shut up those people that keep talking about it the way I talk about some of my favorite games.

I'm enjoying this email thing

For those that don't know the fun things that you can do with Blogger, you can send emails to yourself and whatever you put in the email gets posted up on the blog. Now, I'm not about to start handing this email out because there would be some interesting spam given to it, but it's a nice way to get around things at work because instead of showing me writing on the blog, my screen is simply me writing an email and emails are part of the job! Yay!

Anyways, the partial reason that I'm writing is because I'm bored, and the secondary reason is something that I was listening to yesterday. Yay for NPR being a source of inspiration for too much lately! Weird connections from my brain to this point, but if I ever get 'big' and make it to a point where a story of mine makes it into a movie or anything like that (doubtful, but here's hoping for the best) I would just like to make it clear now, I really have no preferences to race specifics with actors that play my characters.

What I mean is that none of my characters are set in a specific race. For example all four narrators in DA could be any race that you want. Britney doesn't have to be a literal blond for her to be a dumb blond. Trust me, I know enough people that have dark hair that are just as stupid. It's a state of mind to be a dumb blond and some of the best at it are not blond. Shoot, if you get good enough actors, or the director wants to try something particular with it, genders aren't even set in stone. It'd take a little bit of re-writing some of the relationships but it's possible for Pia to be Peter, David to be Danielle, Britney to be Brian, and Kendel to be Kendra.

I sort of get how in some stories gender or race would be important, but really, in everything that I've written up to this point I can't really think of any particular story or character that is particularly set in being white. So 80 years from now when this blog is deleted and there's no evidence of it in any way, just try to remember that I really don't care who gets put into what role, or even how you interpret the story. If you think Kendel is black, let him be black, I don't care. There's no right answer, and I think I've even managed to stay back, for the most part, in giving super set descriptions on any/most of my characters. I'm typically not okay with reader response theory, but when it comes to my characters, use your imagination and make them what you think works best, I don't care; just as long as the story stays the same (and race doesn't change the story).

Senseless Violence - The Games I've Played

I skipped over the Bejewled 3 game that I got because . . . because well what's there to say about Bejweled? It's the same thing that it's always been. They might give it a few new twists and turns with fun little variations of the game, but you're always going to be trying to line up gems and make more gems show up. It's a casual game, it's mindless, but a close runner up for how nice and mindless a game can be is the next one on the list - Dynasty Warriors 7

I know, for a fact, that I have written about this game before on this blog. It's some of my earlier posts, so I apologize for the one person who is getting a second dose of Dynasty Warriors 7, but we'll allow it.

This game is one of the few that breaks my rule for series (If it has a number higher than 2 I better play the earlier games to make sure I don't miss anything). The reason why? IT USES THE EXACT SAME STORY FOR EVERY SINGLE ONE.

Now this seems weird, but Dynasty Warriors 3 has most of the same characters, and pretty much the exact same main story line as Dynasty Warriors 7. The reason that I'm not going to play 8 or higher? Because it's nothing new! Seriously, if you ever want to play anything in this series, just pick the one with the highest number that is out on the market, and play that one because you're not going to miss a single thing from any of the other games. Now while this might seem like the worst idea ever with making a game, really do I have to point out Call of Duty and it's story line for the past 20 games that it's popped out?

Dynasty Warriors pretty much breaks down to this - you're in feudal China, and you're trying to make it so that your clan (Wei, Wu, Shu) wins, and you play as a SUPER powered person. We're going to comedic lengths at some points of how over powered you are. Group of 100 warriors just gathered around you and are trying to kill you? I sure hope you don't hit the triangle button and kill them all with one single attack. It's on the level of Power Rangers vs. Puddies. We all know who's going to win those fights.

The story line isn't even something that they wrote themselves, they're stealing directly from a SUPER old Chinese story called Romance of the Three Kingdoms. With that in mind, the story is out the window for keeping people coming back, and this series staying alive.

Game play? Nope, you use three buttons, combos are stupid easy to perform, and as soon as you figure out how to mob together mobs that are so big that the game engine isn't able to actually handle the sprite count of what is behind you, you can kill thousands of mooks and power level without too much worry.

The thing that makes this game so great is senseless violence. If we're talking deaths per-capita, this game is bordering on Dead Rising 2 chainsaw motorcycle level. I mean, I got a trophy (not that far into 100%-ing this game) where I had reached a point that I had killed over 100,000 people. I easily caused the death of over 300,000 pixilated men who were trying to kill me. EASILY.

The best part about the violence? It was on the lowest level of difficulty to cause that violence? The key inputs don't require complex combos, you don't need to hit the timing perfectly, you hardly have to aim, and the strategy is kill things . . . and then keep killing things . . . and keep killing until you run out of stuff to kill. It's SUPER simple, and the graphics (particularly the specials animations) are an added bonus.

Once you get done with the official story line that has been the story line forever, and will continue to always be the story line, you get the opportunity to start leveling up all of the characters, doing unique custom levels, and getting all of the fun post-game stuff that only comes with that game. THIS is where the numbers matter. The post game fun and games for 6 is completely different than 7, but the good part is, is that the game understands what it is, and doesn't try to hide it. It allows you to do some really stupid things, all in the name of senseless violence.

Yeah, you just saw that right.

It has challenging custom levels, levels where they play 'what if' to the accepted cannon and change the results of who fights at what battles, or ask you to try to win a battle that you should loose according to the story line. They come up with custom levels like a beauty contest where a very flamboyant male character kills all of the female characters to prove that he is the most beautiful, only to tick off the big bad of the entire game which you then have to fight because you killed his girlfriend.

 It's ridiculous, it's over the top, the story is old and hasn't been updated for centuries, but it sure does feel good to jump into a giant unit of army men trying to poke you to death with spears and swords and watch their bodies go flying through the air without ever having to think about actually fighting them.

Edit- I can't find for sure where I talked about this game on my own blog. Weird. What's even more weird is that I can't find rants about the next few games on my list, so I'm not too worried about keeping this series going for a while. Yay?

Orchestra

I was bored at work (hence the blog name) and I started thinking about how much I don't fit in there. For example, the pregnant girl at work who smokes while 8 months pregnant was talking about meeting with her parole officer and to top off that classy moment later said that she would drink a Monster energy drink because it has a warning on the side of the can saying that it's not advised for pregnant women to drink it (reminder, she smokes). It only gets worse/better from there. On the scale of just how much I don't fit in, and how much it's not my crowd of people, it pretty much tells all when I say that I have my masters degree while working the same room with people that don't even have their GED. I don't fit, it's not my group of people.

That, along with listening to some NPR while driving around (yet another thing that separates me from just about every singe soul in that building) made me start to think about orchestra. I play the cello, and I'm not bad at it. I've played in symphonies, I'm classically trained, and I don't play arrangements of pieces, I play the big boy full versions of songs. I'm good (or at least was good) at what I did when I played. If I practiced and applied myself I could easily sit in the top orchestra in all of Nevada.

What's funny about orchestras and people that play at that high of level of skill is that in the long run, everyone there is just as dedicated to the music as everyone else. Everyone in the orchestra likes music in a really weird way and wants to preform it, but what's even better is that even though everyone is about the same, and is equally skilled in their unique instrument of choice, there are stereotypes that fit pretty decently well between the personality of a person and the instrument that they play.

First violins are the prima donnas. Life is all about them. They are the most anal, and they are the most obsessed about everything. If they don't get everything perfectly okay, and you can't hear them from the nosebleeds in the balcony, then something is wrong, because although other instruments are there, they are only there to make the first violins sound better. They are the ones that walk around with earbuds listening to metronomes and tuning pitches so that they can teach themselves perfect pitch. They're obsessed.

Second violins don't care. They're skilled. There's a reason that they're playing at the professional level, it's not like they are less skilled, or unable to do what the first violins can do, they just don't care. If the bowing is off, if they miss a few notes, or even if they fall asleep a bit during a concert, it doesn't matter, just as long as the final result works. The crazy part about them is that when put under the pressure a second violinist has been known to outshine a first violinist, and it is hilarious when they do. It's just who they are, they've risen above, or just remained ignorant, of everything that the first violins are so in love with, and just enjoy the music that they're a part of with an easier part that they don't have to worry so much about.

Violas are the red headed step child of the orchestra. Everything is built around violas getting the short end of the stick. Composers hate violas and never give them a time to shine, conductors always seem to gravitate towards picking out some weird mistake from the section, and the orchestra finds itself quite often sitting in rehearsals having to wait while the violas are drilled for a half hour over a simple run that they should have learned. Again, a lot like the second violins it's not that they're not skilled, or don't know what they're doing, one of the best musicians I have ever had the privilege to sit anywhere near and hear play was a viola, but even he was a glutton for punishment and couldn't carry the section on his shoulders. They never get a time to shine, they always get the weirdest parts that they're forced to play, but as much as the orchestra makes fun of them and they seem to always be out of luck, without that weird group called the viola section the orchestra would sound empty. They're perfectly okay with being unappreciated, and they use all of their talent just to make sure that the middle voice of a chord or an unheard line of harmony works perfectly with the rest of the orchestra.

Cellists are bonkers. Where other sections will joke and have fun, we're the weird ones. I don't even know where to start about us because I'm one of them, but imagine a group of people exactly like me in a room together, working together.

The bass section is all of the slackers, but ingenious slackers. They are stuck for hours of rehearsal playing some of the most uncomplicated lines in the piece which is almost impossible to screw up. Professional level bass players are quite often playing at the level of middle school orchestras just because they're the bass section. They are AMAZINGLY talented musicians and learn how to do silly stupid things on their massive beasts of instruments that if put down wrong can, and will, crush the toys that people call violins, but the composers have decided to force them with the short stick and keep everything together by playing the most basic of lines while the first violins do all of the fancy work, so they have time to think, and it's a deadly thing. You ever want to sneak anything in or out of a rehearsal? Get the bass section to help you out. You want to go to sleep during the middle of a rehearsal? Find a bass player to loan you their case and use it as a sleeping bag. They have zero stress, and are the closest thing to a California surfer that you're going to find where they just hang out and chill in the back of the orchestra.

There's of course the winds (who are their own series of cliques) and the percussion (ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL!!!!) but in general all of the instruments in a typical orchestra are going to run somewhere around those stereotypes. What's interesting about all of this is that when you're 10 years old and picking out an instrument to play, you don't pick it out by talking to dozens of people that also play the instrument and find out which one matches your personality the best, you just pick it, and those that stick with that instrument are typically those that have those personalities. The reason you don't see any slacker first violin players is because they don't fit in, it's not part of the first violin culture. You're not going to find a viola player that is self-obsessed because it's not who they are. The reason that certain people can't play in certain sections is not because they're lacking skill, it's because they don't match the role that the section fills.

The same goes with life. You don't see people with masters degrees at dead end call centers not because they can't do the work, or it's too difficult for them, you don't see them there because it doesn't match their personality and who they are. Just like you don't see lazy people becoming doctors, it's not that they couldn't eventually learn what it takes to become a doctor, it's because they don't fit the culture and what it means to be there.

When trying to find a job or where you fit into in the big scheme of things, it doesn't really matter if you're skilled or not, you can always learn, everyone can; the problem comes down to fitting into your role in the bigger scheme of things. Unlike those middle school kids unknowingly picking up a random instrument and figuring out too late that they don't fit the bill to play it, be grown up and take a different approach to life. Figure out who you are, what you do, what you like, and then figure out where you fit into the big scheme of things. If you fit the bill to be a bass player, do it, but don't lie to yourself if you're a second violinist and think that you can chill with the cello section because you're not going to make it, you're not going to enjoy your life. It doesn't matter how great the music sounds, or how great of a person you are individually, you need to figure out where you fit, and play your part in that section.