Platinum or Bust

Partially because I want to play another game on my bookshelf (Lightning Returns) I popped in this game back into my ps3 recently and started down the path of self flagellation to 100% this thing.

I have played it enough that I should have done it last time, it wouldn't have been much more of a grind, but I was stupid and wanted to go and play FF XIII-2 (which I then promptly platinumed in about two weeks time).

This time, to remind myself of the game and what is happening, I'm going to do it. I'm finally going to put on my big boy RPG pants, and grind out this platinum. It's a good game, this will be the third playthrough that I've given it (first one for casual playthrough, second for 13-2, and this one for Lightning Returns) and it's still a graphically beautiful and rich game. What's really interesting about this time through is that I've been keeping an eye partially on speedruns of this game so I can get to the end game as fast as possible (which is where I'm missing my trophies for the platinum).

The speedruns of this game are interesting because they beat this game from start to finish in the time that it took me to get into the third or fourth chapter when I was on my first playthrough and killing everything that I could in hopes of getting the exp that I needed. I'm not going full fledged speed run this third time, but I'm dodging around a lot of fights, not exp grinding as hard as possible, and it's sort of challenging/interesting that you can still do some of the big boss fights that you'd assume you'd need broken levels and gears to fight as long as you know the mechanics of the game and you play smart.

For this third playthorugh I'm starting to notice that this game you have two different styles of play. You can either play smart, or you can play strong. You can either walk into a fight with everything maxed, ready to go and just brute force your way through the fight (which works) or you can play smart. You're under leveled, under geared, and generally in a rock and a hard place, but if you're smart about how you play and smart about where you're headed with things, you can still beat the game.

For example, recently I had to do the Shaz summon fight. I'm going to call it Ifrit because it's always Ifrit no matter what they try to call him.

Typically you make Shaz a heavy magic user (ravager) and use ice on the fire monster. It makes sense. Ice beats fire, so cast enough ice and win. The problem with that is when I was at this point in the game, my Shaz only had fire spells. He didn't have enough levels to get ice, and he wasn't close to getting it any time soon, so going back and trying to grind out just a bit more exp for the boss fight wasn't an option. Typically I would consider tnohis a lost cause and I'd either give up the game or reset the entire thing and start over again. The normal answer isn't working, the expected solution isn't there, and there's no way to easily fix it, but then (after talking to a few people online) showed a solution to the problem that works for an underleveled Shaz that doesn't have ice magic.

That's how the entire game has been during this 'speed run' of mine.

I'm not taking 100+ hours to finish the game this time (like the second playthrough where I killed everything possible and got in as many fights as I could), I'm playing smart. I'm dodging fights whenever possible, picking up exp only from fights that I know I can win, and doing boss fights as smart as I can. It's a different way of playing the game, and it's fun because instead of walking into a fight knowing that I am stronger, knowing that I have the best gear ever, I'm constantly worried. I'm constantly worried that one wrong move will Dark Souls me into a death screen, but I know at the same time that when I survived the fight it's because I was smarter than the game and that it was because of my control that made the difference.

Don't get me wrong, I'm worried as all hell when the end gets near and I know that I have to have some more power behind what I'm doing, so I'm most likely going to do a bit of grinding to make sure that I'm not as nerfed as those people who hold world  records for speed running the game. It's just an interesting look at a game that I thought I knew pretty well because I'm forcing myself to play it completely differently just by trying to run to the end of the game as fast as I can.

All of this, just for a fake trophy that no one sees or cares about, because I want to have this one at 100%. I can try to say that I'm playing through this one more time to make it make sense when I play Lightning Returns, but honestly, it's just because I feel like I abandoned it and I need to play it to 100% because it's a good game and deserves it.

IM MESSAGE OF DOOM! - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/70/other-peoples-mail

My freshman year I got in trouble for a bunch of things, and I didn't make the best deicions I have done in my life, but the one that got me in the most trouble was the IM message of DOOOOM!

I can not find it, and it makes me somewhat happy that I can't.

The message was from my very first roommate to his girlfriend back home. I had seen them chatting to one another, when he left the room for class and left his computer up with the AIM chat still open with his girlfriend. She even wrote a few things while he was gone.

It was just sitting there, staring at me.

I kept seeing it update, I didn't know what it was about, and I just had to know. I did the unforgivable thing, and grabbed his computer and read the AIM message that was sitting right in front of me and it turned out to be the most amazing/horrible thing ever, because he was sex chatting his girlfriend who he was apparently sleeping with.

Let's all remember that this is freshman year at BYU where there's an honor code, everyone is expected to be super moralistic, and life is supposed to be clean, chaste, and pure. Having a girlfriend that you hold hands with is a big deal, but having a girlfriend talking about how she just wants to have your hands up her shirt touching her, and other more explicit details is just about the most insane thing that you can ever think of.

There's a reason that Robert and I never made it past Thanksgiving break, because I was not smart in how I used that information, nor was I understanding to his situation. It wasn't pretty, and it wasn't exactly his mail that I opened up and started to read, but the results were about the same. It was something personal that he didn't want me to read, and I did exactly what I should not have done and opened it up and read every single word of it.

On an unrelated note, you'll notice that I'm not writing nearly as in depth as I used to, and my story telling is cutting things a bit short. Yeah, I'm aware of that, but I'd much rather have partial stories and ideas up here working through My American Life, than to have no writings at all. For now, while I'm doing a million different things at once, you're getting shorter things. 

House Hunting - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/69/dream-house

Alicia and I have recently started to house hunt, and she has started in on watching a rediculous amount of HGTV. Other people's dream houses are huge! They have so many things and it's sort of stupid how expensive those dream homes even are. Our ideas are significantly smaller, and there comes my dream home.

The one, single, holy cow that is my dream, thing that I would like in a home? A space for me.

One single room that is mine.

I don't want to share, I don't want to make it a hybrid room, I don't want anything else. I want a study, a library, a office, or whatever else that you want to call it, that belongs only to me. It has bookshelves in it, it has a desk, and it has a laptop or a computer for me to write. The room doesn't have to be massive, it just has to be mine. I want a place that I can go to where I can do what I want to do.

Bonus points if it has good sound proofing so I don't hear everything that is happening around me.

That is what my dream home is. I don't care if its 4 rooms or 40 rooms. I don't care if I have a huge house, or whatever else. The floor plan doesn't need to be two stories, it doesn't need to be an 'open concept', it doesn't need to be hyper modern, or have fancy hard wood floors, I only want one thing. For my dream home, I just want a space for me. I want a space where I can read and write without any interruptions, and that's the dream. A room where I have control of technology and can tell people to turn off their phones, where I can sit and write without looking like a freak trying to balance a laptop on my lap while sitting in a couch that is surrounded by Addison's cleaning toys and half covered in unfolded laundry.

Going Out On A LImb - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/68/lincolns-second-inaugural

There is a minor rule in this world that white guys can not talk about race. It's an even bigger rule out there that you can't talk about racism being gone, or things possibly being fixed, we're going to break out of those standards and just say it.

As a white kid, being surrounded by minorities while growing up, by being surrounded by different ethnicity and seeing what it is that they had to go through, I think that in some places racism is a thing of the past.

Of course, there is always going to be some idiot who is dragging their feet and can't give up their slave owning, racial hating ways, but it's getting to be less. Now, despite what the news media would like to lead me to believe, I don't think that race is a key aspect to every single crime, I don't think that the world is out to hurt one skin color over another, but I do know that in some locations, with some bigoted people that are close minded and refuse to see the world in any other way than 'us versus them' racism is still there. Yes it needs to stop, yes that is something that we should see and get rid of, but let's compare some stats.

50 years ago - how many crimes were race related? How many deaths were race related? How many jobs were absolutely banned for specific ethnicity just because of their skin color?
20 years ago - same questions?
10 years ago? 5 years ago?

In my opinion, I think that the US is getting better. The reason that the news media jumps on a racial crime so fast and just won't let it go is because it's such a rarity in the general populous that we are shocked to see that something like that is happening.

The number one thing that I can't wait for is the baby boomer generation to finally bite the dust. They are some of the most closed minded, racial people that exist. Without fail the older generation will say offensive things about people of other races, they will insult immigrants even though their own family line is full of immigrants, and they want nothing to do with any culture besides their own. Not everyone is that grandma who complains about people who speak Spanish. I hate to spoil this, but America doesn't have a national language. It's TOTALLY okay for them to speak Spanish. It's even okay for signs to be in Spanish. Just because you can't understand what is going on does not mean that you are right and they are wrong. Have you ever considered racist grandma that your English all the time is unnerving to them the same way their Spanish is unnerving to you?

I've rambled a bit, and I'm still trying to skirt the issue, but when it comes to race, I do not think  that we are as bad as we were even 20 years ago. We're not perfect, it's not 100%, but there are places out there where race is not an issue. Where we are living the dream and we are doing what people have been dreaming about.

Unfortunately, Utah is not one of those places. The neighborhood I am currently in and the society that I am part of is one of the least accepting and understanding of outsiders that I have ever seen. Love one another seems to only apply when they believe like us, look like us, and don't do anything differently, and it irks me. We're getting better, but we sure aren't at 100% yet.

Irony

Going back to read some things from my students, and I found this from my most troublesome student who thinks that everything I am teaching him is worthless and there is no value to my class. I couldn't believe just how amazingly ironic it is that he wrote this at the start of my class, and now acts as though my class is a burden that he has to suffer through. If it helps, this is the same student who wrote the immortal student response of "I cat say that it dose."

I remember when I was a little child learning how to read, it was hard and sometimes I thought to myself "I will never need this!" of course we know this isn't true, for it opened up a whole new world filled with fun, new, and exciting things. This particular time in my life does make me wonder if there are not other things in my life that I could seek out and master.

TV - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/67/your-dream-my-nightmare

I don't like watching TV.

It's not because I'm hipster or anything like that, I just do not like watching TV. The reason is simple, I get bored.

Sitting on a couch and doing nothing but watching a TV is a bore. There's nothing keeping me awake, there's nothing that is interesting. Whenever I watch TV I think about anything besides what is on TV. I think about what I'm going to be teaching in my class the next day, what I'm going to cook for dinner, what I'm going to write about, what game I'm going to play, or any other action that I am going to take, because watching TV is not a serious action. I know that it's a verb, and it's something that you do, but active thought is not involved with it in any way shape or form.

People say that they watch TV to 'turn off their brain' or something along those lines. I agree with that. Watching a TV turns my brain off, but it turns it off too well, and it makes me think about nothing. If I'm going to relax, I want to do something to help me turn off my brain. Writing is my quick go to when I want to relax. Writing is an activity that I love to do to turn off my brain. It gets me sleepy, it gets my brain focused on something else, and I'm still doing something. Even playing a video game is something that I can actually do to relax my brain and turn it off for a bit, because I'm actively doing something, I'm modifying and creating something.

The whole, your heaven, my hell, idea comes because where I like to do anything but watch TV, Alicia LOVES watching TV. Her dream vacation of relaxation would include a lot of time sitting in front of the TV.

Now with that being said, it's one of those things that it seems so closely related that you start to wonder why I would hate watching TV so much, but for my dream vacation I would e seated in front of a TV or monitor myself playing a game or writing. The difference is my participation within the relaxation. With a TV, I'm not a participant, I'm just an observer, which I can't stand. I don't like it when I have to sit back and observe, I want to be doing something.

For Alicia she loves watching TV and observing, and because I super duper love her, she wins the control over the TV when we're at home, so we watch TV shows. I don't like it, in fact I have to find other things to focus on because it gets so boring to me that it physically becomes uncomfortable for me to keep watching, but she's my person so I do it. It's her heaven, but it's my hell.

Why?! Just Why?!

I am working on 100%ing Borderlands the Pre-Sequel and I'm starting to get angry at 2k Australia.

The problem at hand is that to get the 100% you have to do a few things that are really grindy. Now, I'm a fan of grinding, I play RO, which is the king of all grinding games, but it has to get me something. At this point I'm grinding pointless things like shooting monsters in the face with a shotgun, not for items, not for exp, not for anything of value, but just to unlock one thing so that I can get 100%.

Then comes Claptrap's 100%.

Each character has a special skill. Each character has their own part of 100% to show that you used them enough to kill X amount of people, or use it for a specific amount of time. It makes sense, after 100 kills, you've used the character quite a bit and are getting comfortable with them, here's a trophy. Then there's Claptrap's stupid trophy.

The reason it's stupid? It's randomly generated as to what he does. He has a list of skills that he can do, and depending on what is happening at the moment, the game randomly generates one of them. The catch to this, you have to be at least level 25 (that's the level you're typically at, at the END of the first playthrough) to unlock more skills to appear on the list. The trophy itself? You have to trigger every single randomly generated skill. The kicker to all of that? You can't even do that on your own! If you want to get Claptrap to do certain skills you HAVE TO be playing with other players.

Now, this has been diverted in past Borderlands games because if you ever ran into something like having to win a duel, you just plugged in controller #2 for a bit, and killed yourself. You can't afk on a controller because the other player has to actively be playing for certain skills to trigger. To get it, you have to first get to level 25 (finish a playthrough, which is not a short thing to do), then play enough multiplayer with active players and hope that you randomly trigger the skills that you need. I know, weird rant, especially considering that instead of just giving up and letting it go, I'm going to play through it and make sure that I trigger every possible one, mainly just a small complaint.

I Cat Say That It Dose

I love student reviews. Love them. They're an amazing tool to see what my students think of me, and how I fit within their view of an educator. At the same point, I have the added bonus of seeing how well my work has done during the semester because part of my job is to help them write in an educated and professional manner.

There are students who show that they have learned, and have put in the effort to learn, and their reviews are well written with full sentences with proper punctuation and grammar. Then there are students who have sluffed off class, don't care about what I'm talking about, and don't pay attention in class, and their reviews of me are just awesome.

The winning comment this go around was to the question that went along the lines of, "How does this class stimulate thinking?"

The winning comment falls from the keyboard of a student who from day one thought my class was annoying and stupid and has given no effort to try to learn. His response was, "I cat say that it dose."

Now, let's be perfectly clear. I do not see his name on the reviews. I don't know with 100% accuracy who wrote that review. It could have been ANYONE in the class of 10 people. But just with that amazing sentence I can knock out at least 1/2 of the class because I know that five of them would never, ever, catch themselves writing like that now days. Then I can slowly process of elimination, thinking about assignments that were just turned in to me, and think about of those five other students, who would ever write a sentence like that? It turns out, he wrote winner sentences like that in his homework that he just turned in. It's not an exact science, but I know exactly who it is without knowing exactly who it is that wrote it.

The same goes for my other classes. I know their writing styles enough, and know their words enough that I can tell who wrote what about me. It's not 100% sure, and there's some that are a bit ambiguous as to who wrote them, but typically speaking, the worse their writing and their critiques of me, the higher the chance is that I have a pretty good idea of who wrote it. I have a few other winners that I might put in here later, but for now, the winning comment of today from my students, "I cat say that it dose."

How do you not see it?

Student of mine, paper they turned in, paragraph about describing a hospital waiting room -

"There were mothers with their kids, old people sleeping in the lobby, and sever others in crotches and wheelchairs. The room also smelled like medicine. The entire room was gray color. The smell, color of the room, and the people in crotches and wheelchairs, for some reason, made me even more scared."

Yup, that is not a misspelling. That is exactly what my student wrote.

How do you not see that and notice it's the wrong word?

Meet Up - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/66/tales-from-the-net

During my first year of college I ran into an online community of glowsticking.com (gsc). On gsc I talked, I made friends, I had fun, and I screwed around. For me (and many other people that were on the forums) gsc became a personal community that we were all part of. The gsc community was just like being in a neighborhood community, church community, or even school community. There were people that were in charge, those that were focused on one element of the community over others, and every other element of a deeply made community. We had talk about theology and philosophy, car mechanics, love, relations, and countless other topics, all under the idea of talking about glowsticking. For me, it was a great community. I could participate, be myself, and do it all from the safety of my dorm room, but then came the summer when there were meet ups.

Meet ups have always been weird to me because it takes everything from a very digital and text based arena, to something that is very physical, and very verbal area. For some people (like me) this is a weird transition of things. My strength (I'd at least like to believe it's a strength) is my ability to write. I write, and I write a lot. It's what I like to do, and hopefully from doing that I've become decent enough at it. However, when I talk, I stammer occasionally, my thoughts are not as clear, and it's not how I want it to be, so I don't like it as much. But then there's the real problem with meet ups - on the internet, no one knows who you are.

For example, for the longest time on GSC I had my profile picture being a hobo that I had taken a picture of and had nothing to do with me. I didn't post many/any pictures of myself, and even the videos of me were in darkly lit rooms with glowsticks spinning around me. My actual image, my voice, and who I was as a physical person, wasn't actually that well known to the people around me. This mystery of who is who lead to a 'Hello my name is' tag given to everyone where you had to put your gsc name. Not your real name, your name that you had on the internet.

This funky little tradition is something that is unique to the internet. Normally you learn who a person is, what they look like, what they sound like, and who they are physically first, and then you get to learn about who they are mentally, but with the internet it's totally different. One of the most interesting phrases that came out of people's mouths at gsc meet ups were things like, "You're not Asian?" or even better, "You're a girl?" (the second not said to me, obviously, but you get the point). Where else in the world can you get to know people, talk to them, have deep conversations about philosophy and religion, and not know their gender? It's a unique world, the internet, because it provides perfect anonimity. It's a powerful thing, and is eye opening to what you find is important about a person. You find that it doesn't matter what a person actually looks like, or if they're rich or poor, it focuses in on their personality, education, sense of self. It's a great thing when you can finally look past skin color, ethnicity, gender, financial status, and instead you can focus on the person on the inside. Given, it's not perfect because you're still focusing on people with names like 2Sec0 or GlowFlow and there's some flaws within the system, but in a truly idealistic setting, the internet is a one of a kind place that allows people to talk equally with one another for better (in some places) or worse (in every other place where people are just unknowingly inconsiderate to one another).

Don't know, don't care - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/65/whos-canadian

Who's Canadian? Don't know, don't care.

I've never understood what the big deal is when a person is from a different country, especially if that country is an English speaking country, and especially when that English speaking country has almost no accent compared to the American accent.

So what? They're from Canada. Does that really change anything? As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter. This is a typical statement across the board no matter where people are from. There are a few cultural differences, and expecations that people have on one another or on the government depending on where they grew up, but past those differences, it doesn't really change people that much.

A hundred years ago, the difference between countries was huge. In 1915, the difference from one country to another was huge, the communication at a worldwide scale was impossibly hard, and people stayed with their own. Now days, I can get street cameras in Hong Kong on my computer whenever I want.

http://traffic.td.gov.hk/SwitchCenter.do

I can post anything online and anyone with an internet connection in the world can see it. I have the ability, from my home in my PJ's to call up anyone with Skype, for the cost of internet, with no fees for international calls, and on top of that, it's not even a normal phone call, it's a video call.

With that much communication, and that large of a global market, if anyone wanders outside of their country, it's no big deal. It's an international community now days, and the US is a major player in that community, so there's no big deal (to me at least) if my news anchor is from a different country or not, because I just want my news, I don't care where or who gives it to me. The same goes for my actors, musicians, artists, neighbors, or anything else. I don't care where they've been, or where they're from, I just want to know if they are going to fill a role in my life that they are expected to fill.

The Games Alicia Play - The Games I've Played

Alicia finally has a game that she likes.

The only problem with this? I'm not allowed to touch it.

From what I can tell, I would love the game, but I'm only watching it while Addison runs around or while Alicia calls me in to help her with one area of one level.

The problem is, Alicia doesn't know how to use a modern controller for a game. She can look (sort of) or walk (sort of) but to ask her to use both joysticks at the same time in unison to look and run, strafe, or do anything like that, is near impossible. This leads to some very . . . interesting, events.

Just like any good game, Portal 2 is on a curve. It starts out trying to teach you the basic elements to the game and then it stretches you one bit at a time, constantly getting harder, constantly making you think and constantly growing to include new things. The problem with this is that because of that constant growth in difficulty, Alicia is constantly trying to menuver herself in a new way that she has never had to, but the bad news about this was that for the first few levels, which should have been the easiest, because she was so new to controllers and understanding how they work, it took a REALLY long time.

Let me clarify. Alicia was doing one of the first puzzles. It was so early on in the game that she didn't even have a portal gun to work with, all she had access to were buttons that would activate the portals. There were four areas - 1 was the large open area where you could press three other buttons, 2 was a sealed off area with a block 3 was an area with a place to put said block to unlock the door in the sealed off area of section 4.

Even written down it seems pretty straight forward. Press the button to get the portal to the block, grab the block, make a portal to section 3, put the block on the spot, make a portal to the door, walk out. Because she was still trying to get used to looking and walking at the same time, she spent the majority of the puzzle fighting herself and the confusion of not staring at the ground all the time, instead of actually fixing the puzzle that she had to deal with.

From the looks of Portal 2, I just might like the game, but as for now, the only person that is gaming in my home isn't me.

Summer Jobs Are the Best Jobs - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/64/summer

All of my favorite jobs have been summer jobs.

Given, I've only really had two jobs during the summer, either life-guarding in Las Vegas, or working grounds crew at BYU.

The best part about a summer job, and it's sort of how I met my wife and really quite true, is that during the summer you get to do just about whatever you want and be whatever you want. During the school year, I was the super nerd. No shame, no bashing, it's who I was. Come on people, I've already admitted to going to nationals for a SCIENCE competition, don't make me have to show you even more about how big a nerd I am/was. However, during summer, especially as a lifeguard, I was in a swimsuit and tee shirt just like all of my other co-workers, and I was part of the group. They didn't know I was a nerd, they didn't know that I was reading Dante for fun (or at least not until I brought it to work and started reading it during my break), they only thought that I was a kid who knew how to swim and liked coaching swim team.

The same went for my summer job at BYU. We knew that we were all BYU students, and we knew that we were in school, but during that summer job everyone on the team was created equal. Mowing the field was good enough for all of us, and we were all covered in dirt any day that we had to lay sod, and it was perfect. During those times we were all equal, we were all on the summer crew of the grounds team.

Summer jobs are where the fun and games are at. Even teachers understand that summer jobs are the best jobs because they get the opportunity (if they're lucky) to take off summer and do something else with their life. 

One More Thing - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/63/one-thing

Like anyone, there were moments in my life where things start to revolve around one thing. Around high school there were times that my attention revolved around orchestra, or solos, or science, or anything that I could have been working on, or even those rare times that I was a normal kid and things focused on things like fun. I've had a few that have gone up and down, a few that have been bigger or smaller obsessions than others, but this is how I knew, and I mean, really knew, that I was going to go into my major.

Whenever I got into trouble I would be limited to only the basics, school, home, and if I was lucky (or if it was for an extended period of time) the library. No TV, no computer, no friends, no phone, not much of anything to talk about, but I had books and the ability to write.

This is where I have to get down to specifics. I'm not a fan of books, that's not where the obsession lies. Books are great, they're fun, they're interesting, and you can get some good stuff out of them, but where things really kick into interest for me is when I get to create.

Creating a world, creating a story, creating something that no one else has ever seen ever before, creating something that is truly mine, creating something that is unlike anything else because I have ownership of it, that is something that I absolutely love, and the funny part is that it's not just with writing stories. This is why I love D&D so much. Writing stories is nice, but D&D is pure creation, and then letting other people play around in it. Writing you don't get people's moment to moment reactions of what is going on, what they like, and what they don't like from your creation, but in D&D you're right there and you get told exactly what people are thinking as you play.

Now, I'm sure that this is also true for writing, when you finally get published, and there are more people than a few dozen that read what you're writing, but for now, the biggest (and most consistent) audience I have ever had to go through my creations is in D&D.

Recently at work, one of my co-workers has started to read the draft of DA that is on google drives and I can not tell you the pure excitement it brings m when I get a random message from her about what I wrote. It's amazing for me to see that what I created is getting the reaction that I'm wanting, it's making her go through the exact things that I wanted her to go through, and it's grabbing her and not letting go. It's amazing to watch what you created to do what you actually want it to. People say that creative writing is nothing like engineering or building, but I have to disagree, having to do manual labor and at the end of the day knowing and seeing everything that I had created for that day is just about the same feeling as when I finish a chapter and someone reads it and everything goes perfectly planned. That same feeling an architect gets when their building is finally made and kids are playing in it the way they intended is the exact same feeling that I get when someone reads my creation (or plays my creation) and it works exactly as I intended. 

Everything for Nothing - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/62/something-for-nothing

Everyone knows at least one person in their life that always wants to get something for nothing. I've got a few options, but I'll tell you all about one of mine.

The weird part about people that want something for nothing, is that often, they don't start off that way, or they even hate other people that want something for nothing. It's one of the most odd things that I have ever seen where the person who wants something for nothing, is on WIC, and living in their parent's house on and off throughout the years, also hates the idea of any government hand outs and criticizes Obama for being a  socialist.

This guy hates hand outs, he thinks that anyone who accepts hand outs are lazy, and is one of those people that support the idea of putting stronger limitations on medicare, medicaid, welfare, and is seemingly morally opposed to all things dealing withe the affordable healthcare act. At the same time of hating everything that is subsidized, free, or otherwise assisted, the kid (because even though he's my age, he still acts like he's a kid) is living his life, expecting everything for nothing.

There are people that talk about privileged people and having to check your privilege, and he is one of those that quickly come to mind. He has had things handed to him so much, with such a regular cycle that I seriously wonder if he ever exited the system that he has found himself in, how well he would be able to do on his own. Out of all of the time that he's been married, his family has been on WIC, he's lived in subsidized housing (university ran off campus housing that is significantly cheaper than other housing in the nearby area) or has lived at home rent free, has a part time job that pays just enough money to keep him from going bankrupt, and then has a serious amount of student loans (most of which are subsidized from the government). He is a student that is still working his way through his masters program, but then there comes the kicker to the entire thing, once he gets his masters in Shakespearean studies (seriously, the man has never studied or been interested in the theater at all, and was practically handed a position in that masters program so he took it because no one else in their right mind would specialize in Shakespeare) his plan is to teach theater at a high school.

This would seem like he's willing to work, but you have to understand the following - he has no qualifications to teach theater, he has no experience in a theater, has no experience acting, directing, or doing tech for a production, and is limited his search for a teaching position to one (yes only one) high school. He wants that something, and he's willing to put in just about no work for that position and expects that he'll have it.

It's frustrating talking to him, because even though he's in his late 20's, he's still clueless about simple things in life, like the actual cost of living. He's so used to getting something for nothing, and has never learned anything other than that, that his default thought process is that he's going to get someone else to help him out instead of doing it himself. The most frustrating part about this is his definition of disposable income. He has a wife and 1 1/2 kids (the second one is on the way) and because he's living out of his parents house (or at least is on rotation because he goes out and tries to live in the real world, but ultimately just goes running back home to live in the basement) his disposable income is stupid. You want to take a month long vacation to Russia? Sure! You want to buy a top notch TV with a Wii-U? Yup, all yours. The kid has less income than me by a long shot (his wife doesn't work and stays at home versus me with two jobs, and Alicia working her full time) but because he has so many sources of people paying for things he can get it.

The only thing that makes me feel happy when talking to him (and the other people in my life that want something for nothing) is that in the short term, they might be able to get what they want, they might be able to fake things in the short term, but in the long term when time finally sets in and they have to move on past where they're doing this holding pattern, they'll never be able to get out of it. As annoying as it is to watch him, and being frustrated by every single thing that he's doing, the thing that makes me smile is knowing that in a few years he'll still be trying to live in his parents basement, while I'm (hopefully) living in my own house.

Science Fiasco - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/61/fiasco

Fiascos, the best ones, are when you're trying to do something amazing, stretching beyond what your normal expectations are and then falling on your face in a spectacular way. The best moments, for a true fiasco, are when you someone starts to reach beyond their bounds, improving themselves, making them becoming something better than what they are by their own nature, and then falling back to their normal nature.

There's a lot of them, and in any good life, you're going to have a dozen and a half of them on a yearly basis, but some times you've got better ones than others. With that said, I've got options for which fiasco we're going to tackle, let's go for a high school moment that everyone tried to look past and pad, but in reality it was a full fledged fiasco.

We all know that I'm a big fat nerd, and as part of that, I was part of my high school's science olympiad team.

Yup, I'm a big ol' nerd. For those that don't know what this is it's a series of competitions that a school puts together a team on, and you compete with other schools for the title. The competitions are things like making a bridge from balsa wood that needed to hold a certain weight, or making a musical instrument that must be able to play a specific range, or just straight up physics/chemistry/astronomy, or whatever else quiz that you'd take.

There's a slightly less known fact, that in some states and areas, this thing is competitive. There is even a national competitions with 50 teams coming together and ranking against each other, to try to see who is the biggest nerd of the nerds.


Here are the results for the first year -
Here are the results for the second year -

For either one, you're looking for Las Vegas High School, and you'll notice that our scores were a fiasco each year that we went to nationals.

The problem with Science Olympiad nationals, was that there was no reason that we should have been there. In the state of Nevada, there was no competition. There was no competition in our school district, there was no competition in our area, and the only place that we had to deal with any sort of competition was when we did a state wide competition that pulled from the entire state, about four other teams. Even on the worst case scenario when dealing with things on state, we would get fourth place in an event. The thing was that a few people on the team that really knew what they were doing and had specialties in their areas were carrying the team. Those two or three people were the reasons we were going to nationals, and the rest of us just grabbed on to their coat tails, claimed that we were studying and preparing for what was ahead of us, and got beat like a read headed step child when we finally got there. 

I'd like to think that I was one of the people that carried, and I knew what I was talking about (I mean, I got decent scores on what I was doing, at least I didn't get dead last like some of my other cohorts) but we were all in it together, so we all were part of the fiasco.

The problem with everything, wasn't just that we thought that we were hot stuff because we were state champions, but because for some reason that I still don't understand, we didn't think about traveling to nationals. We thought that we'd bring the same things, pack the same way, and do exactly what we did for state (which was just a small road trip away) for the airplane trip across the country to a place we had never been before. This might not seem like much, but you have to realize that some of these categories require some pretty complicated machines and materials.

These things aren't friendly to pack. There was an entire event to make the lightest planes that you have ever seen in your life.

The lists of projects only increases, and the first problem we ran into without even knowing it, was how to get all of our stuff across the nation. We packed our gears, got ready, and then we realized that once we were there, that everything that we had shipped was broken. The things that we had spent months building were destroyed, and no amount of super glue and duct tape could fix them.

The only thing that hit us any harder was that in our state competition we doubled up on topics. We didn't have a 'full' team, we did enough work so that we would double up on events. I wasn't just in charge of the music competition, I was also involved in the biology competition, the astronomy competition, and a few others. The problem with this is that when we got to nationals, we realized that our system of doubling up on topics and events was going to bite us, and it bit us hard.

You see the problem with the organization of the events was that quite often, on the day of the event, a few of us would have to be doing two things on opposite sides of the university campus at the exact same time. All of that time spent studying in multiple topics, being better than anyone else in that specific topic, ruined because we had to figure out how to put a warm body in the chair to be there at the competition. Suddenly people that had no experience in a specific competition were being forced into them, saying that hopefully they knew enough about the topic that they'd be able to fill in any blanks.

Together this meant that we had broken gear, our teams were mixed up, and most people weren't prepared for the topics that we were facing. By the end of the day we had been stuck in tests asking professional levels of questions that even college students would have difficulty answering, and knowing nothing about them. We went from being the comfortable Nevada state champions, to being beat down and shown just how stupid we actually were. It was a fiasco.

Last Minute

There is a special kind of stupid that I deal with.

I tell my students - get your proposals in and approved or else you will fail. You need to turn them in or else you are not going to get a good grade, turn in your proposals now or else face the consequences. I even told them that if they do not get a 100% on their proposal that they would have to rewrite until they got a 100% because without a perfect proposal they weren't going to do well on anything else.

I had a student submit his proposal for the final paper less than a half hour before class started.

I don't know if I should congratulate him on having the biggest pair of balls in the history of ever because if he hadn't done what was needed he would have had to re-write it and resubmit in the 20 minutes he gave himself, or if I should just pay respect to the dozen or so brain cells rattling around in his head for at least realizing the time and place and at least attempting to get me it sort of in time.

Adam The Mortician - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/60/business-of-death

In high school the guidance counselor inevitably comes up to one of your classes and makes you sit through a career advisement course. Somehow when you're fifteen, just figuring out puberty, and just starting to understand what in the world is going on in your own body, you're supposed to sit down and answer a test, that's not even worth a grade in the class, with enough competency to know what you're going to be when you grow up.

I sat through the test, did as great as I could because they were all weird questions about who I was, what I liked, and how I would react in certain situations, and waited for the results.

I can't remember my full list, I can't even remember the top five jobs that they thought that I'd be good at, but I do remember that somewhere on that long list of jobs that the test said that I would like, one of them was a mortician. Somewhere, somehow, the test got the idea that I would be a good person to host your funeral.

Don't get me wrong, I'd totally be down to host your funeral. I'd let you clown car an entire family into a casket, or whatever else pops up during weird funeral requests, and I'd sit there and say that I'm sorry for your loss, but honestly, because we all know that I run from a solid 4-6 and really don't care that much for people around me, let alone those people that I only see once, I wouldn't care.

This stuck in the back of my mind, knowing that I would never actually be a mortician (I always knew that I wanted to go further in my education than organizing your death) and then I met Brother Smith. Brother Smith was my Sunday school teacher, and also a forensic dentist (also the dean of UNLV dentistry school, but way more cool to say that he was a forensic dentist). Each Sunday he would come in to church and teach a group of 16-18 year old kids about Jesus, and the dead body of the week.

Any major missing persons or random body found in the deserts of Las Vegas would hit the headlines of the Las Vegas Review Journal . . . and then the Sunday dead body of the week in Brother Smith's class. Mother killed herself after drowning her kids in a bathtub? More details at 6 on channel 8 . . . or at 10 AM on Sunday three doors away from the bishop's office. Needless to say, we never missed a day in Sunday school because everyone, both the boys and the girls, loved dead body of the week. He never called it that, it was just what we loving referred to him talking about his job and sooner or later, with some well placed questions from the group of us that loved it, the pictures of the dead bodies, we'd always get the dead body story of the week from him.

This culminated in my senior year. I don't know why, and I don't know how I managed to get it arranged, but I do remember that one day, he came and picked me up in his car (an amazing car, easily the most expensive car that I have driven in ever). I think he was trying to recruit me, or at least sell me on science (the major I wanted to go into when English wasn't on the table. Long story short it came down to something that was easy that was boring, or something that was hard that I loved. I went with the latter). We made it to the campus of UNLV's dental school, he took me on the tour, and then mentioned that he needed to drop by his other work at the coroner's office.

For those that don't know, or at least think they know from CSI, in the real CSI Las Vegas, you don't just check dental records if you find someone's teeth to identify them, you called in Dr. Smith, the forensic dentist, and he would check the teeth to help people get a name. He took me on a tour of the coroner's office, and then, he took me to the cooler.

I've done some awesome things in my life, if I can say so myself, but hands down, without reservation, going to see a room full of freshly dead people still ranks up there pretty high on my list of awesome things. To this day I think about working at the coroner's office, even part time, even at the weird shifts that no one wants to work, just because of how awesome it was.

I don't know what it is about dead bodies, but they really don't freak me out. It was the weirdest feeling, but I had a painful urge to poke the toes of the feet sticking out of the sheets. I wasn't grossed out by the suicide victims, the row of gang violence, or anything else that was floating through the office, I was intrigued. I have always liked being by myself, even while in large crowds, and I mean spectacularly large crowds, I love them because it's only in large mobs of thousands of people that you can feel perfectly all by yourself, but in that room, even with the attendance of Dr. Smith right next to me, I saw my dream job.

A captive, dead audience, not able to run away from me, not able to make fun of me, stuck with me, and I could do whatever I wanted, talk about whatever I wanted, listen to whatever I wanted, and those lumps of meat would sit there. The best part? The lumps of meat that worked around me that were alive and had opinions, didn't like the cooler. It does have a unique smell that takes a while to get used to, and also sort of sticks with you if you're in there for too long, but they don't like it. A job in the morgue would allow me silence from the people that are living, and yet give me meat puppets to talk to, interact with, and have on constant rotation. I don't need to make friends, a new person is going to get ran over in a few days and then I'll meet them.

I'm weird.

I know.

I mean, come on, I've even shown you guys the plans and rules for my funeral. I'm not black and dark gothy, but I'm real good friends with death and for some reason it does not scare me. Dead bodies, being surrounded by death, and everything that would be involved in that job are not things that scare me, they are things that I see and really start to consider aspects of a dream job.