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Category Archives: Rants –

Today must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursday. These posts will be my excuse to talk about whatever I want. Maybe start a discussion, or rant about how shitty or awesome my life is.

The unbearable sadness of being happy.

I’m going to be all super serious for a bit. If that’s not why you come here, please feel free to skip today’s post.

On the one hand I’ve got a pretty awesome life. I like the things I do. I do the things I like. On the other hand I’ve got a pretty depressing life. I’m so alone. Maybe even forever alone. 

How do you define a ‘good life’? Do I have one? I really don’t know. I am pretty much depressed all of the time, but I compensate by enjoying the fuck out of life pretty much all the time. A typical day for me is doing work I enjoy, and then going and goofing off in a variety of ways.

What brought on this maudlin contemplation you may way ask, and rightly so; and the answer is some drunk fucktard’s off-hand comment in a bar. Yay. So here is the breakdown. Said fucktard brought up Yankee Swap aka Dirty Santa aka a million other names. This a is a dumb Xmas game akin to secret santa, except with the option to steal gifts. If you don’t know what it is go look on wikipedia you lazy fuck. Anyways, I’d recently acquired from a charity auction a fantasy game called Gauntlet of Fools that has much in common with Dirty Santa… Each player gets to pick one hero to face a gauntlet of monsters (everyone faces the same monsters) but much like Yankee Swap you can steal heroes by making bigger boasts (My barbarian can face the gauntlet hungover. Well MY barbarian can do it hungover and with one hand tied behind his back). 

Anyways drunk ass fucktard made baseless aspersions upon my, and my friend’s ability to have girlfriends because we were even talking about board games. Never mind that my friend’s GF was just outside smoking, and he was drunk and stupid, it still hit home and reminded me how sad and alone I am. 

That’s not to say that on the whole I don’t enjoy the majority of the moments of my life. However I often feel like there could be, should be more. Do i really need an SO for my life to be fulfilling? I don’t know. It certainly wouldn’t make things worse, but I get by.

Animals and Lasers (FOR SCIENCE)

So I was thinking it’d be kind of neat to set up some sort of mechanical (possibly using Legos) device to move a laser pointer around to entertain animals. Then I was thinking… you could have it set to repeat the same pattern, and videotape your animal(s) reactions. You could even have it come on for sporadic periods through out the day and see if the animals can remember when the “red dot attacks” each day.

Free Movie or TV Show Idea

Please, by all means, someone make this. I would love to see it. If all else fails maybe I’ll write it myself.

Have a portal/dimensional door to another world … aliens or alternate history evil guys pour through. Half an hour into the movie, or end of the second episode of the TV Show the heroes close the portal. Probably at great cost, maybe some sacrifice themselves or get trapped on the other side to close it. The rest of the movie/show is devoted to dealing with all of “threat” that got through before the portal closed. There could be all sorts of complications, from non-combatants who came through to bad guys that go native or join up with criminal elements.

This could make for some really interesting drama…all of the interlopers don’t actually have to be evil, but all of them are stranded here. Some want to go home, but many came here to escape terrible situations “at home”.  Maybe they’ll want to naturalize, or maybe they’ll want to set up a regime here. Maybe some of them will join forces with local police forces to help hunt down criminal elements.

The problem with working two jobs…

…is there’s basically no such thing as overtime. Not that I mind working at the game store, but I do find my self more and more wishing I had more spare time. Instead I end up working extra hours at the game store. Still I find myself way more tired than I should be, and I know it’s not just the depression talking.

And as far as Sandy goes… I doubt we’ll be closed, but I can dream right? I’d love to have a weather day. Hell, I should probably just take a personal day sometime in the next couple of weeks. At least I’ve got Tuesdays half off these days.

And I still don’t have my Halloween costume solidified. I think I may try for Brian from Life of Brian. I’d need to find a white Yarmulke on fairly short notice. I suppose if all else fails I could do Jumping Jesus on a Pogo stick again (I still have one from a decade or so back).

A million emails …

So we’re getting ready to move to a new email provider which means it’s time to clean out my mailbox. That’s a thing that I love about Gmail… I don’t have to delete email … I just hit Archive and if I ever need it again it’s there. Just have to know what to search for.

On the otherhand, I’ve already deleted over 4 years worth of emails … I’m up to 2008 and I still have about 6k messages to go through. That’s about 4 messages a day. Which I suppose isn’t so bad… except that I know that majority of the messages are more recent … that is to say that by the time I’ve deleted all the messages from ‘8 and ‘9 I’ll probably still have 4 or 5k messages, and it’ll be more like 5-6 messages a day.

It makes my brain hurt, but there are definitely some messages in there I want to keep.

Today must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

As much as I love H2G2, Thursdays have become my favorite day of the week. Admittedly part of that is that it is the closest thing I get to a weekend. It’s the one day where I have to work none of my two (or three depending on  how you count) jobs. And often I can get together with some of my friends and play board and card games. And these friends are really digging Dominion, which is probably my all time favorite game so that doesn’t hurt either. And on this particular Thursday, we cut out of the game store early and relocated to my house where we played MORE Dominion with the addition of a few adult beverages. And it looks like this will continue to be our mode of operation for future Thursdays. Hurrah.

What do you do when your Doctor calls in Sick?

So I was supposed to visit my dentist today to get my temporary crowns replaced with slightly less temporary ones (don’t ask, it’s complicated and a little gross).

I got a call this morning that he wasn’t feeling well and telling me not to come in. Now, I’d asked for time off from work (and i do earn Sick Leave). I wonder what the proper etiquette is … should I have called in to work and let them know I was available after all (this is what I did)? If they don’t need me should I change my leave request to Annual Leave instead of Sick Leave?

Halloween is coming, are you ready?

I wish I had more time

I love both of my jobs … all three if you count doing the website and working the desk as different jobs, and between them I work “full time” … but it still feels like I never have enough spare time. 

My book list is approaching 200, which I suppose isn’t too ridiculous seeing as I do work in a library, but then there are all the movies and TV shows I want to watch … Hell I’m only on #100 of Dr. Who … I’ve still got nearly a gross more to go. And there are dozens of TV shows I haven’t even started on. And Anime.

And then there are games. SO MANY games to play, not just video games either, board games too! I’ve only played a couple games of Zombicide and Disaster Looms. One full game of Mercs. I haven’t played 4th Edition 40k yet at all. I have two expansions for Thunderstone that I’ve never played. I haven’t played w/ all of the cards from the newest expansion for Dominion yet.

The sad thing is, even where I to win the lottery and quit work entirely I doubt I would have time to do all of the things I want to, consume all the media I want to etc.

So yeah … First World problem #513: Too Much Cool Stuff!

Depressed all day + 12 hour day = short post

So basically I felt like crap all day. And ended up going and working an extra 2 hours at FNG after I got off of my regular job. Spent most of the time I had at home optimizing my new computer and fiddling w/ my wall-papers and other stupid stuff. Didn’t really get to play any games (besides some casual crap on Kongregate).

Here’s one pane from Signal to Noise, the main reason I picked up the Humble indie EbOok bundle:

What’s next, the Humble Indie Mix-tape?

So I just bought the Humble eBook Bundle because Pete-Damn-It is this the type of thing that needs to become a)Legit, b)Common Place, and c)Easy. Like to the point where book publishers don’t try and pull stupid ass bullshit like DRM or limited number of reads or anything like that.

When you have a digital product, be it Movies, Music, Books, Videogames or whatever, there are really three types of people.

1) People who want it, and care enough about it that they want to reward the content creators so that stuff like it is created in the future (or even just to say thanks!).

2) People who don’t want it, and won’t buy it no matter what.

3) People who want it, but don’t want to pay for it.

Draconian DRM (which in many people’s opinion is ANY DRM) does one thing and one thing only, it moves people from category 1 to category 3. It never moves people from 3 to 1, because the technology to “steal” a product is always going to be superior to the technology to prevent that theft. 

I have bought games before where the DRM was such a pain in the ass, that I then had to go online and acquire a cracked copy of the game so I could actually play it. And that frankly is ridiculous. I don’t need music CDs putting what amounts to spy-ware on my computer. Over 95% of my music I have legitimate physical copies of, even though I mostly just use Google Play and Pandora these days … I don’t even own a CD player. I do have several discs that have attempted to install DRM onto my computer.

I especially love the granularity of assigning where the money goes that you’re allowed with the Indie Bundles. Buying the bundle primarily for one or two of the contents? Push the majority of the money to them. Like Charity? You can do it. Want the Humble Bundles to keep happening? You can make it so. Just hate that one guy? You can cut him out of the loop (at least, as far as your portion goes).

I’m looking forwards to the day when these bundles stop being so humble, and become ubiquitous.