Ramblings

Last day of vacation open thread

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It seems while on vacation I decided to take a slight break from blogging among other things I normally do. In fact I’m not sure there will be a new episode this week. I’ll put together a vlog or something.

I’ve mostly been playing TF2 and some L4D2. It seems valve decided to fuck up normal mode. Did you know that if you linger in a place looking for stuff after clearing it out another horde will spawn in 60 seconds? Yes, a horde of 100. Why? Because Normal isn’t hard enough? Jesus fuck, leave Normal alone and make the other modes even harder than they already are. I was playing Hard Rain and we had to restart before even leaving the beginning because we were already getting horded and raped by commons and special infected.

Ready for work tomorrow. I have all my clothes ready to go. Then after work I think I’ll download the free DLC for Portal 2. I’m not sure if you have to pay on the XBox or not this time since I haven’t heard word on that. But probably.

God bless American clothing made in Asia.

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The local trend around here is a bunch of elderly people wearing proud American T Shirts day in and day out. I guess if you watch YGOTAS it’s like living in a town with Bandit Keith’s grandparents. I never really noticed this until 2010. I don’t consider this to be wrong or anything, just strange. Hell maybe that’s why people in town think I’m a foreigner… I never wear a patriotic T Shirt. How anti American of me…

One of those remember 9/11 threads.

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I remember that I was on vacation in Spokane during this time. I was sleeping off a fun night at the Spokane fairgrounds. Then my father came in and woke me up telling me that America had been attacked. Being half asleep I didn’t know what to think. I just camped on my aunts couch watching the news unfold. Changing the channel and noticing almost all the TV stations were pointed to the big news networks. I was mostly stunned now that I thought about it. Unlike most people though I didn’t go pointing fingers at what country did it…

It was a very sad day that will always be remembered. People lost their loved ones and most people became more fearful of indifference. It really shocked me one year during another vacation in Spokane when I heard one of my relatives say that we should get rid of all Arabs from the United States to make our country safer… No kidding. Of course they said nothing about certain individuals who like to blow up abortion clinics because people like that aren’t terrorists at all right?

Sunday Night Open Thread

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I spent today working on my next review. I’m almost done with it, I just need a few more media related things. I have a few video projects in the pipeline, so as long as things go according to my new plans then SNews won’t be too blank from lack of publishing.

I’ll probably plug at it a bit more before I hit the rack for tonight. All early workdays this week.

As an aside I watched the latest Bleach last night. Oh god… That was the gayest most girly fight scene I’ve ever seen ever in the history of ever. I think the female characters on that show could fight manlier, including Orihime! Today I watched some of the Japanese dub of it and it’s still funny, but not as funny as what the American voice actors did. Somehow they made it even more gay.

I’m too antisocial to join a social network

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Maybe I’m old fashioned but regular email, forums and blogging are good enough for me. Hell I never even thought I would be blogging or vlogging when I was younger. Then eventually I found reasons to do both. However I’m not really a spacebook/myface/tehgoogleplus person. I have no reason/desire to use social networking sites. For one I’m a privacy nut, for another I know that workplaces search sites like facebook to find out about their workers (they try to find me all the time). I have nothing to hide about myself (otherwise I wouldn’t even have a blog), I just think my online life should be like my real life. Personal. I mean it’s not like I go about the real world advertising that I exist online.

The reason for this rant is because of something that’s been coming up a lot lately at work. Random strangers asking if I have a facebook, today especially. There’s this one girl that I see shopping from time to time over the last few years while I’m working or out and about on my day off. She wanted to know if I had a facebook and I told her the truth. Then she wanted to know if I had an email address. Who doesn’t these days? But I don’t go about giving it out to just anyone, hell there are people who I’ve known for several years that don’t have my email. There’s no reason for it, especially if you’re local. It also seems like every other day there is a co worker or a stranger asking someone (including me) if you exist online. I can understand this if it’s a close friend or a family member. But if I see you every single day or every other day why should we discuss things online? I rate this among people who would rather text each other side by side than actually carry on a conversation.

That brings me to another point. As much as I like the online world I believe that places like facebook and even youtube cause social laziness. I guess for some it’s easier to break the ice that way, but often it seems to come off as creepy. Or maybe that’s just me.

Saturday Night Open Thread

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The first thing I did today when I came home was read the internet to see if everyone was behaving. Then I plopped on the bed and passed out. On a promising note, it looks like I’ll be re-entering swing shift this Friday. So you’ll see me once on Tuesday evening and then on thurs and fri.

I’ve been reading at the thinking with portals website. I’m thinking of reviewing Portal/Portal 2 maps/campaigns sometime in the near future. Would be a nice change of scenery and since I am reviewing things in core form it would make sense anyway. I’m also using this as an excuse to not review “The Woods 2”.

Sunday Open Thread

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Ever have one of those days where you wake up feeling dead stiff? I didn’t but my feet and legs were killing me. I don’t think I’ll be doing much today.

On another note I’ve been following the news in Norway. It saddens me to hear about so many children dying because of some pompous ass wanting to cleanse what he deems impure.

Sometimes I just have to ask why.

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The other night I logged into MOUL for the first time since last year. It was pretty quiet, though I did meet some new faces (to my eye at least). As I was logging in I asked myself why I was doing this. I don’t fully know why I did, other than I love starting old games from time to time including DOS ones. Another reason I think was because I wanted to know if I was still interested in this game. Why do I still read forums dedicated to a game that’s long passed it’s prime? Why are we still having arguments and grudges that date back to 04? I think it’s great that Cyan finally open sourced Uru, but I think they were a little late to the party, by 4 years at best…

Uru was the first online game I ever played and was a great way to introduce myself to the online universe. It was quite the addicting game for me. I logged on every chance I could back when it was something new, including prologue. I became so addicted that many of the other games that I had (a big pile of FPS’s) stopped being used for a long time. Even during controversies and guilds/groups hating each other I still liked the game. But after 8 years we haven’t really moved very far with this game. Granted, people have made ages and I’ve been online with other people in a couple of them. But the support for them is lacking compared to many other companies out there.

These days I see quite a few old timers have moved on to other universes, and I’ve been in that group with the rest. While there are other games out there that have improved on their engines and stories, Uru continues to be nothing more than a museum, and though it is possible to make our own servers and clients now, the support doesn’t seem to be quite the same.

I look at it this way. I’ve had all incarnations of the game (secret and nonsecret) since 2004 up till now. 8 years of waiting for Cyan to move forward and what seems to be endless bickering in one form or another. Uru was fun while it lasted, it was great meeting friends, but now there are better things out there. Oh well, I’ll still keep this old relic on my hard drive, and someday I’ll get off my ass and play with the server and client stuff.