Friday, July 29, 2016

KHUX Update

Today I have some updated impressions of Kingdom Hearts Unchain X, referred to hereafter as KHUX, (pronounce that any way you like). Though I’ve not finished the game, I do think I now have a good feeling for it as a whole and can make a fair valuation. Also, KHUX doesn’t really have an end, as new missions and events are added to it regularly. My earlier impressions of the game, which were published last month, can be read here. While KHUX is a fairly good game, many of my updated impressions on it are negative. I was willing to give KHUX a pass on its shortcomings in the early days of my playing it, but the more time I put into it the more its flaws stand out.

My character wears a jetpack and quotes MC Hammer
As of the time of publishing I am on story mission 335, but the story itself has not progressed significantly since the publishing of my previous writing piece on this game. You travel back and forth across a small number of Disney worlds battling back the Heartless, but only a few things of importance have happened so far. Maybe I have misplaced expectations for what I should get story-wise out of a mobile game, but I’m unsatisfied with how little story I’ve gotten. Kingdom Hearts games are known for their narrative, convoluted as it may be, so to see a game with the Kingdom Hearts name attached to it delivering such a shallow story is all the more disappointing.

I'm getting somewhere... I think
Because there’s so little story, the 335 main missions I’ve played so far have been mostly me playing the same small maps over and over again, but with slightly altered objectives. KHUX is generally fun, but nowhere nearly fun enough to justify the sheer amount of grinding the game forces on you. If it felt like the grinding was getting me somewhere within a reasonable amount of time I would be willing to overlook this problem, but given the paper-thin story I already mentioned, I instead seem to be getting nowhere fast.

Some of the medals I currently have
KHUX also doesn’t do the best job of explaining how everything in the game works. While much of the game is simple and east to understand, there are a number of important things the game either tells you rather late or not at all. Before playing KHUX I would suggest quickly reading through a guide so that you don’t make any dumb, irreversible mistakes, like selling a Cid medal because you weren’t sure what it was for.

Hades' schemes shock everyone but Hercules, who has fallen asleep
The last thing I want to discuss with regards to KHUX, and this is going to be the main focus of this post, is its free-to-play nature. Being free-to-play is not an inherently a bad thing, and I personally have nothing against free-to-play games, but as I’ve had time to think over how KHUX works I understand more and more how the game is designed to incentivize the player to pay money for it. Everything in KHUX is centered around jewels, the primary currency of the game. You earn a slow but steady supply of jewels as you play the main story missions of the game, but many of the game systems of KHUX are structured in such away as to deplete your stock of jewels and encourage you to buy more using real money. The most obvious example of this is with the medals you attach to your Keyblade to increase its power and give your character various special attacks. While you can just work with the various medals you acquire over the course of playing missions, the best medals in the game come from purchasing medal packs, which normally cost 1,000 jewels or more. Another method of depleting your jewels is with the AP system. Each mission you play costs a certain amount of AP, and after playing multiple missions in a row you’ll run out of it. You recharge AP at the rate of one point every three minutes, a rate slow enough that a player’s impatience can easily get the best of him, and if you don’t want to wait you can spend 100 jewels to fully recharge your AP. Similarly, in most missions in KHUX losing all your health is not an automatic game-over, but instead you have the choice of either returning to the mission select screen, and thus lose anything you had already gained in the mission, or you can drop 100 jewels to fully restore your character’s health bar and special attack gauge and keep going with the mission. The way KHUX preys on player impatience, though, might best be exemplified in the game’s special missions. These special missions are be played to earn important things like Evolve Medals and Keyblade strengthening materials, but each special mission is only available on a certain day of the week. You can wait for that day to come, or you can spend some real money and unlock all of the special missions for a full week. In today’s society of short patience and even shorter attention spans, I could see a decent number of players opting for the faster options in KHUX by paying rather than waiting.

Some of the medal packs you can buy
Having said all that, I completely understand why KHUX is structured the way it is. The people who made the game need a way to get paid for their work and in KHUX they’ve created a clever method of extracting funds from players. If anything, I have to commend them for their shrewdness and understanding of human psychology.

Spending 100 jewels once is not big deal, but repeated purchases quickly add up
Despite the somewhat insidious nature of its free-to-play design, I would still recommend KHUX to any fans of the Kingdom Hearts series. While the game does try its best to get you to spend real money on it, if you’re patient you can still play it and enjoy it, all without paying a cent. I personally have spent a grand total of $0.00 on KHUX, keeping to my commitment of not spending any money on mobile games. With my upcoming move next week I am hoping to get back into the groove or regularly playing and writing about console games, so this will likely be my last post on KHUX, but I may still play it from time to time.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Embracing the (Video) Faults

I haven’t been capturing gameplay clips on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games for very long, but I’ve already learned what I think is an important lesson for an amateur game writer such as myself. When I first started recording gameplay, I tried to get footage of me playing the game perfectly. If I screwed up in some way, I would stop recording, reload the last checkpoint, and try again and again until I did everything flawlessly. What I realized is that I was stressing myself out attempting to do something that wasn’t necessary. While I don’t publish clips of me playing a game particularly badly, if the gameplay footage properly showcases what I’m trying to highlight then it doesn’t matter if it also shows me making a mistake or two along the way. For example, in my post on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare there’s a video showing the singleplayer mission in Lagos, and while nearly all of it is played without a hitch, at one point I’m aiming at snipers on a balcony but for whatever reason I pushed the melee button instead of the fire button, so instead of shooting the enemy you see me punch the air. Yes, it was a mistake, but it didn’t detract from the particular section of the game I was trying to show. If anything, it gave me a chance to make fun of myself, and if you watch the clip carefully you can see an annotation I added in at the moment I push the melee button. I’ve slowly learned to embrace these minor and inconsequential faults, not in the sense that I’m actively seeking to commit mistakes while playing, but in recognizing them for what they are and not making a mountain out of a molehill.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Moving Again

On August 1st I’ll be moving again, though this next residence comes with a one year lease, so it will be more permanent that what I’ve got now. The room is good, the house is good, but I’m not a fan of the location. However, it’s the only place that is willing to offer me a lease, so I don’t really have any choice. One year in exile, coming right up.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

DNC Leaks

The DNC Leaks are simultaneously a big story and not a story at all. They’re a big story in that the leaks suggest that the Democratic National Party, which is supposed to be neutral during the primary campaign, tried to illicitly engineer the Democratic primary campaign to get Hillary Clinton the nomination. They’re not a story at all because the corruption of the American political system should be a surprise no one.

Monday, July 25, 2016

Background Checks

I’ve gone through several background checks in the past for things like employment and housing, but I had never actually seen any of my reports until yesterday. I was applying for a place live and as part of the application the landlord wanted to run a background check on me through TransUnion’s SmartMove program. After filling out the online form I submitted it and later in the day the landlord got the report and called me about it. As expected, my credit history was flawless and I had no evictions or collections on record. My criminal record, however, contained one item. To my surprise and dismay, it showed me as having a criminal citation this past March in Orange County, California. Seeing as how I was never in Orange County at all this year, I was extremely confused as to why my report listed this.

Earlier today I called the TransUnion customer support line and requested to dispute the item in the criminal history. The customer service rep I spoke with informed me that the citation was a traffic-related offense, and I informed them that I was not in California during the month of March (or February, or January). The dispute has officially been sent to TransUnion’s investigative department and they now have 30 calendar days to look into this. When they have concluded their research I’ll get a letter in the mail with the results of the inquiry. I’m not particularly keen on having someone else’s crimes being associated with me, so that thing better get wiped from my record.

Friday, July 22, 2016

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back - Kingdom Hearts 2

Things have been hectic in my life lately, but a bit over a week ago I had some down time and I decided to dust off the old PlayStation 2 and put in one of my favorite games from that era, Kingdom Hearts 2. My PlayStation 2, having not seen action in many years, took awhile to start reading the disc, but once it recognized it I was back in the game. It still played just like I remembered it, and after a little while my itch for the game had been scratched, but it also got me thinking about the differences between the original Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2. While Kingdom Hearts 2 fixed a number of the issues from the original Kingdom Hearts and improved on the overall formula of the Kingdom Hearts games, it also created a small number of new problems. It was two steps forward, one step back. For me, there are three main areas where the game stumbled.

The first was the overly long introductory sequence. The original Kingdom Hearts had you playing as protagonist Sora, but the opening hours of Kingdom Hearts 2 switch things up and you instead play as new character Roxas. That you’re playing as a different character is itself not a problem, but what goes wrong in Kingdom Hearts 2 is that the time you spend playing as Roxas doesn’t have enough meaningful material to justify its length. Roxas’ story is broken into six days, but everything important that happens in those six days could have been more effectively told in four days, maybe even less. When you finish playing as Roxas it is a relief, not because Roxas himself is a bad character, but because the opening of Kingdom Hearts 2 can feel sort of like getting hazed. It’s as if the game is testing you to see if you’ve got the patience to endure the first two hours or so before the game starts to shine.

The second place where Kingdom Hearts 2 faltered, at least for me, was with the Reaction Commands, which were certain moments during combat where you had the chance to counter an enemy’s action by pressing the triangle button. Reaction Commands could only be done when the game prompted you to do so and you had less than a second to push the button. Sometimes the Reaction Commands were fitting, and other times they weren’t, and this inconsistency led me to eventually dislike them. For example, there is a Reaction Command for a certain boss fight that allows you to dodge while in mid-air, and this is an instance where the Reaction Commands work well, as you would normally have minimal control while off the ground. There are other times however, where Reaction Commands are just substitutes for normal game mechanics, such as blocking, and in those cases it would have been better to just have the player use the block command (or whatever) rather than a Reaction Command.

The third and final issue with Kingdom Hearts 2 was its overall difficulty. The normal difficulty setting for Kingdom Hearts 2 was too easy, and from what I understand, this was a result of people complaining that the normal difficulty of the original Kingdom Hearts was too hard. Personally, I thought the normal difficulty of the first Kingdom Hearts was just fine, and I’m the type of person who doesn’t like hard games, so I was disappointed to find myself blowing through most of the game without too much effort. Kingdom Hearts 2’s hard difficulty, called Proud Mode, should have been the normal difficulty setting, and then Proud Mode should have been a true hard difficulty setting for those that wanted to challenge themselves.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

The 2008 Housing Bubble

At the suggestion of a friend of mine, I watched the movie The Big Short on Netflix. The movie is about the guys who bet against the housing bubble that burst in 2008 and made a massive amount of money on the American economic collapse that ensued. It was a good movie, and it brought to mind my own memories of the housing bubble from when I was younger and how I had an inkling of what was coming.

I grew up in San Diego. My parents had been renters for a long time, but in 1999 they bought a house and we moved in. The house was priced at right about $200,000. In 2004, my parents had the house evaluated, and it was valued at around $400,000. During the summer of 2007 I was back at home and my parents informed me that a house up the street from us that was a little smaller than our house was being listed at $700,000. Even as young man who still had much to learn about the world, I recognized the surge in housing prices for the insanity that it was. Home prices were vastly exceeding workers’ income, and there was no reasonable way to explain how people were getting loans to purchase these properties. On the evening news I distinctly remember one broadcast where the news anchor was talking about how various sectors of the American economy were faltering, but that the housing sector was still booming and thus propping all the others up. If unemployment was rising and people were losing income, shouldn’t housing also cool off, since more people shouldn’t be able to afford buying homes? In one of my college classes that year there was a group project and my group decided to do a report on the now-infamous Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and I remember how much difficulty we had in explaining them to our class. We were dumb college students, but we recognized that something wasn’t right about CDOs, though we had no idea just how badly they would destroy the American economy.

Looking back at it now, I can see that I had many of the puzzle pieces that pointed to the 2008 economic collapse, but I didn’t put them all together. If I was truly prescient, I would have tried to find some way to make money off of what was going to happen, similar to the guys in The Big Short, though as a poor college student I didn’t exactly have the resources one needs to reap a big profit off of such insight.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

No One Else Is Writing Your Story

I recently had something of a revelation with regards to the 2016 Writing Project. It’s a rather obvious revelation, one that should have come long ago, but for whatever reason didn’t hit me until just now. What I realized is that the 2016 Writing Project is the one truly unique thing I’m that working on at the moment. I was thinking over the various writings that I’ve done in the past and am doing now, and which of them stand out the most. While it is true that the way I write about something, like video games, may be distinct from the way other people write about it, the fact is that I’m not alone in most of the writing that I do. The 2016 Writing Project, however, is not being done by lots of other people. I think this strangely overlooked fact really sank in when I asked myself the following series of questions:

Q: How many people are writing about video games?
A: Tons of people.

Q: How many people are writing about life experiences?
A: Tons of people.

Q: How many people are writing about the random thoughts that come to their mind?
A: Tons of people.

Q: How many people are writing the story I have imagined?
A: Just me.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Blog Labels

I’ve made another small adjustment to this blog that you might have noticed. At the bottom of posts you’ll see that I am now adding labels in order to group posts into categories. A new gadget also now exists in the right side of the blog that lists the categories I’ve created so far in descending order of frequency. Going forward, all posts will have labels when appropriate. I also went back and added labels to posts from the last few days. This new addition probably won’t mean much for most of you readers, but maybe it will be helpful for some.

Monday, July 18, 2016

Mini-NES

Last week Nintendo announced that they would be releasing a miniature version of the old Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) this November. This Mini-NES will come with thirty NES games preinstalled, including a number of NES classics such as The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Castlevania, Tecmo Bowl, and Final Fantasy. The Mini-NES will also come with a controller that looks like just an original NES controller.
For me this is a big announcement, and I’m strongly considering buying this Mini-NES, though, as always, it will likely be some time after it launches that I’d purchase it. I didn’t have a gaming console growing up, and though I got a few scattered chances to play NES games when I visited friends’ houses, I can’t say that I have a heritage with that era of gaming. This Mini-NES would give me the chance to go back and experience some of the games that are so foundational to today’s video games. If and when I eventually purchase the Mini-NES, I’ll be sure to do a series of posts on the games that I play on it.

Friday, July 15, 2016

Top 10 Lists

In the perpetual war for viewership, Youtube channels related to gaming (and various other topics) have to regularly produce new content. One of the most common types of videos you’ll find Youtube gaming channels is the Top 10 List (or Top 5, or Top 20, or whatever). The content creators of the channel pick a particular theme, and then rank the top 10 things related to that theme. While I personally think that most Top 10 Lists on Youtube gaming channels are a waste of time to watch, the fact that they are so common and get so many views demonstrates that they are a proven method of getting clicks online. There are many reasons why this is so, and in this post I though I’d list four of them that stand out in my mind. In fact, I’m going to turn this into my own Top 4 List. Here, in no particular order, are my Top 4 Reasons Why Top 10 Lists Are So Common And So Successful On Youtube.

First, Top 10 Lists can be comparatively easy to generate. Unlike other pieces of gaming media, such as investigative journalism or game reviews, a random Top 10 List can potentially be slapped together fairly quickly. Especially topics with a small number of potential entries, such as ranking the mainline Uncharted games, (there are only four, unless you count Golden Abyss, in which case there are five) the list itself can be organized quickly, and then you just need some B-roll game footage and a short voiceover recording. There are tons of easy gaming-related topics to choose from, and though it is true that as time goes on you’ll having to dig deeper to come up with new Top 10 Lists, for awhile they can be cranked out with abandon.

Second, these lists offer us the opportunity to feel vindicated in our own preferences with regards to whatever is being ranked. There’s a certain mental satisfaction in seeing your own picks for a particular subject appearing at or near the top of other persons’ lists. It feels good to see that someone else agrees with you on what the most underrated PS2 games are, or the best entries in the Final Fantasy series. Other people agree with us, therefore in our own minds we are cultured, knowledgeable, and wise, if not superior.

Third, and closely related to the previous reason, Top 10 Lists give us another opportunity to argue with each other over ultimately meaningless things. When our own picks are towards the bottom of the list, or not on the list at all, we somehow feel justified in bringing out the worst of our inner demons to show just how wrong the list is. The creators of the list are obviously uneducated idiots, or worse, and it’s up to us to let the world know via the Youtube comments section.

Fourth, they can just be fun to make. Back in late 2013 through early 2014, I did my own list related to my top 20 favorite games of the PS3/Xbox 360/Nintendo Wii console generation. Doing so gave me a chance to reminisce on games that I loved playing from that console era and bring back some great memories in the process. While it was a little agonizing to cut a number of great games from the final list, the trip down memory lane was undeniably a good experience. I’m actually planning on doing a new list later this year with some of my favorite games so far from the PS4/Xbox One generation, and I think that will be a fun list too.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

2016 Writing Project - Conflict

Conflict is a common means of driving the plot in stories, and my story is no exception to this. In that regard my story is nothing unique, but then again I’ve never claimed my story was all that great to begin with. As the next baby step forward in the 2016 Writing Project, I typed up a document outlining what the overall conflict is that arises in the first major section of the story and the perspectives of the various persons involved. That second part is particularly important, as conflict does not arise out of nowhere, and I’m trying to make sure that all the parties in the story have coherent motivations for being in conflict with each other. If my characters do not have good reasons for being in conflict, then I just have senseless violence and my story is even dumber than it already is. Within the next few days I’ll try to write out the details of the conflicts in the second and third sections of the story.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Untouchable Topics

Every writer has to make choices on the topics they write about. There’s only so much time and expertise any writer can have. A writer has to make conscious decisions about the sorts of things he or she will write about and what will be left to others. My own writings focus on subjects such as gaming, life experiences, travel, and various thoughts in my mind. I’ll occasionally dip my toes into other topics, such as politics, but only if I feel I have at least a modest grasp of them. Certain subjects, though, I simply do not feel competent to write about, and I refer to these as Untouchable Topics. One of my Untouchable Topics is sports. Not too long ago my friend Ben over at Free Refills did a series of writing pieces on this year’s French Open tennis tournament. I don’t follow tennis, so I didn’t feel up to the task of even leaving a comment on any of those posts. The best I can hope to do with sports is to write some sort of brief and (hopefully) humorous observation, while leaving serious thought and analysis to more knowledgeable writers. Barring an unexpected rise in my interest in sports, I suspect it will remain an Untouchable Topic for the duration of my writing career, and that’s ok. I don’t need to write about everything, and if I tried I would only destroy myself in the process. That’s not to say I’m not committed to growing as a writer and an individual, but I’m not going to spill ink on things that I can’t effectively speak to at the moment.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Finding a room

I’ve lived in Boulder since 2004, and at the moment I’m trying to find a new place to live, ideally still in Boulder or nearby. One of the issues I’ve had is that a lot of people who have rooms for rent in Boulder are looking for typical Boulderites, and I am not a typical Boulderite. If anything, I am the anti-Boulderite. The typical Boulderite is involved in and passionate about things like hiking, skiing, cycling, running, rock climbing, and other outdoor activities. While I will hike, ski, and/or go on a long bicycle ride a few times a year, and I usually do the Bolder Boulder each year, I’m more often partaking in indoor activities, such as gaming or writing for this blog.

Another issue I’ve run into is the number of listings that have the phrase “420 friendly” in them. For those that don’t know, “420 friendly” is a reference to Colorado’s decriminalization of marijuana. We all have our differing opinions on this, and for my part I can’t stand the smell of marijuana and will have nothing to do with it. This stance further limits my options.

The last major hindrance to my housing quest is the fact that I’m currently unemployed. Landlords understandably want someone with a steady income, and I don’t blame them for that. If I were in their shoes I would have the same reluctance to rent to someone who’s not working at the moment. A number of times I’ve offered to pay several months rent in advance as a demonstration of my ability to pay, but so far no one has taken me up on that offer.

Monday, July 11, 2016

Prognosticating the Election

As a follow-up to Friday’s political spasm, I figured I might as well give my prediction for who I think will be America’s next president. Keep in mind, I was supremely confident that Donald Trump wouldn’t become the Republican presidential nominee, so I don’t exactly have a stellar record for predicting political events. With that said, my prediction is that Hillary Clinton will win this year’s election. Donald Trump will take a fair number of votes, enough to surprise and disturb many of us, but Hillary Clinton will emerge victorious in the end.

How will Hillary Clinton win? A number of persons have said, and I’m inclined to agree, that Hillary Clinton will win by being less hated than Donald Trump. Normally this should be an absurdly easy task, but this is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about, so she has some work to do ahead of her.

Friday, July 8, 2016

A Terrible Choice


Back in March or this year I did a writing piece on Donald Trump. I try to keep this blog apolitical, but I felt I had to say something about Donald Trump, given his unexpectedly large presence in the Republican primary campaign. While I had hoped that it would be my first and only political writing piece for this blog, in the days and weeks that followed the publication of that post it became clear that I would likely have to do a few more, one of which I resolved to write once it became clear who the presumptive Democrat and Republican nominees were. That time has now come. The presumptive candidates for both of the major American political parties are all but settled, and what a terrible choice stands before the voters this year. (As an aside, let the reader know this post is mostly a disorganized rant)

In the Republican camp, all challengers to Donald Trump have pulled out of the race, leaving last-minute shenanigans at the Republican convention as the only possible way of keeping him from being the official Republican nominee. On the Democratic side, although Bernie Sanders has not yet officially conceded defeat, Hillary Clinton has secured enough delegates to make her practically guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee, and the FBI has decided not to press charges related to her (mis)handling of emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. The party conventions have not yet occurred to make their candidacies official, but at this point it seems safe to assume that this year’s presidential election will be between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. While it is true that there will also be other names on the November presidential ballot from various third parties, the way American politics currently works means that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the only viable candidates.


So often in elections we are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, but rarely have we had an election where the lesser evil is so much in question. On one hand we have Donald Trump, a businessman demagogue who is unrepentant in his personal immorality and appears to lack basic knowledge of international politics. On the other hand we have Hillary Clinton, a career politician who will say anything to get elected and is the embodiment of the corruption of the current American political establishment. Both are chronic liars. Both have an insatiable appetite for power. Both are unfit for the office. Both I find absolutely repulsive.


It is a testament to the condition of both the Republican and Democratic parties that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are their respective candidates. As little as eight to twelve years ago we could have simply waited for their respective parties to come to their senses and then watch as a more reasonable alternative candidate from either party secured the nomination. This year, somehow, none of the even somewhat likable candidates from either party were able to secure the nomination. Instead, we got the worst possible set of choices. It’s like that old episode of The Simpsons, where both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are revealed to be evil space aliens. I was able to track down the clip on Youtube, and those who aren’t familiar with it can watch it below:


How am I supposed to choose between two awful candidates? Neither of them offers a probable outcome that I could be ok casting my ballot for. Voting for Clinton likely means voting for business as usual in Washington DC. Voting for Trump likely means voting for change, but with Trump we’re looking at a case where the proposed cure might be worse than the disease. Either way, America loses.


I cannot in good conscience vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and since I am committed to my civic duty of voting, I must therefore vote for someone other than the two of them. Common wisdom that says doing so is effectively the same thing as burning your ballot, and while I do understand that I would be voting for a candidate who doesn’t stand a chance of winning, I also believe that voting for a third party is a legitimate way for voters such as myself to register our disapproval of the candidates of both parties.

Related to voting for a third party, the thought has crossed my mind of whether I will be viewed as culpable by either side when Trump or Clinton inevitably becomes president. Recently a friend on Facebook shared the image below, which encapsulates much of what I’m feeling right now:


The friend who posted this image is a Bernie Sanders supporter, so for him Obi-Wan Kenobi is Bernie Sanders, Palpatine is Hillary Clinton, and Jabba the Hutt is Donald Trump. I do find the comparisons of Clinton to Palpatine and Trump to Jabba to be quite fitting, though in my own version of this meme Obi-Wan is someone other than Trump or Clinton, and then the order of Palpatine and Jabba can be switched around freely.


It’s probably premature to say this, but I’m going to go ahead and declare this year’s presidential election as one of the worst sets of alternatives America has ever faced in the modern era. Either choice feels like a loss for America and I shudder to think of what might happen to our nation over the next four to eight years. The one positive thing that I can think of that will come out of this is that all of our political science PhD students actually have something interesting to do their thesis on, though I can’t imagine their instructors will be thrilled to get a giant mass of doctoral papers on nearly identical subjects.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

2016 Writing Project - Arc of the Story

With everything that’s been going on in my life over the past two months, I haven’t gotten much done with the 2016 Writing Project. In an effort to keep the ball rolling, this past weekend I did some more work in charting the rough arc of parts of the story. There are three major sections of the story that I have in mind, and I typed up some additional notes on each of them. Right now the third section looks to have the biggest gaps, so perhaps I should focus more energy there. Hopefully when my housing situation is finally resolved I can get back to more regularly working on the project.

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Worldly Possessions

You don’t realize just how much stuff you have until you have to box it up. I like to think that I don’t have a lot of possessions, but my recent moving experience demonstrated that even I have fair number of assets on my balance sheet. Too many assets, in fact. While most of the things I own can justify their presence in my life, there were a number of items that I came across while packing that I have no use for, and even a few that I don’t know where they came from. My friend over at Free Refills wrote a post last month about his own realization about having more than he needed, and both he and I, through our separate experiences, came to the same conclusion, namely “I need to have less.” For full context, you can read my friend’s post here. As for me, I’ll be moving again later this month, and whenever that happens I plan to separate out those space-wasting possessions and then see about either selling them or giving them away.

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Reevaluating Reading Habits

One of the few benefits of the recent upheaval in my life us that I’ve had more time than usual to reflect on some of my daily habits. Among the habits that have been put under the microscope lately are my daily online readings. I read a large number of articles and blog posts every single day. It’s such a central part of my day that it feels weird if I don’t check in on the websites I normally visit. Each day I take in a substantial amount of information via my online readings, but maybe I’m going overboard with it. This past Saturday it struck me that I couldn’t recall much of what I had read the day before. Certainly it’s normal to not remember every last detail from any given day’s reading, but if I struggle to remember at least the basic elements then what benefit am I gaining? It may be time to rework my reading habits. What I’m thinking is that maybe I should slightly reduce the total amount of reading I do each day, but try to focus more on the things that I do read. Perhaps that will yield an increase in my recollections of what I read the day before.

Monday, July 4, 2016

Independence Day

Happy Independence Day to the American readers of this blog. I originally was going to type up a brief writing piece with some thoughts on my country, but yesterday I read a Facebook post that better speaks to how I’m feeling. Below is the link to it. (Log in to Facebook before opening the link in order to read it)

https://www.facebook.com/appealtoheaven/posts/10102814510066079?pnref=story

I realize this might seem like I’m taking the easy way out by linking to someone else’s work, but if you’ve been reading this blog for some time you know that it’s rare for me to do this.

Friday, July 1, 2016

Giant Fail

This past weekend saw the release of the tenth and final episode of the sixth season of the HBO series Game of Thrones. Episode one of season six was the first episode of Game of Thrones I had ever watched (you can read my short, nonsensical commentary on it here) but I hadn’t watched any other episodes since then. I thought it might be interesting to watch the final episode of the season just to compare it to the first, and the next day I discussed the episode with a friend of mine who is more familiar with the show. He helped me fill in some of the gaps of what’s going on in the world of Game of Thrones, and I now feel a bit more knowledgeable about the show, though I still can’t claim to know that much.

I’m not going to discuss episode ten in this post. Instead, I’m going to go on a dumb rant about something else related to Game of Thrones. After talking with my friend, I watched episode nine of season six, because I had read such great things about the massive battle that takes place in it. I watched the episode, and sure enough there was a big battle with some impressive cinematography and tons of deaths to be had. While the battle is very well done, there’s one part that really bothered me. Namely, Jon Snow’s army has a giant in it, but said giant’s tactical potential is completely squandered. The giant looks to be something like fifteen feet tall, and strong enough to wield a tree trunk like a club or staff, but instead he’s fighting with just his bare hands. All Jon Snow had to do was give the giant a large tree to uproot, and with it the giant could have both broken through Bolton’s battle line, as well as breached the gates of the city of Winterfell, and possibly have survived the battle. This is what we call squandering a valuable asset. I understand that things needed to play out the way they did in the show for the sake of drama, but this was really stupid. Combined with his taking the bait from Bolton and doing his best Leroy Jenkins impersonation, I have serious doubts about Jon Snow’s competency as a battlefield commander after watching this episode.

Moving Day

Yesterday was moving day. It wasn’t pleasant, and it took up my entire day to the point that I forgot to post anything to the blog yesterday. Consequently I’m posting two things today, both this explanatory post and a regular one.