Activation, Part 3

The club’s bass beat turned up another notch, and in turn he took another sip from his drink. In front of him was a mass of people on the dance floor in a state of alcohol and narcotics-induced revelry. The DJ transitioned to the next track, yet another generic remix of a popular 90s song. Everyone in the crowd ate it up, but he was ambivalent. Is it that hard to find a good DJ? He threw back the rest of his drink and walked over to the bar to order a few shots. Seriously, what was even doing here? It’s not like he could get drunk anyway, at least not without consuming an amount of alcohol that would be fatal for most other individuals. Boredom had been the defining mark of the last few years of his life. Nothing excited him anymore, not even what had at one time been his favorite nightclub. Pulling out his phone, he thought to see if there was anything else going on that night that might be even remotely interesting. In doing so, he saw a message that had come in earlier. The booming sounds had kept him from hearing his phone when it first came in, but as he read it he couldn’t hear anything else. A smirk came across his face. The fools had finally made up their mind. No doubt they had tried to do something on their own and predictably failed, and now they needed him to save their sorry asses. It wasn’t exactly his idea of fun, but it sure as hell beat this.

Activation, Part 2

Jets roared overhead as he hurried back to his office. The letter had finally come, the one he had been waiting for. Everything from the preceding years had been building to this point. He had passed every test and proven himself time and again. Closing the door behind him, he sat down at his desk and stared at the envelope for minute. This was it, his moment of vindication. Struggling to contain his excitement, he slowly opened the envelope and pulled out the letter. A single page, standard font, on official letterhead. He read the letter. His heart sank. Despite his outstanding performance, there were currently no openings in any of the squadrons. How? How was this possible? He had read the reports himself earlier in the month. At least five slots were likely to open, and with his scores he ought to have been a shoo-in for one of them. Sinking deeper into his chair, the realization slowly crept over him that all his work might have all been for nothing. This can’t be happening. He slowly reread the letter, hoping that the act might somehow change the words. It read the same as before. He slumped forward, head in his hands. Had his phone not started buzzing he would have stayed there drowning in self-pity and grief. The message on his phone was from an old number, one he hadn’t seen in a long time. It was starting again. The timing was suspiciously convenient. One door had closed only for another one to immediately open up. Coincidence? Not likely. Regardless, he was in no position to change his circumstances, and he set about preparing for his departure. Duty had called, and he would answer.

Activation, Part 1

Eight names were displayed before him on his screen. Eight individuals who hadn’t been in service for years, but were now about to be recalled. They were third-rate, all of them. No, that was being too generous. Third-rate would be an improvement. If he and the others had more time perhaps another option would become available, but an existential threat demands immediate action, so here they were, summoning the prototypes. It was never supposed to be this way. The eight were only intended as a proof of concept prior to the creation of the genuine article. Circumstances, however, had nixed that plan, and now the eight were all they had. He sat there for a minute, staring at the screen. Eight names. He was banking the future on eight names. The message he was sending them had already been prepared and just needed a single click to send. He read each name one last time, and clicked the button. It was now in their hands. He just prayed some of them would agree to come back.

Late to the Party - Driveclub

I love video games, but it's rare for me to play them right when they are first released. Normally it takes me a somewhere from a few months to a few years to get around to playing to a game. I've got a considerable backlog of games that I've been meaning to play and it hasn't been until recently that I've been able to start chipping away at the list. With that in mind, I've created a new series of posts called Late to the Party, wherein I discuss the games that came out in the preceding years that I'm finally getting around to experiencing. Today's entry in the series is Driveclub.

A new milestone: creating my first piece of cover art

Too Good At Your Job

If you’ve worked for any amount of time in the traditional labor force, you’re aware of the concept of being too good at your job. While striving to do your job well is a commendable effort and we should all aspire to it, there is a point where it can start to work against you. When you’re too good at your job, your career hits a dead-end, as your superiors don’t want to promote or transfer you since you’re so good at what you’re currently doing that they believe changing your duties would be a bad move. This is an incredibly frustrating position to be in, and when you’re stuck in there it’s hard to see any good way to get out of it (in a sense it’s sort of like being in the Friend Zone of a relationship). I know this situation all too well, as it was where I found myself at my last job. I was one of the best people on staff at my former company, but I realized this had actually become a liability, because I did my work so well that there was no chance I would ever be moving up. That, along with a number of other factors, was part of the reason I eventually left that company, and the further away I get from my last day of work there, the more I’m convinced in my head that I made the right decision. Being too good at your job is one of those things that really shouldn’t be possible, but sadly is hard reality of our lives.

Your Memories on Facebook

For a few months now, Facebook has been doing this thing where it shows you photos you uploaded several years ago, and then you’re given the option to share the photo with your friends if you want. I’ve never used this function myself, but I can understand the appeal and I must concede that it’s another clever feature that Facebook has come up with. Seeing those older photos brings back a rush of memories, and since it’s normal to post positive photos to Facebook, those memories are normally good ones. There is one problem, however, with this feature, specifically as it applies to me. Facebook’s photo selection lately has been from my 2012 trip to Europe. While it is nice to look over those photos, the sight of them keeps prompting the question of when I’m going to go again. Seeing as how I don’t currently have the resources needed for another trip, looking at and thinking over these photos is leading to a great deal of depression and frustration on my part. Seriously Facebook, stop reminding me of this!

World Champions

One of the sillier parts of professional American sports is that the winners of a sport’s national tournament are often declared the champions of the world, despite the fact that no teams from other countries were invited to the tournament. There is at least one sport, in my opinion, where the proclamation of the tournament winners as world champions is actually valid, and that is basketball. This past Olympics we saw again what is now the pattern of international basketball, namely American domination. True, the rest of the world is starting to close the gap (on the men’s side) but for the foreseeable future American basketball will remain the undisputed best in the world. No other country will get invited to the NBA finals, but for now that doesn’t matter. Whoever wins that tournament can, at least for now, legitimately claim the title of world champions.

Grandma’s Books

Last year my grandmother on my father’s side passed away. I can still remember waking up to the email from my father with the news. My grandmother was one of those stubborn old people, and though she had been having some heart issues it had seemed like she was getting better and I thought she had at least a year or two left to go. Needless to say the email announcing her passing was unexpected. My father and his siblings soon set about the process of dividing up her remaining possessions amongst their families, with my father, the oldest of her children, taking point on the matter. He brought back to my family’s house a fair number of boxes filled with my grandmother’s things and it took him several months to work through all of them. A number of my grandmother’s decorations and other items were passed on to me, including a collection of books. Recently, as I was going through the process of cutting down the number of books on my bookshelf as part of the greater project of eliminating unwanted or unneeded possessions, I came across these books again. There are seven of them in total, all written during the period of the mid 1990s to the early 2000s. All of them are related to travel, and my father gave them to me since I’m the most wanderlust prone of his children and he thought I might find them useful. I had placed the books in my collection upon returning to Colorado, and there they sat, unopened and unnoticed. That finally changed when I was dividing up my book collection between what would stay and what would go. I spent a few hours looking them over, reading sections of them, and getting a feel for whether I would ever have any use for them. Sadly, only one book survived the inquisition. I say that it’s sad because these were my grandmother’s books and it feels wrong to let them go. They’re just books, but they were her books, and somehow that makes them more important, even if they’re outdated and/or on a topic I’m not interested in. At the same time, there are several other belongings of my grandmother’s that I’m keeping, so I know I’m not casting her memory aside. The books will go when I’ve finished building the pile of things that are being sold, donated, or given away to friends. There will be a tinge of sadness, but I have to do this.

Late to the Party - The Division

I love video games, but it's rare for me to play them right when they are first released. Normally it takes me a somewhere from a few months to a few years to get around to playing to a game. I've got a considerable backlog of games that I've been meaning to play and it hasn't been until recently that I've been able to start chipping away at the list. With that in mind, I've created a new series of posts called Late to the Party, wherein I discuss the games that came out in the preceding years that I'm finally getting around to experiencing. Today's entry in the series is Tom Clancy’s The Division, referred to hereafter as just The Division. There will be minor spoilers in this commentary, but nothing too big.

Online Forum Comments

I left a comment on an online forum exactly one time, and I’m pretty sure that I broke one of the sacred rules of comment threads in the process. Years ago I was having trouble with my PlayStation 3 not reading certain game discs. I went online to see if anyone else had insight into this problem, and during my search I came across a comment thread on one of the official PlayStation forums. One person had been having a similar issue, and there had been an exchange between him/her and several other persons about it. The thread didn’t solve my problem, but it did provide me with some pieces of information that eventually led to me properly diagnosing my PlayStation’s issue (it turned out to be that my PlayStation’s Blu-ray reader was going bad). I wanted to thank the person who started the thread for the helpful information, so I added a comment at the bottom to that effect. What I failed to notice, however, was that the thread had not had any activity in about a month, so in adding to it I think I broke the rule about not adding to an inactive comment thread. Whoops. What was worse was that by adding to the thread I had moved it back to active status, and shortly thereafter some internet troll noticed the thread back in the group of active ones and decided to add some artful language to it. At that point I felt like I owed the creator of the thread an apology, but keeping the thread active would probably have just made things worse, so I ignored the new comment and never came back.

Game Review Scores, Part 2

In last Thursday’s post on game review scores I discussed my own personal dislike for them and how I intentionally do not give scores to the games I write on. Shortly after that the thought came into my head about what game score system I would use if for some reason I were forced to do so. Should I somehow be compelled to give scores to games, such as if I had a job in a professional games media outlet, and if I had my choice of which scale to use, my personal pick would be the twenty-point scale. In that system there are twenty possible scores a game can receive, from a score of 0.5 at the bottom end and then going up by units of 0.5 until you reach 10.0 at the top. In my mind the twenty-point scale strikes the right balance between overly broad methods like the five-point and the ten-point scales and the needless minutia of the hundred-point scale.

Forgetting Things

I don’t know if it’s been the stress of moving, or just the slow, inevitable effects of age, but I’ve been forgetting things lately at a much higher rate than normal. Not in the sense of failing to recall memories, but in the sense that I keep forgetting to buy one particular item at the store, or to bring one particular thing with me on a trip. For instance, the Venice photo that I wrote about last week I gave to a friend of mine as a gift, but after signing the frame I forgot to put the cardboard backing into the rear of the photo frame before delivering it to my friend. That’s the sort of mistake I normally never make and others like it have been piling up in the past two weeks. Hopefully this is just a phase I’m going through and I’ll soon return to my hyper-meticulous ways, but for now it’s got me concerned.

Writing Hangover

I rarely consume alcohol, but I’m well familiar with hangovers thanks to many years of being around people who drink. A normal hangover is usually the result of taking in too much alcohol over a short period of time and leaves a person feeling absolutely wretched when they next wake up. While I’ve never had an alcohol related hangover, I have experienced a milder form of a hangover when I write intensively for long periods, and I refer to this as a writing hangover. Like its alcoholic cousin, the writing hangover symptoms include headache, fatigue, eyestrain, and sometimes thirst if I’ve neglected to get any water while writing. Unlike an alcohol hangover, the writing hangover is not something I wake up to, but tends to hit me right when I’m getting close to finishing whatever I’m working on. It’s also purely a mental ailment and goes away if I get some rest or switch to doing activities that require minimal mental exertion.

I got one of my more severe writing hangovers when I was typing out Friday’s monstrously long post on Batman: Arkham Knight, a post that went over 3,000 words and I think is the longest post on this blog to date. Much like the end of a wild night out on the town, when I was done with the initial draft and hit the save button, my head started hurting and my brain checked out for a few minutes. That was a clear sign that I was done for the day and I closed out the text editing program, content to come back the next day to make edits and prepare the final version. I had a writing hangover, but unlike an alcoholic hangover, I was somewhat glad to be having it, as it meant that I had gone all-out on the project.

Late to the Party - Batman: Arkham Knight

I love video games, but it's rare for me to play them right when they are first released. Normally it takes me a somewhere from a few months to a few years to get around to playing to a game. I've got a considerable backlog of games that I've been meaning to play and it hasn't been until recently that I've been able to start chipping away at the list. With that in mind, I've created a new series of posts called Late to the Party, wherein I discuss the games that came out in the preceding years that I'm finally getting around to experiencing. Today's entry in the series is Batman: Arkham Knight.

Game Review Scores

At the end of most game reviews you’ll find some sort of a score, whereby the writer of the review condenses his/her opinion on a game into a single alphanumeric rating. Different persons and publications use different score methodologies, but all have the same basic idea of expressing a game’s overall quality in a way that is instantaneously understandable to the reader. Game review scores have been around for a long time and I don’t think they are ever going away, but I do think a good debate can be held on positives and negatives they bring to game reviews in general. For my part, I can see at least two opposing perspectives on game review scores. As a consumer, game scores give me a simple and immediate rating for a game, which let’s me skip straight to the bottom line on whether a game is worth my time or not. As a writer, game scores strike me as a gross oversimplification of one’s thoughts on a game and don’t tell the whole story of whether you should play a game or not. Both of these views have their merits, but over the past several months, as I’ve continued practicing the craft of writing and developing my own skill and personal style, I’ve grown increasingly sympathetic to the arguments against game scores. The thought of putting in all the time and effort needed for a thorough game review and then having that work completely ignored, and indeed rendered a waste of time, is both irritating and depressing. It’s irritating because a sizable chunk of your readership is going to disregard everything you wrote and fill the comments section with woeful displays of vitriol and ignorance, and it’s depressing because it is yet another testimony to our society’s growing aversion to serious thought and reading anything longer than 140 characters (this attitude is best exemplified by the common acronym TL;DR, which stands for “too long; didn’t read”). This is part of the reason why I consciously omit giving games a score in my commentaries. If you want to know my thoughts on games, you’re going to have to actually read my writing pieces, in their entirety. Yes, even the really long ones, like the 3,000-word monstrosity that is being posted tomorrow. Whoops, did I say that out loud?

Background Check Update

You might remember that late last month I did a short writing piece about going through a background check as part of a housing application. The background check came back as I expected it to, with the alarming exception of a single criminal record from Orange County, California in the month of March. This item on the background check was clearly an error, since I had not been in Orange County in the month of March, or at any point this year, and I soon contacted TransUnion, the firm that did the background check, to file an official dispute. TransUnion had thirty calendar days to research my claim and two days ago I got an envelope in the mail with the results of their investigation. I’m pleased to report that I’ve been cleared of that bogus item and it has been scrubbed from my background check. While I’m not happy with the fact that this error occurred in the first place, to TransUnion’s credit, they did their job and fixed the mistake.

The guy in last place

The Rio Olympics are ongoing at the time of this publication, and though I haven’t watched many of the events yet, I look forward to seeing one of the things that catches my eye with each Olympics - the guy in last place. Watch enough events and you’re bound to see at least one race where there’s one guy (or girl) who has fallen far behind everyone else and finishes in dead last. Maybe he got a muscle cramp, maybe he’s not feeling too good that day, or maybe he’s just severely outclassed by the other competitors. Whatever the reason, he’s crossing the finish line in last place. Normally these athletes don’t get any attention, but there are a few of them whom I think deserve at least some level of recognition, namely the ones that keep fighting all the way to the end. If you watch carefully you can distinguish the ones in last place who have given up from the ones who are still pushing as hard as they can, like they’re still in contention for a medal. The commentators on TV may not mention them, but I respect the athletes who find themselves hopelessly behind everyone else and still give it everything they’ve got. There are no medals or fanfare awaiting them at the finish line, and they know this, but they are so committed to their sport that they will not give anything less than one hundred percent, regardless of the now-forgone conclusion of their event. You can’t help but admire someone like that.

Photo Print

About two weeks ago I got a photo frame for free at a rummage sale. Normally I wouldn’t pick up such a thing, but there was a project on my mind that I had been meaning to do for years, and getting a frame would get me halfway to completion of it. The project was to finally get around to having one of my photos professionally enlarged and printed. I’ve been taking photos since I was a child and I seem to have an above average skill for it, but I had never tried getting my work produced on a large piece of nice paper with a high-end printer. With the photo frame now in hand, I just needed to order the print. I would have ordered the print from a business nearby me, but because the photo frame was of an uncommon size, I ended up having to order the print from a company in Denver that was able to print the photo very close to the dimensions of the frame. Several days after placing the order, a very large envelope showed up at my front door, and I eagerly brought it in to see how the print had turned out. To my pleasant surprise, it looked even better than I had thought. The photo in question was one that I took last year while in Venice, Italy, and is of a group of gondolas in the foreground with San Giorgio Island in the background. It was evening when I took the photo and the overcast sky had turned a particular shade of blue that worked really well with the blue of the water and the blue coverings on the gondolas. So, yes, it’s a very blue photo. But it’s also one of my favorites from that trip. It looked good on its own, but when I placed it into the frame I realized I had something special on my hands. The frame itself isn’t that good, as you might expect from something I got for free, but its good enough to make the final product look like the sort of thing you find at a professional photographer’s showcase. Below are a pair of photos I snapped of the print and how it looked in the frame.

With how well this print turned out, I’m seriously considering getting more of my photos enlarged and printed, though since I’m currently unemployed I don’t want to be spending large amounts of money on nonessential personal projects. Whenever my source of income is restored, however, I’ll definitely be looking into getting a whole collection of my photos printed.

Pokemon Go

The craze of Pokemon Go has been sweeping across America and a few other countries for the past few weeks. Pokemon Go has people wandering around with their phones, seeking Pokemon to catch and train and use in battle against other players. When players reach level 5, they choose one of three teams to join - Team Valor, Team Mystic, or Team Instinct. Each team has a color and a Pokemon for their emblem. I for one refuse to play Pokemon Go, partly because I focus my gaming on the console games, but also because there isn’t a team in Pokemon Go that properly represents me. Rather than just sit around complaining, I took the initiative and created my own team, and using a 2003 edition of Photoshop Elements, I haphazardly slapped together an emblem in five minutes. I present to you Team Antagonism.

Black seemed like a fitting color for Team Antagonism (the official teams use Blue, Yellow, or Red) and for the emblem I selected Haunter, which is a ghost Pokemon. While I could have gone with a number of other Pokemon, I limited my selection to the original 151 Pokemon, as that seems to be what Pokemon Go is limited to. As an emblem, I think Haunter works well for Team Antagonism, because if I remember right Haunter is known for being a massive troll, and Team Antagonism is all about mercilessly trolling other Pokemon Go players (the other Pokemon I considered was Mewtwo, which would be appropriate if Team Antagonism took a more sinister turn). Team Antagonism doesn’t care too much about actually catching Pokemon; we just want to be an incessant reminder to other players of how dumb this game is. Team Antagonism is also a direct response to those silly players who want to create a new team that’s all about brining people together and fostering friendship and unity. Fools.

Cycling US-36

As part of the construction to expand US-36, which runs from Boulder towards Denver, a cycling path was added on next to the highway. I’m not a cycling enthusiast, but I had been meaning to give this new path a try for some time now, so earlier today I got my bicycle, pumped some more air into the tires, and headed out to it. The route I took started around the Flatirons Park and Ride and I rode up to McCaslin Blvd before turning back. Anyone who saw me could tell that I’m strictly an amateur when it comes to cycling, predominantly because, other than one other guy, I was the only person not riding on one of those racing bicycles, and I wasn’t wearing the usual cotton spandex outfit that cyclists are known for. My gasping for air as I powered up the various hills would have also given me away.

Oh, and that one other guy who, like me, wasn’t looking the part of a real cyclist, was an interesting fellow. He was ahead of me but moving slower, and went I got closer to him I could see his bicycle was loaded down with all sorts of things. More notable, however, was that he was carrying a big cardboard sign on his back that read “Vegan.” If I were to guess, I would think that he’s one of those more aggressive vegans who is very vocal about his eating habits and not pleasant to be around if he catches you consuming any animal products. I know it’s not nice, but people like this are some of the most tempting targets for trolling. Should I become a more serious cyclist, I want to learn this man’s bicycle routines and then start intentionally riding nearby him with a large cardboard sign on me that reads “Carnivore.”

Knack

 

The first current generation console game that I played was Knack. I was at a Best Buy and there was a PlayStation 4 kiosk set up, so I walked over and picked up the controller. The demo for Knack was the game loaded on the PlayStation 4 at that time and I played it for about five or ten minutes. I wasn’t so much interested in playing Knack as I was in getting a feel for the new Dualshock controller that the PlayStation 4 was using. Leaving the kiosk, I had accomplished my goal of evaluating the controller, but I couldn’t say too much about Knack. It struck me as a half-decent game, but I had no interest in ever coming back to it. To this day I still have never played Knack again, and I strangely feel guilty about it.

“Son, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

A young man, half my age, was briefly discussing video games with me, and I mentioned that I was playing through Batman: Arkham Knight. He asked me if I was going to 100% the game, that is, if I was going to complete every last mission in the game. I replied that I had completed all the side quests but was skipping over finding all the Riddler Trophies, of which there are about 200 scattered across Gotham City. He was quite disappointed in me when I said that, and more so when I stated that I wasn’t going to play through the New Game Plus mode, which unlocks after beating the game for the first time. I informed him that at my age with my various commitments I just didn’t have the time to play games the way I used to when I was younger, but he was quite dismissive of this explanation. The thing is, when I was his age I had the exact same attitude. It always seemed to strange to me when I was younger why other people didn’t play more games and didn’t invest time into exploring every facet and conquering every challenge. Now I’m older and I can see how ignorant and arrogant my younger self was. When that young man brushed off my statement about not having the time to 100% the game I took the high road and graciously let it slide. In my head, however, my only thought was “Son, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I’m Coming Back

Today I move again, but I do not intend to stay in my new residence forever. One day I will come back to Boulder, kick out all the pretenders, and reclaim my throne.