The Crest
Okay, so my circuits homework held me back by a day.
My trip to Michgan was quite fun, I spent two weeks there leisurely and had a lot of fun jam-packed into it. Got to do all sorts of things around town and make the fun trip up north th her aunt Joan's house. We also got to see some band called Lamajamal, they were pretty fun to listen to. We went to the beach again, but this time I went along with Janelle to collect rocks. In particular we collected Leeland Blues, but there were also rocks that were intense shades of green and violet. However after collecting rocks I'd come to realize two things: 1-Spray-on sunscreen sucks, 2-Janelle sucks at applying spray-on sunscreen. I got this goofy tan on my back that had gaping circular-shapes taken out of it. While in Michigan I also got a copy of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (after Janelle showed me the first one), and it's pretty fun. I especially like the sandbox-mode where you can make un-restricted coasters that can injure people; my favorite is one that launches people 300mph straight into the air.
As the days passed by though, the road-trip loomed ever closer. Before I even got on the trip though, I got a speeding ticket in Michigan...I was going 5 over the limit, and got to pay $90 for it. So to summarize the trip, it took 4 days, 9 hours a day, and we travelled through Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Here's also a summary of some of the things we saw:
Indiana: Corn, as far as the eye could see.
Iowa: Corn, as far as the eye could see.
Illinois: Corn, as far as the eye could see.
Nebraska: Corn, as far as the eye could see. And some fields of Sunflowers.
Wyoming: Nothing...well, lots of mesas, if you count that.
Utah: Salt. Holy hell I have never seen so much salt in my life. I want to go back and taste it some time. They have as much salt as the other states had corn.
Nevada: Casinos and awesome mountain ranges.
We had our iPods with us and got one of those FM-adapters, and after the trip we're glad we invested in one. Most of the hotels along the route were okay except for the one we stayed at in Cheyenne, it was right next to a rail-line that had trains going by at random intervals of the night.
What topped off the entire trip though was that we'd expected to come to a room that, at the least, would be emptied, and ready for us to put our things into. I'd talked with my Dad about Janelle coming out starting a year before this would occur. I reminded him every couple of months to keep him aware that date was always getting closer. He even said we would start on things when summer began...which we didn't. In short, it took a month to get 4½ walls painted, none of which my brother helped with. It was really frustrating for me; Janelle was not happy, school was about to start, and I had to cancel the Barbeque. The suprise-barbeque which my jerk of a brother, and loud-mouth of a cousin mentioned in front of Janelle. So I got to be angry along with Janelle for a bit.
This had a small upside to it though; I got to tear everything out of my brother's room. I threw out all of his Playboy magazines (he had at least 100 of them), which my cousin Ryan rummaged through for things like the 50th Anniversary Edition. Trashed his useless items, and through out dozens of pointless novelty books. There was no shortage of things to trash, as years of accumulation had led to everything pouring out all over his floor, leaving limited space for moving. He had also never vacuumed his room, so there was also a layer of his body hair over the entire floor (I just had to share that). As Janelle said, we really should've taken pictures for some before-and-after perspective on the bedroom.
It's definitely been a work-in-progress so far, that's for sure. Nearly every day (at least for the first three weeks) we worked on the room in some way. First painting the bedroom, putting two coats on...but for some reason the off-white color turned out pink. So we got to repaint the room, with another two coats, white this time. We also have the wall with the windows red, and the bathroom is this weird shade of yellow. My Dad has an odd taste in colors, that's for certain. Painting took the longest time and was really draining on our energy, but what was worse was that my Dad didn't want anybody coming over to help. Just this week we finished these desks (with hutches) that we ordered, as well as a pair of bookshelves. Next up: two closet-systems that will replace the need for dressers to take floor-space in the bedroom. Right now we've only got one, and the next one will probably get ordered next week.
My cousin Keith (weekend before last) had a reception party for getting engaged to his girlfriend of 3 years, Gina. She's definitely a nice person, and enjoys partying as much as Keith, so it's a perfect fit. The party was nice, there was a good lot of food, plenty of new people to meet from Gina's family, and lots of good wine. I ended up tagging along with my cousins for the night to party a little more, and it was pretty fun. My cousin Keith was getting all sore about his beer-keg though. Here's a synopsis of that: he argued with Gina as to where the keg would be going after the party, and even when he did get to take it there was only a quarter of it left, and then he was getting mad that people who were at the after-party and not from the reception were drinking from it. Sorry Keith, but if you don't want your keg of beer to be drank from, a party with 30 people is definitely the wrong place to set it down. He even came to me at some point in the party asking me if I'd be ready to get his back in case he started shit with somebody over it. Over beer? Seriously? And what use am I going to be with a screwed up ankle? I'd have at least hit somebody in the head with a bottle for him though. I didn't have much when I got to the party; I was tagging along with my cousing Brian and as such knew ahead of time that I'd be doing the driving. He was nice enough to let me rest at his place for the night, and also got me some Jack-In-The-Box food as well. Before we left the next morning though some guy came by and mentioned to Brian that some woman was prowling around the house, looking through windows and trying to get into the backyard. Apparently Brian has had an interesting break-up with his last girlfriend.
Last weekend was spent mostly on Spore.
My general reception to it? As one person on the forums stated, it could best be described as a "bait-and-switch" Balls to the people saying, "well things get changed a lot over the process of developement" There's change, and then there's removing things unannounced. Examples include:
-Creature physiology is not important. In early demos bone-structure was rudementary in your creatures movement, with the proper structure it could have a larger walking-gait than most other creatures, have difficulty eating with a mouth in a precarious place, and so on. Now design is purely asthetic; how fast they move depends on a "speed" value assigned to feet, and a creature 20 feet tall with 4 legs moves as fast as a creature with 1 leg, if the feet ar the same.
-No exiting your UFO and venturing on-foot. This one pissed me off a bit, what with wanting to go big-game hunting and all.
-Political Correctness. When your creature with a 10 foot tall gaping-maw bites into another creature, you get no blood but instead a little animation of teeth-biting in the air. What happened to animal savagry? First demonstration of anything on land was killing this hapless little frog-thing whose corpse lay limp in a pool of oozing blood. Hmm...I still have to try putting a creature on a planet with no atmosphere, suprised I haven't done that yet.
In addition to things like this, the game seems extremely simplified to ensure that gamers of all ages can play it. While it's nice to make a game as creative as that to younger players, it's a shame to dumb it down and coddle it for the rest of us. Granted I've still had fun playing the game; I enjoyed being an omnivore and being friends with or devouring whomever I felt like. In the tribal stage my creatures maintained their sneakiness, so I was awesome at ambushing incoming raiding groups. The civilization phase I think had a lot more potential that what it was utilized for, and it was a shame you couldn't drive any of the vehicles you made. Space phase is definitely giant in scope, however there's a slight problem...there are 3 things that alert you to the necessity of your presence: Ecodistasters (an animal vital to a planet's food-chain is having an epidemic, and you must eradicate the sick ones), Pirates (they do raids for spice on your planet, which sells for money), and Hostile Aliens (religous or militaristic empires that you pissed off, or just don't like you). Eventually when you have many systems (some across the galaxy from each other), and many enemies or allies (I have no enemies), you end up getting an alert at least once every 5 minutes of gameplay. While I could see how this is implemented to keep the player active, it is very deterring from the element of exploration. I want to roam through the galaxy seeing what people have created, and I want to make colonies on the other sides of black-holes, but it's a little difficult when I'm tied down to playing nanny for my allies and my own colonies.
So I made contact with Joel again recently. I generally sent him a message saying that I'm going to be focusing on recuperating my ankle and overall fitness, and that because of Brian's unprovoked animosity towards me I'm not going to be training under him. Here are some tasty snippets of his response,
"I belive that his presence provides a interesting and useful element to our training...If you are afraid of getting hurt you can do two things. 1: dont train with him. 2: improve your skill so you dont get hurt. in our art if the uke gets hurt its the ukes fault. When I was still a green belt there was a guy just like brian who trained with us and alway hit us way to hard, guess what i am still here. we are learning fighting , not knitting.
You guys can spout of all the excuses in the world. money, school, work ... non of them are valid...the point is if it was that important you would find time every week no matter what.
If you cant handle somone like brian in training, how do you expect to survive someone like him in a fight?
you must learn to utilize the people you dont like to your advatage, this is ninjutsu."
To think that there was a time when our dojo had almost 30 active members, and at least 10 people in every class session. We held seminars for international-practicioners and had people travel from places as far as Utah, Arizona, and Washington just to participate for 2 to 3 days. Most commonly we had a man named Arnaud Cousergue come to instruct these seminars, he was a 15th-Dan (highest rank) from France, and having seen/experienced his abilities myself I can say he's fucking good. I remember when Joel told me about his conversation with Arnaud about the loss of his dojo, and how it happened. And it satistfied me in a way to hear from Joel that Arnaud said Brian was "a despicable excuse for a human being" It's ironically-satisfying, because Brian idolized this man.
All that aside, I'm probably going to first look into the possibility of training under another blackbelt from the dojo. If that doesn't work out though, I may have to seek out an entirely new art which would be rather unfortunate. I really liked this one, and would go as far to say I even loved doing it. At first when I joined it I really was looking for the goofy ninja stuff, "teach me how to ninja-vanish!" and all that. But I ended up staying because it was very real, and had good philosophies that were applicable to all aspects of life. I'd really like to continue training with Joel, he's great at teaching and invoking thought...but I'm not going to shell out $100 just to handle somebody else's baggage.
So school is slowly starting to pick up. Differentials is moving on to homogenous equations, in Circuits we're beginning to use the Node-Voltage and Mesh-Current methods, and my Music Exploration class...is painfully easy, I've already finished the first 6 weeks worth of assignments in the 4 classes I've attended. It'll be a great boost for my GPA though. I also like my Environmental Biology class, the teacher is great and he presents very interesting information on the issues discussed in class. I'll also get to take field-trips in that class, which should be fun. I'll have to skip the Yosemite trip because it'd take a lot of time out of my schedule, but there are plenty of others to go on.
I'm also thinking, would anybody be interested at all in doing any sort of regular weekend-gaming? I've made a bet with Luis for this semester not to play any games during the weekdays, so weekends are entirely it. But as far as a selection for games, I've got these in mind: Starcraft, Team Fortress 2, Command & Conquer Generals, Fallout: Tactics, Soldat, and Empire Earth. If anybody has any games they think people could get together to play on weekends, don't hesitate to mention it.
I'm looking forward to getting the closet systems put in; that'll allow Janelle and I to move all of our things into the room, and I can start being more active about exercising and practicing my instruments.
Some time soon I'm going to post up a picture of an Epic Creature I saw in Spore that Ben made, it was pretty funny to see stomping around devouring entire species at a time.
I'll see you all around, and remember,
make your own luck.
My trip to Michgan was quite fun, I spent two weeks there leisurely and had a lot of fun jam-packed into it. Got to do all sorts of things around town and make the fun trip up north th her aunt Joan's house. We also got to see some band called Lamajamal, they were pretty fun to listen to. We went to the beach again, but this time I went along with Janelle to collect rocks. In particular we collected Leeland Blues, but there were also rocks that were intense shades of green and violet. However after collecting rocks I'd come to realize two things: 1-Spray-on sunscreen sucks, 2-Janelle sucks at applying spray-on sunscreen. I got this goofy tan on my back that had gaping circular-shapes taken out of it. While in Michigan I also got a copy of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (after Janelle showed me the first one), and it's pretty fun. I especially like the sandbox-mode where you can make un-restricted coasters that can injure people; my favorite is one that launches people 300mph straight into the air.
As the days passed by though, the road-trip loomed ever closer. Before I even got on the trip though, I got a speeding ticket in Michigan...I was going 5 over the limit, and got to pay $90 for it. So to summarize the trip, it took 4 days, 9 hours a day, and we travelled through Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Here's also a summary of some of the things we saw:
Indiana: Corn, as far as the eye could see.
Iowa: Corn, as far as the eye could see.
Illinois: Corn, as far as the eye could see.
Nebraska: Corn, as far as the eye could see. And some fields of Sunflowers.
Wyoming: Nothing...well, lots of mesas, if you count that.
Utah: Salt. Holy hell I have never seen so much salt in my life. I want to go back and taste it some time. They have as much salt as the other states had corn.
Nevada: Casinos and awesome mountain ranges.
We had our iPods with us and got one of those FM-adapters, and after the trip we're glad we invested in one. Most of the hotels along the route were okay except for the one we stayed at in Cheyenne, it was right next to a rail-line that had trains going by at random intervals of the night.
What topped off the entire trip though was that we'd expected to come to a room that, at the least, would be emptied, and ready for us to put our things into. I'd talked with my Dad about Janelle coming out starting a year before this would occur. I reminded him every couple of months to keep him aware that date was always getting closer. He even said we would start on things when summer began...which we didn't. In short, it took a month to get 4½ walls painted, none of which my brother helped with. It was really frustrating for me; Janelle was not happy, school was about to start, and I had to cancel the Barbeque. The suprise-barbeque which my jerk of a brother, and loud-mouth of a cousin mentioned in front of Janelle. So I got to be angry along with Janelle for a bit.
This had a small upside to it though; I got to tear everything out of my brother's room. I threw out all of his Playboy magazines (he had at least 100 of them), which my cousin Ryan rummaged through for things like the 50th Anniversary Edition. Trashed his useless items, and through out dozens of pointless novelty books. There was no shortage of things to trash, as years of accumulation had led to everything pouring out all over his floor, leaving limited space for moving. He had also never vacuumed his room, so there was also a layer of his body hair over the entire floor (I just had to share that). As Janelle said, we really should've taken pictures for some before-and-after perspective on the bedroom.
It's definitely been a work-in-progress so far, that's for sure. Nearly every day (at least for the first three weeks) we worked on the room in some way. First painting the bedroom, putting two coats on...but for some reason the off-white color turned out pink. So we got to repaint the room, with another two coats, white this time. We also have the wall with the windows red, and the bathroom is this weird shade of yellow. My Dad has an odd taste in colors, that's for certain. Painting took the longest time and was really draining on our energy, but what was worse was that my Dad didn't want anybody coming over to help. Just this week we finished these desks (with hutches) that we ordered, as well as a pair of bookshelves. Next up: two closet-systems that will replace the need for dressers to take floor-space in the bedroom. Right now we've only got one, and the next one will probably get ordered next week.
My cousin Keith (weekend before last) had a reception party for getting engaged to his girlfriend of 3 years, Gina. She's definitely a nice person, and enjoys partying as much as Keith, so it's a perfect fit. The party was nice, there was a good lot of food, plenty of new people to meet from Gina's family, and lots of good wine. I ended up tagging along with my cousins for the night to party a little more, and it was pretty fun. My cousin Keith was getting all sore about his beer-keg though. Here's a synopsis of that: he argued with Gina as to where the keg would be going after the party, and even when he did get to take it there was only a quarter of it left, and then he was getting mad that people who were at the after-party and not from the reception were drinking from it. Sorry Keith, but if you don't want your keg of beer to be drank from, a party with 30 people is definitely the wrong place to set it down. He even came to me at some point in the party asking me if I'd be ready to get his back in case he started shit with somebody over it. Over beer? Seriously? And what use am I going to be with a screwed up ankle? I'd have at least hit somebody in the head with a bottle for him though. I didn't have much when I got to the party; I was tagging along with my cousing Brian and as such knew ahead of time that I'd be doing the driving. He was nice enough to let me rest at his place for the night, and also got me some Jack-In-The-Box food as well. Before we left the next morning though some guy came by and mentioned to Brian that some woman was prowling around the house, looking through windows and trying to get into the backyard. Apparently Brian has had an interesting break-up with his last girlfriend.
Last weekend was spent mostly on Spore.
My general reception to it? As one person on the forums stated, it could best be described as a "bait-and-switch" Balls to the people saying, "well things get changed a lot over the process of developement" There's change, and then there's removing things unannounced. Examples include:
-Creature physiology is not important. In early demos bone-structure was rudementary in your creatures movement, with the proper structure it could have a larger walking-gait than most other creatures, have difficulty eating with a mouth in a precarious place, and so on. Now design is purely asthetic; how fast they move depends on a "speed" value assigned to feet, and a creature 20 feet tall with 4 legs moves as fast as a creature with 1 leg, if the feet ar the same.
-No exiting your UFO and venturing on-foot. This one pissed me off a bit, what with wanting to go big-game hunting and all.
-Political Correctness. When your creature with a 10 foot tall gaping-maw bites into another creature, you get no blood but instead a little animation of teeth-biting in the air. What happened to animal savagry? First demonstration of anything on land was killing this hapless little frog-thing whose corpse lay limp in a pool of oozing blood. Hmm...I still have to try putting a creature on a planet with no atmosphere, suprised I haven't done that yet.
In addition to things like this, the game seems extremely simplified to ensure that gamers of all ages can play it. While it's nice to make a game as creative as that to younger players, it's a shame to dumb it down and coddle it for the rest of us. Granted I've still had fun playing the game; I enjoyed being an omnivore and being friends with or devouring whomever I felt like. In the tribal stage my creatures maintained their sneakiness, so I was awesome at ambushing incoming raiding groups. The civilization phase I think had a lot more potential that what it was utilized for, and it was a shame you couldn't drive any of the vehicles you made. Space phase is definitely giant in scope, however there's a slight problem...there are 3 things that alert you to the necessity of your presence: Ecodistasters (an animal vital to a planet's food-chain is having an epidemic, and you must eradicate the sick ones), Pirates (they do raids for spice on your planet, which sells for money), and Hostile Aliens (religous or militaristic empires that you pissed off, or just don't like you). Eventually when you have many systems (some across the galaxy from each other), and many enemies or allies (I have no enemies), you end up getting an alert at least once every 5 minutes of gameplay. While I could see how this is implemented to keep the player active, it is very deterring from the element of exploration. I want to roam through the galaxy seeing what people have created, and I want to make colonies on the other sides of black-holes, but it's a little difficult when I'm tied down to playing nanny for my allies and my own colonies.
So I made contact with Joel again recently. I generally sent him a message saying that I'm going to be focusing on recuperating my ankle and overall fitness, and that because of Brian's unprovoked animosity towards me I'm not going to be training under him. Here are some tasty snippets of his response,
"I belive that his presence provides a interesting and useful element to our training...If you are afraid of getting hurt you can do two things. 1: dont train with him. 2: improve your skill so you dont get hurt. in our art if the uke gets hurt its the ukes fault. When I was still a green belt there was a guy just like brian who trained with us and alway hit us way to hard, guess what i am still here. we are learning fighting , not knitting.
You guys can spout of all the excuses in the world. money, school, work ... non of them are valid...the point is if it was that important you would find time every week no matter what.
If you cant handle somone like brian in training, how do you expect to survive someone like him in a fight?
you must learn to utilize the people you dont like to your advatage, this is ninjutsu."
To think that there was a time when our dojo had almost 30 active members, and at least 10 people in every class session. We held seminars for international-practicioners and had people travel from places as far as Utah, Arizona, and Washington just to participate for 2 to 3 days. Most commonly we had a man named Arnaud Cousergue come to instruct these seminars, he was a 15th-Dan (highest rank) from France, and having seen/experienced his abilities myself I can say he's fucking good. I remember when Joel told me about his conversation with Arnaud about the loss of his dojo, and how it happened. And it satistfied me in a way to hear from Joel that Arnaud said Brian was "a despicable excuse for a human being" It's ironically-satisfying, because Brian idolized this man.
All that aside, I'm probably going to first look into the possibility of training under another blackbelt from the dojo. If that doesn't work out though, I may have to seek out an entirely new art which would be rather unfortunate. I really liked this one, and would go as far to say I even loved doing it. At first when I joined it I really was looking for the goofy ninja stuff, "teach me how to ninja-vanish!" and all that. But I ended up staying because it was very real, and had good philosophies that were applicable to all aspects of life. I'd really like to continue training with Joel, he's great at teaching and invoking thought...but I'm not going to shell out $100 just to handle somebody else's baggage.
So school is slowly starting to pick up. Differentials is moving on to homogenous equations, in Circuits we're beginning to use the Node-Voltage and Mesh-Current methods, and my Music Exploration class...is painfully easy, I've already finished the first 6 weeks worth of assignments in the 4 classes I've attended. It'll be a great boost for my GPA though. I also like my Environmental Biology class, the teacher is great and he presents very interesting information on the issues discussed in class. I'll also get to take field-trips in that class, which should be fun. I'll have to skip the Yosemite trip because it'd take a lot of time out of my schedule, but there are plenty of others to go on.
I'm also thinking, would anybody be interested at all in doing any sort of regular weekend-gaming? I've made a bet with Luis for this semester not to play any games during the weekdays, so weekends are entirely it. But as far as a selection for games, I've got these in mind: Starcraft, Team Fortress 2, Command & Conquer Generals, Fallout: Tactics, Soldat, and Empire Earth. If anybody has any games they think people could get together to play on weekends, don't hesitate to mention it.
I'm looking forward to getting the closet systems put in; that'll allow Janelle and I to move all of our things into the room, and I can start being more active about exercising and practicing my instruments.
Some time soon I'm going to post up a picture of an Epic Creature I saw in Spore that Ben made, it was pretty funny to see stomping around devouring entire species at a time.
I'll see you all around, and remember,
make your own luck.