Recently I found out that I had Showtime. Who knew? I never ordered it, didn’t even realize I had it, probably had it for half year at least before I found out. Well it turns out that with their packages that I pretty much have to have some network or whatever otherwise the price goes up for some reason. Why I don’t know,s eems pretty ridiculous.
But anyway, since I had it I’ve been checking it out. But like any decent movie channel, nothing is ever on that I want to watch when I’m searching for something to watch, either that or it is in the middle. So to make my money’s work I started paging through the onDemand stuff. Usually this stuff isn’t very current and is more than likely stuff they are losing rights to and thusly are trying to pawn it off anyway they can while they can. But they do have the first episodes of Californiacation so I’ve been watching that.
The show itself seems like a Sex & The City clone, just for men instead of women. The lead is a writer, working on a blog who moved out to California from New York. (In that sense Sex & the City had an episode where Carrie took a trip to LA and hated it and this is about the same). He has recently split from his longtime girlfriend and has apparently turned into the male slut of L.A. sleeping with anything that moves. The sex in this show seems far more gratuitous than it did in S&C, and oftentimes just felt like they put it in just for the sake of having tits on screen. As I progress in the show, this has seemed to slow down a bit and the nudity has calmed down though it is still there. (This could just be Showtime, after all even the first episode of Stargate SG1 had nudity in it due to Showtime). The most unbelievable thing about the show is that David Dachuvny (sp?) can get women to sleep with him by essentially just looking at them. I like the guy and he works well for this part given his knack at dry humour, but he is by far not an attractive man, especially in this show. It makes me want to go and live in LA so I can get laid by incredibly hot women that around here wouldn’t give me the time of day. But I realize this is only television and that sort of shit just don’t happen.
My routine since the holidays have ended has kept me fairly busy. I came up with the plan a couple of weeks ago to play my games until noon after which I would get on with my day writing, and doing normal every day chores. Unfortunately, one of the things I have added is cleaning the house meticulously… and I mean more than your average pick up around the house. I go into cupboards, take everything out, clean it all including shelves and doors, and put it back in nicely. This takes a long time and has generally started to weasel out my writing time in the day. Because of this, I have started to bring my time in an hour earlier and start my busy work at 11am. This way the hope is that eating and showering and that sort of stuff will go till noon, in which my old plan kind of takes in. This gives me a little extra time, and lets me move into my day more slowly. Hopefully, this helps out me out, but I’m not counting on it working miracles. I’m just hoping every little bit of writing helps the end result.
This Friday I am going into surgery in order to get a port placed. A port is essentially a catheter that is placed under the skin that allows the person to have access to a bloodline so that they can give injections easier without killing veins via shots in the arm. They often put these in the chest, but sometimes in the arm as well. For this one, it will be put into my chest on my righ side which is good. Though I believe they have gotten smaller, they can often leave a bulge under your skin so it is nice to be able to cover that up (not to mention the scars from the sticks to access it).
This is not my first port, I had 2 or 3 previously. My last one was in for about ten years before it got worn out and infected. I think for this upcoming MY plan is going to be to try accessing it less than previously. I still intend to access it every week like I had, but previously I had left the needle in for 2 or 3 days before I took it out. On this upcoming port I’m hoping to access it once a week and then take it out right away in order to try to prevent infection from occurring again.
Though the placement should be a rather simple procedure they are going to keep me in the hospital over night to make sure everything is going ok. Which is fine, I think they are doing it solely because I complained that they wanted to shoe me out the door right away after taking my port out 2 years ago. Though there was a slight difference there in that I needed to get infusions every 8 hours for the first day or two and I can’t give myself a shot so that just seemed retarded to me to ask me to come into the hospital that often. Still, it is nice to be there to make sure everything has gone ok, and I actually kind of enjoy staying in the hospital as it offers me a respite from my normal life, and at least at my hospital, the food isn’t nearly as bad as the stereotype says.
I am trying to watch the x-games over the last few days but I just can’t really bring myself to do so. Now granted the Winter X has always suffered compared to the Summer X, but the competition is so irrelevant these days, I really have no idea what is wrong with them.
Honestly a number of years ago when they took out the really weird sports that were hard to put in competition format in the first place, I didn’t mind. I mean extreme sledding? Bungee Jumping? WTF!?!? But some of the sports they’ve taken out of the years have just been a shame. I mean I sort of get ridding themselves of sky-surfing, it was cool but after a few years it became notably repetitive. But why oh why have they got rid of winter mountain biking? Or the street luge (a sport that was one to really define not only what an extreme sport was, but also was one of the original big sports of the X-Games)? Or flatland bike trick? Hell it seems to me that in general the street tricks of all sports were nearly completely taken out in the last year, as well as inline skating.
In their steed we’ve seen many new additions… ones that don’t belong really in a 10 mile radius of the X-Games… snowmobiling? I think extreme sledding was more in line with what the competition was… when they added the motorbike tricks I thought those were cool, but now they are doing street races with em argh! That’s not extreme at all, that’s nascar… can’t get more conservative than Nascar! Some of them haven’t been too bad, like I said the motorbike trick wasn’t bad, they also added those shorter ski things into the winter and both sides got a big air trick which is pretty kick ass. I am also kind of fond of the high jump motorbike in the summer x that they added a couple years ago.
On top of that, the coverage has gotten extremely bad. ESPN used to send out some of their big dogs to cover the event and because of it we got quality coverage. Now they hired some old VJ throw off to host what essentially seems to be a “best of” clips show… very little is live anymore. ESPN used to send out some of their bigger people to cover X-Games because they believed in the venue, and it was worth believing in. It honestly felt like a competition that filled in the gaps of what the mainstream forgot or didn’t care about given that it was new. But since then, X-Games has forgotten about what the mainstream forgot as well and become part of them, catering more to nascar fan than to extreme sports fan. In so doing, I imagine their viewership numbers have suffered greatly in recent years. Of course the execs likely think this is because people have lost interest in extreme sports, and thus lower budgets and further complicate the issues with the X-Games even more. But for those very few unlikely execs who may somehow stumble upon this blog… get a clue. We are still here, it is you who left us.
A couple of months ago, I discovered a new web-game called Travian. The game in essence is like Civilization or some other type of city building game, complete with the war aspect. Only this one is like an MMO in that the other civilizations are controlled by other players and it is online only. This last bit turns out to be the main part of the game, you build your cities to go to war and take over resources and try to win the game (by making a world wonder eventually).
The game started out to be a minor distraction for me during and between classes. It starts fairly slow, because of your initial lower resources you only really get to build 5 or 6 times a day, but as it picks up and you start having more than the single village, the pace really quickens. Sadly this has translated to me sitting and spending far more time than I had initially intended on spending. What makes matters worse is that one server I was on was completely dominated by about 90% of the larger players all in a single alliance, people who apparently don’t really want to play the game at all… so many on the server decided to leave for a new one just opening and thus I am now part of three servers! My days with this game get busier and busier. Although I do plan on deleting one of my accounts, I may in the end need to cancel two and just stick with the newer server so that I can keep my interest in check.
It is really quite a good game.
Over the last few days I worked on adding some more features. Of course I added another google skyscraper add to the very bottom of the right column, this one will always be at the bottom, and will only appear on the front page, search pages, and archives. The next addition I’ve done is that the site will now submit to blog update guides so if you go to another site that posts blog updates, you should hopefully see mine there. Lastly, on select posts, I will putting a Digg link. I chose a compact version of it, and will only be placing it on the more interesting of my posts from here out. (For instance, this particular post does not have it, if you wish to see an example of what it should look like, go back a few posts to the New Raiding Guild post). This feature is a work in progress as I try to make it easier for me to put it in, right now there isn’t an entirely easy way to do it, so hopefully we will find a solution soon.
It is kind of difficult getting back into writing. This blog is kind of part of that as much of it is really nothing more than actually sitting down and taking the time to write every day. Though in addition to this I have tried to at least look and think of my book a little every day to try to get a better idea of where to go with it. Still it is difficult, all I want to do is sit around and enjoy my time off, I don’t want to spend it doing crap that is serious. In the end, I just need to keep telling myself it is for my own good that I am doing it. After all, if I can sell a book or two, this can be my career and when all is said and done, this career I think would be very conducive to both my personality as well as my disease so if I can keep it going it would really benefit my life. And I don’t want to get a job out of Target….
So feeling a little ripped off about my previous guild ending before we really got the chance to go raiding, I decided to start applying to other, more established raiding guilds to at least be able to go and see the raids occur, see the zones, and at least get some loot. I tried a couple and got in one fairly easily (of course it was the lesser of the two) and last night went on a raid where we killed pawbuster (breaker?) and cleared PR.
Overall, they are decent, they have far too many rules, their dps isn’t where it should be, and I’m not sure if I’m going to enjoy them as much as I had the previous guild. However, this guild’s raid schedule is much better at Mon/Wed/Fri with fill raids on Saturdays and Tuesdays that are usually just for farming or status. This means I won’t get as easily burnt because I get breaks in between and it also means I can go out and spend time with my friends without having to sacrifice four straight nights like the previous guild would have.
Still the overwhelming amount of rules is a bit of a turn off. I liked what we were setting up before… it was a rare combo of top notch players that are expected to do their jobs without worrying about micro managing all of them. Plus the players themselves did much better dps than this current raiding force which tells me we would have been much more successful without even trying. I think that would have been great, it is too bad that we just couldn’t get the membership going.
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