Well a couple of weeks ago, my co-worker came into work and started playing The Elder Scrolls: Arena. ¹ I ask him why he was playing Arena all of a sudden given that it is nearly 20 years old and he said he had a dream the previous night that he would go through all the elder scrolls games in order.

This got me thinking about how I also wanted to play some classic RPGs, so naturally I went and downloaded the original Might & Magic. And we played, him playing Arena, me playing M&M.

This actually went on for a few days and we enjoyed ourselves a lot. Then we discovered a blog called the CRPGAddict. This guy has made it his goal to go through and play every Computer Roleplaying Game that he can. We instantly looked at each other and wondered why we don’t do something like that.

So that’s what we are doing. We are still figuring out a lot of the details right now like name and rules and what games to include on the list. I think we have a lot of the early games down and we’ve started playing a couple.

We’re going to go beyond just Computer RPGs and include Console RPGs which I think will help us differentiate from CRPGAddict. I also think there is something of value of having two different voices. In particular, he’s in his mid-20s and I’m in my mid-30s so we get two generations of gamers. I wish we had someone who was this big into RPGs with us who was in his early to mid 40s because some of the early RPGs in particular are just way before even my time and I think it’d be good to get that third generation.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to currently. I am going to try to keep you updated with how that project is going. It might dig into my time here, but probably not too much. Most of the stuff I post here wouldn’t be appropriate there anyway.

Since that moment, my friend has celebrated every year on that date with a screening of Back to the Future in which he invites friends to watch with him. He says that his next year is dependent upon how the viewing goes. It’s almost like his new year.

This concept got me thinking of my own life changing moment. I think we all have this moment. For me, it was at the bank.

It had been about two months since I was fired from a rather unsavory retail job with no prospects at all and living with my mom on SSI. I went to the bank to deposit a $25 check from someone into my saving account, got my deposit slip back and sat  in my car and looked at the slip. I had just under $800 in my savings account.

It was at this moment that I sat and thought to myself that I needed a better life than this and so I went out to move forward and get a better life. Within a year, I got my GED, had taken my ACTs, and was attending college at the UW in Whitewater.

It has now been 10 years since that moment, and while I am not where I had wanted to be, I am definitely in a better place. No longer living with my mom, earning twice the amount I was in that retail job with benefits (I didn’t even really have any at the retail store), and recently getting a promotion, hopefully at some point with another raise. I still am working towards a better life, but I definitely think I have better prospects than I did 10 years ago but I have a long ways to go.

In thinking of all of this though, I realized that I probably could find the date. You see, I kept that bank slip that made me change my life. In fact, I framed it and hung it on my wall as my inspiration. And after all of this thought, I looked at the date and found that it was February 25th.

I don’t think I can very well have a party at the bank in order to celebrate like my friend does with Back to the Future. I’m not even sure if I’ll remember by the time that date rolls around again.

I do like the idea of a party though. And even if I never do a party, it is nice to reflect on this moment and realize how far I’ve come in my life, and think forward on where I have to go yet. Hopefully I can achieve some of the goals that I have always wanted.

They would all take their bow, people would clap. They’d turn off and on the light and bow again, people would clap. Put down the curtain, and pull it up again, bow again, people clap. Turn off the lights, turn on the lights, bow again, people clap. The silliness of this routine struck me as a complete waste of time, I mean the pieces were good and certainly worth clapping but really 4 to 6 times? For each one? No, that is really not the case.

Then today, by chance, I was listening to the latest Freakonomics podcast in which they talk about booing at performances. They talked in depth about how it is bad etiquette these days to boo a performance, even if it was terrible. But they also talk about how booing is one of the last forms of true democracy. How this is one time where you really do have your chance to say how you feel about something.

I can’t help but think about how this is somewhat true. But etiquette in the United States has gotten us to a point in which we really have no option but to go along with whatever the performers want. I mean, the 4 to 6 casting calls noted above is such a case. Really, it is nothing more than the performers patting themselves on the back, and we as the audience agrees.

Furthermore, etiquette also dictates that you now are required to give whatever performance a standing ovation. This seems like it is more audience instigated, but it is not. Again, this is instituted by the performers wishing a pat on the back and they do it by giving you an encore. In fact, every live entertainment show these days plans their encore and does it every night. It is part of the show now, not a special treat for a crowd who likes the performance more than others.

Gone are the days where you can actually voice your opinion, by not giving a standard ovation, but merely clapping. Or not clapping at all. And yes, though I hate people who boo and am particularly annoyed by hooting and hollering, I also like the aspect that if a performance was bad, we COULD actually boo without being looked at as annoying jerks.

I am not a huge fan of going back to the days of a king. But I must admit, that in this particular case, that I do wish that there was a king that the audience would follow, just so that every performance doesn’t get a standing ovation and the performers on stage continue to innovate.

I also would like to see an occasion where a crowd decided to actually say to a performer how they felt… that the performance was good, worth my time. But wasn’t so spectacular that they deserved a standing ovation. Would the encore still come? Or what if no one clapped at all, no one boo’d. Would the encore still come? Would the performers be so used to their standard, that they didn’t know any other way to act?

In my opinion, 2008 was a fairly weak year overall which is too bad.

The year actually started strong with the Pete Fenlon overland style map. The style is based off Fenlon’s style which he developed while doing the Middle-Earth RPG. I thought the theme was pretty slick overall, very standard map style, nothing special but very cool. I liked it.

The problem, though, started right away with the second month which showed how to make your own customized symbol catalog. Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a useless lesson. It is good to have one of these every year as it shows you how to do something more advanced in CC3 which I do think has its place. The problem is that this year had several like this.

In addition to the Symbol Catelog issue, there was an issue which showed you standards on how to link maps together, which is really basic. ¹ Another issue was how to make your own custom map borders, and some tips on how to make them pop out better.

And lastly, was a video tutorial series which was really geared at new cartographers. Now to be fair on this one, this video tutorial is excellent and one of my all time favorite issues. But there were already four other how to use base features of CC3 issues this year, and they provided lower resolution versions on youtube of this issue free to anyone as a promo.

Besides the 5 base how-tos. There was one issue which showed off new features of City Designer 3. I did actually go through this feature several times when I got CD3 and did find it useful to acquaint myself with the new program. But I did find it to smell faintly like an advertisement for the newly launched title.

Perhaps my least favorite of the issues was the Battle Maps issue which actually I could find useful if I ever GM’d. It is meant as a way to make a standard gaming map for a pen & paper game for your players to be able to move around in. But I’m not hugely interested in this so I didn’t care about it.

I liked the idea of the Shaded Relief maps, however I never got this one to work. I don’t know what it was about it, but I’m going to try it in a live map instead of doing it in the provided template sometime to see if I can get it to work better.

Despite the above complaints, there were a few good ones. My second favorite issue was the Heraldic Symbols issue. They provided shield backgrounds, furs, and easy to use symbols to add to the shields. Then they told you basically what each component meant on the herald so that you made them appropriately. A really cool concept for them and I liked the usage.

The other decent issues were the Lighted Dungeons which showed you how to use lighting in the DD3 (though it was a weird cross between the CD3 issue and the base how to issue), the simple but useful overland black & white maps, and that star system template which had some great backgrounds to use and was cool to see how to map my solar systems.

Overall, I give this particular year of Cartographer’s Annual a solid “meh.” The decent ones are pretty good, but there is a lot of stuff in this one I could do without. Like I said, had they made just one or two of those how-to’s this would have been a much better year.

I don’t want to take away from what I’ve done. I am a Hemophiliac that has always had foot problems and lately had elbow problems. I’ve overcome Hepatitis C. I’ve dropped out of high school and then graduated from UW-Madison.¹ I’ve found in a job in a tech related field that I can live off of for the most part, I got promoted in that job because they believe in me even though they barely hired me in the first part. I feel like I’ve come a long way, but I have a long way to go. So this is who I want to be, and a lot of this is just mannerisms, not just career goals.

I want to weigh less than 200 pounds and maintain it. I finally bought myself a scale and weighed myself this morning at a whopping 253.4. I’ll be honest in saying this is the most I’ve ever weighed, and a lot of it I put on the fact that I work in a very sedentary position. I think back and I do feel like I was happiest with myself when I was 195, and honestly even then I wanted to get to 180. I feel my ideal weight is 185, but I’ll take anything below 200. That is a big goal of nearly 60 pounds. And oh yes, I want to do this before summer (3 months) which is going to require some hardcore dieting on my part.

Over the years I’ve picked up a mannerism which annoys me to hell. That is that my hands are constantly search my face and my scalp for zits to pop or scabs to pick. I really hate this feature of mine and I really want to stop it. I realize this is gross and I can’t imagine that it is helping me at all be able to attract women.

I want to become more self-confident. I will be honest in saying that I don’t think very highly of myself. I do feel like a lot of this will come with weight loss, and I know I’d get self-confidence if I was with someone romantically.² Outside of fixing myself I don’t really know how to get self confidence so I hope the above actually works!

I want to remember how to interact with people. There are many reasons why I have problems with this now, but I’m not really sure if any of them are correct. But when I am talking to someone who is talking about some random thing, I often have no idea how to respond. I don’t know how to sound interested, I don’t know how to add anything to the conversation, I have somehow forgotten this. I don’t think I was ever particularly good at this, but I was definitely better at this before than I am now.

And heck, for that matter, I want to remember! I have a terrible memory, and I feel like it is getting worse. I don’t know how to fix this either, but I think it needs to get fixed. I need to be able to remember common events going on. I need to remember to do stuff. I need to remember how to do stuff. I need to remember.

I want to attract a lady. It is time I get back in the game, it has been too long.

I want to own a Hybrid car. Yes it’s materialistic. Oh I should add to this that I want it to be a NEW car. I’ve never owned a new car to date in my life, and I do think this is a mark of being grown up and self-sufficient.

I’d like to be able to afford a $200 remote control or $100 pen. I’m not really sure how much I want to own these things, but I do want to be able to afford them. I want to be able to look at these really expensive items and be able to not worry about the price hurting me.

I’d like to be my own boss in one way or another. I don’t think I play well with authority, I think that is a given. The best solution is not to deal with authority. Whether it is through owning my own arcade or writing novels, I don’t really care. I just want to be able to work at my own pace on my own thing for my money rather being under someone else’s ball and chain.

I’m sure I’m missing a thing or two, but in a nutshell, this is who I want to. It is up to me to be this person and I don’t know how to do most of it. But hopefully I can force me to be this.

Such is youth I guess. I had a couple of interests whom I think were way above the level that I could likely get now, or at least that is my perception of things. And I’ll be honest in saying there were a couple more along the same lines that also were interested in me that I never bothered with for various reasons.¹

Thinking about this makes me think about where I am now. Back then, I was so self-confident, something I lack now. I do weigh a bunch more now, and I think this might be part of it. But I am to the point where I honestly don’t know how to talk to women anymore and I don’t know where to meet them, I know nothing.

And here is this ex (well sort of ex), married with four children. FOUR! I mean good lord. I was shocked by that, still am. I am remember her problems, her issues. She was great and in another situation I probably would have done well with her. I can picture her and I growing older together, probably not with four kids, but I can see it. And it is just weird seeing where she actually is.

I’d like to meet my previous self. To see how I’ve changed. To see what makes me so less desirable to others than now. Maybe I’m not, outside my weight. Maybe that’s just my negativity, hard to tell. I do feel like I’m probably more negative about life now, and I feel like I joke more now, and I definitely feel like I have a harder time now talking to others. Not in the case of being able to talk to them in the first place, but more in the case of when I am talking to someone, I no longer know how to relate. I don’t know what to say next. I feel like I used to be able to do that better. What happened to that? How do I get it back? How do I stop joking about everything? How do I let someone in.

I don’t know the answer to any of that. The only thing I can really control is my weight. At the time, I weighed about 185, this was about 12 years ago… now… I’m up to about 240. Nearing 60 pounds in weight gain. Yikes.

At the time, I worked a job which had me on my feet the entire day, walking back and forth. And then I was also going to the athletic club working out.

I did also dip in weight when I was taking Hepatitis C medicine. I wasn’t eating much and when I was, it just came out right away anyway.

I feel like I need to just stop eating wholesale. I also think I need to take an hour a night to go and workout somehow or somewhere. I need to get my weight down. Maybe the other things will follow.

I don’t really know what was up with last week. I was looking for any reason I could to not write. I think it had to do with some small blocks of not knowing what to do next in the book. I found myself playing a lot of games when I should have been concentrating on writing. I gotta tell you, game playing in no way helps you out in the realm of writing. It completely blanks out my thoughts and consumes much of my time without any realization. This is something I really need to resist in the future.

This week, work got in the way. On Tuesday, I did my normal Gaming Night with the guys which led me to being tired on Wednesday. But the bigger problem was that I realized that Friday I had an appointment to go to and that put me into working 10 hour days on both Wednesday and Thursday.  This essentially took my 2 hours a day and made me extremely tired so that I couldn’t even make an attempt at catching one hour.

I’ve also been going out to shows and movies with friends a little more recently than I usually would and this has cut into my writing time as well. I try to make up this time as best as I can, but when I am coming home at 10:30 at night, there really is no avoiding skipping the session.

Yesterday I did get back into it a little more. I wrote some pretty hard stuff. It only amounted to about 200 words but like I said… it was hard to write. I would write a few sentences and then just blank out and then repeat.

The last couple of weeks hasn’t been a complete waste. There have been times of outstanding successes that I never would have guessed coming. For instance, last Friday I got a session in where I hit over 1000 words in an hour. This was my first 1000 word/hour  session where I was actually writing for my book.¹ This did roll over into more sessions where I did 700 words, but I wasn’t able to quite hit 1000 again. Still I was very proud of myself, this was quite a landmark for myself.

Going forward, I am hoping to get back into it. This morning I was able to work on my blog in the time frame. But for tonight’s session, I intend on completely getting back into writing the book.

Here’s my update:
My Goal 100,000 words, current words: 7,242. End Date: 6/14/2012.

The old HTC Hero I am fairly torn with. On one side I really liked it. It was in essence a first generation Android phone, and I felt that it was a pretty good one. However, over the last 6 to 9 months it really started to show its age. Both of ours started freezing and crashing periodically. One of the button plating had started to fall off and the back cover barely stayed on mine. And there were a number of other similar problems. It is these hardware malfunctions that made me decide to go back to Samsung who had developed my two phones previous to HTC and both of which were excellent phones in my opinion.

When I unboxed the Samsung Galaxy S II, I couldn’t help but look at it and go “Holy Crap! That’s way too big. The Galaxy has a 4.5-inch OLED screen which is a full inch bigger than the iPhone 4 and I think 1.5 inches bigger than my previous phone. It looks huge even though it is nearly all screen! I really thought I might have issues putting it into my pocket, but fortunately, it is a really thin device at less than a half-inch thick. I think the thinness of the phone makes up for the length and width. I feel it actually fits in my pocket better than my previous phone despite initial worries. I will be honest, even 4 days later I am still trying to get used to the size and this is still making me contemplate returning the whole thing.

The screen itself, outside of size, is quite amazing. A much more clear and crisp quality than my old phone. Blacks are REALLY black and colors just pop out. I turned on the netflix app and could actually see myself buying a stand of some sort and actually watching movies of some sort. It is a far better screen than any other cell phone that I think I’ve seen, iPhone included.

I am an Android devout. I like the OS. I like that Google left it open. I like that they actually support and innovate, unlike their competition. I like that they invented bar code scanning and voice control and don’t sue others who use it, even though they probably should. And I gotta say that Gingerbread is pretty awesome. Rumor has it that the Galaxy S 2 is going to be upgrading to Ice Cream Sandwich, which was part of the reason I made the switch, but for now I’m enjoying Gingerbread. My previous version (I think it was donut) felt like an early iteration. It had a ton of promise, but a ton of problems. Many of these issues they’ve fixed and have since added a ton of effectiveness.

The in-phone keyboard is much more smooth than it used to be and I find myself much more comfortable with it and getting things wrong less. I haven’t really liked the swipe feature very much, it is a good idea but I have had issues using it so far and it actually feels like it takes me longer to make a word on it than it does just typing. I have been amazed at the voice control of the thing. I always liked the voice recognition on my Hero, but I didn’t use it because you couldn’t use it in too many places unfortunately. Well Samsung stepped up and included the mic button anywhere you could type and it works wonderfully. It has caught nearly everything I’ve tried at it. I went and downloaded a task app and started speaking my tasks into the keyboard input… “Geocaching,” “Take Medicine,” “Fold Clothes,” “Clean Kitchen,” and “Take out Trash” all worked without a hitch. The only issues it had was with write which it spelled right, not a huge deal, and “do litter” which it read as “do later.” I think the last one was a fair problem but could have been user error, I will give it the benefit of the doubt. I’ve used it dozens of times since and those remain the only two issues I’ve ever had. It’s everywhere and it works.

The phone has 4G, another reason I got it. I wanted to make sure it was fairly future proof seeing as I was going to have it for two years. I didn’t actually think that we got 4G in this area, but it has been picking up 4G in this area none the less.

The jury is still out on the battery life. It is supposed to have 8.5 hours of talk time. However, I’ve been playing a lot of games, and keeping 4G and wi-fi up as I’ve been home so the battery has been draining. Games in particular are draining it faster obviously. I played Angry Birds on it for about 4 or 5 hours yesterday morning and ended up having to plug the phone back in at about 2pm because it was down to 10 or 15%. I woke up at 7am so I guess this isn’t bad. If I start using it more normally, I think it should last all day pretty easily.

It has a pretty nifty zoom feature where you can put two fingers on the screen, you can tilt in or out to zoom in or out. I think it works pretty well though is difficult to control how fast it zooms. I never really was able to get the pinch thing to work reliably on the Hero so I’m not tied to any previous function so I’m going through both and seeing how they work.

It also has a nice feature that you can turn the phone upside down and it is supposed to mute so that it doesn’t disturb you at work or what not. My initial test of putting it on my stomach while I was laying down didn’t work so well, I’ll have to see if it works better on an actual flat surface.

Overall I like the phone quite a bit. I kind of wish that Samsung released different versions of the phone with high-end and low-end. I would like this phone maybe without the giant screen and half the storage, but overall it’s a great phone. I’m now leaning towards keeping it where I was considering sending it back when we got it thanks to the size issue. But I’ve gotten used to it.

I btw, also had this reaction to getting a big screen TV. I remember when we put it into our house a few years back we looked it and thought that it was way too big and we should have gotten a smaller one. But we did eventually get used to the adjustment and now have a hard time going smaller. Funny how those things work.

Last week I actually did do some work but I wasn’t very consistent and it wasn’t part of the overall hours of work. I cleaned off my desk of all the random junk so that I can concentrate on the tasks at hand without the extra clutter. I then created a new user account on my computer that has restricted access to programs and the internet to try to force me to not do anything but write. I also downloaded, and since have bought, a word processor specifically geared towards writing called Liquid Story Binder XE. I have been liking it so far. It allows me to keep journals of what I’m doing, create checklists of things to do, sort my story by chapter, keep dossiers of characters, set goals for myself, keep a word count and session times, and just overall keep thoughts tracked.

I was supposed to start my actual work on Sunday evening after my daughter had left. I have a two hour block scheduled for Sunday nights, however this didn’t work out well. My roommate and I went out right after my daughter left to see the Oscar-nominated Animated shorts. This brought me home in the midst of my scheduled block and decided that for this week I would just use the time to relax, not a great beginning. I also had a pitfall yesterday morning where I skipped an hour slot due to staying up until midnight the night before. And the night before I missed about a half hour because I needed to make a meal earlier as we were going out.

My writing still hasn’t gotten to be full speed though I think that it is better than what it has been. Over the week I have done a lot of setting up and a lot of learning of Liquid Story Binder. I am also taking the time and using it to write blogs, like this one. I got my novel copied over to the program from when I was writing it previously, went through and did a quick edit of what I had so far, separated it into chapters and so forth.

I had about 2500 words written previously (I know not much), and I have since added about 750 more words to it, as well as two blog posts of about 1000 words. For my first week I don’t think this is terrible. I think I did have a pretty good test last night where I was tired and didn’t feel like writing much. I admit that I didn’t do as well as I could have normally, but I did manage 250 words and even though it is slight, I was proud of it considering my condition.

I have also added to my daily time reading time to inspire and enlighten my writing. For each block of time that I set aside for writing, I set aside 10 to 15 minutes for reading either the Bible or the Poetry Dictionary right now. The reason for this is that I feel that this time should be not just getting the work done, but also for bettering the work. I do want biblical references, and I admit that I don’t have a hugely strong grasp of the Bible so that is why that is there. The Poetry Dictionary I think is a good source for me to learn how to use rhythm better which will always help.

During my writing and reading I have tended to listen to music. I bought a brand new pair of headphones that cost me about $40. They are of the over-the-ear variety. I wanted ear phones that would be really comfortable and help me block out the rest of the world and so far I think these work great. I so far have been listening to Pandora and my own music, though every now and then I plan on listening to alternative net radio stations to try to keep up to pace on alternative music seeing as I don’t actually have much opportunity to do that.

Overall, I do think that it is going well. I definitely am still adjusting into the role, but I like that I can see the promise of what I am doing. I can see how this method might work extremely well. Even when I get the 250 words while tired, I sit and think of how easy it could be to get 1000 words in an hour. Given that my goal only has me doing 500 words an hour to get a 100,000 page book in 4 months, I am hopeful that I will be ahead of schedule soon enough.

My Goal 100,000 words, current words: 3,743. End Date: 6/14/2012.