With Thanksgiving behind us, we start to look ahead to the next holiday…Christmas. A sure sign that it is that time of year is when Shell and I break out boxes upon boxes of Christmas decorations, ranging from lights, wreaths, window displays, and, my personal favorite, my talking Homer Santa! He makes a great addition to my cluttered desk during the holidays.
Now that we have a brief rest for the next few weekends, we were ready to foster another cat. Shell came home today with our next assignment: Star, who is a female Siamese mix. We don’t know too much about her yet, but she doesn’t seem to shy, and was letting us pet her within a minute of placing her in the room. She is sick with a UTI, so we will have her for about two weeks until her medicine runs out and she is feeling better. She is about a year and a half old, and recently had a litter of kittens, though we do not have them. Sadly, since she is sick, I won’t be integrating her with Loki and Odin. I’ll put up more pics in a few days when she is a bit more used to us and will stay still for a bit.
This one isn’t as long, or as funny, but it still happened, so I must document it.
I was playing 3D Dot Game Heroes on the ol’ gaming chair while Shell snoozed away on the couch. Suddenly, she sits straight up and looks at our cat, Loki, who is laying down next to her on the couch. She said:
“Oh Loki.”
At this point, I didn’t know if she was sleep-talking, or actually awake, since Loki was there next to her. So I said:
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s sleeping in his cage.”
Seeing how there was no cage on the couch, and Loki was free as could be, I knew she was sleep-talking. So I said:
“Yeah, he’s a good boy.” To which she replied, before slipping back to sleep:
“He loves his momma.”
I finally have a promising job lined up. I’ll be interviewing Wednesday, so here’s hoping I’ll be working by Monday. The good thing is that this is a full time, 40-hour gig, not some part-time project job that will only last a week. I am actually looking forward to getting out of the house and working again. I have actually been missing working these past few days…
So tomorrow I’ll be out and about getting some last-minute stuff done, with the expectation that I will be employed by the time I get back from South Carolina on Monday.
I went up to Oneonta today to meet up with my Dad. Deer season starts tomorrow, and he was up there today getting ready and making some basic repairs to the house up there, so I met him there to give him a hand. After a few hours of work and lunch, he wanted to take the ATV up the road and drive over to his tree stand to make sure it was ready for tomorrow. I had an accident involving an ATV years ago, and since then I have never driven one again, so I was not about to go up with him. Instead I decided to stay behind at the house and wander around outside.
So I walked down to one of the abandoned farmhouses on the property and checked it out, but didn’t stay long. My hobophobia had kicked in and I was afraid that I would find a vagrant living in the house over there. So I walked back to the main house to wait for my Dad to return. As I walked alongside the back of the main house, but still a ways up in the woods on a hill above the house, I happened to look down at the house. I suddenly stopped short, because I had noticed something weird. I took a closer look, and sure enough I saw something in the back room window:
Being a proud member of PlayStation Plus, I am one of the lucky few who get a bunch of cheesy games shoved at us for free every two weeks. I try them all, and end up deleting most. However, this week we PS+ members got a bit lucky, and we received free copies of the PSN game Shatter. When I first saw it, I yawned and said “I do not want to be playing a brick breaker game on my PS3.” Still, my curiousity got the best of me, and I gave it a whirl. I must say that I was quickly blown away by the refreshing breeze of awesomeness that was blown into a game that has been re-done over and over and over again.
As I mentoned, Shatter is a brick breaker-esque game. You control the moving platform (called a bat in this game), and use it to hit a bouncing ball into bricks. Once all the bricks are gone, the level is complete. While Shatter definitely delivers this common experience, it spices it up by adding in a multitude of tweaks that will really shock you if you aren’t prepared. Read More
One of the neat revampings of Fallout: New Vegas was that the “morality” scale from Fallout 3 (how good or bad you were determined how people reacted to you) was replaced with factions. In New Vegas, each “faction”, which could be a city, town, or a group/gang, has a different view of you based on the quests you take and who you kill. So some towns can love you while others will despise you.
The problem is that this gets confusing, and as you get to about the middle of the game, you have tons of quests at your disposal for different factions. Problem is that you don’t know how different factions will react to your completion of the quest until you complete it. For example, I was researching five different factions for some robot dude. Upon giving him information of the last of the five factions, two totally other factions suddenly got mad at me, and one was ended up disliking me due to it. So these factions that were in no way involved directly with this quest had their perception of me change upon it’s completion.
Since I was in middle school, I’ve been a fan of Michael Crichton’s books. I loved the way he used science in the vast majority of his fiction books to really lead the reader to believe that what was going on was physically possible. Just reading all the technical jibberish in Jurassic Park is enough to say “hey, that all makes sense…this could really work.” I picked up “Pirate Latitudes” from the local library, which was actually a manuscript that was found in his files after his death in 2008. It was a really entertaining read, but it uses more “pop culture” references as opposed to science to weave an action-pack book on…you guessed it, pirates.
The book takes place in the 1600s, and starts out in the “pirate town” of…Port Royale! The British governor of the area ends up helping to organize a privateering operation with some of the local populace, who head out to capture a Spanish treasure ship that ended up getting stranded, making it a tempting target. The big thing to notice is that despite the name of the book, the crew that go out to raid the Spanish ship are indeed privateers, meaning they were “pirates” that attacked ships belonging to rival nations only, and portions of their swag was paid to the crown they were loyal to, making them a bit more than average pirates.
The book follows the adventures of this crew as they sail out to sea, get captured by a Spanish fleet, escape, raid a Spanish military stronghold and capture the treasure ship. As they head back to Port Royale to divy out the treasure, they are attacked again by the Spanish navy, have to endure a hurricane, get stranded on a deserted island, and even have to do battle with a krakken. Also peppered about the book is witchcraft, cannons, explosions, pistol and crossbow battles, and other piratey things.
The book was a very well-written action book, but if I didn’t know it was a Crichton book, and you told me it was after I read it, I would not believe you. It simply is nothing else like his style, which leads me to believe that this manuscript was far from finished in his eyes. At times it will feel like you are reading a novel loosely based on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, with all the cliche pirate-ish stuff going on. Still, if you like the current hype of pirates sailing and plundering, this book is a very good, and relatively short, read that I recommend.
Today was the last day of my job, meaning the project lasted a mere nine days…actually, less than that since we finished up and were sent home early today. I really enjoyed that job too, and I wish it was a full-time gig. So now I’m back to searching for employment.
I had a slight ray of hope this morning as I went on break to find a voicemail with a job offer waiting for me, but the message was left by someone with a heavy Indian accent, and I couldn’t understand most of it. Heck, even the visual voicemail on google voice couldn’t decipher most of it! However, those dreams were shattered when I went on lunch break an hour later and saw that I had an e-mail from the same company, offering me a job selling life insurance.
I may be unemployed, but I’m not that desperate…yet…
I think most people who even know a little bit of me know that I have a fascination with Sasquatch/Bigfoot. I honestly like to believe that such a creature is out there…some kind of lost link between man and beast that has eluded capture all these years. However, what I won’t stand for is this creature I just became aware of this very evening…
As odd as it may sound, Shell enjoys watching those “ghost shows” that air on A&E and other stations. We were watching the show “Paranormal State” today, and the episode we watched didn’t concern ghosts…it concerned UFOs. This was weird to me because every episode we have watched so far featured a haunted house or business with ghosts…never UFOs. I was intrigued, since I also have a belief in interstellar life outside our own. However, it went downhill pretty fast. What started as an episode about UFOs outside this ranch that people stay over to watch them took a horrific turn as the team headed into the woods at night to get their investigation on, and one of the locals began to tell them that something lurked in those woods: Batsquatch.
At the time I was playing around on my phone, but as I heard the word “…quatch” uttered my interested shot back to the television to see how Sasquatch was brought into this. Then I thought I heard the guy say “Batsquatch”, and I didn’t think I heard it right. That’s when the guy revealed a picture he drew of what he believed lived in the woods, and at that point I nearly lost it. This is the image the guy on the show claimed he saw (I actually got if off their website):
3D Dot Game Heroes is one of those games that has been in the backlog of my Gamefly queue for quite some time. I was unable to snag the only “new release” I wanted (Force Unleashed II), so Gamefly sent me 3D Dot Game Heroes. After putting about an hour into it, I am overwhelmed with feelings of nostalgic bliss as this game definitely takes me back.
3D Dot Game Heroes is a top-down action RPG, which plays similarly to the first Legend of Zelda, from the NES days. Sure, the graphics are spruced up and the characters, enemies, and environment all have a 3D-ish feel, but the gameplay is so reminiscent that it actually made me stop and wonder “is this game licensed by Nintendo?” As I said, I only played an hour so far, but here’s the similarities between this game and Legend of Zelda: Read More
As I mentioned earlier, Steve came up last weekend to partake in Guys Weekend In. On Sunday we decided to do some geocaching. Steve had a travel bug he had picked up at a previous cache that he wanted to drop off, and I wanted to finish up some caches I hadn’t found at the East Greenbush Town Park yet. Thus, I decided that we could go there and kill two birds with one stone.
We started off by returning to “the icky place”, which was the abandoned, run-down restroom at the park. This was my fourth return there to try and find it, and I was determined to finally cross it off my list with the help of a second pair of eyes with Steve. Once we walked up to the bathroom, I suddenly realized that I had once again forgotten to bring a flashlight. Luckily Steve had an app on his phone that turned his phone’s camera flash into a flashlight, so we were good to go. For some reason, the flashlight apps available for my Droid were only for the screen, which wasn’t much help. Read More
My current job has me grading state tests for elementary school students. Thus, the job had proven to be quite entertaining as the kids frequently get off topic. So papers constantly have either a listing of their favorite foods or pets, while the really far out ones are just ridiculous stories the kids write up on the spot. It definitely helps the day go quick.
Shell was in Vegas this past weekend visiting with her family and throwing her sister a surprise baby shower. That left me alone for the extended weekend, which proved to be the perfect opportunity for me to throw a “Guys Weekend In” and have my friend Steve come up from Middytown. The weekend was full of gaming, cheesy movies, geocaching, hockey, and lots more. I fine time was had by all.
The main event of the weekend was WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2011. I had created a co-op storyline for Steve and myself which followed our rise to the top, and eventually to the tag team titles. The storyline had everything: action, suspense, treachery, comedy, and more. It also included a variety of tag team matches of varying degrees, all culminating in a massive Hell in a Cell match at the PPV for the tag team titles. We also played plenty of exhibition tag team and other matches, including Royal Rumble, Table, Money in the Bank, Elimination Chamber, and many others. WWE SvR 2011 was clearly the winner this weekend.
I’ve mentioned previously that I’m playing a browser-based game called Cyber Citizens, which uses Google Maps to create a city you can live and work in. I’ve been living in the city of Dallas for nine months, and the incumbent mayor is stepping down after his current term, which ends on the last day of November. He has handpicked me to be his successor, and has officially endorsed me for our political party as well as the city. Now I need your help!
If you want to help me become the Mayor of Dallas, you can do so by joining in on the fun. Using the referral code below, you can create a citizen in the city of Dallas. Once that’s done, head on over to the local courthouse and vote for BigBadBob. If you do happen to come along, message me in the game so I know who you are, and we can become friends, which will help increase your social stat.
Here’s that link, and remember…BigBadBob is counting on you!
http://www.cybercitizens.com/default.asp?Referrer=1005164
I woke up at 6:00am today, and it was the first time in a long time that I got up because I had to. I’ve got a little gig starting today where I will be grading English papers for a local school district. It’s not glamorous, and it’s not permanent, and it sure ain’t Social Studies, but these days I’ll take what I can get. This is gonna be a huge change of pace from puttering around the apartment all day…
We can all see that the country is going down, and here in good ol’ New York that is plain to see. Especially when you are living outside Albany, the state capital, where local news consists of where Patterson ate lunch that day. Well, today being the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November (ie- Election Day), I headed to the polls to choose Patterson’s replacement.
In the end, I went with what I know…and I know Star Wars. Thus, I voted for Carl Paladino, since he reminds me of Emperor Palpatine, supreme overlord of the Galactic Empire.
Carl Paladino- Republican Party
Emperor Palpatine- Galactic Empire
It doesn’t stop there. If Warwick Davis was to run for Senator or some other position, I would vote for him in a heartbeat. Wicket is the most badass of the Ewoks!
It’s been quite a few months, and the surveys have been far and few between, but I finally accumulated enough points today to snag my fifth gift card. This time I plan on holding onto it, and waiting until I get another one. This way instead of buying a cruddy used game for $20 or so, I’ll be able to pick up a new release and have the vast majority of it paid off with $50 in Gamestop gift cards.
Since I finished reading the five books in the “Song of Ice and Fire” series, and I will probably be finishing up my tenth re-reading of “Lord of the Rings” tonight, I needed some new bookage. Today I finally went down to the local library, got myself a card, and went book hunting. I ended up getting Michael Crichton’s “Pirate Latitudes”. It seems to be a short book, but that’s just fine for me. While I’m reading this I will be researching some of the “great” fantasy series, and see which one to get into next. Any recommendations, please leave a comment.
I have accumulated 500 MS points since using the Bing Rewards program, and I have been looking for a 400 point game to get off of XBLA. Luckily I saw a tweet last week indicating that Risk:Factions would be on sale this week for 400 points, so I made sure to pick that up today. I love Risk, and enjoyed the trial game which I played a few weeks back. This will make it a breeze to cure my Risk itch when I feel like breaking out the board game but have no one around to play against.
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