TankSpot - Blogs - Lament of the Grindstone by Alent

Heaven's Wish to destroy all minds!

Alent — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:38:15 GMT

No, this is not about religion. It's about Math, and how a crazy guy named Aerostar taught me to look past the classroom.

You see, Math has always been my Achilles heel.

I never really appreciated the skill as my talents are primarily artistic. I'm not the best writer, my writing is rife with grammatical errors and spelling errors, but writing comes naturally to me. Math, however, for most of my school life, was something nobody could convince me I'd need.

Then some time in 98, I was hooked on FFT by my cousin. And I was a huge fan of the Holy Knights. Stasis Sword, Holy Explosion, etc. Couldn't get enough of TG cid, etc.

Thing was, I sucked at the game. I made it to Riovanes castle and without Agrias, I was absolutely crushed beneath Wiegraf's heel. I didn't see a normal way to beat Wiegraf's lightning sword. I had to start over as I couldn't beat him with the save I had, and I only had a single save file - inside the castle. I made it back to him and speed cheezed him. Beat the game, put it aside for a while.

Eventually I would start up a few new saves, tried the "single class challenge" for a few hours before I said screw it. I had a monitor set up in my bedroom and would play the game until I was too tired to play anymore, and pass out. Many mornings I awoke to find my camera spinning in circles in Mandalia Plains.

And then, a friend linked me Aerostar's mechanics handbook.

I recognized everything I'd been looking at in math class in this guide. I learned how and why some skills sucked. I went and farmed gear I'd always ignored before. I tried classes I never saw a point to trying. I was crunching numbers to try to find how to do the maximum possible damage.

And then it happened.

On his first turn in Riovanes, Ramza walked up and oneshotted Wiegraf.

It wasn't a lucky crit. I wasn't overlevel. I had done hours of number crunching, gear farming to pump the right stats, percentage mods, I put everything together and tested it, and when it came time, I put it to the test and my foes fell before me. I had taken regular classes and made them more powerful than the unique classes, sometimes using unique class abilities to make them far, far more potent than they ever should be.

All with hours of number crunching, applying everything from math class I had thought I would never use.

I would, however, never come to apply this newfound zeal for number crunching to my math class, and it continued to wtfpwn me all through school.

I'm reminded of this, as I'm doing math cram right now. I pulled out my old course materials and video lessons for algebra 1 and 2 to prepare for my entry exam in the distance learning college I'm signing up for. I'm trying desperately to build and rebuild a foundation of knowledge that I never properly built in school so that I can jump straight into college level math.

The weird thing is, as bad as I am at math, I really enjoy number crunching and programming.

Now I just have to learn to apply that zeal to my course material and I'm set. It's just messing with my mind. @_<

Which came first..?

Alent — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:00:21 GMT

I had a terrible headache earlier tonight that basically kept me from playing Aion, but the brief time I was online I noticed something: all of the chat channels were offline for some reason.

It was strangely disconcerting not to see the usual round of trolls in LFG. I usually think they all should be /banned from the channel, but it got me thinking.

Which came first: The troll, or the bridge?

I still have the touch. (Economy)

Alent — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:31:48 GMT

Something that I haven't had to do in a long time is Barter, beg, scrape and borrow to get a deal on something. WoW's economy works in such a way that it's basically not necessary. You want something, go do dailies. that's pretty much all there is to it. Aion's economy is in that delicate, frail state where half of the people out there wants the world and noone can afford it.

The other half of the people, however, live pretty well within their means.

I wanted the Noble Durable Steel Breastplate pretty bad, because A: it looks better than the other Lv 10~19 chestpieces and B: the stats are good.

Well, the only one on the broker had a value equal to my gold supply at the moment. Breaking yourself in a game where you can have to drop hefty sums of money on transit fees unexpectedly (Teleporting between Sanctum and other zones, flightpath costs) is hazardous to your sanity, so I elected to not do it.

But that BP just kept taunting me. So I whispered the guy who posted it to see what I could manage. Sure enough, he was farming his ass off, but his connection was lagging and causing him issues, so he wanted to get out of harm's way and I gave him a good excuse.

Here is where I need to explain how Aion's crafting system works for the unaware. It's not terribly dissimilar to WoW's crafting system, except there's a chance of failure. Also, when you craft something, there are two possible outcomes: a "normal" craft, and if you "Crit" or "Proc" at the end of your normal craft, you can make a "Rare" version. The odds are somewhere around 1 in 5.

In this case, the recipe is for "Durable Steel Breastplate" and the proc is "Noble Durable Steel Breastplate." I gathered mats, met him in Sanctum, and I only had mats for 3. Like the mighty jormungar, there were not one, but two procs. Giving me a regular BP, but also a Noble Steel BP to wear, and one to sell. :D

All for the cost of travel fees as I had all the mats sitting in my bank. :D I tipped the armorsmith generously for his time and travel expenses, too. :D

http://na.aiononline.com/characters/Triniel/Alent

Hmm, I can do this youtube thing!

Alent — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 02:19:38 GMT

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e9DVEA_CHY"]YouTube - Guybrush being Guybrush[/ame]

Monkey Island is cool.

However, I plan to make vids of my Aion experience now that I have a working fraps setup.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbCr8h0xP5c&hl=en"]YouTube - Alent's Aion Character Select (HD)[/ame]

My Aion Chara sel.

Hurray, College time.

Alent — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:37:48 GMT

I got an E-mail in from my app... FAFSA's decided I'm elligible for a full Federal Pell Grant, which with the school I've chosen will cover about 90% of my tuition.

Hurray distance learning being cheaper and more flexible than a traditional college. :D

Lament of the Grindstone, pondery

Alent — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:38:07 GMT

I'm going to pull this while I do some pondering and thinking. I crossed some lines I shouldn't have.

Why I love Aion.

Alent — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:14:28 GMT

See: My chara's title.

also, I just installed Windows 7 and don't have photoshop installed yet, so no image cropping. >_>;

Simultaneous invention's bane is waiting for help.

Alent — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:59:06 GMT

Simultaneous Invention is basically when two people come up with the same thing more or less around the same time.

So what do we call it when someone creates something and cannot implement it themselves, only to see it invented by someone else several years later who can? Is it still simultaneous invention? I call it an opportunity lost, and that's precisely what I'm facing.

About 9 years ago now, I came up with a game idea that was pretty simple. I wanted to take a genre I'd enjoyed growing up, and modernize it in a different way than it's descendants had modernized, in an effort to create a different, casual play version of the genre.

I lacked the skills to make it, and thought I'd pursue art and find a programmer. This was a bad idea. I avoided college thinking trade knowledge from it would be out of date by the time I graduated.

Time passed, my day job grew more and more frustrating as more responsibilities fell to me, and I felt like I'd never find a programmer. I have an RL friend who's day job is programming, but can only spare the occasional weekend to help, which I'm grateful for, but we've never made any progress. And so I looked more for something I've yet to find.

Fast forward. Seeing ideas I came up with 8 years ago in various games is angering me and enough is enough. The worst of which was seeing Ikarium take over tankspot, as that's the very genre and medium I wished to use. I will see my own ideas to fruition. To that end, I'm going back to school for a software engineering degree, and revising my ideas so that they properly stand out, instead of blending in with games that came after, but had the resources to be first.

The point of this? Don't repeat my mistake here. 9 years is going to turn into 11 before too much longer here and if I have to wait until the end of my schooling, 13 years. It's nearly impossible to keep an idea or dream viable that long, even with updating and revisions.

A semi-existant quality of MMOs.

Alent — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 02:05:50 GMT

So, my wow account finally lapsed. Farewell WoW.

I also finished off Valkyria Chronicles last night. My impression: zomg. This game is the gift that just keeps on giving. It reminded me of the things I love most about S/RPGs. (back to that in a minute)

There are two things I find fascinating about MMOs, that drove me to play WoW when I didn't really like it. The first I've oft talked about, the social aspect. I generally enjoy games that not many people like. It's not uncommon for me to run into less than 1 person in 500 who enjoys the same games I do, let alone someone that shares my viewpoint on them.

The second, is in a backwards way, raiding is like a multiplayer S/RPG. S/RPGs are sometimes mislabeled T/RPG by people who were introduced to the genre by FFT, however the S/RPG label is most accurate. (it's short for Simulation RPG, in deference to it's hybrid war simulation, hybrid rpg nature) S/RPGs are few and far between and most of them aren't particularly challenging, which by and large disappoints me, leading me to play one S/RPG that is challenging until I have totally mastered it. This in turn makes the less difficult ones even less enjoyable, as my bag of tricks is so deep that I literally steamrole them.

The reason for most of them not being hard, is most problems in S/RPGs can be overcome solely by grinding. Some S/RPGs have challenge modes or time goals which provide that missing difficulty by either setting a goal that's difficult regardless of grinding (Fire Emblem is notorious for this) but there's an opposite extreme which is literally "the grind game". Several titles are responsible for birthing this sub-genre, FFT probably being one of the most famous, and it has grown to insane heights (Disgaea).

From my love of S/RPGs that basically came from enjoying the grand experiment that was Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu and the perfection of that experiment which was Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, I came to expect that a game should teach you how to better play it through progressive challenges. These two games fought the "grind game" model by setting a target number of turns that you should beat the game in less than. You could grind to max level if you so desired, but you would suffer a reduced rating the longer you took. Impressively, you actually leveled faster following "good practices" learned from allied npc AI (and some enemy armes.), making "stale grinding" less and less appealing as you learned more and more efficient ways to play.

Efficient play and gameplay that trains you are awesome. However, these are tools that work best when you and the enemy operate under the same basic rules. In some places, this is the case. Often times, it is not. S/RPGs are often rooted in the basic fact that you and the enemies work by the same stats and rules, which means that any time there's an inequality favoring the enemy, it's either a strategy or terrain advantage. You can usually take these strategies and use them yourself. Effectively, you make the enemy your teacher and simply turn everything back on it, using the eye of a player to adapt new variations of the strategy on the fly.

Another trait of S/RPGs, is "easy to learn, slow to master". They are games built on the concept of gradual, incremental difficulty. With some exception this difficulty is not, or rarely, ramped up quickly. Depending on how quickly, or why, this can be a good tool or a terrible idea. For the FFT fans out there, think the first time you stepped foot in Riovanes castle and ran into Wiegraf as an example of the "terrible idea" side.

The gradual increase in difficulty, if done too slowly, can also be a bad thing, as you don't realize how much you've absorbed until you go back and see things you didn't even know to look for. This is true of all games - I point to Starcraft as an example most people here can relate with. I heard from several people that they had learned so much from battle.net play, that the campaign was boring.

So, one has to wonder, how does this relate to MMOs? Well, aren't they the same kind of game content from different perspectives? Consider the fundamentals of a Raid and an S/RPG's party- a small army comprised of different skills, working as a whole to beat whatever you may be fighting. An S/RPG is one player controlling it all in whatever turn system is controlling everything; where an MMO is a group of players controlling one character each, working as a whole in a realtime/tick based system.

Enter what I consider to be a flaw of MMOs, WoW is no exception, the core of a boss fight has very little to no positional advantages/disadvantages. An S/RPG will often use terrain as an avoidance/damage modifier, enabling you to upset the balance of what's being thrown at you. The fundamental rules of targeting are the same regardless, There is no actual change in play here, the terrain simply restricts what you can use or how you can use it, or maybe even how much of it you can bring to bear on a target. We often call these "chokepoints", but the concept extends past a chokepoint itself. in an S/RPG, you can often force an enemy to change terrain spots with you, greatly increasing your own defense, or allowing you to deny the enemy access to some of your army. In fact, as most S/RPGs have no aggro table system, controlling positioning, choke points, and surrounding enemies to prevent their movement is how you tank without an aggro table. Without npc, collision detection, MMOs are at a distinct disadvantage here. (Some MMOS do, and are better for it.)

Although not to the extent of an S/RPG, most MMOs do teach as you go on. Consider how trivial Naxxramas is to most of us at this point - it's not just gear making it easy. It's familiarity. Enter the problem: At least with WoW and EQ2, the two I have the most experience with, there's not much to teach. Second hand information suggests to me that this is a common problem, and I feel confident from that making the statement that MMOs tend to have shallow depth, with one or two focal points for strategy, and past that it's largely how your raid chooses to pad it's numbers. It was not always this way, but that in itself worked to the disadvantage of the industry as it soured moods to hear someone say "But we already have too many (Class), and not enough (race) + (class) for (fill in blank), we can't take (him/her/it)."

In some ways, the genre is moving backwards for wider accessibility. This is not entirely unprecedented on the S/RPG side of the fence: The successor to Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 (FE's 5th installment) was Fire Emblem: Fuuin no Tsurugi, (Smash Brothers fans will recognize Roy and his Sword(tsurugi) of Seals (fuuin) which regressed the series to it's difficulty and shallower development 7 years prior. Fuuin no Tsurugi enjoyed better sales than Thracia 776. Since that point, they've built back up, once establishing a new baseline, and have slowly raised the bar with each installment.

In that light, one has to wonder: Where is the MMO industry going to set it's new baseline to work up from, and how subtly will it invoke mechanics? WoW has done a fairly respectable job of tearing down the "old" way of raiding where you padded everything to hell and back, and even though they've (seemingly?) unintentionally pushed us back to that point, familiarity and practice reduce the need for the degree of padding that sunwell had.

Since WoW has done this simplification, future MMOs will likely base their ideas off of it. WoW is, despite it's aging client and server engines, the defacto standard in the MMO world for one reason: it's subscriber base. One of my friends worked for just under a year as a QA team member at a studio making an MMO that was placed on indefinite hold, and when any issue came up at all, the question was, "Well what does WoW do?"

This is not to complain that the WoW way of doing things is specifically wrong - I think the issue here is a greater one: We learn from making new mistakes, not repeating mistakes that have already taught their lesson. Any warrior will appreciate this one: That game ran into a situation where they needed a different class mechanic. Struggling for ideas, someone asked "Well what does WoW do?" The answer? Warrior Rage. Needless to say, they inherited the problems of the Warrior in doing so.

And so we wonder, where is the complexity going to come from? If S/RPGs are to be used as a rule of thumb, there should be rewards for doing things right, and faster, and Subtle mechanics used to progressively build up. As the saying goes "Perfect practice makes perfect".

However, what about those places that a developer feels NEED to be abnormally difficult in comparison? I will draw an analog between two points in WoW and two points in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776. Thracia used an ebb and flow system of difficulty. Some maps would be abnormally difficult compared to the map before it, and it would be abnormally difficult compared to the map after it. In many ways, these extremely difficult maps were your teaching tools and pop quizzes in one breath. Not only did overcoming them require an intense amount of learning and proof of learning, but the next few maps were slightly simpler implementations of the same challenges, to cement the lesson. This shares a common root with Kael'thas, who's mechanics built upon T5 mechanics while adding new ones, and saw reduced reuse in the first few bosses of Hyjal and BT, resulting in these bosses being labelled (quite fairly) free loot bosses.

With this in mind, here I will call out a question, and wrap up: If we gave MMO bosses Defensive abilities and restorative abilities similar to an S/RPG's, semi-randomized talent trees of their own, and instead of setting them to function by stopwatch and RNG, gave each boss it's own procedural AI, how would it affect the dungeon/raiding experience? How would adding sublimely beneficial and detrimental terrain effects (Altitude advantages, elemental modifiers, avoidance modifiers, etc.) affect the dungeon/raiding experience?

New Toys and good shows

Alent — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:34:00 GMT

A few months ago, my projector burned up. We went through a mess trying to get it fixed, and ultimately, Staples wasn't willing to honor Circuit City's warranty and just sent us a check to get the issue resolved. (For the unaware: Circuit city sold it's warranties to Staples. )

After some research, we finally decided to go with a Sharp 1080p projector. It had a good balance of quality vs price, and we were able to purchase it through some of our business connections.

I also picked up a PS3 to feed it. I don't play console games much these days, but Valkyria Chronicles and Tears to Tiara interest me so, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Warhawk Demo at E3 a few years back. Sadly, I'll have to wait for a while before Tears to Tiara gets an english port, although I might just say screw it and play the Japanese version. (I can translate menus and gameplay stuff as I go, although most dialog is beyond me.) I was introduced to both series through the anime based on both. Tears to Tiara and Valkyria Chronicles both are currently airing in Japan, drawing near the end of their respective seasons.

So, to test out the new projector, I hooked up the laptop to it and tossed on a few Tears to Tiara episodes. they may only be 720p, but damn, it just looks GOOD. :D

Tomorrow, or maybe over the weekend, we'll be ceiling mounting it and getting some sort of speaker arrangement setup so I can properly game on it. ^_^

if I were a reviewer...

Alent — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:16:15 GMT

... this is how I'd review wrath.

Quote:

Gameplay: 1/5
Graphics: 2/5
Music: 2/5
Plot: 2/5

Overall: 1.8/5

Gameplay:
WoW is a multi-player game designed around solo content, with group content tacked on as an afterthought. When you begin the game, you are playing solo. If you attempt to group for solo quests, you are penalized and it takes three to four times as long to do a solo quest for each additional person in your group, making it extremely difficult to play with a friend. "Group" quests can be done solo or skipped entirely, encouraging you to play by yourself until you reach level 80.

There are "instances" designed for groups of 5 while leveling, each progressively more complex to encourage people to learn group mechanics, but nobody actually does these as a group due to mechanics that I will mention later. The game does not feature Trivial Loot code, which encourages people to get level 80's to run them through instances for gear that will make soloing easier.

Once you reach level 80, there are timesink quests that you can repeat to increase mudflation, and you are now expected to participate in timesink content (instances) and have to learn the basics of working in a group in dungeons. Blizzard recognized this obstacle, making level 80 group dungeons shorter and easier than their level 15 to 60 counterparts.

Once you've run out of group content, there is an extra layer of tacked on content called "Raid content". Raid content is, at best, a Rube Goldberg Machine designed to give you loot. As long as the machine doesn't fail, 3 pieces of gear will drop for the 25 people in your raid, and inevitably, 2 out of the 3 will be "sharded" because nobody actually needs them.

Many raid bosses are optional, but feature several items that the majority of your raid needs in their loot tables. As a consequence of loot being RNG based, the vast majority of the time unwanted items will drop, leaving the majority of your raid saying "fuck this game! (item) never drops!"

As if this wasn't bad enough, basic fundamentals of the game change every patch, further encouraging solo play and making grouping less and less desirable. Groups are built around what is referred to as a trinity of "Tank, heals, and dps". The Tank is a highly armored class that through highly artificial and contrived mechanics draws all attacks to himself, making the job of the healer, who replenishes group health, while the "DPS" (an acronym meaning damage per second) attack random targets in an effort to make them all die before the group dies. Every successive patch gives the DPS less and less reason to pay attention, making the jobs of tanks and healers progressively harder, as the task of keeping the DPS alive falls to them.

This is further complicated by the fact that not all tanks and healers are created equally, as blizzard is constantly increasing and reducing the effectiveness of abilities in these classes especially, causing the playerbase to complain about this change or that change. Many raid groups will exclude a certain class or "spec" from a given role based on a set of changes, which results in many people starting a new character of another class and leveling it to 80 to keep their raid spot.

An excellent example of this comes in the form of the Death knight, a tank class introduced recently to intentionally reduce the number of people playing Warriors, Warlocks and Mages. Because this class was introduced to intentionally depopulate those classes, those classes were reduced in effectiveness and made less desirable, and all players were given the option to make level 55 death knights, drastically reducing the amount of work they had to do to get back to level 80.

Graphics:
The wrath visual style is an exaggerated impressionistic look, using a dramatic range of vibrant colors to create a surreal landscape marred by the fact that it has noticably less polygons than the average game. This is because the graphics engine is an aging overhaul of the warcraft 3 engine, and it inexplicably, with fewer polygons and graphical effects, runs at half the framerate of it's market competitors, that are designed to run on faster hardware.

The framerate reduces even more drastically in group and raid content, underscoring the emphasis blizzard puts on Solo content and how little attention they pay to anything else.

The majority of the armor in the game has the same appearance and color, regardless of it's quality, with rare exception. What armor is in the game is bulky and unrealistic, and many of the game's fans have become so accustomed to the look that news of a new MMO is often met with "the armor's too small, it needs to be bigger and have more spikes like wow armor".

Music:
The Wrath soundtrack is abnormally small for a game of this era, and extremely repetitive, with few exceptions. The music of Sholazar Basin stands out as a beautiful track that breaks the monotony of the game's "Dramatic" music. The vast majority of players turn the game music off, preferring to run their own music in the background.

Plot:
The plot of wrath builds upon the rich warcraft lore, particularly that of warcraft 3. It retcons details that don't mesh with the current vision of the story, and much of the emphasis of the story is aimless and random, exemplified to the utmost in the upcoming patch, in which raiders are summoned from ulduar, where they just finished slaying an ancient god, to do battle with two jormungar. (that Tony Stark built in a cave- with a bunch of scraps)

Obviously, not every story can be epic. However, blizzard makes every effort to make the story seem epic, no detail can be allowed to be mundane, and so much of the quest dialog reads with senseless hyperbole.

Blizzard is to be commended for introducing the new "phasing" system, which allows a player to see a version of the zone he presently occupies that permanently reflects his own changes, however this system is thoroughly underused. The intent of the system was to allow a player to feel as though he was impacting the world through his actions, however many quests are still in a common zone, meaning in most cases (insert bad guy here) will be back in 5 minutes for the next adventurer to kill, cheapening the effect of the story.

One of the most impressive quest chains worthy of doing at least once, the sons of hodir faction quest, allows you to help one of the ancient watchers, Thorim, recover his pride and venture forth to do battle with his corrupt brother, Loken. In battle, Thorim is captured and placed under mind control, and can be fought as a boss in one of the raid instances. However, should none of your raid members have completed this quest, Thorim will still be in ulduar, and he will still greet you with "Wait, I remember you... in the mountains...", even if he had never met any of you.

Overall:
Worth playing at least once just so you understand pop culture references to it.

This is, incidentally, why I'm quitting the game.

Moving Forward

Alent — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:40:34 GMT

So, what do you do when it's time to move on from something?

I'm at the point in life where I'm evaluating what to let go of so I can go forward, and let me tell you, it is scary shit. :eek: I have a terribly hard time letting go of anything. It's here, it's what I know, why let go of it?

So far, I have a short list of things to cut...

1: Forum trolling.
I have terrible, terrible habits as a forum troll. I enjoy sitting and hitting F5 to see what responses have been posted far, far more than I should. To a degree that it's crippling and takes time that should be spent working.

2: MMOs
I need to cut back on MMOs... hardcore. To the point I'm contemplating cancelling WoW because it cannot be played casually. This is ironic as people continually bash it as catering to casuals, but let's face it, the endgame isn't really accessible if you just want to log in and play when you can.

3: ????
There's quite a bit I probably should cut, but can't see to cut because the first two are obfuscating the rest.

4: Loss.
Because I'm not cutting profit. :p

If that's what I'm letting go of, what am I replacing it with?

That, I'm trying to figure out. I have dreams, and a terrible feeling of inadequacy at all of them. I'm pondering pursuing a career in Pharmacy, but academically I'm such a failure at math that I don't know if I could get through the prereqs to reach that career, and I don't know if I'd enjoy it once I finished school and got into the profession. it'd be 6~7 years before I really got to see the profession.

I've also thought about going back to school to pursue programming, because I learned I'm not terrible at it, and it actually makes quite a bit of sense to me. There's less transition time on that but again, it's 2~4 years before I actually get to go into the profession, although there's more potential for self-employment before I graduate with that line. As a downside, there's next to zero job security with that line.

I'm also seeing my limits as an artist in the game design work I'm doing with some friends. I'm taking too long to sprite things, and the things I sprite "need polish". This is an experience barrier that I don't think I'll get the opportunity to breach working for my friends. I doubt I'll make it past the current project without help, and the head artist (read: only other artist) is so busy with his project that he can't afford any time to help me, and he isn't satisfied with my work.

Working for friends sucks when you're coming up short. We're not doing ourselves favors by limiting everything to summer. (Both programmers resume school in the fall and will be unable to devote code time.) Our time tables are short and we're trying extremely hard to get as many games to market as possible without actually committing shovelware. And I'm slowing us down. :(

I'm also starting to go to the Gym, I meet with my trainer for the first time Tuesday. IT, art, etc. is all a pretty sedentary lifestyle, so I need something to compensate, and workouts seem to be pretty good for channeling my energy to places it needs to be channeling. I'm finding myself better able to focus after working out, which has helped.

All in all, I'm a little unsettled. Where I am isn't working out, and I can't see where I'm going. Forever I've let the fact that I can succeed at gaming sway me from fixing problems with life, and I have to stop doing that. Succeeding at gaming is not a safety net, it's an escape from reality.

but dammit all, it still feels like gaming is the only thing I can do well.

Depression

Alent — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:50:08 GMT

So... yeah.

it's been a wacky stretch of time, and I'm failing at stuff just because I'm too depressed to give it my all... which isn't good because a few things that I've wanted for a long time are happening finally.

I'm gonna take a break from the forums and crap since as much as I enjoy the brain dump of just soaking in the chatter, a fair amount of the chatter I disagree with and it just derails me mentally - something that I do on my own easily enough.

I'll be back in a week or two, maybe three. I just need the extra head space to deal with things.

I had the strangest dream this morning

Alent — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:59:23 GMT

So... yesterday was a really, really shitty day. I ended up passing out for a while after I got back from working, which resulted in me being way too rested to sleep last night. I've been mulling over a ton of stuff lately, and I wouldn't say I've been depressed, but I'm frustrated lately with how much time I've wasted on various things...

... Which I'm guessing is why when I finally did pass out, I dreamed I woke up two years ago.

It was the strangest thing. it was a Wednesday, Wow was still patch 2.2 My pally was level 40, my druid was level 68, and I was still in the guild of IRL friends that got me to play the game in the first place. We hadn't had our "epic meltdown" yet where everyone basically ended up going their separate ways, and life was in general happy times... yet I still remembered everything from the last two years.

I was debating what to do, how to take advantage of this. Dozens of things shot through my mind. Practical things like going to a doctor and getting checked for gallstones to nip that problem in the bud... (about a year ago-ish I ended up in the hospital with a terrible gall bladder attack and ended up in an emergency gall bladder surgery) To things like "huh... my EQ2 pally is still in a raid guild that needs a paladin OT... and I know I hate wow game mechanics but at this point in life I haven't met the friends that have been making WoW special... and I'd have to start from ground level and work up..."

That internal self-argument went on for a bit. Then I hopped on to WoW to get back to grinding for 70 in BeM, thinking I wouldn't change anything just yet because I didn't know if I wanted to change stuff. Logged in, hit chara select, popped into the cenarion camp in BEM, Looked at the gmotd... and /gquit .

I was immensely satisfied for no reason I could discern. Then I woke up.

Which disappointed me gravely as I wanted to recreate my ignore list and start working on my UI next. :(

pop "... what was that noise..?"

Alent — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:45:01 GMT

So, I was sitting at a red light earlier today. I had just come back from a service call that was so short I couldn't even charge for a full call. I was noticing that the windstorm going on was lifting my car to the top of the shocks, I had the AC on because inside the car, it was actually hot, etc...

... And then the wind started to blow ~really hard~. It was a bad enough windstorm before that, but the intensity just doubled almost for a good 3~4 seconds, followed by a really strange dull thud noise along with the kind of noise that sounds kind of like when you crinkle paper.

I looked back to see my rear windshield cracked. It's safety glass, so it's a bunch of little square/hexagon/octagon cubes that haven't actually gotten around to breaking yet.

I'm not sure if it was the internal pressure from the AC, or the relative vacuum caused by the increase in external air pressure. But, the windshield just shattered and started falling in.

I made 20 dollars fixing someone's computer. it's going to cost over 200 to replace the glass that went poof. *sigh*

On the upside, the cellphone game project (a vertical shooter) I'm working on is turning out well. The stage I worked on is a hit with the rest of the dev team. :D I hope to blog more on that later on.

If you have a phone with google android, you're gonna want to play this when it comes out. It's seriously fun. :D