Weird Just Works for Me

Oh Snap!

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 02:42:21 -0600

That is a picture of my DPS (damage per second.) I am very pleased with that number. That is a very nice number indeed. That number is objective proof that I am awesome.

Moving on.

I read an interesting book last week called The Big Short. The first 3/4 of the book were fascinating. The last 1/4 wherein we were walked through the meltdown of the subprime mortgage industry, was less enthralling--mostly because, well, I’ve lived through it and hearing about it from the perspectives of the people actually responsible made me a little bit sick.

So thanks for the book, Dad. I enjoyed it. On a side note, I don’t know if you got my last email. If you didn’t well, it’s not a big deal. If you did---WTF, mate! Why no response? :P

I am now reading a book called The Ancestor’s Tale, a book on evolution written by Dawkins. It is interesting. I recommend it to everyone.

Do you know what else I recommend? Visiting Washington DC and the Smithsonian Natural History Museum while they still have the Human Origins exhibit up. That exhibit is so cool. I literally spent an entire day there while my compatriot wandered around. I would put pictures up, but I don’t know where they are. They are somewhere, though.

And I found a word to describe my interest: anthropology, the holistic study of humanity. Specifically, a subset of the field called Cultural Anthropology. (No, Shelby, not like “Bones,” but she is still awesome.)

How does this relate to everything else, including my all-consuming obsession right now? WoW is an MMORPG (Massively-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) that is perfect for anthropological study. I dunno.

Wanna try it? I can get you some free game time.

You gotta ask yourself one question:

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:53:48 -0600

Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

I got my Mechano-Hog, and I love it to pieces. I ride it everywhere, even off tall cliffs that lead to the demise of my unsuspecting passenger. Especially off tall cliffs.

My work schedule has changed a lot, although it isn’t terrible. It will just take some getting used to is all. And I didn’t have to work during the 24th of July, which was awesome. I hate the 24th of July; everyone is downtown and TRAX isn’t running. The 4th of July doesn’t have TRAX service (usually), but no one is downtown because there aren’t any parades. Because we save those for the 24th of July. I dunno. Whatever.

I upgraded my internets this week. I now have 20Kbps instead of 7. It is very nice. I also have the biggest tension headache I’ve ever had.

I had chicken tikka masala at the Bombay House on Friday night. So. Good. I crave it now. If anyone asks where I want to eat dinner, they will be informed “Bombay House.” Yum.

I found some granola at Smiths that I love. It’s got bits of raspberry and strawberry in it instead of apples or other fruits. I like to mix it with vanilla yogurt for dinner or a snack. Riley likes it, too.

I wish I could hang upside down forever. I enjoy hanging upside down.

I wish it would cool down in my apartment and also that Riley will stop chewing on his feet while I am away. He gets the only air conditioned room in the house: the bathroom. Lucky dog. If that room were any larger, I would probably sleep there.

I hate riding my bike on the roads down here. Drivers are twits. And I don’t ride on the sidewalk because that’s not fair to pedestrians. It is nerve wracking to ride a bike downtown. I am trying to get Riley used to walking next to a bike so I can ride it around the park and he gets to run. But he does not like the bike at all. He is a sissy.

My friend, Dan, might be stopping by SLC sometime to say hello. We’ve never met in person before, just online through Wrong Planet, then Facebook, then him hiring me to work for his software company. He is moving to NYC and is planning a road trip with is mom. It will be interesting to meet him.

I have decided that I like being alone more than I like being with other people. I am told this is weird---well, I am weird, so what’s your point? I realized this causes contention when other people want my attention and I don’t want to give it to them. This annoys me. If I could live on my own island, I would be happy (so long as I had electricity, high speed internet, running water, and some form of air conditioning. I do not like “roughing it.” That is gross.

I think there might be something wrong, though, as I find myself less and less able to pretend to get along with people or care about them, really. I find myself spending more and more time alone (not even logging into WoW, and when I am logged in, being anti-social and distant) and getting very angry when my solitude is disrupted or someone clamors for my attention. (The sole exception for this is Riley. I love spending time with Riley.) Does this make me a sociopathic misanthropic asshole? It isn’t on purpose, I don’t think. It’s just that I just don’t really share any interests with you, or that I am really not interested in a relationship that is more exclusive than “friend,” or that your definition of friend is different than my definition of friend.

To me, a friend is someone that you know very well and that does not involve family members or a sexual relationship. Facebook has, I think, diluted the word friend to mean the lesser “acquaintance,” but nobody seems to realize this (or care.) A friend is therefore more than an acquaintance, but less than family or a significant other (which means that spouses and significant others can be friends, but that being a friend does not grant you that secondary status.)

This seems very clear to me. Facebook “friends” are really mostly just acquaintances that you can fool yourself into thinking are friends due to the insane amount of personal data Facebook aggregates for you.

I don’t know how to do all that, anyway, so of course I will clash with someone who is very social and requires lots of attention. I think there is a time limit on my ability (or maybe willingness) to meet someone halfway. After that time, it becomes much too difficult to keep it up, and I start to resent the other person for not backing off without having their feelings hurt. I say “I need more time to myself,” and it is interpreted as “OMG YOU HATE ME!” How am I supposed to conclude you are rational when you clearly aren’t?

Sometimes I wish I had a reset button that let me start all over again. I wonder if there some version of me in another universe who is not so weird, and what that would be like.

How can you tell I am stressed?

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 02:51:55 -0600

I do things like that.

My work schedule is changing. I don’t like that.
I have to register for school. I don’t like that.
There were an average of five people in the room all at once, talking all at once. I didn’t like that.
The radio was on. I didn’t like that.
People kept messing up my candies. I didn’t like that.
The line at Barnes and Noble was too long this morning, so I was unable to purchase my morning orange juice and blueberry muffin. I didn’t like that.
My normal route to work was disrupted by an event in the train depot. i didn’t like that.
The train was full of loud obnoxious people going to the even at the train depot. I did not like that.
I got a phishing email wanting my account information. I didn’t like that.

In other news, my priest, Etpwngnome, is far more geared and proficient than I thought. For a toon still decked out in some heirloom gear, I was pulling an average of 6K DPS.

Also, due to my use of that name as a handle on the forums/wow-related sites, I am no longer the only Etpwngnome in Azeroth--a fact that annoys me, especially since the doppelgänger is a stupid Alliance shaman. /FAIL.

I am 2/3 of the way to my beloved Mechano-Hog.

Shocktiday

Sun, 4 Jul 2010 14:58:36 -0600

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was not the greatest of all the Indiana Jones films (but better than The Last Film That Shall Shall Not Be Named), but there is one scene in particular that everyone remembers: the one where they rip the heart out of someone’s chest. That’s right, "Kali Ma Shakti de!" “Indie, cover your heart!”

It served as inspiration for the name of my current alternate character in WoW, a rogue named Shocktiday. (I also have a Warlock holding the name Khalimah if I ever decide to give up melee combat and go for caster instead. This day will probably not come for a while given that I have a max level caster that I despise playing.)

That picture is of my dog, Riley. He is actually smiling, not planning on ripping off your face. Sophie’s eyes (the lighter dog on the left) sure make it seem like something else is going on, though, huh?

In WoW, in order to facilitate easy of communication between 9 or 24 other players while undertaking a boss fight in a raid, the use of some sort of VoIP software is required. In my guild, we use Ventrilo (Vent) to talk to each other. The WoW client actually supports VoIP in-game, but it’s choppy and if something happens (such as you disconnecting or the game crashing), you are unable to communicate that with the rest of the team. So we use Vent.

A lot of people like being in Vent all the time, no matter what they are doing in the game. Most people are social and enjoy that sort of interaction. I don’t usually mind listening to it, but it’s not something I actively participate in, even while raiding. I let other people do the talking and joking around, and if I want to comment, I’ll almost always type a response in whatever chat channel we’re using, whether it be /g (guild), /p (party), /ra (raid), /w (whisper reply to player), or even in /1 or /2 (general, so everyone in the game can see it.)

I do, however, get frustrated with Vent when people are talking all the time, all over each other, and saying all sorts of different things. It is very distracting to me, so I usually only have Vent on during a raid or in the off-chance I am PvPing and need to communicate with my teammates. Lately, I had been getting a lot of flack from some of my guildies about this preference, so I took it up with my GL, explained my reticence for this type of social interaction, and have been assured that the jibes will stop. (I think my GL is awesome, by the way, as are all my guildies.)

I think I might enable the VoiceFX on my headset during the next raid just to mess with my guildies. My headset has software that lets me talk in the voices of all the races in the game, so I could actually sound like a Blood Elf when I talk (or maybe even an XT-002 Deconstructor.) That would be pretty funny, actually.

Oh, and I also made a new Facebook profile (I had deleted my previous one) so I could join the Midnight Assassins Facebook group. LOL.

Nuclear Paladin

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:23:30 -0600

That is what my enemies see before I annihilate them, a glowing, axe-wielding, wing-popping harbinger of doom.

This weekend I bought rode my bike around downtown, and have decided that people in cars are very possessive of the road, regardless of whether or not there is ample room for both car and bike.

I also learned that SLC does not have a bike registry, but oh well. If someone wants to take my bike, they are gonna have to do a lot more than use bolt cutters to get through 1/2 inch of metal cable. Why? Because I have two layers of bike protection now, suckers. I have a u-lock, and I have a cable lock. The u-lock secures the frame to whatever I want, and the cable secures the wheels to the frame. Twitfaces can’t just rip it off that easily now.

Of course, I am not locking it up outside my building anymore, seeing as how thieves like to use hacksaws---and if someone gets into my apartment, I doubt they will jack my bike once they see my beautiful electronics. It would definitely be a pyrrhic victory, but a victory is a victory, right?

I have two new toons (i.e. “characters”) in WoW these days: a rogue named Shocktiday and a warlock named Khalimah.

I also discovered a nifty website for learnings and things. I like this site a lot.

After a brief foray into genetics to answer a question, I have decided that I don’t really care about things on the micro scale, preferring instead the synthetic thought processes of figuring out how an entire system works and is affected by various things. I have recently become enamored with anthropology and sociology because I am sort of obsessed with the “Why?” questions, not so much the “how?” questions. To me, figuring out how something works is quite boring when compared to trying to figure out why it works the way that it does, especially when it comes to humans and society.

(So no, people, it is not because I saw the show “Bones,” okay? Just as the reason why I am starting Kung Fu in the fall is not because I saw a preview for the new Karate Kid.)