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Category: Random

25Nov

Cash Is Never A Good Thing

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As you might have noticed from some of my comments before, I might have a bit of an issue when it comes to buying things that I really have no need to be buying. If the steam sales aren’t enough proof, I got some news for you today. I got a new Nintendo Wii U last night so that I could play the new Super Smash Bros.

Let us go back to the beginning for a second on how this came to happen. I was watching a stream one day of the new Smash and realized that it looked pretty cool. I was somewhat sad that I didn’t have a Wii U to be able to play the game, but wasn’t interested enough to be bothered going and picking one up. I had also heard they were much more expensive then the last few Nintendo systems. Then we come to last night when I get home from work and realize that I have a giant wad of cash in my pocket. Having cash on hand is probably the worst thing that can happen since it just sits there mocking you daring you to spend it on something you will never need. Then I was at Wal-Mart with my roommate buying some food and we walked past the electronics section. He stops in since he just bought a DS2 the day before to check them out. At this point the money was practically screaming at me to spend it on something and really the only thing on my mind that day was Smash. So we try to get a Wii-U at that point to appease the money gods.

Of course Wal-Mart doesn’t have it, which normally would be a good thing since that means I didn’t spend the money. I think the money had somehow absorbed into my body at this point because the only thing we could think of was how the decision was already made to get a Wii-U. So we drive down to GameStop just to buy this stupid console and spend this useless paper that was somehow still in my pocket.

The cash might have been gone, but the inner gamer in me took over at this point. As I was sitting around today trying to finish up a bunch of stuff I had to do at work, I was thinking how dumb it was looking that my Wii had exactly one ipad shaped controller and one game. What kind of self respecting gamer would I be if I let that stand. A quick trip to Amazon fixed that issue with some additional controllers and useless games that will probably never get played arriving tomorrow…just in time for when my family comes down for Thanksgiving.

Hopefully the system will look much less lonely once those things arrive, and who knows maybe I’ll break the trend and actually play a fighting games more then once this time. I mean it has to happen eventually, right? I wonder if this is what women go through when they start looking at clothes.

13Nov

The Next Generation Of Gamers

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If only I was going to college now instead of way back in the day. I could have been one of the cool kids that everyone looked up to and been the super preppy jocks that you always see in the movies who date the head cheerleader. Well maybe not all of that would be true, but I with colleges like Illinois university offering partial scholorships now to people to play on their school gaming teams, I could have at least not had to pay so much for college. And that it would be a much better reason to go back after class and sit in front of a computer all night instead of the lack of reasons that I had.

Really though I think this just goes to show how far competitive gaming has come over the years. I still remember the times back when you almost couldn’t tell people about the stuff you did because nobody would understand. Now not only do people understand, but you can make a pretty good living doing it. I actually wonder if this is working out better for the students then all of those football players who wont make it into the pros. Sure they get to be on tv and become more well known, but if the gamers get to keep their winnings, then at least the gamers will be making some decent money. And if they don’t get their winnings, then I don’t understand why they would even go and do it for the school when you could just as easily do it on your own and be sure to keep all the money.

Getting a little off track there so lets bring it back with the one thing that always seems to happen in gaming stories, the person who thinks games are bad for people. Yes, you can never have a story without it so let’s be glad that Kimberly Young was around in the ABC article to make her comments heard. Of course she says games are addicting and that schools shouldn’t be offering scholarships for something oh so very addicting. I’m sure she knows a lot about psychology and maybe I’m slightly biased since I play quite a few games myself but really anything can be addicting. You just have to do it in moderation. Even if this was addicting it has to be better that they are doing it with school supervision and with other people around to help monitor it, then how it was back in my day when you sat in your room doing it for god knows how long anyway.

It sounds like things are going well, and they university it going to continue to the for at least another year. That’s always great to hear and of course we will always hope that more people will find the joy of competitive fps gaming and stop focusing so much on the Leage of Legends bandwagon.

07Nov

Overwatch – We’re Watching You

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Pop Quiz. When’s the last time Blizzard released a new franchise? If you said 17 years then you either know way to much about Blizzard or have obviously been reading all about the new game they announced today, Overwatch. It doesn’t seem like that long but I guess if you don’t consider Starcraft Ghost a new franchise then it makes sense. Blizzard does after all make a company like Nintendo look like it has tons of different franchises.

The game does look interesting though and since it’s going to be a new genre for a company like Blizzard as a first person shooter, I am interested to see what they do with it. The little bit of game play that I’ve been able to check out reminds me loosely of Team Fortress 2. Which if it turns out to be true would make me pretty happy. The game takes a pretty original turn to start things off by taking place in the future. Not like that’s been done before.

Ok maybe not a completely fair comparison, and future settings do lend themselves pretty well since you get more freedoms in your gun designs and levels. The rest of the small bit I’ve managed to find looks decent so far. Small 6v6 battles, different classes to choose from including a big slow gorilla and a fast blinking around woman. If you squint they might even look like a Heavy and a Scout. Not really to much else I can say about this for now since I don’t really know anything about the game but we can always hope that it turns out better then Ghost did. They’re planning for a beta in early 2015 so maybe we’ll get lucky and get a chance to try it then.

Oh and before I forget. To any news sites that want to write about game announcements, please make sure your writers know something about games when they write about them. Trying to say that Overwatch is “similar in some respects to multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games including League of Legends and DOTA” just makes you look silly. Unless there are npc minions that roam around the map in lanes, each team has a base they need to defend, and there are levels and item upgrades to purchase; there is no way you could possibly say the game is like those. I guess that’s what I get for clicking the link to a normal news site.

05Nov

Let Me Take A Selfie

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I never quite understood the fad with taking selfies. I’ve always though that they looked stupid the majority of the time and the people doing it were dumb. Then again I never really understood the whole thing with Facebook or any of these other social media things that are all the rage these days so many I’m just a grumpy old man. Anyway, in what can only be described as the best use of technology ever, pretty soon we will be giving our babies the ability to take their own selfies and post them to the internet.

I wish I was making this up, but some things you just can’t make up. The designer of this new toy got the idea after realizing that all the dumb baby pictures she would get on Facebook were posted on there by the parents who thought their babies were cute. Then she realized that the babies never had any say in whether their pictures were going on the internet and that we should make a toy so that they can decide what to put online. Ignoring for a second the fact that babies are dumb and still wont realize that pulling on the little stuffed F will upload a picture of them to Facebook, at least the pictures the parents would upload would be decent quality. Now the internet will be full of nothing but closeups of a babies mouth as it is about to eat the little F.

I guess it is all fair in the end though. After all, your baby will now be able to not only annoy you with its constant crying and wanting everything it can’t have, but now it can also tug on a toy and annoy all of the internet with constant twitter status updates and facebook pictures. I don’t know about everyone else but if there was one thing I wanted to see online, it was the combination of dumb selfie pictures with stupid baby pictures.

04Nov

A New Roommate

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It’s possible you’ve heard but I’ll be getting a new roommate in a few weeks. If we’re lucky, it will turn into one of the greatest things to ever happen to me. In the perfect world he will end up giving me lots of money to buy new games, while we play lots of games, drink lots of alcohol, and I end up streaming all that shit for everyone to laugh at together. In the worst case, he drinks all my alcohol, blows up my internet, and crashes into my car when driving home from the bar. Either way it should provide lots of fun times and plenty of new stories to tell.

He is actually a pretty good friend of mine so it all should work out pretty well. The biggest problem we will probably run into is that he is a console gamer and doesn’t really do much of the pc side of games. That can be fixed though and then I will finally have started my dream of turning my house into a real gaming house. All I need is to find 4 more people and my professional gaming career can finally begin.

I guess the thing that everyone else probably really cares about though is how any of this matters to them. It will either work out to be a great thing for you guys or one of the worst things that could happen since I became really busy with work. With my friend living here, I will no longer have to take an entire weekend out to go hang out with him anymore since he will always be around. On the other hand, with him always here it will make it that much easier for us to go do something stupid together. Maybe I should just go out and buy a GoPro and strap it to my forehead. Then you would always get to see all the stupid stuff that we end up doing.

Maybe that is going a little overboard though. I should probably just stick to my original plan and turn my house into one of those weird stream houses with webcams in every room that seems so popular these days.

08Sep

The Long Absence

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So it’s been a while since I made a post on here. I guess you could say I completely failed my goal of posting on here regularly and as well as my consistent streaming I had been trying to do. Hell, I couldn’t even get this post up in a timely manner, it’s been sitting here in the works for over a week now. I’m sure you’re all tired of hearing the reasons by now because they are the same as they’ve always been. Work has been killing me in a good way, things outside of work have been keeping me away from games, and there hasn’t been a ton that has interested me lately.

I seem to always be saying work has been ruining my game time but I guess really it’s all for the best. Since the beginning of the year I’ve gone from a normal software engineer at work, to being a technical lead on one of the core critical systems and most recently a project manager on another one of the sub projects for our massive system overhaul we’ve been working on. Learning all the new responsibilities that I had for those new projects was a ton of work but has been very interesting and a lot of fun. The only bad part as I’m sure you’ve noticed is that I haven’t had time to do much else right now.

With all that said, I do hope that I’ll be able to get back into the swing of things again soon. I’m not going to make any promises like I tried to do last time about my stream schedule or post schedule but we’ll see what works and move on from there. Hope to see all you wonderful people again soon!

04Jul

The Real American Way

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Today being the 4th of July, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about something we all know and love, America. But what is there to talk about you might ask? I could write about how we should be celebrating 2 days earlier than we actually do. Or perhaps we should talk about two of the founding fathers died on the same day with a third passing away years later also on the 4th. Instead I thought it would be interesting to talk about a true American symbol, the bald eagle, and how Benjaminn Franklin was wrong.

Bald eagles and Americans share many things in common. Like most Americans, the eagle can be found all over North America. Last I checked, it is also illegal to shoot both bald eagles and Americans. Apparently these many many reasons were not enough to convince big Ben and he still had his doubts about the eagle being on the national crest. You see way back in 1784, Benjaminn Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter where he talked about his real thoughts on the bald eagle being on the new republics crest. In part of the letter he wrote:

“Others object to the Bald Eagle, as looking too much like a Dindon, or Turkey. For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.”

When he puts it like that, it does make a little sense but if you stop to think about it for a second, it turns out the the eagle was a perfect bird to represent the most badass nation in the world. After all why go through all the work of catching the prey yourself if you could just wait until it is done for you and then eat the rewards? Does it really matter how you got the fish or does it only matter that you ended up with the fish in the end?

So what did he think should be the bird to represent America? The turkey. I guess it could make sense to make a big fat bird the official bird of a big fat nation. But if we did do that, then what would we eat at Thanksgiving?

30Jun

Back To Work

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Well it went by faster than I thought it would, but the vacation is over and now we’re back at it once again. Of course now that we’re back we will have to get back into the swing of writing these posts and streaming amazing games and with a short week before the holidays I’m sure we will have loads of fun again. There will be plenty of time to go over all the random interesting things that I see every day so instead of going into that, lets get the quick hits of the vacation out of the way today.

World Cup madness:

Was a great time to take a week off from work since it was smack in the middle of group stages for the World Cup. Tons of great games and a lot of surprising outcomes from the group stages, but getting to go to the bars for the last two USA games against Portugal and Germany were so much fun. I was surprised how hard it was to find sweet USA swag in the stores at the beach, almost like the beach hates America. Since we weren’t able to get stupid crazy with full face paint, dyed hair, and flag capes (had this happened there would have been a picture for you all…Blame America hating beaches); instead we made up for it by getting crazy stupid drunk for the games. The golden rule of not asking the price on the beer special bit us in the ass for one game when we ended up paying way to much for not enough beer, but the 50 jello shooters we had before the Germany game made up for it. Overall loads of fun was had and I’m mostly sure the we remembered the entire game.

Did the dew:

The Dew Tour was in town the week I was down and as much as I didn’t know anything that was going on, it was a lot of fun. Extremely crowded which I don’t care for, but watching all the skaters and bikers going around doing their things was pretty cool. Outside of the actual dew tour action the best part of them being there was probably the beach concerts at night. The music was decent enough but that isn’t really why they were the best. They were the best because they happened late enough that you could enjoy a nice evening at the bar drinking more then you should, and then go hang out on the beach and be stupid with a bunch of other people who are also being stupid while listening to good music. It might not have been the amazing stuff on the stream playlist, but it was good enough to get stupid with.

Do you have an older sister?

I must have ended up saying that more times then I care to think about last week. I don’t know if it was my boyish good looks, my slothy attitude, or my extremely humble personality but there were so many girls coming up to me on the beaches. Normally I’m not one to complain about things like that, but when you are over 10 years older then they are, then it becomes a little strange. I think the saddest part was that no…they did not have an older sister.

The bad stuff:

Like everything not all was great. Nobody likes bad stuff and this is already longer then I wanted so lets just get through this one quick

Why no Nintendo? For all the years that I’ve gone down to our condo, this was the first year that the Nintendo Entertainment System could not be found. Was probably one of the saddest moments of my life when I realized I would have to go a week without any real games.
Waiters blow. Multiple nights when we went out to eat, we ended up waiting over an hour for food. This wouldn’t always be a problem except for the fact that while waiting the waiters did not come check if we needed more drinks which significantly cut back on the drink intake.
Arcades are expensive. It’s been a while since I’ve been to an arcade, but man have they gotten expensive. Everything is pretty much at least a dollar now and outside of better graphics aren’t that much different then they were years ago.

20Jun

Vacation

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Short post with nothing really all that interesting to talk about today. It is however that time of year again when I take my week long vacation to the beach with friends. Tonight will most likely be the last stream until the end of the month. There will be lots of drinking and lots of stupid stuff happening, so I’m sure there will be plenty of amazing stories to talk about when I get back. Be sure to check back as I will still occasionally be posting on here while I’m away. Also don’t forget to follow on twitter to keep up on all the stupid that happens.

Hope to see lots of people as we hang out tonight, and if not I’ll see you all when I get back.

17Jun

The Hangover Moment

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If you’ve been around the stream before you’ve probably heard my talking about my life goal of having a bachelors party in vegas to recreate all the best moments from The Hangover. Who wouldn’t want to wake up one day after a long night of partying to find a tiger in the bathroom anyway? Today I found a backup plan just in case I am unable to make it to Vegas.

Turns out this other group of guys went camping for their bachelors party. Not quite the big spenders that Vegas would be, but who doesn’t like going into the woods with a ton of alcohol and adventuring around. I can only assume that while they were running away from some wild animal that they poked when they shouldn’t have that one of them tripped over something in the sand. That had to be the point when they see a giant face staring up at them and they realize they found something kind of interesting. The next part is what I actually found most interesting in the story. After they found the head they went and called the experts to come out and take a look to see what they found to later find out that it was a couple million year old stegomastodon fossil.

They did what now?

Yep, you heard it correctly. At a bachelors party in the woods, after finding something strange they call the experts? Maybe it’s just me but if I was at a bachelors party and found something strange, the last thing on my mind would be to leave it alone. I would have probably tried to dig it up, wear it as a hat, and then eventually strategically place it somewhere in the camp site to scare the shit out of my friends the next morning. Maybe it was one of those new bachelor parties I’ve been hearing so much about where they go to a pancake house for breakfast instead of doing anything fun.

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