So long family

Yeah, so I ordered Fallout 3 and Oblivion. I didn't mean to do the Bethesda theme, but I did. Hopefully the games and my XBox will be arriving about the same time.

Reckoning Day, Reckoning Night

Ah, the last few hours of the weekend. It's almost worth giving up a paycheck to just not feel the crushing weight of it. The fact that it was an enjoyable weekend makes it even more difficult to go back to work. Luckily, we have the first off, so it's broken up into three and one. I'd rather it be just a long weekend, but whatever.

I said something unfair and untrue to Amanda today.

I got a generic gift-card from my in-laws and the thrill of capitalism is upon me. After so many months of being a financial black hole, this sudden influx of funds from gifts and my first paycheck, however small, from my job has made me almost giddy. Now I just need to settle on what I want to buy with the $100 I have. I could go the board game route. There are two expansions to Arkham Horror I don't have yet and they would get me caught up there and take the game into a world of WTF I have never seen. It would also push the total retail for the core game and the expansions past the $200 mark, which makes me giggle a bit. I paid about $80 for Twilight Imperium, which was totally worth it. Then Bahie bought the expansion and then I sold the whole thing to Nate for $30 and a 4th Edition D&D handbook. I'm not sure if Bahie got screwed there... but I feel he did. I don't know.

OR! I could go the video game route. I have several options here: Left 4 Dead would be a good choice considering the over two years of XBox Live Gold I got. Fallout 3 would be another choice and a possible child neglect charge. I'm also considering a few months of City of Heroes, but that would require commitment from Bahie, Dave, and possibly Amanda for me to really, really want to do that.

"But J.R.," you may say. "What about Miranda? You could buy something for her." I offer exibit A, my living room floor, which is awash in various whatsits and such and say, "Nay!"

Seriously, she's fine. Lot's of stuff.

We also bought her a pile of clothes from the GoodWill to replace her ever dwindling does-this-still-fit pile.

If it falls on you, we're just going to bury you out here.

So, if there's one thing I'm jealous of, it's my buddy Andy's blog. Reading his made me want to start my own. The thing is, though, is that his entries really show his education and knowledge of philosophy really shines through. He can easy and entertainingly pull back the skin of things and show the fun gooey stuff underneath. I get caught in the skin most times and I try to make sense of the interior of the structure by how the outside looks. Then I just fake it till I make it. The single thing that got me through just about every paper I wrote in college is that I never doubted whatever it was that I was trying to say, regardless of how much or how little proof I had or if I even believed what I was saying.

It's been four months or so since I had my last hair cut. I intend to get a trim in the next week or so, but I'm thinking about how much to get taken off. Should I grow it out? I've got to say, while I'm used to it short now as it's almost been two years, but if I entered The Matrix my hair would be long.

I've started carrying a little notebook in order to jot down my thoughts so that they don't disappear into the little ether where all my random thoughts go. I mean they will. I can't write down an actual thought, but I can put a thread on it to pull it back in or find it later.

But it's late and I'm tired. My mom is home from the hospital, and it's wonderful.

You're the best, daddy.

I'm not sure how a majority of people keep friendships going without games. Most of the people I consider friends I met over a game of some sort (the rest I met in college, but have played a game with at some point). My relationships with Bahie, Nate, Marcus, and Dave were all forged through Dungeons and Dragons. Andy and Paul I got to know with board games (and video games). Leslie and Carrie I know from college, but have played Werewolf and board games with Leslie, and board games with Carrie. Shea and I met at work and started talking about video games and now he plays Shadowrun at my place Monday nights.

Additionally, I don't know what other friends do when they hang out together, especially as one's age goes up and the pull of responsibility makes just "hanging out" a less attractive option. Once a board game hits the table, or game night rolls around, then it's active leisure, not just wasting time. We were storming a corporate front trying to save the client till 2 am; which is different than just screwing around with your buddies. I think that's why social drinking exists, and why I don't usually imbibe. It's hard to hold your shit together in a game of Settlers, say, if you're several gin and tonics down.

Now, that's not to say that I haven't used games as facilitators to drinking. Last Night on Earth has been used in such a way, but Liar's Dice has got to by my favorite. After three shots, the dice and pips and numbers swim in your mind like a school of fish and you become more bold and brazen in your bluffs, calls and accusations. Then the game comfortably and naturally dissipates when everyone has had enough. It's also alot easier to follow than spades for new players. Fucking spades. Stupid game.

So people drink, I believe, in general, forthwith, to facilitate socializing. Games do the same. It gives everyone involved something to talk about, but it's not all we talk about. We talk about work, and relationships, and what we're watching on TV. But it fills the voids and works as a jumping off point for conversation. I guess other hobbies can be used in the same way, but few are as social as gaming, which makes me wonder at the stereotype of gamers as anti-social or loners. I mean, some are and they are a sad, sad lot, but the nature of the hobby requires you to have at least a few people who can stand you for a while.

This must be the Swamp of Stinkiness.

Went to orientation today. Standard stuff. Don't be late, don't steal and sell privileged information on the black market, etc. But it's a business casual environment and they have a full cafeteria with a salad bar and free coffee.

So tomorrow starts training and Monday I'm on the phones.

How are we going to do that Kai-Lan?

Amanda and I took Miranda to get her Christmas portraits done this morning. Despite having been woken up from a nap and being in unfimiliar environs and being jostled this way and that by a complete stranger she was a real trooper and some real gems came out of the session. Additionally, the total for the portraits came out to less that$5o with a fancy coupon from their website.

We then went to IHOP and I got a Bacon Temptation Omelet... I am forever tempted by bacon, and IHOP had the panache to call me on it. I also had three glasses of iced coffee because it's so fucking good.

I've been playing a "free" FPS called Combat Arms on my PC. First and foremost it falls under my blanket belief that RPG elements make anything better. For example, I enjoy parenting and being a parent, but I can't say I don't feel the lack of a defined leveling system, or balanced character classes. To be fair, Miranda simply doesn't have the hit points to last in combat. Not to say that I want or need her to tank for me, but I'd rather not have to rez her every 15minutes either.

So, Combat Arms should be an excellent diversion and sometimes it is. The problem is is that glitches, exploits, and hacks run rampant so the guy in the lead is more likely to be using a hack of the game than using legitimate skills. On the other hand, it's really hard to give good players thier props because you don't know if they're legit. It's sad and more than a little irritating. But I can gain experience and points to purchase weapons and modification therefore.

I've finally got a character into the 70s in Diablo 2. I can't tell you when that last time that happened. Everyone should be playing it. Seriously.

Bahie, Shea and I got in a game of Arkham Horror last night, which went better than we forsaw, which is an easy statement to make about any game of AH. We had 3 of the 6 gate goal sealed, and were doing well as far as clue collection. But we just couldn't stay on top of the monsters on the board and the King in Yellow just made a quickly woken Shudde'Mel awaken even faster. Luckily Bahie finished a task making the Great Old One weaker in combat and we were just equipped enough to make a strong showing in the battle and we got the win, saving Arkham from being destroyed by a terrible earthquake.

If none of that made any sense to you, then you need to drop me a line and we'll get our game on. In a proper way of course.

I'm still waiting for my Xbox. It just got to TX to be repaired on the 13th. It'll probably be New Years before I see it again.

And on the tenth day, J.R. said "Oh, yeah. I've got a blog"

So, my mom comes home in less than a week. Next Friday. She hasn't been home since October 5th. That's over two months. How long have you ever been away from home?

She spoke to a woman named Elizabeth, who is a paramedic who stopped and helped my mom after the accident. She was off-duty at the time and was driving just behind them when it happened. She told them two pieces of information: 1) There was no way to avoid the deer. It just jumped right out at them and 2) That my mom wasn't thrown from the bike. She held on as it flipped and it ultimately landed on her. So now she's moved from "There was nothing I could have done" to "I should have let go of the bike". And since responsibility breeds guilt, she's been pretty angry at herself for a few days. There is so much healing they have to do.

It satisfies my soul...

So, I've got a job that will span from Dec. 17 to Jan. 16. Answering phones. Three years at Wesleyan paying off. My father tells me that I need to get "hungry for it". I'm not sure I know what he means nor what he's implying. I guess what it comes down to is that I simply don't know what to do. My resume' is at a place that I think it adequately conveys what I've done and what I can do. Additionally, doing more to pad my resume' further would involve classes and certifications that I simply cannot pay for. The image I have of an employer looking at my resume' has them turning it this way and that as if trying to make sense of a language that is almost there own, then giving up and tossing it.

On the upside, Miranda is on a precipice. Her gross motor skills are improving. She has a drive to walk, but just needs that extra umph to use it as a primary mode of transportation. She can move quite well if she has something to support her and has taken numerous steps unassisted, but she just can't quite keep her hips centered. Additionally, her vocal skills are taking off. She "bah, bah, bahs" quite well, and is beginning to add "da, da, da" to her vocabulary. She also vocalizes at the dogs barking and does a "Huh" or "Hai" sound at uncannily appropriate times.

She also enjoys just sitting next to her toy box pulling stuff out, inspecting it, then discarding it and moving onto the next thing. It's very sweet to watch.

Haymaker them in their Turducken!

Sadly, no turducken this year.

My mother-in-law came over early this morning to get started on the feast. Their oven has a few years on ours (maybe 15 or more) so she was very impressed with the speed and accuracy of our oven, and we'll probably be having Thanksgiving at our place rather than theirs in the years to come. We had decided to have it at our place rather than theirs in the first place due to the general difficulty of transporting and storing the baby during the day.

Amanda and I also went to see my mom, and my brother's in town. For a while near the end of the day Miranda had both of her uncles playing with her. It was pretty great.

Claim her in her Amerigroup!

So, I had an interview today for a temp position for Amerigroup, which is an insurance company. They're sending out a bunch of information to Nevada and they're putting together people to field those calls. I think I impressed. It's pretty much the same thing that I was doing at EDS, just Health and Welfare and not Defined Benefits. Blah-dee-blah. Jargon, jargon.

Capsize him in his fish mouth!

Ok, the title thing has already gotten ridiculous. But, like all geniuses I will suffer for my art.

I made pancakes this morning. Pancakes for breakfast is quickly becoming a mote of happiness in my household as they're yummy, easy to make, but still require a bit of work which makes me feel that I've accomplished something. I gave Miranda a few small bits, which she enjoyed and I'm looking forward to having a three-person breakfast.

I got a call today from one of the temp agencies I'm involved with and they have a job lined up for me. It'll just be a 5-week job answering phones for Amerigroup. I'm hardly excited about it, but I'm looking forward to working again. Just some sort of paycheck. I've worked two days since the beginning of August. We're doing ok, but we're one minor misfortune from being hobos. Well, maybe not, but still.

Speaking of Miranda, she's doing quite-well-thanks-for-asking. We're planning on getting Christmas pictures of her taken soon, maybe next week. My mother had planned to do it last month, but obviously couldn't thanks to the accident. We have a dress and hat picked out, and plan on picking up tights and shoes pretty soon. Maybe this weekend.

Shea let me borrow Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth for Xbox... One? Classic? Origional Flavor? Anyway, I own the PC version of it, but didn't get far because it played like I was trying to push the main character through molasses. The XBox version is already much more responsive and I look forward to witnessing Jack Walters spiral into insanity.

Speaking of Call of Chthulu, it's terribly unfortunate that Chaosium has, though the CoC role-playing game and Arham Horror has cemented the form of Lovecraft's creatures. His descriptions of the various entities went into the bizzare and upserd because they were meant to be beyond description. His descriptions were meant to be a gist. A "kinda-sorta" but instead we're subjected to a winged cucumber with a starfish for a head. While I have enjoyed the various games built around ol' H.P.'s work, a Yithian is a stupid thing to behold.

Punch him in the neck!

I'm not sure if all of my blog posts will involve "Violent act vs. part of body" but it would be neat if I could keep it up.

This particular title comes from this evening's Shadowrun session, wherein my Troll attempted to do precisely that. It was unfortunately the only thing my character was able to do before the mage and mystic killed everyone. Let me explain... no there is too much: Let me sum up. My team, or rather the team that I am with (played by Bahie, Shea, Marcus, and Dave respectively) have been hired to protect a pop star named Maria Mercurial, who has been threatened by the Yakuza. We had been hiding out in a safehouse, some of us off doing a few errands: My Troll, Slabber, was out buying Maria a change of clothes. The safehouse was swarmed suddenly by Yakuza and I wasn't able to make it there until the very end, when I suddenly lumbered into the building and punched a guy in the neck. Then that was that. He's pretty amazing with his hands, but Godly with an Assault Rifle, which I haven't been able to have at the right time. Maybe next time.

Shoot 'em in the head!

There are an awful lot of types of Zombies. There are those that are just meat sacks that can be taken out through just physical abuse: Beat them with a crowbar until they stop moving. Then there are those that can only be "killed" with severe damage to the brain, which are my personal favorite and the one's that you see more often. Then the last, and the most severe, are the one's whose parts can continue to move independently of the whole: lopped off arms keep flailing and only through major body-wide trauma can the whole be stopped. True unstoppable zombies.

But I think that's enough about the living dead for today.

Shea came over with his Wii yesterday. I had never actually even touched a Wii till then, and the whole experience was ultimately enjoyable. We played Smash Bros. Brawl, an "On-Rails" shooter like Virtua Cop or House of the Dead called Ghost... Something. It was actually pretty terrible, but the Wii-mote worked very well as a zapper. There was another game, a side scroller shooter (or "Shmup") where you can stick destroyed ships to your own at random angles and what-not. I quickly lost myself behind Shea's contraption which took up almost half of the screen. Suddenly I was a dead and we moved onto something else.

We played though Aegis Wing, which was fun. It seemed like we got an Achievement after every level, which we laughed about. I would like to play it with 4 people sometime.

I was glad he came over. An afternoon of video games is a great way to pep yourself up and Shea's a good guy.

Gotta start somewhere, might as well be with the undead

I've been playing the Left 4 Dead demo a lot this past fortnight (short for fourteen nights, in case you didn't know). Ideally, I'd be saying, "I've been playing Left 4 Dead a lot this past several days" but alas I've been severely unemployed for the past... Christ, four months so the $60 retail on the game plus the $10 for one, $20 for three, or $50 for twelve months of XBox Live Gold that is a requirement for this kind of game is just simply beyond my capacity. I mean, I could drop the month, but then it's no eating. Shame I'm not a zombie, there's food everywhere. Speaking of which: playing the demo has gotten me thinking about Zombies.

Most of the media I consume is associated with them. Or at least involves them in some way. Or, if they don't involve Zombies specifically, then it's about the lifeless trying to destroy the living. There are undead in Diablo 2, which I play very often and just about every screenshot I see of Diablo 3 displays either a zombie or an animated skeleton or a GodDamned WALL of Zombies. I almost wrote just "skeleton" there, but I realized that most people may or should just think of the boney remains of a human corpse, completely inanimate and unassuming. Assuming that there is something unassuming about the skeleton and this isn't an episode of Bones. The definition attached to the word "Skeleton" in my brain is two-fold, 1. The boney remains, blah, blah, blah and 2. the animated skeleton of a once-living thing that means, usually, to do harm to the living. Think Jason and the Argonauts and Army of Darkness.

Actually, don't think Army of Darkness, I honestly don't like it that much. Evil Dead II, which your average freshman in college geek has not seen, but will spout unsubstantiated bullsh*t about how cool/awesome AoD is/was. While I appreciated some aspects of what went down (the fudging of the incantation, and a few of the lines) it just doesn't stand up as a horror or as a comedy to ED2.

Also, I think one of most underappreciated lines in Ghostbusters is when Janine answers the door when the police are dropping off Louis/Vinz Clortho and she asks deadpan, "Picking up or dropping off". I'm not sure exactly why I find it so amusing, probably because she seems so bored asking it and it insinuates a number of amusing interactions with the local law enforcement.

So, in a Zombie Apocalypse scenario, what happens after? Do they just wander around, trying to fill a need that cannot be sated? Maybe they turn on each other. They were once human afterall. I've got some ideas, but I think I'm going to keep them close to the vest for the moment.

Also, I fucking hated 28 Days Later. And Shaun of the Dead. There, I said it.