Present Day 2012

My life has gone about as one might expect it to since the last post. Though I get older, I continue to play video games obsessively. I even created a list to ensure I work my way through almost 50 games one at a time without getting too distracted. My present games are Bioshock and Arc Rise Fantasia (along with Final Fantasy IV which I'm playing on my phone). I'm alternating between those two games because they are very different from each other, and I find I need a break from the claustrophobic first person shooter occasionally.

On Bioshock, I'm nearly done. On an 87 page walkthrough, I'm on page 77. I'll be following Bioshock with Gears of War 2. I'm primarily going through the games' storylines along with some basic sidequests for as long as I remain interested. This applied most definitely to Assassin's Creed Revelations and BAtman: Arkham City where the games complete their storylines and then allow you to continue working on sidequests almost indefinitely. With Arc Rise Fantasia, it's a game I borrowed from a friend of mine who insisted it was completely awesome. It's okay. A decent JRPG to offset the pounding from the shooter is nice.

I don't know if I have mentioned my 3 books, but they remain stagnant. No real movement online, nor have I found an agent to help publish them. I have pretty much determined the only reason is because I can't get anyone who can do this for me to read them. Everyone else, almost without exception, has liked them. And some of these are people who don't need to like anything I've done, nor do they need to tell me. But they do.

In addition, we've got a sort of summer movie marathon going with the Princesses to watch a bunch of movies they've never seen, and we've opened up the world of PG-13 to them all, as opposed to just Rock Girl, who just turned 13. They're really enjoying them, though the younger pair do occasionally hide their eyes from gross or scary parts.

Work is what it is. I continue to single-handedly support the programming side of several products in the company I work for. The powers that be have promised a few times to get me more help, but so far it has all come to naught. I have another new person to learn one part of my job, and we'll see how long she lasts.

We recently came off a vacation to Oklahoma City. On the way there (and back) we visited a store called Pops (http://route66.com/). Its claim to fame is having 600 varieties of soda pop. Yeah, who knew there were that many forms of liquid candy out there? My bright spot was that I finally got to try Bawls, the geek's choice of caffeinated beverage. The original flavor was really good, the cherry was ok, and I didn't like the sugar free. No aspartame, which was fine, but it used sucralose to try to sweeten it. My first thought was that it was some kind of beer. Another piece they did well was the hamburgers. Sure, burgers are burgers in most cases, but with these, you could actually tell they were hand made from the ground beef. No perfectly machine rounded burgers here. I don't mind rough edges on a burger at all. The restaurant is 90 minutes from home, but we'll have to visit again at some point. Long way to go for a burger and soda, but it was cool.

With the blog, I'm promising nothing, but as always, I would like to keep up with it. I once obsessed over trying to write something clever, but I think it would be better to simply write something. I'm not really promoting anything, nor am I really hoping for anything, so if I can remember to write about anything at all, I think that will be a good start.

So whatever I write might not be clever, insightful, or otherwise worth reading, but if I start somewhere, maybe I'll get somewhere else.