Holding Doors

When I go to lunch, I will occasionally wander through our parking garage over here just to stretch my legs. In doing so, I simply walk out to where the lucky saps who get first floor parking go and just walk up the ramps. I avoid the stairwell entirely, which can create the occasional awkward situation when well-meaning people don't understand the etiquette of when to hold doors open.

Surely you've come across this before where you approach a door and the previous person, who you vaguely remember cutting you off when they arrived, has reached the door and is now holding it open. They're holding it open for you. You're still at least 10-15 seconds from reaching that door at your present pace, so what do you do? Keep the pace and take that full time? Do you speed up and run through the door to minimize the time of the person holding the door. Or simply scowl at the door holder before deciding to take a lap around the building once you reach the door and waste their time entirely for having cut you off only to enter the building at the same time (you know that was the guy - you recognize that massive nose a mile away).

What makes this scenario even weirder is that when the person for whom the door is held finally reaches the door, they tend to apologize for taking so long. What precipitates the apology? It wasn't as if they saw the potential holder in the parking lot and said, "Oh, hey stranger, mind holding that door for me that we can't even see yet? I'll be there double quick." No, the guy let himself in the building, glanced back and saw a possible one night stand and decided to go for it (you know that's what he was thinking - why do you think the chicks dig the nose?).

So there I am, walking out on my lunch time constitutional, and I am confronted with the open door. I didn't see the person open the door since I was still around the corner, but you know, they saw me coming, and pop goes the door. What do I do? Some dude holding the door for me, a random guy walking to the garage. Do I say something? Apologize that I didn't let him know my plans before he got that door for me? Waive politely and sheepishly as I pass by while avoiding eye contact at my shame of not taking his open door offer? Change my plans, and take the door anyway to be polite, and then sneak out once he's safely in the elevator? What if he doesn't take the elevator? Do I go to the second floor and walk about from there? What if he propositions me? This could get really awkward really quickly. What if he takes my acceptance of his open door invitation as a metaphorical acceptance to a "open door" invitation? That smile as I approach could mean anything.

I stop, pat my pockets, and turn around to return back inside for the keys I completely did not forget and jingle in my pocket as I give up on my quest for a walkabout.

A few minutes later, when I can be sure that the seedy door holder has moved on to easier prey, I return to the garage to get that walk in. I approach the door to the stairwell. Someone walks out, and ... crap.

Games With Gold

I've spoken before of being a big gamer. The image there in the upper right hand corner of this page (at least as of right now) is my Xbox Live avatar that will update as I change his appearance on Xbox Live (yeah, I know how cool that is). In fact, I woke up just this morning and played a little on Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7 and nabbed me another achievement in doing so. Nothing starts the day out like an achievement...well, I suppose a lot of things would be better than that, but when you normally get up too late to do anything, you take what you can get, I suppose. Anyway...

Today is a special day for people who have Xbox Live Gold. Twice a month, Microsoft has taken it upon themselves to give away a game to everyone who has the Gold membership in a program they call Games With Gold. They select which game is free, of course, but you purchase it from the download store via Xbox Live, and it is yours whether you actually download it or not. One of the game in July was Assassin's Creed II, and while I've already gotten 100% on that game, I still "purchased" it so it was in my purchase history and if I so desired, I could download it at any time, and not concern myself with keeping the physical disc.

Game they've offered to their subscribers so far were Fable III in June, which I will play when I get through Fable II (that I paid all of $5 for quite some time ago ... I'm really behind on my games); Defense Grid Awakening (an excellent tower defense I've nearly completed) and Assassin's Creed II in July; and now in August, we got Crackdown for the first half of the month, and today, the game is actually a two for one in that we get the retail game, Dead Rising 2, and also the Xbox Live Arcade prequel Dead Rising 2: Case Zero.

I've not played Crackdown yet, and I probably won't get to Dead Rising 2 (either one of them) for some time either. This is primarily because I'm working to bring my overall completion percentage up, and the only way to do that is to play the games currently present in my profile. If I were to start yet another game, that would add X achievements to the total and bring down my percentage until I work through those achievements. Now, I've read about both of these games and I'm honestly looking forward to playing them, but even in hobbies, you gotta make your priorities.

Because video gaming is a serious hobby.

Just ... five ... more ... minutes.

No, it's not. I will be the first to tell you that nothing I do in the video game world affects my real life. Well, except for chatting with people I know over an Xbox Live Party. That's still pretty cool, and kinda builds those social points ... er, because life is totally a game of the Sims ... or something.

Obligatory public service announcement.
Oh, look, a GameCube! Mmmm, GameCube...

Dew Done Did

So at work, they committed a terrible sin against mankind. Women are crying in the streets surrounding the office. The news crews are backed up and blocking off traffic. Men are escorted from the building in shrouds. Disclaimers are flying like candy through the email. It's horrible.

Ok, so no one actually cares except me and maybe a few others who haven't said anything to me about it, but must be thinking it. For some time, my work place has offered free pop/soda. Why yes, I do feel lucky. Or I would, if I weren't feeling all entitled up in here. You see, they recently moved out the old can dispenser and put in a fountain, so instead of popping cans, we can now fill our gallon jugs and suck those straws until we keel over in a diabetic coma. Or we would, if they had not made this grievous error.

The fountain has no Mountain Dew. None. Oh, they have DIET Mountain Dew, but that tripe is only fit for errant worship leaders to try and suck down. Those of us who prefer a tasty citrus beverage with way more caffeine than it has any business possessing are now left out in the cold. There was no poll taken. No one asked about what people might want. At least they didn't ask me, and being the only person who does what I do, my opinion should have been the first they asked of. That's right, I am that important in my own mind.

This loss of Mountain Dew has left a void in my heart longing to be filled with urine colored liquid candy, but all that's left (that isn't diet) is poop-colored Coke and Dr. Pepper.

You might say, "Well, Mr Geek, you should be grateful for what you have, and those fountain taps can't hold every drink there." I agree with you, but tell you to hold that thought, for there is a far greater travesty being put upon us in this nightmare. One of the fountain drink options is water.

Now before you tell me that water is an essential beverage choice, I'll tell you that I drink over a gallon of water every day, but I don't take it from that fountain tap. No way. I tried, and it tastes like acid. It really does. Some kind of nasty, unclean taste, and yet, I see people get it all the time. No, I get my water from the Culligan machine...on the other side of the room. The same room as the fountain machine. That's right. They put a water option on a fountain drink machine in the same room as a purified water dispenser that dispenses cold water that is cleaner than what comes out of the fountain.

Conclusion: this water tap is unnecessary. It should be switched for Mountain Dew.

I cannot convince anyone of this.

So Very Tired

I'm not tired. In fact, I'm very rarely tired. I only realize that I am actually tired when I lie down and fall asleep in under five minutes, and at that point, I don't really remember much.

At this point in evolutionary history, most people on the planet have a Facebook page. We love Facebook, right? I look at it sometimes even once during a day when I remember it's there. There are people who lie and die by Facebook, though, and they post everything. Like, every detail that comes up. I blocked a guy once just because I became weary of him describing every turd that dropped from his body. Seriously, I don't care, nor do I want to know.

Some people, however, post every creak that emits from their person, and declare that this is what getting old feels like. They note how tired they are. How much they need a nap. How bad their kids act. I read from the stay at home mom about how grateful she is that the kids are at daycare so she can take another nap (She also took a nap that morning when she was sure the kids were sufficiently distracted by the TV). I read from the 29-year-old about how hard it is to get up some mornings, and that they must be getting old.

This isn't just Facebook either on the old thing. I've been hearing from people for years about how old they feel some mornings, and these are people at every age. My worship leader is a bit younger than I, and even he complains about feeling old and not being able to do as much as he used to. I shake my head.

I'm 38, and don't feel any creaks or groans, and I maintain a level of energy that rivals my three princesses. I've asked before exactly when it is I'm supposed to feel old, and inevitably, people give their own age or a few years before. I've actually passed up some ages that I've been given before, and I'm certainly older than most of the people I read about on Facebook and their poor, creaky 30 year old bones.

I don't know what it is. I don't work out with any regularity, but I have an athletic weight. I have occasion to play video games till midnight and still get up at 5-6am for work. I don't watch what I eat, though I don't overeat.

I'd be very curious to know what it is about me versus other people that I still feel like the youngest person in the room when I'm quite occasionally the oldest, or at least the upper age bracket.

Maybe it's the hyperactivity. Oh yes, I was diagnosed as AD/HD as a child, and that never really changed. My legs are bouncing away as I type...

Eight Stupid Xbox 360 Achievements

I’m a gamer. Once the princesses go to bed, and the Queen has realized that my stare has that glassy look to it, I’m left to my video games sometime between 9pm and midnight. I play because I enjoy it, and when I discovered that the Xbox games have all those wonderful achievements, I quickly entered the ranks of the achievement hunters. 

Some of you may not be aware of these achievements, so I’d like to let both of you know that most of the achievements have been related to actually achieving something, such as beating the game, tracking progress, accumulating collectibles, and outscoring other people on Xbox Live as well as highlighting facets of the game you might otherwise miss (would not have caught that you could throw sand in an enemy’s face in Assassin’s Creed II without them), but in other cases, achievements feel like the developers have run out of ideas or were simply high when they made the list. Accomplishing these tasks in game are worth something called Gamerscore, which is little more than bragging rights, though Xbox has had a rewards program that gave you a little 2% discount if you hit 25,000G along with a couple of other very minor perks.

This is not a comprehensive list of the best or worst of these achievements gone weird, but more or less those that I’ve run across in my own gaming that I thought were just strange or really pointless. 

Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure: True Portal Master

Unlock all other achievements

The first Skylanders game brought some piece of the video game into the real world in the form of $10 figurines that everyone had to have to the extent that stores were sold out of them for months after the Christmas of 2011. The game had the usual achievement fare of completing levels, opening bonus areas, and completing the final with a single Skylander, but then there was this rather pointless one. The game has 38 total achievements, and no one who plays the game will ever have 37 because the final achievement, worth a whopping 80 Gamerscore, is to accumulate all of the other achievements.

What’s wrong with this is that the point of accumulating achievements is to get them all, so having an achievement whose sole purpose is to count the other achievements is a waste of space. Why not just spread those points out to the other ones?

Batman: Arkham City: Storyteller

Have 12 murderous dates with Calendar Man

Arkham City was the follow-up game to Arkham Asylum, and both of them are really exceptional to play. Because the game is a open world sandbox environment, the achievements are generally related to gathering collectibles, hitting milestones, and completing the myriad of missions that are presented. This is one of those missions (sort of). 

Calendar Mar is located in a jail cell under the police station, and to get this achievement, you have to visit him on some very specific days – 12 of them, obviously. Which days, you ask? A holiday in each of the 12 months of the year, of course. This means to properly acquire this achievement, you have to interrupt your holidays to see Calendar Man and chat over the course of an entire year. Miss the holiday? Well, there’s another one next year.

Or you can do what most people do: disconnect the Xbox from the net and change the date. It honestly makes more sense.

Portal 2: Professor Portal

After completing co-op, complete Calibration Course online with a friend who hasn't played before

The first Portal game was genius, and the second took it to new heights with a hilariously involved storyline and some mind-bending puzzles along with an ingenious co-op mode. Not only that, but you could play this co-op mode over Xbox Live and lose that annoying split-screen. Then you look through the achievements and after you chuckle at hugging three people over Live, you get to this one.

After you complete the co-op game, you have to locate someone who has never played co-op and complete the Calibration course. This is not as easy as it sounds. The achievement site I frequent has an entire message board dedicated to finding Portal 2 co-op virgins whose “cake has not yet been tasted.” I get that they wanted to highlight the online aspect of the game, but randomly finding someone who bought Portal 2 and never played the co-op is no small task.

I found a friend of mine at work who had just started the campaign portion of the game, and commanded him to not start that co-op without me. Yes, I said commanded. What?

Rabbids: Alive and Kicking: 3 of them

The Raving Rabbids series is supposed to be stupid humor. They don’t pretend to be anything else. It’s all about burping, farting, and slapstick, and the Kinect version of the game holds true to that. In fact, this particular game should have been bundled with the Kinect since it uses the peripheral to an extent that no other Kinect game I've played does. It would stand to reason, then, that the achievements would have some silliness to them. In fact, a lot of the achievements involve doing exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do in the mini-games. Silly digresses into pointless, however, when the first achievement anyone gets is this one.

Welcome to HQ

Launch the game for the first time

Yes, that’s an achievement for managing to start the game. Well done, soldier, you found the word “start” on the screen, and dutifully followed its instructions. Why might this be here? Oh, there is a possible, quite diabolical reason, for it. You see, when you start a game you can remove it from your list of game sin Xbox Live provided you haven't acquired any achievements. Once you get even one achievement, you're stuck with it forever. This is why I have The Michael Jackson Experience in my game list. One stupid achievement, and there is no deleting it...ever.

Anyway, if you managed to start the game, and forget to quit, you might just come up with this one. 

Marathon

Play for 2 hours, 3 minutes and 59 seconds in one session.

The joke, of course, is that at the time of the game’s creation, the best marathon time was 2:03:59, so they decided to tell everyone to play a physical video game for over 2 hours in one session. Still, that one isn’t as good as this one.

Still At It?

Play 6 months after your first game

Like in Arkham City’s storyteller, one is tempted to fiddle with the dates.

Most Lego Games: Use One Character to Defeat Another

The Lego games have always had a wonderful sense of humor that they inject into culture’s biggest franchises, and along with that humor, they throw in some achievements that make you feel led by the nose to do something that you would never do in the course of playing the game. These involve choosing two specific characters, loading a specific level, and then using one character to kill the other. Sometimes, as in the case of Harry Potter: Years 1-4’s Role Reversal, doing this involves finding a very specific character only available very late in the game, such as Voldemort, who is only available after you've completed the game to 100%, but most of the time, the characters are just match-ups the creators thought would be funny. Normally, you tend to be respectful of your pathetic AI sidekick and just leave him alone to chase butterflies, but to grab that low-hanging Gamerscore fruit, you have to get violent on your sidekick, such as with:

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga: Love Is…

Crossover: Destroy Jango Fett with Boba Fett.

or

Lego Batman 2: Green Lantern's Light

Defeat Sinestro as Green Lantern

And while we’re on the subject of Lego…

Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4: Quiet, Please!

Turn the sound and music down to 0 in the options menu whilst in the library

I want you to read that very carefully. The developers want you to be aware that you can turn down the music and sound effects from the options menu. Normally, they include that sort of information in the manual no one ever reads, or that they stumble across exactly one time while looking for the red brick menu and accidentally hit options instead, but this one decided that turning down the internal game volume was so important, it warranted a special achievement to have you do it...in a very specific place in the game.

Fable 3: We Need Guns, Lots of Guns

Collect all 50 legendary weapons. They won’t all appear in your world, so trade with other Heroes!

Oh yes, the exclamation point is part of the wording on this one. Fable III has some wacky achievements anyway, such as marrying a friend’s character over Xbox Live and having a baby with them, but this one is especially warped. The game, itself, only contains 24 of these legendary weapons, and they appear randomly meaning that your playthrough and your friend’s playthrough might gather different weapons, and the social aspect of them game allows you to trade these things. But do the math there and understand that everyone else is working to get these together. In addition, you have to have all of these in your possession, not having simply owned it at one time or another, so you have to hoard them until you have the achievement. 

Sure, marrying your buddy is weird, but collecting an item that doesn’t exist in your own game is beyond that, in my opinion.

Dance Central 3: We’re Friends, Right?

Link Dance Central 3 to your Facebook account.

This is another one of those achievements that is intended to highlight an aspect of the game that you might have otherwise overlooked, and I picked it over a couple of other achievements that are also a bit silly such as skipping songs and playing for three weekends in a row because it involves the world outside the game. Sure, Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform, and the chances that your average player has a Facebook account is almost guaranteed, but to require someone who is playing a game to have an account there seems over the top to me.

Yoostar 2: Red Carpet Superstar

Achieve 2,500,000 Fame.

I throw this one in last because when the game came out, it was an achievement in the vein of the Gears of Wars franchise’s “Seriously” achievements (no, just kidding, nothing is that crazy), but what happened with Yoostar made this one much, much worse. Fame on Yoostar was supposed to have been acquired through posting the crappy movie scene remakes you made on your Kinect to their servers and people vote on them or something like that. I don’t really know because the Yoostar servers are down, never to return, so this achievement, and the others from the game that have to do with the social aspect of the game, have the worst categorization an achievement hunter can come across: Unobtainable. 

I’ve searched for a reason as to why this happened, but never came across anything. If anyone ever played this game, they’ll never have 100% completion in their game lists.

Search Engines

You how some people can drive traffic to their blogs and such? They make certain to speak of certain very popular topics that appear in the top rungs of search engines. It's easy enough to locate these things, especially if oyu pop into Yahoo. They kindly place topics like Ken Griffey Jr. and Bernie Kosar right at the top of the lists of things trending now. Even weird stuff like dufnering and lobster shell disease shows up pretty near the top of things that people are currently searching for.

These lists of items really help to place your finger on the pulse of what people are talking about the most right now. What's on TV? Why, Breaking Bad, of course. Movies? Elysium is right there at number nine. People are even still searching for info on that Fukushima disaster along with weird stuff like Clown Obama Missouri, India aircraft carrier, and for some reason, a 1912 eighth grade exam. makes me wonder if some of this stuff isn't just a plant to make people search for stuff, like when people searched for cat videos and Mitt Romney eating hot dogs (hint: they liked to photoshop them).

Time was, people would search for Paris Hilton and Justin Bieber, but I imagine those only come up when new stuff of their comes out, though the Hilton deal was more about the sex tape than anything else which is why Pamela Anderson tended to crop up in people's search results as well. Of course, digging deeper will find you Erwin Schrödinger and the cat he never had, Katy Perry, AMC, and Usain Bolt as some of the top searches along with the Teen Choice Awards, hannah Anderson, and a meteor shower.

I hope you've enjoyed this shameless search term plugging post, and hey, maybe I'll do another one soon that's just as uninformative and shameless.

Blogs

Blogs are rubbish, you know that? This one has gone all over the place since I created it a few years back, and really, it not only has never settled into anything firm, it doesn't get a lot of view either, and that's fine. I shouldn't expect it to.

Now, I wouldn't have always said that since when I created it, I was somewhat inspired by the Queen's obsession with the Pioneer Woman blog, hence the plethora of nicknames during the "history" phase of this write up of something close to my life. It stayed close to history, went through a few anecdotes, but it only proceeded with a fabulous inconsistency though I tried to stick to the truth, which is what makes it boring. You know what's more interesting? Making stuff up.

I'm a writer. I love my family, my games, and my music, but in the end, I love to write. This would be another reason I have a blog, you know? I've actually had more than one blog over the years, and there was even one that was a total work of fiction. Still people don't forward or share the boring, and they sure don't pass on posts about someone else's life...unless it is funny, interesting, or horrific. Blog posts are almost never shared. Period.

What to do about this? Take the mainstream news approach and spin that truth so it's turning on its ear. I could do a lot of other things too, but we'll see what happens in the next few days before I get distracted once more and forget about this completely. I have a variety of ideas like I always do, and I'll work out my style as I go along.

There. Boring, obligatory "I forgot about my blog" post out of the way.