The Information Super Highway Was Paved With Good Intentions

Want to Listen to This Post?

Watch below or check out more videos on my YouTube Channel.

As we continue to hurl ourselves into Idiocracy territory, I thought about the last 25 years of my life.  After all, my 25th reunion is this fall.  Good time to reflect.  Look back on my adult life.  Cry in the corner a bit.

What I discovered is that for all the technological innovation we’ve seen in the last two decades, we’ve become incredibly stupid and selfish.  If I could go back in time and change one thing, I might actually make the ultimate sacrifice.  I might try to prevent the invention of the Internet.

I know.

I KNOW.

What madness is this?  Why, on Earth would you un-invent the Internet?   Aren’t you selling shirts, online?   Aren’t you trying, and failing, to produce YouTube videos?  Yeah, but that doesn’t change the truth.  And, before you start clutching your routers and barking madly, understand where I’m coming from on this.  It’s like Terminator 2.  No matter how hard they tried to keep Skynet from happening, it happened.  Granted, it happened in a bad way, a la Terminator 3, but it was inevitable.   Now, I don't want to keep the Internet from ever happening.   I only wish to delay the process until we are better equipped, mentally and emotionally, to handle it.

We were given fire by the Gods and we ended up torching the world.  We literally did not understand what we were given.    For awhile we just did silly things with the Internet.   Hell, we still do.  Cats playing keyboards, planking, Hadouken pics, Horse Head Mask videos, memes, vines...  But soon, it warped and became something different.   There was porn… so much porn.  Then there were cell phones and soon commercial WiFi.  iPods. Tidepods  iPhones. 

Facebook, Instagram, Elvis Presley, Disneyland.

It spiraled out of control.   Slang (OMG, WTF,  ROTFLMAOBBQ)

We became addicted to technology.  Our lives revolved around little devices that did everything for us.   A phone replaced a pager, a camera, a gaming device, a laptop, watch, GPS, radio, Walkman, and tons of other devices.  It became the Swiss Army Lazy Man.   Texting gave way to sexting.   Polaroids gave way to selfies-in-a-bathroom-with-duck-face being Instagramed and put up on Facebook.  “Like, please!”  (read: I have no self-esteem and need constant and instant approval to maintain my shell of an existence.)  Soon, there was cyber-bullying.   Hacking phones, emails, the need for 24/7 news that may or may not even be accurate spread like a wildfire. Hacking of elections and influencing voters' minds.  Fake News, trolls, and bots.  We have become unable to put the genie back into the bottle.

And, I don’t think we ever will.   Isn’t it odd that in the last 25 years we’ve invented things that bring us closer together, more so than ever before, yet they put us farther apart in terms of actually connecting with people.  Used to be, if you wanted to reach someone, you had to catch them at home, by phone.   Now, you call their cell.  And, in a lot of cases, they want you to hang up and just text.    Also, isn’t it odd that in the last 25 years, so much technology has come about yet, what’s the last thing we cured?  Polio, I think.  We’ve created a generation of customers.

Our kids?  Our kids have become over-privileged and entitled. 

“Well, Johnny has an iPod and he’s seven.” “Well, Johnny is also a selfish brat that can’t wipe himself yet, but can send a text.  He probably still wets the bed.”

Nobody wants to work for anything.  And I don’t mean the entitled vs. the uneducated.  I’m talking about EVERYONE.   Somewhere along the way, we lost our mission.   Our grandparents went to WWII.  They sacrificed a lot of things in order to keep the country running.   Now, we’re asked to give up something and suddenly, since 9/11, our government is either out to control or enslave us.  Take away our rights.  Funny.  Our grandparents sacrificed a lot in order to give their family a better life.   Our parents, well, at least mine, gave up a lot of stuff in order to make our lives better.   They scrimped and saved.  They went without new clothes or fancy appliances.  They made ends meet and did what they could to ensure that we never had to live like that, ever.   And somehow, we thought, “Oh, cool.  Great.  Thanks.”  And that was it.  We accepted their generous offer.  We watched as they worked hard and bled for us and we just took that better life and continued to not pay it forward, but instead we cheapened the thought.

We were given so much without having to ask for it and yet, when it came to our children, or the next generation born into the millennium, they didn’t understand what our parents did to provide, because we were the end result.  We didn’t continue the trend.   We didn’t have to work hard anymore.   Technology caught up and made it easier.   Hell, I am just as responsible.   I work in an office all day, but I also run a business where I don’t have to put a lot of effort into it and am rewarded, monetarily.   Granted, I wish I could work more on it.   I know the quality would benefit, but at the end of the day, I get emails saying , “Congrats on your sale” with no deserving of that praise.  The Internet has done the work for me.

We take to Facebook and instead of sharing our lives with each other, we share half assed researched and cited examples of hate against one group or another.   I can count on at least one hand how many friends I have on Facebook that never say a word, yet post CONTINUALLY their disdain for one group or another in this world.   And 9 times out of 10, they share from one subjective group that is not even factual all the time.  It’s just a funny picture, or what they claim to be funny, slamming another person/group/religion/etc.   They don’t say “Hi”, or “How are you” they say, “Here’s why you’re all wrong and I’m right” in graphic form.  And for all that friending and sharing that goes on, I believe we are more so divided than we ever were as a civilization.   Friends are not friends, they are an audience for our amusement and our agendas.  We don't connect, we try to redirect.

We do not deserve the Internet.    If aliens were to come here, looking for intelligent life, we’d be blown off the face of the galaxy like we were a plague. 

“For the love of Blurg!   Zyphos, we must eradicate this menace on Earth before it spreads and infects us.”  

“How do you know that, Lishu?” 

“I saw it on Reddit.   And Grimjor saw a post on Zarnbook that he shared from "I bet this Gorpcar can get more likes than Firtarp.”

100 Andelorians like this.  (Picture of a tentacle in a thumbs up position.)

So, yeah.  Let’s go back, blow the servers and tell the geeks of the 90s to keep working on it and we’ll work on being better humans, so that one day, we may be deserving of such an awesome power.

I Don't Want To Leave

Want to Listen to This Post?

Watch below or check out more videos on my YouTube Channel.

Open world games such as Minecraft or No Man’s Sky are sometimes overwhelming to those of us who like a little bit of structure in our lives.  After all, we are essentially given not just a blank canvas, but a blank studio, gallery, and entire world in which to create.  The level of awareness of how big the world or universe is in regards to what your footprint is could crush your mind.  You start out at spawn, and immediately worry about survival, so you cobble together a shelter or hide out where it’s safe until you can fully prepare yourself to venture beyond the safety of your immediate surroundings.  As you gain experience and develop more survival skills, you explore further and further.  Your original base is no longer something you need and you want to look for greener pastures or more advanced resources.  You want to move somewhere that your level of evolvement is now at the bottom of the scale and you can work your way up to the master of the domain.  Rinse and repeat.

And especially, in a game like No Man’s Sky, you will shed resources a lot. You will throw away things that seem so important or valuable all because you need more room for consumables to build and survive.  It’s the equivalent of people who survive a shipwreck on an island with a case of extremely expensive 100 year old scotch and they use it for fuel because survival is more important than status or wealth.  Many times, and I mean maaaannnnnnnnyyyy times I have come across worlds, rich in valuable resources that I would love to plunder, only to jump in, grab a small, totally unrelated item, and then jump out.  I may be tempted to grab a couple of high quality items if they are close by, but usually inventory space doesn’t allow for a profitable haul.  The game actually forces you to play slow. It hamstrings your efforts, even though you may be capable of higher functions with items such as advanced mining lasers or hazmat gloves.  And until you progress far enough into the game, you won’t have access to more storage on your person, at a base, or in a freighter.  Probably the best option at this point is to acquire a bunch of starships, park them in your freighter, and use their inventory space to hold multiple stacks of resources you need.  You can always jump back to them and pick up what you need.

But that causes another issue.  Travelling.  How many times have you gone somewhere, say in Skyrim, or Minecraft, or No Man’s Sky and not had what you needed or the inventory space to carry what you came for?  Imagine it, you’ve landed your ship, walked over a mountain towards an item or location and then realized I am missing something that I need or I can’t even carry this.  So, you have to hopefully have something you can drop or you spend an hour creating something to recharge your tools or suit, and then scrapping the rest to make room… A simple walk becomes a two hour ordeal.  And when you don’t have hours to play, it can be frustrating to make very small moves towards a goal.   So there you are, bebopping around the universe looking for a handful of items because they can’t all be readily available in the system you start out in. So, off I go to another system, and another, and the explorer in me is conflicted with the achiever.  I want to search for all the species and all the plants.  I want to discover and catalog all the planets, not just a landing patch on each one.

In the early days of No Man’s Sky, the idea was that you could discover planets and creatures and name them, uploading them to the servers which would retain that information for when the next player, who happens to warp on by, can see your discovery.  It was a multiplayer feature in a single player instance.  It meant “discover all the things” which had me wondering that if the universe of No Man’s Sky was based on algorithms and is procedurally generated, how does every player exist in the same space? But, of course, with the advent of this new type of feature, mapping and discovery, that meant that he/she gets to the end fastest, gets the spoils of being first but misses a lot of stuff along the way, something I find annoying about people who speed run in order to have arbitrary bragging rights. 

But I learned to let go.  I learned that no system is a snowflake.  For as unique and detailed as each system and all their planets may be, the one thing I learned in No Man’s Sky and Minecraft is that I can pick up, go somewhere else and find exactly what I need, albeit after maybe a wasted day, looking over new planets.  The stuff in my inventory can be valuable but materialism in this game is almost as inconsequential as your own physical existence in the game.  It’s all data. There’s a pattern.  It’s repeatable.  It happens once and it happens again.  It took me awhile to leave the worlds I was so accustomed to, so familiar with and enjoy finding the next place that is somewhat new but somewhat the same.  At one point in my early travels, I gave up on the allure of trying to reach the destination and worried more about the journey.  I spent a lot of time just hanging out in the third system I traveled to. I hopped all over the place to max out my ship’s inventory.  I maxed out my weapon.  I maxed out my exosuit.  I linked all the upgrades.  Everything was great… and then it all changed.  And I was reset in a way.  Suddenly, all the bragging rights and inventory and discoveries didn’t matter.  I’m now playing differently.

No Man’s Sky is meant to be enjoyed, experienced, not rushed to conclusion.  And unfortunately, you have competing in game directives.  Follow the path, but explore and build.  So, you move from place to place and keep building, leaving remnants of your existence scattered about the universe.  When in reality, what I want to do is settle down and explore an area that holds so many possibilities.  But I have to continually put that desire on hold due to a requirement that forces me to go somewhere else.  There is no rooting yourself in the experience because the ability to do so requires you to leave your immediate area and after searching countless systems and countless worlds for that perfect paradise to build and grow, your objective lies somewhere else, like a princess in another castle.  The main issue became tracing back over your steps.  After a few updates my progress was lost, planets changed, bases reverted or became missing.  And for me to travel back along my path trying to find previous worlds and systems became annoying.

Luckily, the NEXT update somewhat reconciles this quandary.  I can explore any and every world.  I can follow the path as long and as far as I need to, but along the way, I need to leave breadcrumbs. In every system that has an essential component or seemingly perfect world, I place a base.  Getting enough resources to plop down a wood shack and a portal isn’t too hard.  As I move further and further along, it just means more names on my transporter list.  Even if I don’t put a portal down, at least I can get back to the space station and fly down to where my base is located.  Then, when I find the perfect place to park, I can build my final base and connect a portal network to the essential locations for resources needed to complete base quests.  The main annoyance will be teleportation times but that isn’t as bad as having to physically fly to different systems. 

I don’t have to leave.

A Legacy of Binary Dust

Want to Listen to This Post?

Watch below or check out more videos on my YouTube Channel.

How infinitesimal will the legacy be of someone born in the 20th century. I often wonder about the effects of our lives and those who have come before us on this planet. Stonehenge. Easter Island. The Pyramids. The Nazca Desert drawings. Croatoan. These are all mysteries of history where we’re not sure what was the exact purpose of their design. In fact, what exactly was being discussed when those responsible stepped back and looked at their creations, now finished. Was it for the benefit of them to leave their mark or for us? Were they trying to simply say, “Killroy was here,” in some ancient fashion, or were they trying to tell future civilizations something important.

But what’s past is prologues and we are the new builders of a legacy that may never be realized. We’ve built structures on the beach, a testament to our ingenuity of molding sand. We leave monuments of our gritty labors for others to partake, some to take out with their feet. Hopefully, they take delight in our design for a brief moment in time. But, ultimately, the beach, like a giant Etch-a-sketch, shakes itself each day, wiping away our efforts. Once towering castles in the sand, a new resets the board and allows the next master builders a chance to impress the passersby. But what if no one glances our works in the sand? What if not one person wanders by before the tides reclaim the sand? Did it ever exist? Did it ever matter?

So what if we carved our initials into that tree or upon the steel beams of a rusted old bridge that spans a river. So what if we tag a water tower or train car? Someday that mighty maple may fall, a casualty of mother nature. Or that bridge may crumble due to the elements, only to be rebuilt anew, sans scratched in symbols of our defacement. The graffiti on an overpass may be painted over. And who really gets the chance to read all the tags on the boxcars as they roll by at the railroad crossing? Then what? Our monograms go unnoticed, forgotten in time. We lose a foothold on the past with our legacy erased.

Of course these acts are all destructive. They hurt nature. We should build things not deface them. But even then, over time, those structures could be wiped from memory with a wrecking ball or an evil plot. Our history books and the Internet preserve those images, indelible in our minds and hearts for generations to come, but still the memories get corroded and the history gets morphed into something different, a narrative told by one side to blame the other. Of course, this only matters to the legacies built by those with presence. Those items are on display for a reason and the knowledge of their dedication is made public. For us, the lowly, anonymous citizen, our legacy gets wiped quite often.

I hope, that one day, many, many years from now, a child puts on their father’s shirt. It’s faded design marks a time in the early 21st century, where a young man, no longer alive, decided to put funny images on a shirt, and perhaps a younger man bought that shirt, wearing it with pride And it held up, over the years, until he had a family all his own, and while the shirt no longer fits him, his young son can run around in the faded and cracked ink marked shirt, still giving the father a smile, remembering when he bought it so many years ago.

And one day, when a new generation comes up with a better idea for sharing content among viewers, and the servers of YouTube are wiped and scrapped, the last remnants of these videos will be lost to time. Even the raw footage and files from their recordings will no longer be able to be viewed as we move onto different, more efficient means of compression and storage of digital media. Today’s MP4s are yesterday’s 5 ¼ inch floppy disks. Centuries from now, an archaeologist may come across a box of these thin black squares and wonder what the faded words “Lemonade Stand” or “DOOM.EXE” means. What will be the legacy of Chocolate Rain or Keyboard Cat be when no one is able to view the videos in the 22nd century?

As for gamers, we spend time and money on a digital footprint. On multiplayer servers, long since decommissioned, we built massive bases and farms in Minecraft, creating pixel art Mario or Pinkachu out of wool, so that a n00b on the server could pass by and see our art or architecture, marveling at the design and detail. Even I gave money to a server which no longer exists. I built many structures costing me countless hours only to have them wiped away after the mods went away and stopped hosting. The videos of these structures, while still on my channel, harken to a time when I was still early into the channel, not really knowing how to best present and edit content. In GTA, we built empires and acquired clothes and vehicles, but those were all temporary fixtures as newer titles were released and support for the old was removed. The money gamers spent on shark cards to amass all this material wealth, gone in a command line execution of finality. Angry Phisting will be no more as will Bob in the world of San Andreas. These are the legacies I’ve perhaps wasted my time on. Many hours, many dollars in maintaining storage and Players Plus accounts only to have everything blinked away. What purpose did it serve? What did I hope to achieve in them? Why do we continue to leave footprints where we know someone will later erase them?

It’s a perfect rabbit hole to climb down as you play a game like No Man’s Sky where in essence, the game wants you to be found. Perhaps not physically, or even maybe literally, but your mark on the game is left to be witnessed. Of course, as the game continues to morph and update and become something further away than what it initially started out as, our digital footprint on the universe is being wiped clean from the servers and one day, maybe a year or maybe decades from now, no one will ever see how you named your first discovery, Planet McPlanet Face. As the NEXT update gives us the option of building bases anywhere and in any quantity I am laughing as I come across the many footprints, little messages from other explorers, screaming out into the void. Their messages like little, “Killroy was here” moments as I pass through on my way to completing missions. And as new players wander by, they may see my half constructed, abandoned bases, a simple checkpoint for me to find my way back, along the landscape of some world I’ve marked up in an effort to cash in on the resources of a world until I find that perfect location in which to build my ultimate base, only to have it wiped away from existence by the next update… or perhaps one day gone forever when Hello Games turns down the servers.

What do we hope to accomplish by making marks in the dirt or on the sides of buildings which can be erased with ease? How do want to be remembered when our digital feats and discoveries can be wiped away with impunity. Why do we care? As we move further and further online we lose more and more of our past because we become more closed off to the outside, opting to bottleneck our interaction into a screen and a signal. There’s a real chance that if we were to digitize our entire history and all of our accomplishments we could lose them all if something happens. If the power goes out, we lose everything. If some kind of attack occurs that wipes our data, we could lose our entire past. No more “Killroy was here” and no more “Ask not what your country can do for you.”

I’ve worked in knowledge management. I know what it’s like to be in an organization where the greatest wealth of information is held close by a very few individuals. The tribal knowledge that could help solve today’s problems and prevent tomorrow’s is closely guarded because by giving up that ownership, the owners feel they become obsolete and no longer useful. We didn’t get to space by having a few mathematicians say, “It’s easier if I just do it for you.” But it’s even more than that. We, as a society, are unprepared for what happens when those who take care of us don’t pass on their knowledge of everyday things. Farming or basic maintenance or even how to function as an adult and manage finances.

Education is the most powerful legacy we can pass on to our next generations. And it’s taught word of mouth and written. Yes, technology can help mobilize and shape the message. It can even help deliver it, but it cannot be the system of record when it comes to our past. That we must write down and teach to the youth. We must cut through all the Fake News and partisanship and pass along those details and facts that will keep up from losing ourselves completely. That is the carving on the tree we need. That is the graffiti on the water tower we should embrace.

We need to have more than a legacy of binary dust to have blown away by the winds of ignorance and shortsightedness. We need to learn from our past or we will forever make the same mistakes.

Tekkoshocon and other objectifiable things

Ah yes, Pittsburgh, home to the furries and also Tekkoshocon. 

Now, this may piss off one side or the other, I’m not sure.  In any case, here goes.

I’m a guy.  I’m as red blooded as the next stereotypical version of a guy.

I watch Game of Thrones for the breathtaking locales and expositional dialogue as much for everything else.

I’ve played video games for decades and I loved Tomb Raider when it came out. 

All of these ideas are pointing towards the sexual objectification of females in media.

(This is the point where I totally get shit wrong about cons and manga and anime and comics but bear with me.)

If I were to walk around Tekkoshocon, I’d be looking.  First, because I’m not used to seeing people dressed up in costume outside of Halloween.    Secondly, because well…  It’s gonna happen.  You know it is.  And by that definition, shit be effed up. Necessarily

Let me put it this way.   And, I know this is the wrong genre, but let’s say a girl dresses up for a con like Power Girl.  Does she warrant unwanted behavior based on her clothes?  Will she receive unwanted behavior based on her clothes.

No. Probably. 

Now, take that same girl and put her in a costume she found on the Internet under the “Sexy (Insert Benign Occupation Here) Costume”  and do you think that changes anything?

My point is that one, the system is broken.    

Whether or not that girl chooses the superhero costume or the sexy garbage worker costume, she is opening herself to unwanted negative behavior.  Does she deserve it?  No.  But if I were to walk around some neighborhoods with hundred dollar bills hanging out of my pocket, I should expect some unwanted negative behavior.  Doesn’t mean I deserve it.    It’s totally my right to do it, but shit may happen.  I should be ready for it.   If I just happen to walk around a neighborhood that I don’t belong in, everything tucked in my pockets, I may get some looks, but the chance of it ending badly is probably lessened.

The system is broken in the objectifying case because media is to blame.  The artists, the writers, the game developers, actors, directors, all of them have held such a male centric target demographic for so long that they need to evolve just like everything else in this world does.   Comic Book artists created girl protagonists that are strong, but a majority of them are drawn with rather improbable proportions.    Power Girl is probably a great role model.  Powers, abilities, does good deeds.  She just happens to be drawn with a large chest and most of her top missing in key areas. 

And while I am still missing the point between comparing comic books to anime or manga in this case, my point is universal.  There will be people who dress up for these cons as the characters they identify with or want to emulate.  Some will dress to impress, either with complexity or… simplicity in their costume.    Unless they dress to conceal their entire body, say in a full costume with mask, they want to be noticed.  They want to be looked at.  Maybe for thumbs up on their creativity or effort in constructing said costume.  Yet, some will be there to get the nerd juices flowing.   Be ready for some of that unwanted negative behavior, though.

It’s 2013 and we still don’t get it yet.  Men still run the world.   If a woman does it as well or better, she’s either a heartless bitch, a fake, or a lesbian.    I know that sounds horrible in that context but think about it.    If a woman created a comic book character or whatever and it was purely for reasons of strength and intelligence, and did not show up scantily clad to save the day, people would assume she’s a feminist or one of those people who spell women wrong.    Whether or not  the material was top notch, it would get panned or not receive the following it would deserve.

Look at Ripley from Alien.   The character wears a jump suit for the entire movie.   Loses everyone on that ship to the Alien.   Faces down certain death.  Survives. Wins.  Spends the end of the movie in a tight tank and a pair of panties while duking it out with a giant creature with a phallic chomping second mouth.    Even the inspiration for Alien came from the Sci-Fi monster movies of the 50s and 60s, most where the monster is carrying the damsel, who is objectified by her manner of dress and restraint.

Horror movies use the concept of the final girl.  Halloween sort of sparked that idea with Laurie Strode.  The final girl is usually virginal and pure... because that's sexy while maintaining an innocence.   The monster is there to take her innocence, in which we mean kill her.   The promiscuous girls get killed.  It's almost somewhat religious or allegorical in nature.  Yet, most movies have final girls that are the embodiment of what sells, which is sex.  Ripley at the end.  Jessica Biel in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. 

The gaming industry introduced Lara Croft, much to the delight of gamer boys in their teens and 20s.   Over the years, as the technology rendered a more lifelike Lara, her dimensions changed.  Her shorts got shorter.  Her tops got tighter.   Even Angelina Jolie helped boost that image as did the promotional models who appeared as Lara at cons and events.  With the reboot, they’ve toned down the image of Lara, but really all they’ve done is made her younger.    Lara had become Demi Moore and the fans (Ashton Kutcher) still wanted the same looks on his gal, just 20 years younger.  

Girls who play video games have a lot of stigma to overcome either through the industry’s male centric characterization or the few brash and stereotypical representatives who ruin it for the core subset of the gender.

Girls either get picked on for trying to play the same games as boys or they get hit on or objectified.   Quite frankly, you have to understand that for every nerd who is a nice guy, there are ten others who are too socially awkward to understand that just because a girl plays video games, it doesn’t mean they stand a chance.   Common interests don’t make up for lack of chemistry and compatibility.    And both genders have to also realize that anyone who plays games can like any game and still be considered a gamer as much as the core subset of gamers need to realize that yes, in fact, Angry Birds is a game.  As much as they hate that Farmville gets used to denote a gamer.  I  know.  I don’t get it myself, but whatever.

The point is, don’t objectify the person you see.  Do see the person, objectively.

And don’t stare at the girls in cosplay.  They don’t like it.

The AngryCast update #2 - Mongo Smashes and Build It

Since the last update, I’ve been busy with recording and editing.   I managed to put together two more videos for the Minecraft series.  This brings the total up to 10.  Granted, I am still only releasing one a week.  

Part 3 - Arrow to the Knee

Part 4 - Minecraft Part 4 - Inane Ramblings of a Reluctant House Builder

I’ve also posted the last Build It video for work I did on a Multiplayer Server that appears to have gone dark.   It was a project that granted me Builder status on the server and gave me creative control.   Unfortunately, the footage is quite bad and I admit I had to make do with what I had.  At the end, there were a lot of problems with trying to record there.  There was some griefing of the landscape and missing chunks that didn’t make for some great backgrounds.

The Cult of the Creeper

And as if I didn’t have enough going on in that realm, I just got the latest SimCity title and began doing some recording of that playthrough.    For anyone who has considered doing this kind of work, believe me, you find it hard to come up with commentary on a game that pretty much makes you wait for things to happen.  I hated having to do edits to the flow because the soundtrack is pretty good.  Unfortunately, I said a lot of stupid things.  More than I usually do, so I had to do a lot of cutting.   I’ve also enabled longer videos so it ended up being over thirty minutes. 

Part 1 - Shatner You Fabulous Bastard

So, come on by, and see how I'm doing.  I know.  It's bad.  ;)

Liberation after 607 straight days

It was hard to let go. I kept feeling the need to stay. It was like Stockholm Syndrome had kicked in or something. Finally, the last straw had broken and I was tired of throwing away countless hours on it.

I quit Café World.

(Cue thunderous choirs of singers.)

OK, I admit it. I AM THAT guy. I play Facebook games. I am a prisoner of the evil Zynga.

No, not really. I do play Farmville, but even that is probably on its way out of my life.

I should have seen this coming. In fact I realized the problem months ago but continued to plonk away at the restaurant themed game, even though it was dictating some aspects of my life.

Let’s back up for those of you who have a life. Zynga has a game called Café World where you run a cafe. You decorate it with different themes and styles, holiday or country specific. You cook dishes, make drinks, cakes, all kinds of stuff, and serve it. You hire your “friends” to work in your Café, which has no real effect on them except that they sometimes get notified that your using their Facebook identity in your game. I think that stopped awhile back if it was ever a thing at all.

Anyway, you get goals or missions. You cook up a certain number of dishes or ask friends for certain items and complete those goals for rewards. The more goals you complete, the better you can make your café. But, there’s a price.

Not all the goals are easy to achieve. There are time limits. There are restrictions on how many dishes you can cook at one time, and every dish has a different prep time. There is a restriction on how often you can ask your friends for help… and they have to be playing the game as well. Not at the same time, but they have it loaded on their facebook account to be able to help.

So, you get a set of goals and you complete the first one, fairly easy. Then you get to the third or fourth and now, you have to cook up like 30-40 dishes, ask for 10 items, and you have three days left to complete that goal and three more to complete the entire list. Meanwhile, you are already working on three other sets of goals. The pressure is on. But, you can still complete the tasks if you use up your “special” cash which you earn along the way. Your regular profit is based in coins but there is the “Café Cash” which you can buy with your “Real Cash” and that’s where the real game begins. Zynga wants your money.

And why not? They are a company that provides the game free to use over Facebook. But these microtransactions are just the tip of the iceberg. The game sort of makes it unwinnable and never ending if you don’t spend in game cash. The later goals in any set involve a lot of items that are either nearly impossible to complete because you don’t have the tools to do it or you need the help of friends who don’t play the game. That’s their goal; get people to suck their friends into playing and spend real money to complete in game goals.

It wasn’t hard to see the problem with these games and yet I still played. Part of it was that spirit of not quitting and part of it was that I had achieved so much that it felt ridiculous to just throw it all away.

After all, one of the few perks was free items for cooking a dish every day. After 607 days though, I’d had enough of it. The game was notoriously buggy, it was slow, half of the items you cooked never stayed in game and would disappear upon refresh or coming back later to serve them. In all, it became extremely frustrating to try and make it to my computer to cook something just so I could keep the streak alive. I wasn’t having any fun and finally said, “Eff it!” And removed the game from my account.

Gaming from Point A to Point B

I’ve said before how much I am a gamer with no time to game. Back when the world was simpler and I was not obligated to have a job or do a lot of chores I could partake in long-ass sessions of point and click, hack and slash, get lamp, and pew pew. Ah, 1987. How I miss you. But in today’s harsh reality, I have a five year old, a job, chores, and no time to game.

Those days of cruising around Daventry and evil scientist’s mansions looking for damsels in distress are gone, replaced with rescuing my daughter from the clutches of the evil monsters under her bed. The Saturday afternoons of swinging through the jungles looking for money bags and diamond rings are over as I am more inclined to look through the couches for the TV remote in order to put on something I will watch in the few minutes I get the television to myself. The nights of building cities from small towns have vanished as I put out the garbage and try to keep the roof over my head from buckling.

But, as a father who has no desire to grow up, I still find whatever time I can get to do a little button mashing. When my daughter was just about to turn one, I bought "Grand Theft Auto IV". Now, I am a huge fan of the series. I actually made the decision to buy a PS2 just so I could play "GTA III" back in 2002. So, nothing infuriated me more as when I had just got my daughter down for a nap and was all prepared to launch into "GTA IV" and that stupid glitch thing happened. Flash forward three years later, and I haven’t finished the game. Now, she’s old enough to understand what’s happening on screen, so she can’t even be in the same room if I were to play it. Pretty much my life has been relegated to watching Qubo or Nick Jr. If I do manage to steal some time to play my PS3, she comes bounding down into the man cave and I am forced to quit because she wants to watch.

But, it’s not all bad. She likes watching me play games and she really wants to participate. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have the coordination to handle a sixaxis very well. However, I plan to raise her as a gamer, but in doing so, she needs proper training. She has a Fisher Price iXL, so she has the stylus thing down. Now, we need to work on her ability to handle a controller. We can’t move too fast though, she needs to learn the basics. So, we’ll start with Atari 2600 games. One button, one stick. After all, learning to play video games without first playing on an Atari 2600 is like being taught how to win an All Valley Karate tournament with a stupid, blockable move like the Crane Kick but never being taught to paint a fence first. After that, we’ll move onto NES games and then Playstation and PC games. I would like her to appreciate the evolution of gaming and how even the simplest of games like Tetris can be entertaining and addictive.

In truth, I will look forward to her becoming a gamer as she grows older. She already has an interest in watching me play "Minecraft" and at the right age, when she can master keyboard and mouse, I plan to set up a server on a desktop and the two of us will build worlds together, just like we build skyscrapers and dinosaur compounds with her foam blocks. I’m laying the foundation, as it were.

Look at the landscape of games, per my analogy, Atari’s "Adventure" would be analogous to something like say "Skyrim"… maybe. I know that’s a stretch but I was thinking about the whole “Arrow to the knee” in that the sword in "Adventure" is basically and arrow like on a keyboard. Actually, you could probably draw a line from "Adventure" through "Zelda" to "Skyrim". Just like you could draw a line from "Pong" to "Wii Table Tennis". "Dodge ‘Em" to "Need for Speed"? I give up.

In any case, I’m bringing her up right. Then maybe I’ll bring her up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start.

Help! I'm Addicted To Minecraft!

My penchant for getting addicted to games is legendary. I spent an entire series, early on in the blog history, detailing my love of video games throughout my life. I went from the age of the Atari 2600 through PC gaming and ended up at the PS2. And I always vowed to go back and more entries on PS3, Wii, and even online gaming. Unfortunately, I got lazy or busy, depending on your understanding of my free time.

To bridge the gap, I did a couple of ‘one off’ posts about Uncharted and Fallout 3 for PS3 and the Call of Duty series for the Wii. Since then, I’ve taken a break from those and had focused on Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, which is a game that can get your adrenaline really pumping. I do not suggest playing it for any length of time and then driving anywhere. You’re liable to find yourself speeding.  But this is nothing compared to my new timesuck.

My wife has a piano student who is a bit of a gamer.  He has an Xbox 360 and was a big Halo nut.  We’ve talked a lot about gaming and we’ve spent lesson time racing, much to wife’s dismay, I’m sure. However, he started asking me one day about Minecraft. I had never heard of it. I thought he was talking about Minesweeper.  To hear him speak of it made little sense because he’s in high school and has a tendency to talk really fast and not make a lot of sense unless you really pay attention to him. You can see why I like this kid instead of my usual, “Get off my lawn” mentality. So, I did a little research and was utterly amazed at this game. I also resisted it with as much will power as I could muster.

Unless they are a gamer, trying to explain Minecraft to someone can be frustrating. They don’t understand game physics or sandbox modes or anything like that. So, I found it very hard to try and relate to others about what Minecraft is without saying, “Just go to YouTube and watch a video.” But, I’m going to try to do it for you, the reader.

Imagine the island from LOST as if it were built by the creators of Wolfenstein and then ask people to just go out and build stuff like in a SimCity style of game. Not clear enough? OK long version it is.

To get you into the right frame of mind you have to understand the brevity of the design. Everything in the world of Minecraft is built using blocks. It’s a very cubistic world with really no angled surfaces except for liquids. For being 2011, the level of graphics are laughable but believe me, once you start playing you’ll forgive the crudely drawn landscapes.

You start out on an unknown continent. You have no items in inventory. You have no real direction. You just start building. There’s no score, no end, and no limits to your imagination. Sounds like a typical Saturday with my kid and her basket of blocks. That’s what this is, essentially, a game of building with blocks. Except you have to get the blocks from your environment.

The hills are made of dirt and rock and the beaches are made of sand. There are trees around and even snow in some areas. Basically, you walk up to a tree and punch it. It pops and there is a floating block of wood left in its place. You grab the block and continue to karate chop the tree until you have several pieces in your inventory. Now, you need to start making a shelter. Why? Because nightfall will be soon upon you and the monsters will be out. That’s right, monsters. There is a day and night cycle in Minecraft and during the day, animals roam free. At night, skeletons and spiders and zombies search for unprepared miners. And perhaps the worst of the lot, the creeper will sneak up on you, hiss and then explode. So, your first order of business in Minecraft is to build a shelter. You can do that by opening up your inventory and putting a piece of wood into your ‘crafting’ area. It can then be rendered into wood planks. Those can be used to construct a crude, but effective shelter to keep you safe from the nasties. During the night, you can focus on building tools. Once you are safe, open your inventory and build a crafting bench. One plank in each of the four crafting squares will render a workbench with an expanded area of nine spaces in which to craft items. Place wood planks into the center of your crafting area to split them into sticks to make tools.

Building tools is a fairly simple process. You need only to consider what the essential parts are to a tool. Since you have a nine square crafting area available, putting wood planks in the blocks to form a ‘T’ will construct a wooden pickaxe. This is essential to your inventory in order to do anything else. Well, there are other ways, like luring a creeper into an area and then letting him explode in order to collect various remnant blocks of cobblestone, but that’s dangerous. So, once you have your wooden pickaxe and it is day time, once more, venture out into the world and find rock. Use the pickaxe to bust up some stones in and collect the cobblestone. Using the same method as the pickaxe construction, replace the top of your ‘T’ with cobblestone and you will have constructed a stone axe. Put two a vertical line, consisting of one stone and two sticks and you now have a shovel. You can also build hatchets and hoes as well.

Now that you have a decent amount of inventory built up you want to hold onto it. So using wood planks, construct a chest by placing a plank in all of the nine blocks except the center. Place the chest in your shelter and fill it up with your stuff. Place two chests next to each other and you double the capacity. You can build a furnace the same way using stones and now you can smelt ores and other materials to build more items. Use wood as fuel and sand as an ingredient and you can make glass for windows in your shelter.

The important thing to remember is protecting your items. If you die, you respawn at your original starting point and you lose all your items. If you are pretty close to where you died, you may be able reclaim all your belongings which will all just be floating in the air. However they can disappear over time. That’s why chests are so valuable. It’s the basic rule of adventure gaming. Take only what you need to explore and return to deposit your acquisitions. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Once you are ready to really explore, grab some tools and head for the nearest hillside and just start digging. Eventually, you’ll open up a cave or a tunnel into a mine. In order to light the way and see where the monsters might be, you’ll need torches. A simple recipe of two sticks with a piece of coal on top and you’ll have a way to mark your path as well as keep the monsters from spawning behind you while you are exploring. Two rules of thumb when exploring a mine are never dig straight up and never dig straight down. Because, sand and gravel react with the same realistic physics as the real world, you can potentially suffocate yourself in a sand or gravel avalanche because they will fall if there is space below them. Also, lava will fall and monsters will fall through holes in the ceilings of caves. When you dig straight down, you run the risk of breaking into a cavern and falling to your doom.

This is why Minecraft is so addictive. When I was just outside, digging in the dirt and not really making sense of what I needed to do to survive, Minecraft was rather boring. Punch a pig here. Karate chop a tree there. Oooh, big fun. Then, I had to take shelter. I broke into a hillside and found a small cave and set up a simple dwelling. I waited out the night while I read up on how to make tools. There was a lot of rock around me so I started digging into the walls. I busted out a block and there was this expanse behind it. It just went on and on forever. It was dark and there were noises. I quickly walled up the opening with dirt but I kept thinking. I want to see what’s in there. So, I basically spent time building up tools and supplies to do some exploring and that’s when I realized that I had been playing for a few hours. I simply just gave in to the possibility of what that little hole in the wall could become.

Eventually, I moved on from the cave dwelling because cows and pigs and chicken and sheep kept spawning inside. Not to mention, on occasion, skeletons and creepers spawned inside, regardless of all my torches. I died quite a few times and couldn’t get back inside to where I kept all my weapons were at because a big effing archer skeleton “Waz in my house, killing me lotz.” So, now I am building a new house a few feet away on top of a mound. Unfortunately, building a proper house takes time and I have to run inside the cave with the chickens and pigs while spiders sit outside my window during the night. To fix this, I’m building a tunnel from the cave to the construction site in order to move back and forth. This is what Minecraft has done to me. I’m building tunnels that take twice as long as the actual house construction will take. However, once I’m done, I will have access to a tunnel that will lead right to my cave and all the caverns within. Eventually, I will move on to other caves or even begin to dig in the basement, starting new caves.

So, if you’re even the least bit interested in all this madness, go pick up Minecraft and watch your life slowly be taken away from you. In the meantime, go watch these hilarious Brits enjoy the wonders of Minecraft. Even if you don’t feel like taking on Minecraft on your own, because you have a life, waste a good lunch hour watching their YouTube videos. They’re a riot and make sure you wear earphones because they swear quite a lot. British humor, w/ swearing, ranks up there near Muppet violence on my list of things I absolutely love.

And once you've made that jump into playing, I highly suggest going to Minepedia to research how to do things.   Have fun!

I've also done some shirts for my stores.

United Minecrafters
from Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash!at Zazzle

Can't Talk. Must Mine.
from Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! at Skreened

Remember Remember the 6th of November

I haven't lost my coconuts. I meant that number 6 in the title. Yesterday was, duh, November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day or as you kids today call him, that guy from V from Vendetta. Anyway, I had my Facebook status set to the rhyme of Guy Fawkes as I always like to be either A: Obscure in my pop culture referencing nature or B: Relative to the actual events of the time I post it. This being November 5th, I was sort of both, I guess.

But now, it's November 6th or as I call it, my anniversary. Five years ago, today, I wore down my then fiancee enough to say "I do." Since then, she's been saying "I DOH!" So, for today's status update I did a little rhyme all my own.

Remember, Remember, the 6th of November
of wedding bells and tying of knot.
Here's to 5 kiddo. You'd surely be a widow,
if ever, our anniversary, I forgot.

Please, please no applause needed. Kidding.

So, people have asked me what I plan on doing for our anniversary. Well, I've never been one to keep up with traditions like this. We made a pact early on in our marriage to not go crazy for days like this or Valentine's Day. Neither one of us have the energy for it. I think we've only done two or three things for either of those days in our entire tenure as a couple.

The first was Valentine's Day of 1999. My wife was still a student at Seton Hill University and I was just some old college grad that hung around with these kids. However, they were willing to play ball with me in one endeavor. I asked one of the group that we used to run with to help me in a plot to surprise my girl. She would be busy until later in the evening so I had plenty of time to gather up my stuff and spring my plan into action.

I stowed away in one of the parlor's outside of Cecilian Hall and set up a table and chairs, complete with table cloth, candles, flatware, silverware, and my trusty boom box. Then I went and placed a to go order with a local restaurant that she and I liked. I went and picked up the food and brought it back, all with the blessing of security, thanks to one of our group of friends. My wife came into the parlor and was taken back. She was always a bit shy around me even after months of dating. She could never look me in the eye. Now, I have that problem, usually because I'm trouble. Still we had a nice romantic dinner for two in a beautifully designed space, complete with candlelight and mood music.

Skip ahead a few years...more like five...to our first Valentine's Day in our home. My wife sprung the surprise on me by doing up our family room with candles and music, complete with takeout Chinese food for dinner. Trust me, this is just fine by me. I thought it was an awesome form of reciprocation.

As for our anniversary we really don't do that much. The most we ever did was go out to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse and then spent the night at the Holiday Inn next Shadyside UPMC Hospital which was real nice. That time we had the help of my Mother-in-Law and her partner in crime at work to arrange for the reservation through our travel department at work. It's nice to have friends in high places. It was a pretty spectacular room.

But being a milestone like number five, we thought we would indulge a little bit. However, having a two year old makes it a little hard to get away for a night. We can only rely on babysitters so much and we have been burning the candle at both ends with help since we are trying to save up some money for the holidays by taking on extra work.

Still, I figure we can at least go out for an evening and make it home for bath time. That's why we plan on recreating our honeymoon for our fifth anniversary. My wife is going to be deathly ill with a cold and I'm going to attempt to smuggle duty free whiskey across the Canadian border into the U.S. We're already half way there. My wife's had strep throat and been under the weather for a few weeks now.

To give a small explanation of what I'm talking about, let's step in the way back machine and travel to 2004. Monday, November 8th to be exact. After out wedding we loaded up the best damn car on the planet, my 1997 Chevy Cavalier, and drove from Pittsburgh to Niagara Falls. I booked us a room at the Embassy Suites overlooking the falls. They must have been hard up for guests because they were nice enough to upgrade us to the Jr. something suite complete with free valet parking. We also got free buffet breakfast at the KEG restaurant and complimentary manager's reception cocktails in the afternoon. It was rather posh for a couple of goofs like us who were used to the Gazebo Inn in Myrtle Beach for $99.00 a night.

We had a two room suite with living room and nice huge bathroom with a door that opened above the jacuzzi tub so that you could look out the big ass window and see the falls. Not to mention I loved the shower in that place. It was the kinds with it's own room and you just walked into it and it had jets in the walls. Besides the electric fireplace in the room we had a nice big television and one of the coolest channels, the falls' view channel.

Well, after our first night there, my wife got extremely sick and congested and spent most of our stay in the other room among a pile of tissues. I was already to go out and gamble our wedding reception haul away at the casinos but we ended up spending most of our time in our hotel asking around for a pharmacy in the area. In all, we had a pretty decent time and I ended up winning about $50 on Spanish 21.

On our way home we came all the way through to Buffalo and forgot to stop and exchange our money. So, I had to drive back into Canada and stop at the Duty Free store right over the border. Picked up a few items of interest and then headed home.

This weekend, liquor aside, I think we'll head down to the new Casino in Pittsburgh and have a nice dinner but my wife will probably be chasing hers with some Robitussin. Should be a fun time in the steel town tonight.

One in Ten Addicted To Video Games, Nine Others Just Suck.

I love video games. Have I said this before? I mean I love playing video games. I love driving a kick ass car through cities towards a finish line. I love blasting away zombies and various residents of Liberty City. I love figuring out little puzzles and sliding down pipes into dark worlds looking for coins. But am I addicted to video games? No. Do I play video games more than I should? What’s the standard?

There was a report done by Forbes magazine on how there is a rampant addiction to video games among teenagers. It’s nice to Forbes is stay on top of things. Actually, the study was done by Iowa State University so they are to blame for this. Forbes just waited around to report on it. since video games have been around since the before the 70’s. The point is, whether they are upright and accept coins or sitting in your living room and have a little controller attached, video games are everywhere. They are accessible by young and old and have been for years. They are as prevalent into today’s society as the multiple television home and the nine year old with a cell phone. Now, if you want to talk about addictions, let’s talk about cell phones. I think people abuse texting far more so than video games.

OK, that statement might be a little unfair. Before the proliferation of cell phones among the adolescents of the world in a time, long, long, ago, known as the 80’s. Kids spent copious amounts of time on the telephone chit chatting away with their friends. They’d tie up phone lines for hours causing parents to install a second line for their hooked in teenagers. There is not much difference between the teen spending hours on a phone with the ratty old curled up 16’ cord and the teen running up huge bills over texting and talking on cell phones.

But back to video games. Is there such a thing as video game addiction? Here’s an excerpt from the Forbes article…

“Experts don't agree on whether such a thing as "video game addiction" really exists. At present, it is not listed as a mental disorder in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The next update of that manual, which describes criteria for diagnosing various psychiatric disorders, is due out in 2012.”

So, in order to be recognized as a disorder, we have to wait another 3 years? Why don’t they just put a little hourglass at the bottom of the report and have it spin around like the loading screen for a video game? OK, let’s get something straight. While there may not be a disorder called “Video Game Addiction”, there can be an addiction to video games. Just like addictions to other behaviors, video games represent an escapist resource. Bad day at work, run over pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto. What we fail to realize is that it is not the fault of the video game for the addiction. When is the last time we actually blamed alcohol or cigarettes for the addiction? I’m not talking about the companies that manufacture, market, and distribute cigarettes and alcohol. They are partially to blame for enticing people to engage in addictive behaviors However, an inanimate object is not responsible for someone’s inability to show some restraint and enjoy that behavior in moderation. I’m not saying that all behaviors are something you should enjoy, I’m just saying you have free will.

Taking a look at the report done by Iowa State there is a HUGE mistake right in the Abstract.

The current study includes a self-report measure of video game habits completed by 607 8th and 9th graders for hand-held devices, video game consoles, and the computer. A scale of addiction was identified and separated into two groups (Non-Addicted and Addicted). The Addicted group revealed more reports of involvement in physical fights in the last year, more arguments with friends and teachers, higher hostile attribution scores, and lower grades. These results suggest that video game “addiction” is a problem among adolescents, particularly among males, and that addiction is associated with adjustment problems such as school performance and aggressive attitudes and behaviors.

Let’s take video games out of that equation and test those students again, shall we? Let’s test these students based on the behaviors they display and then ask them how much time they spend playing video games. What is going on here is that video games are being blamed for kids with pre-existing behavioral problems. The fact that they play video games is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. If video games were not around, the same results would have been attributed to television, or music, or movies, or comic books. In every generation since the end of World War II, sociologists and psychologists are looking to blame some external factor for bad behavior instead of blaming where the behavior stems from, poor child rearing.

This article comes at an ironic time since April 20, 2009 marks the 10 year anniversary of the Columbine Massacre. Somehow, using the word anniversary to denote one of the top five tragedies to ever occur inside the United States is somewhat morbid. I would not even go near the word commemorate. How about observance? That sounds more appropriate. Anyway, 10 years ago, two students, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, walked into Columbine High School dressed in trench coats and carrying semi-automatic weapons and homemade bombs, much like a scene from The Matrix. They unleashed a hellacious amount of violence on the students and faculty before killing themselves. From then on, the aftermath of psychoanalysis over bullying, media, and social subcultures look for some rationale behind the cause for these two students to enact such a tirade played out on the television and the courts.

Psychiatrists and investigators concluded from journals that Harris was a psychopath and Klebold was depressive, easily swayed and manipulated by Harris into joining his delusions of superiority over their oppressors. These reports have been listed as inconclusive. Were they a part of some Trench Coat Mafia? Did prescription drugs for pre-existing disorders cause Harris’ actions? Was their addiction to gaming responsible for the desensitization moral behavior and the importance of the life of individuals?

I am neither a psychologist or an expert in any field needed to analyze this type of behavior. What I can tell you is that video games are not to blame for their behavior. Violent music or movies are not to blame for their behavior. These things are merely ways for them to indulge and explore an already established predilection of violent or anti-social behavior. Fuel for the fire. For anyone else they merely exist as a recreational outlet. A person can engage in playing violent video games, listening to music with violent undertones, and watch ultra violent movies without any repercussions. Just like a person who is not an alcoholic can go on a night of extensive drinking and then function normally without needing or wanting to drink for any amount of time afterwards. How is this possible? I am one of those people. I love playing games like Doom or Grand Theft Auto. I own or have listened to the same music that other people have claimed as the reason for violent behavior. I've seen "The Exorcist" about 167 times, and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it! You get the point.

Now, to say that this type of stimuli, exposed to the mind of a developing adolescent, can lead to violent behavior is not too far from a true statement. Again, the development of adolescents is something that can be influenced directly based upon the amount of exposure and chemical makeup. The same goes for the ability for some people to burn and some people to tan when exposed to sunlight. Some people just have better skin, just like some people have thicker skin. I was bullied in some ways, growing up? Did I ever want to grab an AK-47 and kill them, metaphorically, perhaps, but it’s nothing I would have ever acted upon in reality. Why? Because my parents gave me a proper upbringing and allowed me to learn what is right and what is wrong based on experiencing both first hand in moderation. By reinforcing that I am totally capable of free will and making bad decisions, those decisions have consequences that directly affect the amount of money I see in an allowance or the tenderness of my ass cheeks at the hands of a wooden spoon.

I’ll give you a better example. My wife is a piano teacher. She has a student that fits into your stereotypical designation of a nerd. He’s lanky, has curly hair, wears glasses, and is a bit awkward, socially. He’s the teenage version of Eddie Deezen. Now, he’s getting no help from his parents. He’s been sheltered and coddled by his parents to an extreme amount. His mother sits just a few feet away from him during his lesson. She asks out loud in front of other people if he needs help with his belt when he’s been in the bathroom for a few seconds more than normal. She walks him hand in hand to their car and has him sit in the back seat while it’s parked in our driveway off the street. The kid is just about ready to start high school and he’s going to be the social equivalent to chum in the shark infested waters of high school bullies. This kid could very well snap out, grab a gun, and climb a clock tower. There’s no moderation in either his exposure to everyday concepts such as success and failure or shielding from harmful stimuli. It’s feast or famine. You either get Karen Carpenter or that guy on Inside Edition being led down the street to his wedding on a parade float that looks like a bed.

Before I go on towards infinity like a game of Tetris, which even that concept has been debated to infinity, I’ll wrap this up. In fact, I’m going to pull a head fake on you. This whole diatribe, while enormously dear to my heart, is in fact a setup for a new design for my CafePress store. So, here you have it.

Video Games Have Destroyed My Life.
Fortunately, I Have Extra Lives!

I Got a Wii 4 Free

Several posts ago, I went on and on about wanting to get a Nintendo Wii. I already have a PS3 which is great for me, but my wife and soon to be gamer Daughter may have some problems getting with the control system and some of the games I own aren’t exactly for more than one player or family oriented, at that. So, I went on a quest to get a Wii for the family. Now, compared to the PS3, the Wii is priced pretty low. However, where you make up the difference is all the additions. There’s the extra controllers and nun chucks. Not to mention the charging station as I’ve been told the controllers will drain a set of double AA batteries in a week. On top of that some of the games require some fancy peripherals like the Wii Fit Balance Board or Zapper. Once you get to the register, you could be looking at $500 and that’s before you really get any games. Speaking of games, the catalog of Wii centered game titles is a bit on the weak side. Anything that I can get for the PS3 I will probably do so unless it’s a family oriented title.

So, after much consideration and a good long look at my bank account, I decided that I was going to get it for free, just like I did with my PS3. Ever the cheap ass gamer, I immediately went and signed up with my old friends at Trainn on Your Nintendo Wii 4 Free. However, I really didn’t have the time to devote to another IFW site, right now, so I'm keeping it to get the $250 cash for free, instead. Looking at other options, I figured I could just start putting money aside or use any holiday or birthday money but that is always a problem when I look at my outstanding credit card debts. Every time I get extra money I throw it at my savings or debt. Since the Wii is a luxury item for me, it ranks low among my priorities.

Then, on a whim, I checked out my Visa Rewards Points that I’ve been accumulating over the last four years. When I signed up, I originally intended to use them towards plane tickets so I could take my wife on a real honeymoon. But, it would be years before I would be able to redeem enough to make it worth the wait. I checked the catalog over in full and found that for 400,000 points I could get a Wii. I thought, “Wow!” There it is. Then I checked my balance. I had half that already accumulated. It would take another 4 years to produce the rest at my current rate. Not to mention, I’d pretty much have to spend nearly $200,000 just to get all 400,000 points. I checked the catalog again and saw that I could redeem my current balance for around $220 give or take if I opted for cash or gift cards. That’s when it hit me. The price of a Wii is $249. I have almost that amount. I did it.

That’s half the battle. All the peripherals would cost close to that same amount. I feverishly put into place another plan of attack. Using my Paypal account and my checking account, I cycled 20 transactions a month of $1 each. Starting off with a $20 withdrawal from PayPal to my Checking account, I then put $20 back into my PayPal account, $1 at a time. Each transaction was worth 25 points giving me a monthly maximum allowance of 500 points. For every 2000 points I can redeem them for $4. Granted, it takes me four months to build up 2000 points by that method, my usual spending habits will make up the difference quickly giving me a monthly accruement of close to 7000 points. Every two months, I can redeem that for $28. If I can be disciplined enough to do the redemption, I can pay myself back in a few months time. Additionally, my birthday just occurred and my family gave me cash. Totaling all of that up, I now had more than enough to buy the Wii and all the extras.

Somehow, life has its moments and all of this got put on hold when my Mother-In-Law was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Her treatment and recovery have been nothing short of miraculous considering that she was diagnosed on March 12th, tested over that weekend, went in for surgery on March 18th and was home on March 20th. She’s due to get her stitches out March 26th. My wife felt extremely bad for dumping the entire world on me in order to help out, which was nothing. I babysat, drove my daughter to various babysitters, and just kept her at an even keel. But, she wanted things to get back to normal so, she took me shopping after her Mother got out of the hospital. This past weekend I had to go to four businesses to get everything but we managed to do it.

At Best Buy we got the Wii, charging station with extra nun chuck, and Wii Play with extra controller for $400.
At GameStop, I picked up House of the Dead 2 & 3 for $31.00
At Wal-Mart, I got the last WiiFit for $90.
I added 2000 Wii points for $21.00
And I bought 2 third party Zappers on eBay for $24.00

In all, I came out ahead by about $32. I also managed to recoup close to $10 by buying the gift cards for Best Buy at our local grocery store which gives you $0.10 off a gallon of gas for every $50 you spend. I dropped my price for gas from $1.99 a gallon to $1.19 a gallon on my next fill up.

After my shopping spree, we came home and put our Daughter down for a nap. I figured I could get everything set up and have some time to play. Two hours later, I had it all setup and was settling down to do some zombie shooting when the little one woke up. Figures. I have been able to get in some game time and I’ve become addicted to beating my own records on Wii Sports. The Fitness part of that game said I was 64 on Monday and 29 on Tuesday. I just turned 34. I don’t think it’s very accurate. I will say that all the hype about injuries are real. My body is hurting. My arms hurt, my shoulders hurt, and my legs hurt. With any luck I’ll end up with a pulled Wii knee. It’s that twisted sense of humor that prompted me to put up these two shirt designs on the store. I’ve already sold one and bought one for myself.

We're doomed, aren't we?

Free Wii 4 Me: Part Two

Part Two: Wii-Wards

Someone ought to tell me to tone down the puns. I’m beginning to really reach……I guess it could be worse. I could have said, “Wii-ly Wii-each.”

So, in Part One I explained how my Father-in-Law got a Wii for Christmas and I got a little jealous. Now, I am going to outline my plan for getting one for free. Honestly, the more I think about this plan, the more I think I should have just did my Wii site instead. It would have been less work. I just didn’t want to have to pimp my site in order to get referrals. It’s a lot harder to convince people that it’s legitimate. By that token, I decided to do this myself. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I realized I could pull it off in earnest. The gist of this concept relies on me utilizing my Debit and Credit Cards. I’ll try to be as clear and to the point as possible explaining this, but I cannot guarantee that I won’t ramble and spin off into a tangent along the way. Ready…?

STEP ONE: REWARDS CARD

My bank has a program that offers rewards points for purchases using my check card. For every purchase I make in the store using it as credit instead of debit earns me 2 points per dollar. Every bill I pay online like utilities, mortgage, car payment, etc. using my account earns me a bonus of 25 pts per transaction. Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to do the 2 pts/1 dollar method. If I did, my mortgage alone would get me thousands of points each month. Regardless of how I earned points, I didn’t get caught up in the hype of redeeming them right away. They weren’t set to expire anytime soon and the catalog of prizes was a bit laughable.

At first, I didn’t think much of my rewards card. I joined up four years ago when the program began and figured that I would just accrue points until I had enough for plane tickets and hotel stays. Then, I could take my wife on a real honeymoon. We just went to Niagara Falls for a week and she spent most of it with the flu. A couple of airline tickets would probably run me something like 400,000 points. Since I started earning rewards, I’ve accumulated about 100,000. With that I could get a free putter. You see the ridiculousness of the redemption? It’s like that scene from The Jerk where Steve Martin is explaining what you can actually win from the weight guessing game. “Uh, anything in this general area right in here. Anything below the stereo and on this side of the bicentennial glasses. Anything between the ashtrays and the thimble. Anything in this three inches right in here in this area. That includes the Chiclets, but not the erasers.”

Every so often, I’d check in on my account and see how I was doing and I’d also look at the catalog to see if there was any new items that I would enjoy. I skipped the low end stuff like water bottles and travel bags and went right for the items that were worth over 100,000 points. There it was, a Nintendo Wii, and for only 200,000 points! Well, I was half way there and it only took me four years to do that. Just think, I could get a Wii by the time they introduced the next generation of gaming console. In reality, that means that I would have to spend another $50,000 to get it. Sarcasm aside, I decided to check the low end items to see if I could get something I could tolerate. For 2000 points, I could get $4. Wow. That’s 500 points for a dollar. Well isn’t that crap….wait a minute. 500 points for every dollar. I get two points for every dollar I spend and one dollar for every 500 points I redeem. If I redeem my balance now, I would $200. That’s not too bad. I did some checking throughout the rest of the catalog to see what else there was. Here’s a rundown.

$4 Visa Cash Value Award for every 2000 pts
$15 Visa Cash Value Award for every 7500 pts
$25 gift card to GameStop for every 11500
$40 Visa Cash Value Award for every 20,000 pts
$50 gift card to Best Buy for 22,500 pts
$100 gift card to Amazon.com for 40,000 pts
$100 Visa Cash Value Award for every 50,000 pts

Doing some quick math I determined that Amazon, at 400 points to the dollar, has the best point to dollar redemption ratio giving $250 for my total rewards. The straight Visa reward is 500 pts to a dollar, while Best Buy is 450 and GameStop is 460. Suddenly, I began to formulate a plan. Redeem the points for Amazon gift cards and buy the Wii for an addition $50.

STEP TWO: GET MORE REWARDS

Whether I choose to redeem points now for gift cards or cash or wait until I have 200k to get the Wii outright, I decided that maybe I should step up the process a little. Every little bit helps. I went to my bank’s website and looked at their FAQs. Here’s what I found.

Regular Activity
CheckCard purchases - 2 per $1
credit card purchases - 5 per $1
Home Equity Line of Credit access card spending - 2 per $1
Small Business Line of Credit access card spending - 2 per $1
Checks, online bill payments, PIN purchases at point-of-sale, direct debits from checking - 25 per (up to 500 points monthly)
First time use of the first three items above - 5,000 each

Bonus activity
Open an use a new Home Equity Line of Credit - 5,000
Open an auto loan 5,000
Open and use a new Small Business Line of Credit - 5,000
Add direct deposit to a checking account - 5,000
Open a Personal or Student Savings account with a preauthorized monthly transfer (PAT) or any other type of savings account without a PAT - 5,000
Pay a bill for the first time with Online Bill Payment - 5,000
Open a new mortgage - 50,000

I’ve already been rewarded for most of the 5,000 options and I’m not about to get a loan or mortgage just to get a Wii. I already went through my monthly expenditures and found that I average about 2500 points a month through various purchases and bonuses. That still puts me on track for four years until I rack up another 100k. There has to be a way to get more points without having to spend more money than I already do. That’s when it hit me.

STEP THREE: PAYPAL

I found this out by accident. This actually serves another purpose which I’ll explain later. When I was working on my Free PS3 account, I frequently add funds to my PayPal account for support. It’s a long story, don’t worry about it. Anyway, I noticed that every transaction earned me 25 points. That got me to thinking. I can transfer money from my checking account to PayPal for free as long as it takes the usual three to five business days. I can also transfer money from my PayPal account back to my checking account for free as well. What if I set up a revolving door of transactions? The only way to be safe about this was to keep the amounts small. I didn’t want to be overdrawn on either side.

1. I transferred $10 from my PayPal account on a Monday.
2. On Tuesday, I went in and added $10 back to my PayPal account $1.00 at a time.
3. After the cycle was over, I had the same amount in both accounts that I had when I started.

I just made 250 points without spending a dollar.

Ok, it’s not a pretty process and according to the rules, you can only earn up to 500 bonus points per month this way. The concept behind this is to maximize my rewards. If I’m only paying five bills online every month, then I’m only getting 125 points. I’m throwing away 375 points a month, that could be building towards my Wii. It seems petty, but here’s another angle. Forget about the Wii. Think of that 500 points as a free dollar. After four months you can redeem 2000 points for $4.00. You can use that $4.00 to pay off a credit card. In this struggling economy, paying the minimum balance on credit cards isn’t going to cut it. Every little bit helps. If you start redeeming your reward points for cash, you can start to work down your debt. Thanks to Me Vs. Debt for this tip.

STEP FOUR: COMPOUND

In looking at the list of gift cards I can redeem for cash I noticed that perhaps the GameStop route is the best method of redemption. While I lose 40 points on the dollar for the gift cards I also found other ways to get cash from this particular outlet. I recently won an eBay auction for a game. It was for my brother’s birthday. He also has a Wii. Apparently, everyone but me has one. I opted for the Buy It Now button and paid $34.95 for a brand new Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures with free shipping. When I got the game in the mail it was the XboX 360 version. After I calmed down, seeing as how I had now missed my brother’s birthday due to this error. I explained my case to the seller. They apologized profusely and overnighted me the correct game and told me to just keep the wrong one. I suspect that this was more than just shipping error since it looked as if they had to go and buy the correct version which had a price tag of $44.95 on it. Not only did I save close to $15 on the game, I have a free Xbox 360 game to barter or sell. I can take that to GameStop and get some store credit towards my Wii. I don’t know what the trade in value is but it’s free money.I could also just take the cash from the points redemption and buy gift cards for GameStop in my local grocery store. For every $50 I spend I get $0.10 off a gallon of gas. For my 200,000 points I could get $0.40 off resulting in about $5.00 saving overall. That $5.00 can go back towards the Wii fund and now I’ve whittled down the cost further.

If all this seems rather silly and overly complex akin to a Rube Goldberg Device (i.e. Mouse Trap Game), that’s because it is. For all the calculating and planning and spending I could easily just go to the store and buy the damn thing. But this is about something more. It’s about getting it for free. Call me cheap, call me lazy, but these are the little challenges I like to on and see if I can make it happen. It may take a few months to acquire enough reward points or free gift cards, but so what. It’s fun to do. Besides, this will give me just enough time to teach my Father-in-Law how not to throw the controller.

Free Wii For Me: Part One

PART ONE: Wii Didn’t Buy It For You

If you follow my blog with any regularity…..which I know no one probably does…you know I am a pretty enthusiastic gamer and gadget head. For the better part of the decade, all of my gaming has been done on Sony platforms, namely PS One, PS2, and PS3. I haven’t gotten into the PSP for the simple reason that I don’t even like carrying around a cell phone. A PSP is like three times the size.

I also didn’t want to start collecting various game consoles because I barely have time to play anything and I don’t have the money to spend on such things. However, anytime I can get one cheap or even free, well, I’m there. I’ve been trying in earnest to figure out how to do this for the Wii. Now, I can sit here and promote some Incentivized Freebie Website for a Free Wii. But, I know that it requires more work than I can commit to right now. It’s not that I don’t think those sites are trustworthy. After all, that’s how I got my PS3 for free. It was also the subject of my first ever Blog Post here at MAMS. But, I wanted to see if I could do it a little quicker. It took me almost four months to complete the process on the PS3 and I just don’t have the free time.

I really wanted to get a Wii but having to find one in stock or pay $300 for one was a keeping me from just going out and buy one. I also have a friend who has one and they confess that there isn’t a lot of Wii specific games out in the stores. Yeah, there’s Music and Wii Fit, but beyond niche gaming, Wii has just as much available content as my PS3. I had pretty much decided to wait until prices came down considerably. Of course, by then, I could have cashed in on my Free Wii program.

That was, until this last Christmas. I’m turning into my Father when it comes to Christmas presents. It would be easier to get a confession out of a prisoner at Guantánamo than a Christmas list from my Father. Now, when my wife or family asks me, I tend whittle down “what I really want” to “what I would be comfortable with if someone bought it for me.” I mean there are tons of DVDs and games I would love to have, but I hate to see someone pay for something I can find cheaper on my own. I don’t expect my family to sift through eBay or the bargain bins at media stores to find me a cheaper version of what I want. I also tend to become a little particular when it comes to movies. I try to be extremely specific in criteria by telling them middle tier pricing, which usually means “2 Disc Special Edition” and wide screen. This usually results in me getting something else from the list instead. Still, this past Christmas, I decided to be a little sarcastic and said to my wife and her Mother. “I want a Wii.”

I really didn’t expect them to take me seriously, but somehow that stuck in their head. I was serious. I did want one, but I didn’t want them to buy it at full price. When my wife got back from her annual all night shop fest with her Mother, she informed me that there was one Wii left at the store and they bought it. Before I could feign modesty and inform her that she wasn’t supposed to buy me one, she let on that it wasn’t in fact for me. It was for my Father-in-Law. I was a little surprised, to say the least. And it’s not like they just decided to get it for him, spontaneously. He actually asked for it.

To understand what we’re dealing with here is to provide you with a little background on my Father-in-Law. Now, I love the man dearly. I mean my wife’s parents have done more than I can say to help us out. They are extremely generous and a riot. That being said, my Father-in-Law isn’t exactly technically inclined. Well, that’s not an accurate statement. He is a retired technician and is working part time for a company doing contract and prototype work for the government. Test bench work and such. He’s very smart when it comes to mechanics. He’s also a skilled craftsman and has picked up the bass guitar in the last three years. In all, that’s not bad for a 70 year old. But, he’s a bit of a novice on things that involve microchips and small electrical components. He’s constantly messing up the settings on his television remote and the extent of his gaming capabilities is an old NES with Duck Hunt up at his hunting camp.

Needless to say, I am going to have to help him with this thing. It’s kind of like having to train someone new in your job because you are being let go. But, I will be more than happy to set up and teach him the Wii. It might be the only way I get one, for now. Just to show you how much of a good sport I am, I bought him Tiger Woods 2009. Now, if I could only get him to take it out of the box. It’s now the middle of January and it’s still in the closet.

In Part Two, I’ll explain how I intend to get one for free or very cheaply..