Oops!

Yeah, I ended up not posting at all for a few days, as you can see.
This is because for three days in a row I was gone for at least half the day and too tired to come up with anything to post about.


Thursday: Arboretum.
It was Arbor Day, so it was free.
I don't really have anything to say about this. It was good to be outside because the weather was nice.

Friday: Uhhmmm...
Actually, I don't remember what happened on Friday. Maybe nothing. No, that's not right... I'm SURE it was something. Well... I THINK it was something. I'll... get back to you on that?

Saturday: Field Museum
We went to the Field Museum in Chicago on Saturday. We got to see old dead things and whatnot. It was fun.
That night our Sunday school class went to our teacher's school to see this musical. A Dr. Seuss musical. Several of his books arranged into one story.... It's a bit hard to explain. Very weird, and lots of fun.


...And now I'm back.
I had some kind of interesting thing to post about, but for whatever reason can't think of what it was!
Oh, now I remember!
This is a great article that every self-respecting gamer needs to read. And every not-self-respecting smoker who wants to stop. And everyone who hates video games and thinks they are no good. Actually, I think pretty much anyone would find this article interesting.
Read it any then come back to the post.

OK, now you're back, right? You didn't read it, did you...? Figures. Go and actually read it, this time.
Thanks.
Anyway. I liked this article a lot; it simultaneously proved that:
1. Video games are not a bad thing in any way.
2. Pokemon is not some "lame kiddie game"
And probably more things, too, but I can't think of them.
Addressing the first one, anybody who thinks video games are a waste of time just got pwnd. And you probably don't know what pwnd means, and I'm going to attribute that directly to you not playing video games.
Anyhow, this guy used video games to stop smoking. You can't possibly say that's in any way a bad thing. Video games have other benefits, too, and the biggest one is that they're FUN. Seriously, you haven't yelled at anyone for playing Monopoly lately, right? So give us a break!
Video games causing violence / frying brains is all a lie. Well, OK, playing video games too much will probably fry your brain. But too much of anything will fry your brain.
Moving on to point two, I highly encourage anybody with doubts about the Pokemon series to look into it. You may think the toys and card game and anime are silly, but they're actually just a cash-in to the game franchise anyway (true story; the games came first). They're great RPG games. And they never (or almost never) get old, because there's always more stuff to get and do.
Of course, if you hate Pokemon, you're not going to listen, but that's good, because you'd let your spite keep you from enjoying the game anyway.


Now I'll move on to talking about what I was going to in my last post.
Thinking about all the holidays on that one day made me think, "Hmm, I should make a calendar with a holiday every single day."
It can't be that hard. If there's no holiday anywhere in the world on a day, I'll commemorate some historical event.
I'll get back to you if I make any progress.

So this made me decide that I should use Wikipedia's "what-happened-today" feature thingy more frequently and blog about stuff I read in it. Maybe I'll make it a regular feature?
Well, I may as well jump straight into this.

Beethoven composed Fur Elise in 1810.
I find it slightly disturbing that it only took him one day. Of course, I do my best composition work when I do it all in one day, too, but my stuff is pretty simple, and plus, did he not have some kind of job or other obligations? Or did he just spend the whole day composing?

A march for the impeachment of president Nixon took place in 1974. 10,000 people participated.
Good riddance!

Cebu, the first Spanish settlement in the Philippines, was established in1565.
Well, I didn't even know there was a city named Cebu at all. But that makes me think of the animal, naturally, which, just as naturally, makes me think of the long associated therewith.

The Eastern Orthodox church celebrates Easter today.
Interesting. I wonder why they don't celebrate it when we do?


...Well, I couldn't find much else that was interesting / that I had anything to say about.
So it looks like that's it for today!

:::Source= Paul M-unit 19.91 MKII

Don't you love it when support people actually help you?

I know I do, and I have some stories about that.

First of all, with our Wii. We just got it back today and it's working fine; no data deleted or anything. Really neat. When my dad called they were really helpful, too. Told us exactly what we needed to do, and explained what they would do to it, and offered to get us a new disc if it broke, and everything. They were really nice and helpful.

Now, for a more complicated story of contacting people for help.
So I found out about this game, Mythos, that sounded pretty neat. It was in closed beta, though. There was this thing to sign up, where you put in your email address. I figured this would put me in a sort of "line" and would make me eligible for selection. I waited a few days, then contacted them to ask what the process was.
The response I got back was something like "Closed beta is a beta test that is not open to all players." You'd think I would have gathered that from the "closed" part.
So I sent back a more clear question, also asking what the process for answering questions was, because, quite honestly, it was like mine was answered by a robot.
I got an awesome response back from someone else. He said just what I thought, that I was eligible to be picked, and they emailed people when they had spots available or whatever. He then sent out an invitation to me right away, which was very kind.
I signed up right away, and thanked him for his help; I got an email back saying "no problem" before I even logged out, too, so that was also neat.
Later I received another email from the first guy with a very polite and (for the most part) easily understandable response. He said mostly what the other guy said, except that, pretty much, "Well, they never contacted you, so tough luck. You'll have to wait for open beta, and we don't know when that will be."
Sorry if you're out there; no offense or anything. But I liked the other guy's response better! =D

Anyhow, I'm now in the process of downloading Windows XP Service Pack 2, which will hopefully allow me to actually play the game. If not... I don't know. I think eventually I'll be able to get it to work. I do have the recommended system requirements (or pretty close, anyway).


Oh, by the way, today was both Saint George's Day and Administrative Professionals' day, and yesterday was what I refer to as the politically incorrect "Tree-Hugging Liberals' Day."
This was going to launch me into some long other subjects, but I need to go to bed so I'm going to have to cut this short.
Hopefully I'll get back to that tomorrow.

:::Source=Paul M-unit 19.91 MKII

The government gave back my money!!

Yeeeeeesss!!

I got my state return a while ago. But I just got my federal return in... let's see... I think it was yesterday, yeah.
It's not a huge chunk of cash, but I will say that it's "significant."
Jeremy has suggested that I use part of it to buy Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and I'm considering doing that. I at least would like to get some DS game; I was also thinking about getting The World Ends With You, which hit stores just today. Or maybe I'll get a Wii game. Okami just game out, and it looks really snazzy. I always wanted to play it, but we didn't have a PS2 until recently. But now it's on Wii, and I'd rather get that version (it seems to me like it'd be a lot better).
Unfortunately, though, our Wii is "in the shop," so to speak. The disk drive was being weird. At least it's under warranty, so we can have it fixed for free. It almost certainly means the destruction of our Super Smash Bros. Brawl disc, which was stuck inside of it at the time, but they'll get us a new one for free, which is really nice of them. The one annoying thing is that it may also delete save data. If that's the case, we'd have to go back and do everything in SSBB again, because you can't back up that data onto an SD card.

Anyhow, it's been a while since I posted last. This was because of TFC, and the youth conference at FBBC (more on those later), and other stuff that was keeping me busy /away from home.
But I'm back now, so yay!
Lately I've been working a lot on stuff for Egoboo; I composed two songs for it today. Tomorrow I'll probably start working on some gear for my Hobgoblin character.
I also started making this game just before I left for the youth conference. I like the idea of it and think it's got a lot of promise.
The basic idea is that you're this little purple jelly thing that can be killed by practically anything. If something touches you, you die. You are unable to kill things; all you can do is flex your body to bounce them away. The problem is that the goal of the game is destroying monsters. So the way it's done is by you knocking them into dangerous things like spikes or the mouths of other monsters, and stuff.
I don't know when I'll get working on that fully. There's also Fafnir-Cola to be considered.

Speaking of games, I've been thinking more and more about game design. I'm seriously considering it as a career now. It's far down the road, though; I'd have to start with a smaller industry job and work my way up, but... it's something I really want to do.


Anyway, about TFC; I got first place. I beat all of zero people. The event's a lot smaller here in Illinois than it is in Iowa. I had a good time, though, and I get to go to nationals now.
I guess I don't have anything else to say on that subject.

I could say a lot about the youth conference, but I don't know if I want to take the time. In short, it was awesome. I had a lot of fun and the speakers were amazing. I got to stay in my brother's dorm, which was pretty cool.


Oh, by the way, for those of you who hadn't noticed, I have one of those fan page things on Facebook now. It's for my writing stuff; I want to get some of it published. I'd appreciate it if you became a fan (those of you who are on Facebook, I mean).

Anyway, that's it for today. A comparatively short post, but it's a post, at least, right? I'm going to *try* to get back to posting every day. We'll see.

:::Source=Paul M-unit 19.91 MKII

Short Post

Just writing to let you know that yesterday's post was a very bad joke to get people's attention.
Of course I'll still be doing blog stuff, but it won't be as regular until at least next week.

:::Source= Paul M-unit 19.91 MKII

I'm done.

That's it. I'm done with this whole blog thing.
It's dumb and I hate doing it.
Also, nobody reads it anyway.

Convince me to keep posting, and I will. But I don't think there are more than like... two or three people reading this. So yeah.