well appernatly there isnt anything wrong with me. which struck me as odd. everything came back fine. the doctor asked what my diet consists of and well yeah lol. then he asked how much i excercise. right now im 6'1 270, big boy. im a sr designer so i sit all day, when i get home i usually work on the house for a bit then go play video games, but i eat like shit.
so his plan is as follows,
walk in the morning, ehhhhhh
then eat some cream of wheat and a apple or bannana
lunch he said sandwich is fine, but with wheat bread.
dinner he wants me to eat salads, i can add chicken and stuff. plus more fruit
and more water
also wants me to walk after i get off work before i think about sitting down.
cant say eating like a squirrel has me excited, im a meat and potatoes guy and i told him that, his reply was your meat and potatoes is what got you here lol.
The number of games out right now means you're probably picking at most three or four, with plans to double-back for the rest later. Games are almost too good now. (How many times am I going to march through Horde mode? Probably a few more times.) You feel left out when you put off one game for another, leaving a little room in for real life.
Read the gaming sites, you see it's also a good time to make video games The industry is holding its own in this economy. And yet, when an industry is doing well, even during an economic downturn, it takes success as a sign that it should be doing better. If we're making this much money, we certainly deserve to be making twice as much.
Marty O'Donnell feels that proceeds from a second-hand sale of Halo 3 should be given to Bungie, which would pretty much cripple the used sale market and deny our right to sell something we paid for. Epic Games' Mike Capps even floated the idea that you should have to pay to download the endings to games, that the boss fights should be paid-DLC.
Game developers work 24 hours a day. It's a grueling job. What's funny is, the guys complaining are probably two of the richest guys in the industry. "If only gamers had fewer rights! Who wrote that copyright law?"
Blezinski drives a Lambo. Not sure how or why I know this, but I do. Capitalism.
While the industry works out a way to get its hands on our resale dollars, it's taking more legitimate steps to separate us from our money. Which brings me to the NXE.
Now that the new dashboard update is officially out, I'd like to make a request to all 2O2P gamers, whom I believe to be the smartest people on XBL.
Do not buy clothes for your doll!
You've probably read that the XBL avatars will be able to wear custom pixels in the form of clothing. That this clothing will be sold for MS points, 250-350 each, (I am guessing this high, since the best of the stuff will be licensed by game makers).
A Fallout 3 helmet.
A Bioshock diver's suit.
A COD4 sniper ghillie suit.
Gear for your avatar?
Clothes for your doll.
Microsoft has a predominantly male population dressing up avatar dolls. This we must live with. And the avatars do serve a function, to make XBL more visual. That I understand. It's a good goal, and seems to work well. In fact, the reason I'm saying "don't buy clothes" is precisely because the avatars are sort of cute and disarming.
They're also kind of vanilla, effeminate, softer looking. The minute a company presents a way to make them tougher and more unique, you know the temptation's going to be there to fork over $4-5 to do it. And that gets me back to the video game industry making more money.
I still haven't bought one of the premium-priced XBLA games from this summer. I don't see why Braid deserves $5 more than Geometry Wars 2. Braid is artistic, very stylish. But is it more of a value? Is it a game-and-a-half? The precedent of paying more did not sit well with me. If MS sees a $15-price point moving product, they're going to look at 95% of the other XBLA games and think, "don't we deserve more here than $10?"
At least we're taking about games. The avatars: complete window dressing. Not one dollar that goes into tarting up our avatar dolls will go into our enjoyment of games. OK, in Kingdom For Keflings you could probably wear your Fallout 3 helmet while you're stomping on people. But you know what I mean.
The video game industry is doing well because it offers great value to us. The industry deserves its success, and we're the ones making it successful. I bet we're all spending more on video games than we used to. I have more games I haven't completed than I want to tell you about. (Mostly bought used, I tell myself....)
Moving forward, the biggest opportunity for the video game industry, beyond the huge epic games which take 2-3 years to make, is the snarky little transaction, like the upcoming avatar-gear, or non-functional DLC like the Dead Space skins that came out last week. (You could spend $26 on Dead Space DLC, or half the price of the actual game.)
We don't have to buy clothes for our dolls. We can say, no thanks. The doll is fine. It shows that I'm online. It's sort of customizable. But I'm going to pass on the opportunity to pay for virtual clothing.
If we all did it, then we wouldn't worry about keeping up with xXxSnipzxXx who has the Silent Hill dripping-bloody dagger. These are next-gen Barbies. Our own families need clothes. Games are one thing. But these are not games. These are dolls. Let's end the madness before it begins!
The NXE is the start of a great new cycle of video gaming. Maybe we use the opportunity to take a look at all the macro and micro-transactions taking place within our favorite hobby.
I'm sure some of you remember this news story a few years back. A cleaning woman in the south who made very little money, after a long life was able to donate a couple million dollars to a university. The donation made the news everywhere. The woman had no formal education herself, just saved her money. I'm never going to be that woman. But it does make you think.
one more full work day and half of another and i will be in slacker heaven! w00t!
played some soul caliber iv last night after getting the NXE and made my avatar. the graphics are gorgeous, some of the moves are killer but it failed to "wow" me and i was too lazy to look up the controls so just kinda mashed my way thru it and figured most of them out. i just kept thinking to myself, i want street fighter or mortal kombat or tekken or hell, even toshinden (which was totally awesome on the ps1 when you were stoned).......call me old school i guess but fighting games that get so complex into their button combo's just doesn't entertain me very much. i'm in no way slow or stupid, well i guess it depends on which exwife you talk to, but it just seems a waste of time to memorize hitting keys in a litany of b, x, y, a, rt, lr, push this down, squat jump 3 times, spin on your heels and then click them three times to perform the super-duper-totally-outrageous-funkadelic one combo kill move. thanks but no thanks so that game is going back to gamefly today so now i get to screw around with ninja gaiden while still feeding my fallout3 addiction.
1 1/2 days to vacation! double w00t!
anyhoo, i see the stock market plunged below 8 grand due to the worries over whether we will bail out the automotive giants, that even though they're about broke, they still managed to find the funds to board a private jet and fly to meet congress to ask for help with taxpayer money. gotta love the corporate cats, they have balls. screw 'em all i say, plunge our society back into another great depression, do a global reset and let every freakin' business go under. i mean, they do have teams of accountants right? they couldn't see this coming? where are the indictments for cooking the books? anyhoo, i'm just ranting and have no real purpose other than to do just that, rant with no feasible back up to support it other than my own theories based upon the right-wing web-sites and liberal radio shows i listen to on a daily basis. ;)
and just because i'm looking forward to cooking my ass off on sunday and enjoying some much needed downtime from work and the trials and tribulations of my latest divorce escapades i present to you Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. c'mon, you know you can feel it....
So Armada99 came to visit over the weekend. Friday being his birthday he came out for some reast and relaxation. After me getting lost at the airport at 1AM, we were able to make it home and get some sleep. We basically spoiled him. Made breakfast on Saturday morning, grilled hamburgers Saturday afternoon and took him to our favorite Mexican restaraunt on Saturday night. We also took him to the mall to see Santa......kidding. We took him to church on Sunday morning to visit our class, to whom we bragged about him quite a bit. We also watched Kung Fu Panda a couple of times with the kids and finished the weekend up with a special birthday present, seeing the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. This was my first time seeing them and besides the awesome Christmas music, the played O Fortuna, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Flight of the Bumble Bee, and a mix of Beethoven's Fifth and Mozart's Requiem Mass. Very good stuff! But, enough of me, on to the pics!!!
I'm sitting at my desk, looking at my paper and some more graphs that my professor wants me to include. I'm wondering where in the hell I'm going to get the motivation to finish this and the presentation by tomorrow night. I just don't have the energy. I have to have a finished paper by tomorrow afternoon COB and ready to send to my other two committee members. I'm slowly going more insane than Dastard claims I am now. I don't have time to spend with my family, ride, read or do anything except stare at the computer screen wondering what BS I can add to my conclusions to make them sound better without being too wordy or grammatically incorrect and have the proper phrasing my major professor demands. Anyone want to trade places? Oh, yeah, I have to finish my assignments for work also.
I can't wait noon on December 1. I am going to drink. Then I'm going to get back to work and make the revisions on my paper that the other two committee members are surely going to suggest before it gets uploaded onto the college's library database so the whole world can google it. (oh, joy)
Oh man. I have to post an excerpt from an article I just read.
TRENTON, N.J. (Nov. 19) - Online dating service eHarmony said Wednesday it will launch a new Web site which caters to same-sex singles as part of a discrimination settlement with New Jersey's Civil Rights Division.
The settlement is the result of a complaint New Jersey resident Eric McKinley filed against the online matchmaker in 2005. McKinley, 46, said he was shocked when he tried to sign up for the dating site but couldn't get past the first screen because there was no option for men seeking men. "It's very frustrating and it's very humiliating to think that other people can do it and I can't," he said. "And the only reason I can't is because I'm a gay man. That's very hurtful." Neither the company nor its founder, Neil Clark Warren, acknowledged any liability. Under the settlement, eHarmony will pay New Jersey state division $50,000 to cover administrative costs and will pay McKinley $5,000. McKinley called the settlement "fabulous" and said he was happy with the outcome. He's considering signing up for the new site once it launches.
By now most of you have tried out the new XBOX360 dashboard. I reall got a blast checking out everyone's avatar on my friend's list. Did you try to really make it look like you now or did you create an image? Mine for the most part is true.....about twenty-five years ago and without the vampire teeth. I couldn't help but have a little fun. Shit, it took nearly forty-five minutes to load it so why not? J-cat's froze up on her and I don't think she ever got it so lets say a prayer that she either gets a new one or has her's up and running TODAY before she goes postal or has a breakdown. We already had netflix so this feature was really cool for us to load up the instant que. Although I'm still not ready to make nice because of all the Vista bullshit, I will give them props for this one. Played FO3 until 4 this morning and now feel bad about bitching about not getting Left 4 Dead until the next day. It will be played today...oh yes. Peace out and if you wonder what our parent's do after we leave the photo below may provide a clue.
Peace out and if you wonder what our parent's do after we leave the photo below may provide a clue.
