The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

If there’s one thing I’ve been learning about, it’s taking care of yourself.

Early this week, I felt really horrible. It wasn’t completely a sickness. It was strange. I just felt like utter crap, to the point that I couldn’t do anything. I went to bed, and basically slept all of Monday and Tuesday.

Now I feel better.

I never take care of myself, really. It’s damn important to, and I really should. I’ve been trying to get sleep since. It’s frustrating, since I can’t do things like talk to a certain kitty when I’m going to bed early, but it’s not worth falling behind in all the shit I have to do, as well as just generally feeling bad.

So, in the interest of relaxing, I’m not writing anything more than this today. Sorry. But here, uh, listen to this amazing song inspired by Barkley: Shut Up And Jam Gaiden instead. Or maybe check out FakeAPStylebook’s new twitter feeds, FakeNNWMTips and FakeeEtiquette. Hilarious stuff.

I’ll be back tomorrow.

Sometimes it takes sleeping for hours and hours to make you realize how tired you are.

Sometimes.

It bothers me how tired I am. Falling asleep at my desk at like 8:30 PM is completely lame. At the same time, if I didn’t need sleep, I wouldn’t be doing that, would I? When I go to bed at 10 and don’t wake up until noon or later the next day, it just kind of proves my need. I needed sleep.

Part of me says this is me getting old. I mean, I’m getting older. Time is marching on. I can’t just stress my body out like that. I need to actually get 8 hours of sleep from time to time.
The rest of me says that this is simply a sign of how stressed I am. Now, I feel like, for the most part, things are under control. Maybe not proceeding at the pace I want, but under control? Certainly. At the same time, I am being pulled in a lot of directions at once with no relief. I know that, if I admit to myself how I feel, that I feel that I need more time to myself. I need rest.

I need to sleep all day on a Saturday.

So, you know, I guess that’s what I did. It would be better if I could go to a Prospit or Derse to get more stuff done during that time, but I suppose I’m not that lucky.

Basically, I’m tired! That’s what I’m saying. I’m tired.

Awhile back, I had tooth problems, as you could recall. Recently, I’ve started noticing an effect these problems had on me.

I stopped biting my nails.

For the first time in my life, I have fingernails. Well, on some fingers. Some not so much, since they were seriously bitten down that seriously. But I have some fingernails!

It’s really kind of fucking me up.

One would think that it would mostly be benefit. “Hey, I can pick up coins from the ground now!” and so on. But I’m not really finding it to be the case. I have years, literally a lifetime’s worth of muscle memory of how to do things without fingernails. Now I can’t do those things. Even typing this blog, from time to time I find my fingers hitting the keys in an odd way, because there’s a nail on them, and I’m not used to accounting for it. I feel like I can’t do the simplest tasks. It’s really stupid.

I mean, I’m going to try to keep them. But I’m not going to lie: I’ve been tempted to gnaw them off, not because of the bad habit, but just to let me work without having to adjust. It’s weird. Fingernails are weird. Someday I might master them. Until then, I’ll bumble about when, say, attempting to pull a paper off of a stack of papers.

It seems really stupid, honestly, but I’ve been using Epic Win for a week or so, and it’s pretty amazing.

I’m really good at keeping things in my head. I always have been. I’ve never really had to keep much of a schedule or anything like that. As I got more and more into all this teaching and schooling stuff, though, I started to have to give myself loose guidelines. I used my phone’s calendar to point out when I had to be places. But I still never really connected up and attempted to keep a list of tasks. I still kept those in my head.

However, it was starting to become taxing, because to remember them, I’d have to go over them often. It sort of started to feel overwhelming in a way. I had heard of Epic Win, and I decided to splurge and try it. I liked the cut of its jib, so to speak, and I figured it might be useful.

I don’t know if it’s REALLY proved useful, but I’ll tell you one thing it has done. It’s made me feel like I’m getting shit done.

I often feel like I’m not accomplishing anything. Nothing is moving forward. I’m not doing anything. It can get downright frustrating, and contribute to generally horrible moods I find myself in. In reality, though, I do actually get a lot of shit done, and just listing it, and then completing those quests… it really makes me feel more productive. It’s a nice feeling. It’s something I rarely feel. Hell, take this blog post. I have a daily quest set to write a blog. Just checking it off on there when I finish writing this helps me to realize how much work I actually put into this silly thing. It’s a lot. It is significant, and it’s something to be proud of, even if it isn’t the most amazing blog in the world. It’s awesome to get to see that.

It’s also making me more productive as well. Or if not more productive, at least a bit less of a procrastinator, as I tend to set quest deadlines in empty spaces, spreading my various tasks out a bit more, instead of doing them all on one day. That’s another benefit.

Yeah, I really like Epic Win. I wish it had a bit more functionality. For example, I’d love to be able to link to my character, show off my stats and loot, and such. It also seems a little expensive, especially since they’re selling additional character classes as DLC. But hey, I’m getting things done and enjoying myself. I mean, I have a quest log now. That’s way more badass than a list of chores. I can get behind that.

I believe I mentioned that I never actually dress up for Halloween. I always get some ideas or something, and then never follow through because of busyness or laziness.

However, I had a Halloween party to go to, at my brother’s house. I was thinking it might be nice to dress up.
Then I had a dumb idea.
Because of this recent comic by one Phillip Armstrong, Phanto was in my head. I got to thinking, “You know, with a little effort, I could create some sort of shitty Phanto mask to chase me around.” I threw the idea at Brer, and he got a chuckle. “Okay then,” I said, “Fuck it, I’m doing it.”

I doodled Phanto heads on some paper, and taped them to bits of an Amazon box that was sitting in the room. Then, with a gigantic roll of duct tape, I attached the head to one end of a hangar, and the other to a belt, and used massive amounts of duct tape, and additional cardboard, to create a shitty harness system so that Phanto would float behind me. It didn’t work perfectly, and of course, when wearing the thing, I couldn’t, say, sit down. But it was something. I took the big key by our door, to give Phanto a reason to chase me, and went to the party.

Of course, when I got to the party, nobody knew what Phanto was. Well, a few did, but were still confused. I guess it was more of a strange concept, seeing as I wasn’t dressed as any of the cast of Mario 2. But hey, I made more of a Halloween effort than I have in years, so I’m calling it a win. Something like a win. Yeah.

Every October, I tend to try to think of some things I could dress up as, and every October, I end up not dressing up as anything at all because I got too busy or was too lazy to attempt to figure costuming out.

Oh well.

Halloween has always been an exciting time, mostly because I am around so many people who feel that it’s an exciting time. There’s nobody more into Halloween than Essner, for example, which is why we always attempted to put together those elaborate Halloween games for awhile. As such, it has always been something that has had parties around it, and has been fun.

It’s also meant me eating way, way too many Smarties.

Fuck, why am I so obsessed with Smarties? (For our Canadian readers, I mean Smarties, not Smarties.) Maybe I’ve written about this before, but shit, you put a bag of Smarties next to me, and they’ll be gone. Like, immediately. I’ll feel slightly sick, but I won’t be able to stop eating them. I will continue to pop them in my mouth, again and again. I’ll have a huge pile of wrappers on my desk.

And that’s the true meaning of Halloween. Maybe. Candy is the true meaning of Halloween, right? Smarties in particular? Also, I guess, women dressing up in “Sexy” outfits and pretending they’re a costume. That’s a thing Halloween is too. Mostly the Smarties, though.

Hope you have a decent Halloween, in any case. I’m going to go Pahtay, certainly. Maybe grade some papers. I dunno. Probably stay away from Smarties so I don’t kill myself with sugar sweetness. Probably.

I am sitting in a Borders, writing this on my tiny little netbook. It’s been awhile, netbook! I forgot how terrible your keyboard is. It’s pretty bad. But oh well, you’re my little computer. Mokona-chan, I have named you. (All my computers are named after xXxholic characters. Shut up.)

Awhile back, I decided my tiny little computer hadn’t gotten enough love. I hadn’t used it in awhile! I had also heard about the Flow Chromium builds that are out there. I love the crap out of Chrome as a browser. I’ve basically stopped using Firefox completely, even though the name is much more appealing. As such, bringing the smaller, more streamlined experience to a whole OS sounded like a great idea. It would do the few little things I needed to do quickly and well. It would rock, and I’d get more use out of my little lappy. I did an OS install.

I hated it.

I didn’t realize how much I depended on the little things in an OS in order to function. Without a task bar and set programs, I found it very hard to operate. Sure, I could use online word processors or something, but it wouldn’t be organized in a way I could deal with. I mean, I couldn’t even figure out how to shut the computer down. It was just so completely different, I couldn’t understand it.

In addition, I expected Chromium to be extremely compact and speedy, but I didn’t find that. My little lappy here was chugging on it, which was unappealing. If it’s going to chug anyway, I might as well have a more complete experience!

So I went and installed the latest EasyPeasy build.

I had an older build on here before my Chromium excursion. It was functional, but kind of janky at times. Certainly better than the bullshit linux this thing shipped with, but not great. I was pleased to find that this new build fixes most of that. It seems a lot quicker, and has streamlined the menus in such a way that I still have access to everything, but can get to my most-used programs in a much clearer way. I appreciate that quite a bit.

It also adds this new thing called Empathy. I don’t know if this is a general Ubuntu thing, which EasyPeasy is a fork of, or what, but it’s pretty great. Basically, it builds basic chat and social networking functionality right into the OS, and it works. My Twitter and AIM are right there, built in, in one spot. Since I’m not running three different programs, it doesn’t eat up as much processing power either, which is always a benefit on a little thing like this. It’s pretty nice stuff! A great feature.

Anyway, that’s sort of what’s going on on the netbook front with me. If you have an older netbook, or just don’t want Windows, EasyPeasy is a great alternative, while Chromium still has a ways to go. I’m very happy with the latest EasyPeasy.

And hey, I’ve mostly gotten reacquainted with the shitty keyboard on this thing. I can almost type full speed again. Crazy. Too bad I’m done typing on it for now! Oh well.

Apparently nothing can piss me off more in video games than poorly constructed mazes with no useful minimap.

I mean, first, I was doing the LotRO Harvestmath thing with Essner and Brer. There’s this haunted house, with a bunch of quests in it you do to get little coins you can trade for silly shit. Fun, silly times, right? Except this Haunted House is designed to be impossible to navigate. The mini-map doesn’t actually show all the walls, stuff is constantly jumping out at you and messing with your vision, and there are three doors to every location in the house, and two of them don’t work. Attempting to do these silly quests filled me with great, great rage. I just wanted a silly mask, game! Don’t piss me off! It also didn’t help that I felt fairly completely ill for a lot of us playing, as well. Either way, I logged out kind of pissed.

Then, a few days later, I start playing Dragon Age. It’s really good! But I decide to do the mage tower first, as I want Healer Mage. In this quest is a horrible Fade sequence that lasts way the fuck too long. In it, you’re dropped in several mazes. One of them has a bunch of nonsensical teleporters in it. I got so pissed at this area, you wouldn’t believe. Well, I mean, mad enough to get pissed on twitter. It also didn’t help that doing one of the things you need to solve the maze is completely unintuitive and kind of buggy, at least in the 360 version. Doing it throws up an error of “You can’t lockpick this” even as it’s functioning properly. If you don’t ignore the error and let it happen, you’ll be stuck forever. It’s really stupid.

Basically, I hate non-logical mazes forever. Teleporters that don’t follow simple “this door leads to this door” logic and instead does whatever it wants, depending, is a great way to piss me off, apparently. Fuck teleporters, and fuck mazes! If, you know, you find them sexually attractive. Otherwise, just hate them with me.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m still COMPLETELY EXCITED to play Gamma World this Friday with people. I mean, totally excited.
But man, the main rulebook leaves something to be desired.

I swear there is a chapter missing in this thing. The book makes references to things like “worldlines” and all kinds of crazy stuff, but there’s no section in the book which actually describes the setting. Now, I’m not a lore person, but still, you have to give me, as DM, something more than nothing so that I can create a setting that is thematically appropriate. All you really get is “crazy, destroyed world with mutant powers.” I guess that’s enough, but goodness, it seems a little questionable, especially when you have all these other elements showing up in your descriptions of monsters and gear which refer to things you haven’t referred to.

It also seems weird that, by using the rules in the box, you can’t create several of the player characters that the pictures in the rulebook show you. For example, there are several pictures of a mutated rat person, but following the rules, you can’t be a mutated rat person. You can be a swarm of rats. An entire swarm of them. But not a rat person. It’s just odd.

Still, I really like the card mechanic in general. I am looking forward to seeing how that adds random fun to the game. It should add some! I think that’s neat. I’m not so hot on the booster thing, but if it works fantastically well and everyone is interested? Well, who knows. Maybe. I still feel like they should have been stand-alone expansion packs of powers or loot, but I guess I don’t get to make the business decisions at Wizards, huh?

It’s pretty obvious to me, though, that Wizards has a potential hit. It does seem to be handled pretty badly, though. Hopefully they can turn it around. It’s still going to make for damn fun role-playing this Friday, though. I’ll be sure to let you know how that goes. There will be pews, pows, and things of that nature! Believe it! Like a Naruto!

I kind of want to write something else, but damn, I have like 20 tabs open in two different browsers, so that means it’s time for…

RETURN OF THE SON OF LINKDUMPING!

My good friends (note: I don’t actually know them) at Rocketcat Games are preparing to release their next little game, and they made a trailer. These guys have the very amazing grapplehook genre down pat. If you haven’t spent the dough on any of their more expensive games, and you should, at least get this one when I rave about it after it comes out.

This link lets you play Dominion online. The interface is a little rough, but it totally works. How badass is that?

Nothing will bring a smile to your face more than another Hiimdaisy comic dub. Well, at least, if your face is my face. Or similar to it.

Do submit comments on this new Proposed Land Use Action.

I don’t know what this is, but it’s been open in a tab for weeks, so… yeah.

This thing lets you randomly generate names of your Lands if you were playing Sburb. Which is kind of fun for a few minutes if you enjoy Homestuck as I do.

Here is a dice roll I made for Jan in the game I’m playing on Talking Time. It’s on this neat site that lets you roll dice and save the result in a thing where you can link to it, which is fantastically useful for playing on a forum. It’s neato, if simple.

Finally, here’s a link to this article about a manga I keep meaning to look up. I want to read a story about an actual, healthy poly relationship, which supposedly this is. And, you know, I guess there’s fucking in it too, which… well, you know, that’s nice too!

I’ll go ahead and leave you with that thought, I suppose. Remember that fucking is nice, too. Cause it is.