May have Died

California was a failed experiment.

Returned to Arizona.

I work, I sleep.  A few friends seen now and then.

I work, I sleep.  Is this hell?  Maybe limbo?

Could it be that I have died and simply failed to notice?

Regained the weight I had lost.

Misplaced my motivation, and haven't the motivation required to go looking for it.

“I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later.”
― Mitch Hedberg

Stopped tracking my age, I think I passed 40--but I don't care.

Dead end job, minimum wage.

Lacking motivation to... anything.

I work, I sleep.  Perhaps I have died already.

Keeping it going!

Keeping what going?... Hell, I don't know.

Anyhow, there won't be any nuptials, nor, it appears, is my purpose here going to become a reality.  Feels like I've got nothing.

So, where am I now?

Physically: California!  Have a job, making crap wages but learning to sushi, so that's cool.  Here's a picture of the first roll I made for a customer.

Guess that means I've graduated to Sushi Chef level 2.  I think my boss is level 20 so I've got a ways to go...

At work, my boss(es) where jokingly(?) talking about having me run the restaurant when they open a new location in like a year.  Not that long ago, they were jokingly talking about firing one of the servers, and he's gone now.  Not getting my hopes up, but how cool would that be?

Feels like I spend all my time at work, sofa king glad I'm off today.  Other than that, I live in a place, have internet and good food, so I guess all my physical needs except hugs and cuddles are taken care of. :,(

Mentally: I miss my brain, don't know where it went.  My head is wildly gyrating between 'fuck everything' and 'I am the calm center of the universe.'  Sometimes I cry while I'm watching porn...  Is that weird?  Whatever.   Sometimes I cry during "Wreck it Ralph" and in some parts of "Monsters Inc" so I guess during other videos is no big thing, right?

Oh yeah, and somebody should tell Rynoman he was right, I will eventually but don't want to say it right now.

Subscribed to /r/mentalhealth on reddit; not sure what exactly that says about me, but it's something.  :-/

Emotionally:  Kinda... raw.  If my emotions were skin, then mine's sunburned and stay the hell away unless you're bringing lotion and volunteering your hands, then we can work something out.

Oh yeah, and on the topic of physical (whatnot) state, here's the obligatory "I'm losing weight (or 'loosing' as Greg would say) torso shot."  As you can see, when I stand upright and suck in a bit, I've got some pretty shapely flab.  Cropped and censored for decency.  :-P

Spiritually: Feels like I'm on the edge of either an enormous spiritual break-thru, or an enormous nervous break-down.  My Zen is improving.  Sometimes, I meditate--usually while playing minecraft.  Kinda trying to do the Buddhist "right thought, right action" whatnot crap, not to be a Buddhist, just to rein in my head.

Other stuff: Working at job where you get tips is cool.  I miss gaming, and more particularly those people with whom I used to game.  I miss you guys generally... Guess that's it.  Questions answered in the comments, please and thank you.

Closing thoughts: You are not alone, you are loved, you deserve to have an awesome day, you are missed.

An Update, for those interested.

Hello all!

So, I'm sure everybody is curious how I've been.  Thought I'd throw together a little blog post about it.

I've been here about 2 months now.  Earning money as an in-training Sushi Chef (level 1).  Also, doing freelance code-monkey work via elance.com for a little extra.

I miss everybody, but I'm here for a purpose.  Interpersonal relations amongst my new familial unit are different than expected, which should be a lesson about having expectations to begin with.

Still free of cigarettes, but I've started having the occasional cigar.  Another chain to free myself of.

Been eating a healthy balanced diet, exercising, doing lots of yoga.  My inches are pounds are kinda melting away, I'm hoping to be in awesome shape when you come to visit (you know who you are, and you can always ask if you aren't!).

Feel free to comment or question.  Much love, and respect.  Hit me up sometimes, k?

Peace out.

LPT for Ingress players.

Hey all!

If you, like me, play Ingress, and your current version is 1.18.1, you may have noticed that sometimes when the Ingress app goes to background and it's later called back to the screen, the GPS is off and it won't get a location fix to save your life!

So, the hard way to "fix" this--use a task-killer and end Ingress, then restart it.

However, there *is* a handy work-around:

Fire up Google Maps (before starting Ingress), and set it to give you turn-by-turn navigation directions to somewhere (anywhere, as long as you're not actually going there).  Then, mute the voice.

Et viola!  You can switch to and from Ingress at-will and it'll have perfect GPS locationality (is that a word?) the whole time.

Cheers.

Who am I?

I am human; a temporal physical manifestation of the universes' energy, momentarily made flesh.  Human, the living contradiction.

I am simultaneously more gullible and more cunning than you.  Simultaneously more naive and more wise than you.  I am both the embodiment of chaos, and the keeper of vast wisdom.  The sum of myriad tiny cellular creatures, and the single being who's potential is boundless.

I am the promoter of life, the bringer of death.  The tool maker, the destroyer.  The inventor of God, the unmaker of Gods; the bearer of all luck, and the focus of all unfortunate events.  I am the dream of the universe, alive to wreak change upon the state of reality.

Who am I?

I am human, hear me and know the reason you fear the night.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Or perhaps, disregarding sex, age, color, place of origin, body, ego, memory, all those trivial things... perhaps I could sum it up better simply with "I AM".

"City of Ember" Critique

"City of Ember" Critique


(for those of you who know me, this may bear a few similarities to my rant about Fallout 3)

First, full disclosure: If there's a book, I haven't read it and apologize in advance to the author.  This is about the movie.

---

200+ years went by... and the city, apparently, stagnated...

Over 200 years and nobody built a new light-bulb?  No tunnels were dug?  No mining occurred?  Nothing?  Really??

As near as I can figure, the City of Ember was put together at the very last minute on a shoestring budget, and into it they crammed the least-motivated least intelligent dregs of society.  It wasn't mankind's hope for the future, I suspect it was more like "well, just in case all the other plans fail, maybe these people will survive or something."

A damn cruise ship is better equipped for survival then the City of Ember was!!  No machine-shops to make replacement parts? Really??  No light-source fabrication?  No circuit-board construction?  No computers?  You must be kidding.  And the food... apparently a couple green-houses and tons of canned goods.

They had answering machines--which required programmed microprocessors (which means a fictional setting of at least 1960AD or later).  Manufacturing microprocessors--even primitive ones--isn't hugely difficult if you have the right equipment.  A few computing devices would have aided them immensely, but no, none of that.

Things which might have aided the city: The ability to make pipes, perhaps?  A bare minimum of equipment for the mining, refining, smelting, and machining the rocks around the cave into usable things.  Supplies for doing chemistry things--the right metals and chemicals and you can make circuit boards, gears, valves, wiring, tons of things any post-industrial age society could find millions of uses for... but no.

In 200 years any industrious people would have secured, cleared and lit a large nearby cave (or three) and produced a bountiful garden which more than met all the food needs of the populace.  (Though, given the planning, I'd bet they didn't have any plant seeds which weren't brought in by accident.)  They had apparently one or two potato-growing greenhouses.  Good thing somebody thought to bring a raw potato with them, else the city's inhabitants would likely have starved to death 150 years earlier.

ONE generator.  A single hydroelectric generator--with no capacitive in-line power retention is supposed to run the city for 200 years.  Nobody thought it would be good to give the citizens the plans/parts to construct additional generators along the river which flows under/thru the city?

And worse yet--they decided to maintain the a few of the worst ills of society for some stupid reason in the ill-conceived shoe-string budget survival city: money (why?), and a large standing army of "security" thugs who apparently exist to break things and intimidate the populace.  And worse, inefficient bureaucratic nonsense.  It feels like perhaps the City of Ember served the same purpose as the "second space-ship" in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy--you know, the one that was full of middlemen and phone polishers.

Anyhow, those thugs should have been mining new tunnels, refining minerals, making new lights with which to grow out the humans' underground demesne, damming the river for the additional newly-constructed hydroelectric power plants, helping mulch waste biological material for the gardens... really, anything other than breaking things and intimidating the populace.

---

So yeah, I guess that's about it.  Lots of time and people, and nothing accomplished aside from squeezing out an bare existence--well at least they managed to make yarn in a variety of bright colors.

Advice for future developers:

Soon, I'll occupy a shiny new office. It's been a learning experience.

When moving from one office building to another, moving a computer & backup hard-drive containing your docs & code-base is far easier than moving dead-tree copies of same.

To pacify programmers' rebellions, it's best to hold off moving the computers until you have internet setup and the facilities cabled and ready to go.