12.31.08
2008, I hardly knew ye
2008 has come and (very nearly) gone. That notion has caught me fairly off guard. It seems like just a couple weeks ago I ushered in this year with a night much like any other night with my friends; playing games and watching movies. Unlike these other nights, though, there was a much larger variety of food and at one point we celebrated counting backwards to zero. Huzzah.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about New Years. On the one hand it’s terrific fun to get together with others. But on the other it’s just the turn of a dial and the placing of a new calender on the fridge or wall.
I’m also not a fan of New Years resolutions. It seems to me that if you are able to identify a characteristic or trait about yourself that you are interested in changing that you should alter that problem right away rather than waiting until a somewhat arbitrary day. Add onto this the generally accepted idea that most resolutions don’t last more than a couple months if they even last a couple weeks.
The one good thing I can think of which comes from such resolutions is that it becomes a moment when many people take an introspective look at themselves. That’s a behaviour I can’t condemn. It is always good for people to take a look within and assess the situation of their life. Otherwise we’d all be like cats. As cute and lovable as cats are, all they do is eat, sleep, expel what they ate onto the floor, and sleep some more. There’s a distinctive lack of evaluating their lives.
Or maybe they do assess their lives all the time and they have concluded that their situation is as good as it gets. Those cats. So devious.
12.16.08
I’m Done Son!
I thought today would never come and end. Alas, it has, and now is the time for me to get busy doing nothing. For those that don’t know, this week is finals week at BYU. Yes, generally speaking a week later than all you chaps out there. But keep in mind, BYU’s summer was a week longer as well. Time’s gotta be made up somehow.
I’m super excited because this semester has now passed me by. And what a semester it was. Not overly difficult, but difficult to some measure. So, after having completed four finals today I would like to share some insights that I learned these past couple months that I bet you all know anyway.
1) It’s easier to stay caught up than it is to catch up. It’s almost like I have to learn this fact on a yearly basis. You’d think I’d be able to apply it. It’s just that Futurama or some other such show is just so tempting to sit down and watch once I get home from school. Now that I’ve changed majors this will definitely have to change since long, complex math equations can’t be solved adequately in a matter of minutes.
2) My brain is not equipped for cram sessions. This works pretty well with the prior point. I’ve come to realize that in order for me to be able to recall information it needs about three days to soak in. Once it’s in there though, it’s as good as gold. Brain gold. My art history class was the bane of my existence this semester for this very reason. I’d procrastinate studying for the tests until it was too late and many hours spent in the morning before a test didn’t prove to help. Sure enough, though, two days after the test I couldn’t get the name Loacoon Group out of my head.
3) Orem isn’t as far away as I originally thought. I remember coming down here now and then over my life and always thinking “Gee, this place is far away.” Turns out it isn’t. It’s only a few miles further than Lehi, which as it turns out is also not very far from Riverton as well. As long as gas prices stay low I will definitely plan to come up to the valley of salt to spend more time with some chaps. Sorry Wong, while Logan isn’t forever away, it’s not THAT close.
4) No matter how convinced I am in the morning that I can stay in bed and not fall asleep, I’m wrong. Throughout the entire course of my life I have probably woken up in the wee hours of the morning and laid in bed without falling asleep again only a handful of times. I’ve been trying to wake up earlier this semester to get things done in the morning but that hasn’t worked out very well. I swear, it’s in the blink of the eyes that five more minutes turns into two more hours.
I think I’ll do one more, but leave it up to you. What do you think I should have learned this semester?
5)
12.01.08
Even I Can Be Mayor
My last post about video games and the realization that I haven’t played any of those games (outside of Rock Band and Guitar Hero) made a part of me sad. I think it the index toe of my right foot (going by corresponding finger association here since I’m not sure if toes have alternate identifiers (although “ring toe” really can’t be correct)).
After this impulse traversed the empty expanse of my nervous system from the before mentioned toe all the way to my brain and I pondered it a moment, I ended up doing what all sane men do after such toe-riffic thoughts: I played a game. I’ve actually played three games since then. One of them I have decided that I can’t play while in school and once out of school I can’t play it when I’m married and have a family (if I don’t have such responsibilities by the time I exit my schooling) because it’s just too much of a time suck. Possibly the worst I’ve ever experienced.
It’s an immensely entertaining game. It requires a great deal of thought to get set up in, and once it gets going you tend to snow-ball into victory if you get things right in the beginning. I enjoy it a great deal, but like I said, time disappears into this game like you would not believe. On a Friday night I went out with Alex and Sheree and decided that Saturday I would head up to Salt Lake and spend some time with them in their neck of the woods. At noon I sat down to play this game and was cruising along in my own little world. Eight hours later (I kid you not) I looked at my phone to see the time. “Well, so much for spending the evening in Salt Lake.” It wasn’t a complete waste though, I did win the game.
No more of that. I need something more manageable. Something that could fill the gaps in my everyday affairs rather than replace those everyday affairs. Ah, my DS. It can travel with me and when I have even just a couple minutes I can pull it out and get to work on some adventure. I have a fair number of DS and Gameboy Advance (which the DS plays) games that I haven’t beat yet so that works. Last night I beat the first Fire Emblem. I’d explain the premise to you, but it’s a Tactical Role-Playing Game and people don’t play those for the stories. They get played for the tactics and I can’t adequately explain that in a paragraph or too.
I now come to the third game I have played of late: Sim City 4. I remember playing the first Sim City on some horrible school computer. I was no good. No good at all. I tried it on the Super Nintendo and I was even worse at that one. I left the second installment alone and tried 3. I could get started, but my city would collapse financially after a short time. My ability to govern seemed to be minimal. Then Wong built a computer and bought Sim City 4. As life would have it, at this time in mine and Wong’s lives we were pretty much the only ones left in Riverton of our friends. Most others were on missions or away to school. This left Wong and myself with plenty of time hanging out at each other’s places doing whatever. And one of those whatevers was Sim City 4. If one of us was not playing Sim City 4 the other one usually was.
It took some time and some discussing of strategy between the two of us, but we got to the point where we could build somewhat stable cities and let them grow, but only to a point. We never could really get past a certain threshold. Then one day as I was playing it all started to click together in my head. I began to understand and one of my cities surpassed that threshold. Not for long. It began to fall apart, but it made sense to me why it didn’t work now.
Not long after this Wong left on his mission, leaving me with all that time by myself. Luckily Wong lent me his Sim City 4 and I filled some of that empty time with building cities. Over time I got better at it. A LOT better. It all made sense to me and I was loving it. I far surpassed my prior notions of what I could accomplish in the game and developed a region that I was proud of. Alas, that region has been lost to me and I have begun again. Some of the knowledge I once had has also fled, but as I’ve picked Sim City back up it has slowly been coming back. And so I come to this invitation of sorts. Over the next.. however long I keep playing this game I guess, I will periodically update you one what is happening. First, let me show you the region I will be building in.
What you’re looking at is a default region called “San Francisco.” (Building your own regions with water and mountains like this is grotesquely un-fun.) Each of these rectangles is a possible city to be built. At the bottom middle of the image you can see two cities I have already started. The first one I did was “City of Disease.” It’s not doing so well. I’ve balanced the economy but it’s not growing anymore and I’ve moved on. The second city is “Contagion City.” I started that one today and spent a little time on it. This is what it looked like when I first laid out the plans:
The green is residential; blue is commercial; yellow is industrial. In the center of the city I have a high school, elementary school, hospital, police station, and fire station. On the right is my little wind generator farm for power along with the water pump (which you can’t see really) and the landfill (the brown area). I set this up with the middle circle of empty plots to be filled with future civic buildings when they come along and a ring between the residences and commercial plots for expansion as needed. So I clicked the fast button and let things fly. With some careful micro-managing of the schools and hospital, after five years I ended up with this:
It’s coming along. You might notice that the landfill has been put to use, there are a couple more wind generators, and both the elementary and high schools have been replaced (with bigger versions of themselves which are just better). I’ve also added some commerical and residential plots into the dividing ring where appropriate. I let things go and kept on micro-managing and got this after fifteen years:
There are many more wind generators, the city has begun to build upwards with taller buildings, and I have added a college behind the hospital and some other little things like a private school, a couple churches, a cemetary, and if you look right next to the high school is the mayor’s house. Yay.
That’s that. Or at least that’s where I stopped for today. If you think this might be fun to follow along with then pay attention for future Sim City posts. If you don’t like it, then move along home.
