I'm turning 26 on Thursday.

Wow. Hmm.


Yeah, I don't really have much to say about it, I'm not a big birthday person. On the bright side, it will be the first birthday of mine I haven't spent working in two years. So that'll be nice. I'll be spending the day with family as some quiet little family dinner, so I've got that taken care of.

I almost feel like I should at least do something the night afterwards on Friday, but I suppose it's too short of notice to go out somewhere or have drinks at my house.

Our breakfast cereals use mind control.

So it's been a fun-filled week of hauling 2x4s, watching Avatar in 3D, hand-mixing concrete, hosting Dungeons & Dragons, filing for unemployment, Watching 30 Rock until 2 AM, and not having access to my PC whenever I want to type because I don't want to boot people paying the rent off of it.

I used to have free time like this all the time, it just never felt so aimless and jumbled. Even excluding those weeks in Baja. Or maybe I'm thinking Okinawa.

Anyway, so it's Friday afternoon when I'm having a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats (with Almonds) for breakfast, and I realize something:

You ever notice how, in General Mills' Lucky Charms, all the sugary, delicious, but unhealthy marshmallow bits are not just obviously 'lucky charms', but pagan lucky charms? Stars, the moon, four-leaf clovers, iron horseshoes...

...Yet what do all the icky, healthy, 'good' oat pieces represent? Close your eyes and think real hard, you might remember seeing them: crosses and fish and eucharists. Catholic good luck charms.

And what was the name of the mastermind behind this marketing plot? John Holihan. I know an Irish O'surname when I hear it (due to being French/German and thus being able to also smell social class at 50 parts/million), and I know for certain they're all born Catholic. It's in their genetics. I looked it up.

Now, I'm not saying this is inherently a bad thing; Catholicism in my book is up there with Kabbalism, whatever George Harrison was into, and Tzeentchian chaos magic in terms of 'cool factor', but this here is clearly a case of religious judgment calls being mixed with cereal and milk.

So what does this mean for everyone eating frosted Lucky Charms, including their claims of being 'magically' delicious?

Nothing really; nobody eats those damn oat bits anyway.

Besides, I eat Honey Bunches of Oats (with Almonds) dry. But often with craisins. I dunno, I guess I'm kinda weird about my cereal.

Check out my entertainment room!

You gotta see the entertainment setup I've got in my basement, it's really great; I've got a big-screen TV on one end, quadrophonic sound system, video games, shelves full of DVDs, bookcases, movie posters a full sectional couch, and...





...Oh.

Actually, we've been making good progress on the basement since this photo was taken. The drain system has all been laid and concrete poured back over, and most of the clutter has been cleared out as we're now starting to frame up the walls. There should be some big updates by this time next week.

James spent all day playing Assassin's Creed II.

So yeah, I'm already slacking off on the image/vid links and thoughts for the day. As some may know, Assassin's Creed II is a new and mildly popular little game where you relive the life of a young noble in the Italian renaissance as he becomes an assassin in the rough political landscape of that era. I won't go into all the nice qualities of the game's controls, graphics, and storytelling, nor will I indulge myself in long stories about some crap I did in a video game, but I will list a few things that really stand out to me as enjoyable. Then I'm going to sign off and play more video games.

-The history of the setting. Personally I would have preferred 1640s London or perhaps 14th century Paris, but all the little details of life with merchants and politics and real-life figures to immerse oneself in 1476 Florence is nice. I like having the database to look up historical places and facts; they're light, but good reference.

-Scaring the ever-living daylights out of people from the rooftops. The game's a bit easy, but often that means I have ample opportunity to have fun with its obstacles. Take guards on the roofs; sprint up from behind and stab them. Usually the result is a body sliding off the roof and falling to the streets below, which causes people to immediately disperse. But then they'll return, just to stare and voice their fears and confusion of the incident. Sometimes two guards will soon arrive on the street to investigate, which is the perfect opportunity to jump right on top of them and stab both in the neck. This completely scares the shit out of the crowd and the process repeats until there's too many guards to instant-kill.

-Chasing thiefs and pickpockets. The moment a red & white icon appears on my mini-map I drop everything I'm doing and run after the dude at full speed. The trick is keeping momentum and watching your path on the roofs, trying to gain shortcuts and keep up with the thief. When I finally punch him and throw him off the roof if I feel like it, the 500 florens is a nice bonus to the real reward: the chase itself. Then I realize I'm on the other side of the district and have to find my way back to what I was first doing.

-The distractions of crowds. You can stay out of sight by standing in the middle of a group of people, including ones you hire to follow you. Gives a nice excuse to slow down and enjoy the sights. I've been walking down a street avoiding the attention of guards when suddenly some pair of minstrels prance up to me, lutes in hand and signing me praises. This can be turned around by throwing some coins on the ground; the entire street suddenly becomes clogged by dozens of Italians shouting 'mahney, mahney, mahney!' which enables a pretty clean getaway.

-Doing cool stuff is really slick. This is actually more of a tossup between sword fighting and running around the city, but the underlying enjoyment of both stems from how well the game lets you pull them off. There's a lot of smart features for lock-ons and simple controls, but the result is I can fight five guys at once with a sabre with fancy counters, parries, disarms, and violent stabbing, and vaulting around roofs and swinging like an acrobat is mostly a matter of holding down the buttons to run and pressing jump when I need to. If I fail it usually feels like I made a specific mistake. I don't know how they did it with a game this big, but it seems everything is traversable in this city.

Well, that's it from me until tonight or tomorrow.

How about that traffic?

I hate this, seems to happen every time I'm driving down Blairs Ferry.

James will be holding a food drive for himself.

So I'm eating an orange for lunch today, looking out one of my back windows at my un-trampled snow-covered yard, when I see this object in my neighbor across the fence's back yard, which for all the world looks like a bulldog.

Now by my estimates, this must be some kind of rock or part of the base of their patio, and no bigger than a shoebox, but I have to give a pretty long stare to not see the eyes, nose, ears, and jowls of this thing. It looks for all the world like they've left some tiny little animal out in the snow to freeze to death, selling matches or the like.

I wonder if I could bum a few matches off that dog.

What I could really go for is some frozen pizzas and maybe some real pasta. And some decent lunch meant and lettuce. And some more shampoo.

That Captain Picard

Have you seen this? I don't know if it's a thing on the internet right now, but I like the awkwardness of the edits.



I would have posted this or some other 'fun stuff' yesterday afternoon, but I spent the whole evening playing boardgames at my local tabletop gaming store. Yes, we have one of those and yes, I enjoy boardgames. They drew in nice variety of new and irregular people last night so I got to play Revolution, Settlers of Catan, and Tales of Arabian Nights. I'd seriously recommend it to anyone looking to try out some games of more substance than Sorry or Monopoly (though you can bring those in too); everyone's there to play and try out games so nobody's trying to be competitive and you'll just get people who'll sit down and learn a new game with you.

Also I need more people to get to play Battlestar Galactica the Boardgame.

When I die, donate my body to comedy.

I'm going to admit that my biggest fear about death is simply not knowing what will happen next. Not just my funeral and the after party, it's not knowing what will happen to the world in a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years that bugs me, even if it just descends into humanity running around in the woods like savages being hunted down by apes. I guess I just like knowing how a story ends.

Which reminds me, I need to finish reading the Dying Earth series. Better add that to my list.

Anywho, even in the minor 'deaths' we suffer moving from one chapter of life to the next, I would have killed for some Ghost of Job Future to show me the scene going on right now at my old workspace: squatters picking apart and subsequently fencing my old equipment, talking smack about how weird or mumbly I was or that I sat around too high and mighty and stuff. And across the way is poor Tiny Jeremy's spot in the workplace, empty.

But we all knew this was coming eventually, it's just the nature of the field. So in passing, to whomever reloaded my work PC, I've left this comic for you: it's about a crack-addicted squirrel who wants the stuffed bear to remember him when he's gone. I thought it had a nice allegorical quality to it.


Also I am sorry if you got nervous waiting for some kind of dead man's switch to activate and fry the motherboard or cut your fingers off.

Today is the first day of my funemployment.

So far this is feeling like an extended holiday break, but at some point the realization is going to hit me that I no longer work, the paychecks stop coming in, the crappy insurance is gone, the job-hunting gets me down, and I'll never have another job where I just load computers unsupervised day in and day out again.

But I've said my piece about the whole thing. Downsizing's a reasonable excuse these days, I don't want to burn any bridges or dwell negatively on it.

So let me list some of the positive things I can take from not working:
-I can sleep in until noon.
-I don't have to eat out of a paper bag.
-I can play video games for 8 hours straight like the old days.
-I don't have to log in 200 times a day.
-Unemployment benefits!
-I don't have to wear those damn biz-cas shirts.
-I can try to grow a beard every week, only to shave it off when I remember I can't grow a decent beard.
-I don't have to search for a badge that keeps falling off its clip.
-I don't have to go back to being a drifter like in the early 2000s.
-I won't end the day with cut up hands and covered in dust that smells like coffee and burnt PC parts.
-The government gives me free cheese.
-I'll finally have time to avoid working on my short stories and not practice digital airbrushing without something out of my hands taking up my free time.
-I do not have to stare at my alarm clock at 6AM with mindless unbridled hate.
-My family wont ask me to troubleshoot for them and their friends because 'James works in IT and he knows everything'.
-I can start drinking at noon again.
-I can loudly listen to Vixen and nobody who doesn't pay me rent can complain.
-I don't have to wear my long hair up in a futile attempt to not look like a hippy.
-I can skip lunch.
-My alarm clock can shut the hell up because I am done with his smug bullshit.
-I'll finally understand the lyrics to 'Born in the USA'.
-The government will not give me free cheese.
-I can go to doctor or dentist without pretending I wont be picking up most of the tab anyway.

See, and so far those are being mostly optimistic. As for me, it's already 1 in the afternoon; I'm gonna go pour some craisins onto a bowl of dried honey bunches of oats and sit on the couch. Maybe one my readers (or both of them) can comment with a few more ideas.

James finally has a blog.

Ironically I have only now just put the interest in starting a blog into actual time and effort, despite the jokes in the IT department. The story I'll be sticking to is that I never had downtime long enough to really focus upon writing and reading anything at length.

But now that's different. The weight of those last couple months is off my shoulders and now I've potentially got time to do more things and I'll have to keep up with people I used to see in person.

I suppose this would be the big opening entry where bloggers would normally go on about all the things their blog is going to cover and the fun things we're going to see, like it's the first episode of Sesame Street or something. But I have neither a script nor a budget, so I'll make no promises.

This blog may not be updated regularly. It will not always be funny or cover topics which are interesting or recent. It won't always be a smooth or coherent read and may contain material not entirely safe for work or mother. It may not make me seem as cool as we'd all like me to be. I may post things which are not even true. But dammit, I'll be giving it a try.

My name is James, and this is my blog.

Hur hur, 'nailed'.

Well, the basement renovation is coming along. We've laid the drain tile for the sump pit and that's been dealing with the water problem under the slab pretty nicely.

Now, when you completely tear out the walls, ceiling, and floor in a room of a house, you're bound to leave behind a few nails in the wall. Some of these may be embedded in concrete, which you may be compelled to remove with a large pair of bolt cutters.

This will cause the nail to fly out and strike somebody. In the head.


Blood and sweat, people. Blood and sweat.