Digitally Staving Off Boredom

As far spending stay-cations go, I think I can take a certain yuppie pride in this one.   Every single day for the past 9 days, I got my lazy arse up on a treadmill for about half-hour, mostly to make sure I was adequately woken up to do something productive.  It worked.  Over half the rest of the day was spent honing my game development skills.

I figure you are probably more interested in what I did with the rest of the day; it is just a heck of a lot more interesting talking about completed games than it is talking about me bashing my head against code.  So lets put that best foot forward, and just leave my game development talk to this: I am definitely getting better with practice.

Revisiting: Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

It has been awhile, I actually managed to wean myself off of the New Leaf for over a year now.  However, given how my coding routine has personally mandated half-hour breaks every once in awhile, I can complete the daily grind in this game in about two sessions.

Dai…

For once, I am getting my wish of self-fulfillment in life by actually doing some game development.  If I had to take a stab at the factors that attributed to my success, it was a combination of integrating morning exercise into my daily routine and utilizing an easy procrastination hack to get myself started.

I have done some variation of that procrastination hack many times in my life, but the daily exercise is something I never really got around to that I should have earlier.  Exercise is easily as effective as caffeine at getting you up in the morning.  Can I Google some affirmation on that?  YoubetIcan.

As for how I achieved the motivation to get up on that treadmill in the first place, it's a little harder to nail, but basically it comes down to this: I can either spend half an hour on the treadmill in the morning, and be woken up enough to do something with the rest of my day, or not, and don't.  Put in such simple terms, there was no need for motivation: a significant …

For whatever good it does me, I am on vacation... which is to say that this part-timer has scheduled to take three days off that, merged with my next four days off, becomes an eleven day stay-cation.  Frankly, after that nasty cold I have been suffering (I still have a slight touch of it) combined with not being allowed to my have last bizarro weekend to myself, my need for a vacation has never been stronger.
So, how about that last entry?  If I did more like that, I might actually have more than a couple followers!  Instead, it seems I feel obligated to update this blog every couple days whether or not I have anything particularly valuable to say, because here I am!  Well, if I can't be insightful, I should at least try to be brief.

Now playing: Ultima IV.

Since I seemed to be so very impressed with Ultima V, I thought I would go ahead and give it another play.  But, if I'm playing to replay it, I'm going to go all the way, and that means importing a character from Ultima …

For the second time, I have given The Spoony Experiment's Ultima retrospective video series a view, an exercise in self-confirmation bias considering I was there when these games were first out too, so he was basically just preaching to the choir.
Watching it again, an old opinion felt even more certain: Ultima V was the highest point of the series.  Yes, that is definitely just my opinion, however, there are some verifiable points supporting it:

Point 1: in Ultima V, the graphics and sound effects were still simple enough that the players' imagination needed to do the greater lifting. 

This was the fifth (or sixth if you count Akalabeth) such game Richard Garriott made along those lines, so that many generations of design thought went into each element.  Aside from the combat and magic sounds, the main sound effects I remember from Ultima V were the poignant tick-tocking of grandfather clocks, the peaceful trickling of fountains, and the crackling of the campfire... all prese…

Barring popular demand, there's not going to be a Simulacrumception Life #2.  Tomodachi Life sucks, even with the addition of simulacrums of the likes of Charles Darwin, Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, and Harriet Tubman to this ridiculous experiment.  In short, I was hoping for a microcosm, but I found a Facebook simulator.  As a general introvert, this game revolts me.  If I was not sick with a cold, I probably would have known better than to buy this god awful social media simulator masquerading as a game.

Now I am just about recovered from that cold bug and have decided to act on the theory that a lot of the trouble I am having expressing myself creatively is physical.  I need more exercise, so how about a half-hour on the treadmill every morning?  I threw meditation into that routine, before or after the treadmill, because it is a good idea to exercise one's critical thinking muscles as well as their aerobic ones.  Excitingly, day one of my four day weekend, I succeeded i…

"This isn't brilliance, it's narcissism." I thought, as I embarked upon my first foray into Tomodachi Life, a Nintendo 3DS  game with a summer 2014 release for the Western world.  But I was not condemning the game, though maybe I should have considering it is basically a video vignette game of socialization on the most banal level.  No, I was actually referring to the premise of my particular island, Simulacrum Island.
The idea behind Simulacrum Island is inherited from the one discussed in the above video: historical figures differ from the reality because history does not want or need the real individual, but rather an abstract idea of these individuals that serve some sort of ideal: a simulacrum of the individual.  The definition of that word:
1. a slight, unreal, or superficial likeness or semblance.
2. an effigy, image, or representation Here's where the narcissism enters the picture: why would I ever populate my Tomodachi Life island with Miis of my friends…

A whole lot of nothing continues to be accomplished as I struggle to overcome this damn cold.  It is not quite as severe as the one I had back at the end of October (about 3 months ago) which had me bedridden for an entire day.  Instead, this one leaves me feeling energetic enough to think maybe I can go to work, only to wrack me with miscellaneous dysfunctions.  It's like this cold is not serious, it just enjoys screwing with me.

It seems the only effective means to fight such a sneaky devil is to play defense, drinking fluids and getting plenty of rest even if I think I am fine, or else it will stab me in my back.  Currently, it feels as though it has made its last holdout in my sinuses, the jerk, and not a member of this household has been spared infection.   Suffice to say, while undergoing this kind of assault, I am not getting a whole lot done.

Still playing: Fantasy Life.

I am at the mid-to-end of this game right now, and I am not sure there's too much to say that I hav…