... Check his Pulse

... then grab his shoes!
Long time no see!
I've had the desire to vent for the past few months and have forced myself to swallow the bile back a bit. My hope was to soften the bite through the lens of hindsight. Let the truly significant details stand as pillars in my past and the unimportant crap to fade into the background. And it worked. A little too well. It's amazing just how much of our day to day lives is relatively unimportant crap. A wonderful realization for a man in his thirties. I keep wondering if maybe I should indulge an existential crisis... meh, maybe later.
Work is... I sat staring at the monitor for a few minutes. I can probably sum up the biggest issues thusly: I miss the days when, while working late, I could finish up my tasks and head home. Now when I work late I stop when I'm out of time. There is no foreseeable end. People at work have noticed and their comment is "Well, at least you have job security." I usually smile and say "If THIS is what job security feels like then I'm not sure I want it!" We laugh and they turn away and head for the door. But enough about that. A work rant could fill this page and in the end it would resolve nothing. I'm still cautiously optimistic that things will even out, but at the moment I am hitting the leading edge of the storm and the waves in the distance are looking pretty intimidating.

Lots of minor stuff happening at home:
I haven't cut my hair in a while, my plan being to achieve a 'Crazy Hobo' look before winter.
I'm on my second week with contact lenses and am trying to decide if I'm willing to shell out for a year's supply. That plus a pair of glasses with my updated prescription is almost $600. It has been nice being able to wear actual sunglasses again.
3 year anniversary happened last weekend, so the Girlfriend and I headed to Kansas City for a few days. Hotel pool + spa on one day, and Oceans of Fun on the other. It was great fun, and the sunburn was nearly worth it.
Built a new computer. I finally bit the bullet and put together a brand-spanking new system completely from scratch. Did quite a bit of shopping around and found a great balance between performance and cost. Solid manufacturers. Solid warranties. Rugged parts. And lots of headroom for future expansion. BlackBehemoth. Next step? SSD drives. Sadly the current batch available is a mixed bag of performance and features with the clear leaders still in the enthusiast price-ranges. The prices have to come down soon, but manufacturers are hell-bent to squeeze as much profit out of their old tech for as long as they can before they obsolete themselves into a corner. Blazing fast access, no moving parts, a fraction of the power use, a 10+ year theoretical lifespan vs tried and true tech that has been in use for decades now. It will take a while.
Gaming.
The things I've sunk time into recently include Borderlands, Battlefield Bad Company 2 (these two include a chunk of time playing online with my brother, which was quite fun for a while!), and Just Cause 2. I'm holding my breath for Civ V. That may be the first game in a long time where I am willing to pay full retail. I've owned every other core Civ game and enjoyed them immensely.

I have been on a comedy kick for the past month and have spent quite a bit of time sampling and exploring the works of various stand-up comedians. Facilitating this has been the discovery of Marc Maron's podcast: WTF (wtfpod.com). It is lewd, crude, unapologetically self-indulgent, and a wonderful exploration of the personalities behind the characters that make us laugh. Every episode he interviews a fellow comic and explores the psyche behind those that dare to stand in front of a crowd to be laughed at. It isn't a 'funny' show, but it is real. A kind of "Behind the Comedy." There will be rants about relationships, candid discussions of past and present drug use and abuse, frustration, joy, happiness, pain... at times brutally honest and at others inspirational. My favorite discovery from this show so far is actually from the latest show (episode 98) a British comedian called Stewart Lee. He has no albums released in America, but youtube has quite a few clips both past (young and manic) and present (deliberate and self-aware). The pacing and tone of the show fits right into the space in my head reserved for funny. Then again I also enjoy Doug Stanhope, so maybe I'm not the best judge of 'funny.' But I know what I like! :D
A few months ago I decided to spring for a Zune Pass membership. Maybe I've mentioned it, probably not. For the past few weeks I have been trying to determine the cost vs benefit ratio, since Zune Pass charges me whether I use it or not. But my new comedy kick has made it all worthwhile! Lots of the comedy albums are available through the pass and I can sample them at will. (It also helped me find a Monty Python album that has been in my brain since before I could speak English! Monty Python's Previous Record. Bits of this album had been dubbed to a cassette that I found years and years and years ago in my parent's stash o tapes and listened to it obsessively. I have the tone, pacing, and skits printed on my brain to this day and finding the original to hear again is such a treat! "Stand and Deliver!" :D
Ok, well it is now 6 am and I'm faced with the realization that I'll probably not be able to go back to bed. Time to make the coffee.

Fragile Thread

Distractions abound, and for the last few days sinus headaches, bordering on migraines, have kept my brain from focusing on the chaos surrounding me. A brief internal summary reveals just how tenuous my situation can be when viewed through a critical lens.
The work stresses are coming down to the nitty-gritty details and there are hints of bubbling discontentment and outrage over some of the decisions that have not been officially announced yet. Contract changes. Benefit changes. Salary distribution formulas. Work-load increases. And behind all of that... the job in front of us that needs doing day to day. D-Day is July 01, and at this point I don't think anyone will have a smooth transition. We will see how it all shakes out.
On the home-front things have been relatively quiet. Relatively.
Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii is a fantastic game. Aside from the difficulty in arranging communication channels with your team it is quite possibly the best ad-hoc multiplayer game I have played on a console since Chromehounds. Luckily most of my 'team' are avid gamers and members of a teeming online community, so we have access to a donated communications server. A little trickery with configuration, and the USB station that allows me to connect an XBox wireless controller (and headset!) to my computer and I have a nearly seamless integration of Ultra-Big-Game Hunting and efficient push-to-talk communication with my fellow hunters. Sublime when it all comes together. It is a Capcom game, so there are a few odd movement conventions but the gameplay feeds right into my OCD.

Out of Excuses...

So now I need a reason.
Escapism. As I get older I sometimes wonder why I spend so much time in pretend worlds, reading and playing video-games. Then I watch the news, read some political commentary, check on the latest polls, pay my bills, and dig right back into my post-apocalyptic training simulators and fantasy novels.
I'm not sure I could express my frustrations with the way things are without swearing. Heavily. Nonstop. Punctuated with rude gestures at key intervals. Spittle would be involved. And that's just about the general status-quo. Specific topics would probably involve a punch to the neck.
It sounds like I will have a job past July. That is the good news. The bad news is that no one has been able to tell me what my job will be. I may have mentioned the merger in previous posts. We are now in the layoff phase of the process and things are looking grim. Between the two agencies we have lost about two million dollars in funding due to the state-wide budget cuts. I do not know what will come out of this mess. A merger is a messy business at the best of times, sorting out redundancies and readjusting management structures. The political back-and-forth about 'whose side' will need to be cut makes for a vicious drama to begin with, but to have utter uncertainty about the future of the agency in any form makes all of this a little disheartening.
Supposedly all the cuts in staff that were going to be made have been decided by now. So maybe we'll begin hearing from the powers that be about the vision that they had when making the decisions about who to cut from where. It probably will not be satisfying, because from most accounts the cuts may as well have been random. Seniority, performance, workload, experience... none of these seemed to be an indicator as to the stability of your position.
We'll see. Again, it looks like I'll be offered a contract, but at this point I don't know how I would be able to perform the duties I've had for the last 7 years when looking at the rough outline of the new agency. The expectations of my current position fall well within my abilities, but it wouldn't take much to make my job physically impossible. Our service area will double in July. Our department has had staff-cuts, with no comparable department in the agency that we will be merging with. Workload divided by workforce is giving me a fairly daunting result at this point, so I really hope that someone soon can give me some idea of what the workload side will entail.
And for bonus points... My girlfriend will find out sometime tomorrow if she will be laid off due to outsourcing. HAPPY FUN TIMES! :P

Despite all this I'm actually pretty happy. I've finally worked my way back through all the Terry Pratchett Discworld books sequentially to get to the newest one. I'm playing a neat FPS/RPG game set in a fantasy wasteland/Russia/militarized zone thingy. Mutants, radiation storms, odd anomalies, warring factions, a mystery, and a world just open and dangerous enough to be interesting: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat. The third entry in the STALKER series. I've played the first one a bit, but ran into major technical issues with my old computer. I've played the second one for about an hour but ran into major distractions with other shiny games. I've played the third one for almost 40 hours so far... this one has the magic sauce. At first it plays almost like Nethack (gamers with roots will know what I mean). Pop into the world. Run around doing stuff. Meet an enemy. Do something stupid. Die. Rinse, repeat. Slowly you learn about the world and its dangers and live longer.
It has been a long time since I've been this engrossed in a game. The unforgiving way it drops you at the edge of the swamp with the tools but none of the knowledge to survive.

But enough rambling praise.
This was composed while at work, so I apologize in advance if the narrative seems a bit broken and disjointed. As you can imagine things are bit chaotic at the moment.

My Hobby

Part 2
I like Netflix. As an unmarried man (in a relationship) with no children I generally have enough disposable income for impulse buys. Until recently, this included movies that I thought might be good. Action. Drama. Comedy. Kung Fu. For less than 20 bucks I could take it home, put it on my shelf, and watch it whenever the mood might strike me. I ended up with a lot of crappy movies. Since disposable income has become a little more scarce recently (see: relationship) I've been looking at ways to keep my net cash-flow in the positives. Part of that was the decision to subscribe to Netflix, and so far it has been a rousing success! So far I have been spared from purchasing the James Bond movies: Fun, but definitely not worthy of several repeat viewings. Any Stargate SG1 episodes: The first few were excellent, but then the premise began to drag. The Fast and the Furious movies, several Anime series, some one-shot comedy flicks, dozens and dozens of titles. I've found that as I got older I was more and more willing to purge items that I would normally have hoarded, and I'm slowly chipping away at the stuff that surrounds me but never warrants a second glance.
I've started cutting back on the largest part of my consumerism: Gaming. I enjoy video games, and until a few months ago owned every major console. I did some honest introspection and realized that despite having been fun at the time, there would be little to no chance that I would ever revisit the majority of my accumulated video-games. They had been supplanted by newer distractions. So I began a cycle of purges. Sorting through my collection and weeding out the duds and abandoned gems. Trading them in for credit to be used towards new distractions. Now I browse my gamer forums and deal sites, keeping an eye out for price drops, coupon sales, and clearance items. Am I... 'growing up?' Hardly. I still game like a fiend, but my tastes have changed a little, and I've started shopping around more. I'm willing to wait for the deals, read the reviews, and allow the masses to filter through the glut of games for me. Luckily I have found an excellent online community of gamers to help me with this. Gamers with Jobs has been my primary online home for the last few years. But I digress...
Some of the games I have been spending some time with, or have begun ignoring:
A few days ago I finished up Puzzle-Quest: Galactrix on the NintendoDS. An interesting game, with a few twists on a classic Bejewled model. I was disappointed with the relatively low level cap for the main character. My playing style meant that I hit the maximum level before I was even halfway through the main campaign. I still had enough fun to plow through to the finish, and would recommend the game to anyone that enjoys games that require luck, skill, precision, and luck. ;)
Yesterday my girlfriend and I finished up Lego Indiana Jones on the Xbox360. By 'finished' I mean we received a 100% game completion status. Unlocking all the characters, collecting all the hidden secrets, finishing all the bonus missions, purchasing all the extra modes. We are done with that game. Nothing left to see. Nothing left to do. And aside from a couple of frustrating jumping puzzles we had a blast! The Lego games do a wonderful job of giving you low-stress gaming scenarios that feel very rewarding. It's nearly impossible to fail, but there is definitely some challenge involved in succeeding well. I'm debating picking up Lego Batman for us next!
I picked up SoulCalibur 4 for the 360 a few days ago during a sale, but haven't sunk too much time into it. Being able to fight as Yoda seems like it might be great fun!
My PSP has been stuck on Sudoku for almost a year now. ;) Great way to get to sleep at night!
On the Wii we've been doing some bowling, but it seems that the more I play, the worse I get. Otherwise I've stalled out on MadWorld. The current level I'm on is pretty difficult and I just haven't had the motivation to try more than once at a time. We'll see if I pick that one up again.
My PC gaming has been making a HUGE comeback... Plants Vs Zombies was a surprising time-sink. The game is perfectly balanced, with just enough cute, difficult, mean, rewarding, silly to keep me coming back. I've you're into chess-like tower-defense games I would definitely recommend checking out the demo for that one! Just watch how quickly that free hour of play disappears!
Also on the PC, Demigod. Demigod is a strange concept. A spot has opened in the ranks of the high gods, and the slot must be filled. The prospective gods, or Demigods, must battle amongst themselves to advance to the rank of God. A great mix of characters with different personalities and play-styles duke it out in high detail arenas, capturing resource points and doing battle while gaining levels and unlocking skills. It's hard to describe the actual game-flow, and once you look at what you do in each round the game seems like it should be extremely limited... but the depth of strategy and synergy for each of these characters provides so much variation by itself that I'm having a blast just trying out different approaches. We'll see how it goes after I dig into the multiplayer modes a bit, which is apparently where this game truly shines.
Well, those are the big ones. There's a few other things on my plate, like Civ Revolutions on the DS, Izuna 2, Disgaea 3, and if it weren't for all the other compelling games on my plate I'd be digging back into Team Fortress 2 to unlock the new content that Valve has released for the Sniper and Spy classes.
Yup, it's a good time to be a Gamer!