Happy Thanksgiving!

My apologies for the lack of blogging this month, but a variety of things has kept me away. For one, i figured everyone was sick of me after hearing from me every day for 31 days in october. Two, Minecraft. Just freaking playing minecraft all the time. So addicting! Three, still trying to finish up my novel for national novel writing month.

I did want to give thanks, however! I want to thank.. well, whomever. Since I have long since stopped being a practicing catholic and pretty much don't even believe in a supreme being anymore, I just want to be thankful for certain things, to nobody in particular. :-)

I am thankful for having what few friends I have. Granted, most of them are imaginary, and some of them want me to kill the neighbor's dog (ok, that's mostly the real ones), but it's always nice to have friends. I wish I had more, but being scarily intelligent, dead sexy and insanely witty just are too much for most people to handle. I also have the body of a greek god. Let's say, Dionysus. But still, he was a greek god, right?

I am thankful for finally getting my bedroom exactly the way I want it. Sure it took 27 years. That's not the point. Perfection can't be rushed. I'm happy with it now. Maybe next week I'll want to change it, but for now, it's perfect. And yes, it's where the magic happens. With myself. I'm a magical kind of guy, what can i say. I do seem to randomly find myself covered in pixie dust/glitter. Odd.

I am thankful for food. Oh yes. Food is awesome. That i can eat it is even better. Sure, ice cream gives me gas. I don't really care. This may be related to my lack of friends. I have to buy some gas masks and start handing them out to new acquaintances, and just tell them something like "Don't worry, you'll know when to use them." But food in general.. love it. Thanksgiving is third on my list of favorite holidays just because it's focused around one huge meal. :-)

I want to thank indie game developers. Without minecraft, i'd literally have NOTHING to play until after january, because the big gaming companies haven't got their act together yet as well as one coder with a dream. Good to know I am paying that $50 per game to those folks for... advertising. yea. A hearty "well done, asshats," to the big gaming companies. You've made my xmas less happy.

I want to thank women. For having boobs. Nuff said. I have boobs, and they just aren't as nice as women's boobs. I knew I should have stopped at nuff said, but no, no, I had to keep going...

There's other people to thank, sure, some I missed I bet. Well, thanks! I am having a pretty good run of luck right now and I don't want to ruin it by not being thankful, so, thanks again!

So here's a problem. I have til the end of the month to finish a 50k word novel for nanowrimo. It's the 24th. That leaves me 6 days. I have about 7000 words written. Which means... By next tuesday, I need to write 43000 words. Coherent ones. Some people would read my novel and say I haven't yet written a single coherent word, let alone 7000, but according to google documents, my word count is just shy of 7100, and I'm not going to argue with it. Google knows more than I do. I know it's probably not going to happen, but I'm going to do my best over the weekend and eventually finish it anyway. The nanowrimo.org site says at my current rate I will finish by May... of 2020, no doubt.

Here's my other problem. Minecraft. Why did I have to hear about this game just a month before nanowrimo? If i hadn't poured all my creative efforts into that game, I'd have time to write my novel twice over. November is just ludicrous timing for me, I've had relatives come to visit, way too much to do, work to, you know, work around, and thanksgiving to prepare for. Why couldn't they put nanowrimo in january or something? Best time for it, everyone's locked indoors due to snow, there's no major holidays after the first of the month, and everyone's all on about new beginnings and sticking to resolutions! November is a horrible time to schedule it! I need to email those nanowrimo organizers and have them reschedule it for 2 months away.

By that time, I might even have a few more thousand words done!

Happy Turkey Day, everybody. For everyone that has a turkey day tomorrow, that is. You foreigners, well, eat some ice cream or something. It's good for you.

On a side note, today is national opt out day, so if you are heading to the airport to travel, opt out of the full body scanners and go for the pat down. Oh, and due to the TSA being in charge of the national government, and perhaps the government not caring about the people of this great country anymore, anyone who opts out of the canacer-inducing scanning machines is now being labelled a domestic terrorist. Yep! Refuse a patdown that involves some fat guy fondling your genitals? You go on the terrorist watch list and can be denied your rights as a citizen of this country. Don't want to be scanned by a radiation-emitting device that reveals your naked body, stores the images on computer for anyone to look at, and has never ever been tested to see how much radiation it actually puts out or if it does in fact cause you harm? Oh yea, you just opted out of your rights as a citizen. Keep in mind the TSA is filled with people who have no legal right to arrest you, have no police training, and are essentially thugs who couldn't be trusted enough to get jobs as security guards at museums. Since when does a moron who likes to grope women get to rip up the constitution as he sees fit? Why isn't our government laying the smackdown on these sons of bitches who strip search children at airports? Oh right. MONEY. I forgot. That's what is more important to our government than it's citizens. Do they even think of us as citizens anymore, or just impediments to their profit that need to be removed at whim? Forget safety, this isn't even close to being about that. Security is a billion dollar industry that's being protected by the companies that want to install screening everywhere so they can profit from it. And they are buying up the lawmakers to get it done. Here's a link to check out:

http://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty/are-you-living-constitution-free-zone

I didn't even think that was legal, a constitution free zone? wtf? I'll tell you what, the day you turn my country into a constitution free zone is the day this nation becomes the british empire and we need the american colonies to come kick our ass and give us a wake-up call. Friggin ridiculous bullshit going on in this country. And don't give me that vote to change it shit! I'd vote to have all the bastards in office now thrown the hell out and we start from scratch because they're all DOING IT WRONG!

Sorry, I get all upset when my rights are revoked for no goddamn reason other than, some asshat who owns a company wants more goddamn cash. Fuckin hell.

Minecraft

Okay, I'm pretty much playing a lot of minecraft lately. After finishing my 31 days of horror movie reviews on Halloween, I needed a break, during which I... just played Minecraft. In case you don't know, minecraft is a game. You can get it from minecraft.net if I am not mistaken.

Minecraft did not win me over at first. Typically in MMO's and fantasy games, there is a lot of questing (which I don't like), a fair amount of fighting (which I love) and a little bit of crafting thrown in to "power the game economy" which translates as "another way to waste your time in the game while paying us ridiculous sums of money." I hate the crafting in games as you can NEVER craft anything you can actually use, and it's usually only something you can sell cheaply for a tiny sliver of copper or two.

Minecraft in it's first iteration was ALL Crafting. That's all you did was run around and build stuff. This put me off the game at first, despite there being the added Survival mode, which is essentially the game currently under development. When I say under development, I mean the guy who makes it is busy coding his ass off, and while the game is only in Alpha (the first phase of game development, before Beta and the released or final version), it's enormously fun to play.

So here's the deal. You spawn essentially naked in a randomly generated world made of... blocks. It sounds odd. It looks odd. You may even see farm animals made of blocks. Blocky sheep, pigs and cows roam the open grasslands. Chickens are made of smaller blocks, and run around laying eggs. They moo, oink and baa at various intervals (not the chickens), roam around and are generally there for the same reason as everything else... They are a resource.

Everything in the game is a resource. Well, just about everything. Trees are harvested for wood to make everything from tool handles to stairs to torches. Other materials are harvested to make stronger tools, different objects or entire buildings. You can make a suit of armor out of cowskin, a sword out of stone and wood, and replenish your health by killing pigs and eating bacon. Mmmm bacon. Blocks that make up the very ground can be shoveled out, mined away with a pickaxe, or otherwise recovered to make use of.

Thus, the name of the game, Minecraft.

Of course, you only have one day to gather up what resources you can. When night falls, the zombies come out. Which, wouldn't be so bad if it was just zombies. There's also skeletons, spiders, and creepers, which just run at you and blow themselves up like mutant green suicide bombers. It's a difficult task to survive the night without some sort of shelter. Hopefully, you've made one by then, because the night lasts as long as the day, and you have to make it til morning, when you can again walk the land freely and get back to the important task of making yourself a safe place to live.

It's severely addicting, and that and life in general has made it impossible for me to write my novel (and also delayed my blog postings). A friend told me about nanowrimo, which is basically National Novel Writing Month, and I signed up to write a novel in the 30 days of November. I've done 6 pages, which is about one day's work, and I haven't had a chance to get back to it and it's already the 11th. So, I've essentially got to write a 50,000 word novel in 19 days. Should be fun! Wish me luck.