Updates

Some dancing updates. I’ve now passed somewhere around 7 13s. Infernoplex, Indulgence, Boss on Parade, Bat Country, Mechanical Love, Operation Evolution, Shooting Star (12/13?), The Fate Of. I’m going for passes on Above The Winter Moonlight (first Dragonforce) and Beast and the Harlot (first 14) tonight and tomorrow and whenever else I play. I’ve gotten about 60% into both of them before failing (more due to leg endurance than stamina in both cases). Just gotta stop sucking. Pretty pumped for both of these. Footspeed is slowly improving as I can comfortably combo anything of about 165 bpm and I’m getting better at FAing 160 and below. Just an FYI 160 bpm = 2.67 quarter beats a second. Considering I’m talking 16th notes you’re looking at about 11 steps a second, or 13 steps/second for 200 bpm which is what ATWM is. Too bad that’s nothing compared to the dude who’s probably considered fastest in the world (http://www.youtube.com/user/Sigatrev). YEA DAD YEA.

Wisdom

In Proverbs, Solomon (and Lemuel) write extensively on the application and appreciation of wisdom. In Proverbs 1:7 he writes that “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” What does this say about us? For one thing, I think it’s telling that our appreciation of learning is slowly degrading. We are constantly bombarded by information from multiple sources, tv, the internet, radio. The world that we live in is connected 24/7, and yet despite that, the information that we pay the most attention to is inane and thoughtless. Celebrities, politics, and other human interest stories dominant newcasts without ever having a real effect on our lives. Does it really matter who wins in an election when both candidates will do the exact same thing after being elected? In the same manner I wonder why we are so caught up in the lives of people who we will never meet while our own lives are but a shadow of what they could be. Rather than spending time making our own existence better, we live vicariously through the fake tween heartthrobs on the Disney channel, or the scripted existence of reality tv. The current information age is like The Matrix without all the wires attached to us. And one cannot help but notice the irony of criticizing pop culture through a pop culture device. It’s like listening to System of a Down because you like their musical style and find their message intelligent.

Slowwwww

I’m going to try to update this fairly regularly now, which I know at the moment sounds like nothing more than an empty promise. I figure that writing regularly will enable me to escape the trap of feeling like I must be expansive in order to satisfy my goals. Short and to the point, hopefully with a dash of preciseness thrown in, is a better recipe for my own success.

Spacial Relationships

One thing that often strikes me in our human relationships is just how little we tend to analyze the cause and effect relationship of our actions. It’s pretty easy mathematically to determine correlation, and thus to at least infer causation, but things get a lot trickier when the human element is introduced. For example I have recently discovered that one of my personal acquaintances is embroiled in a fairly ugly feud stemming from a series of unfortunate choices. She seems completely caught up in the immediate problems that the feud are causing, but she seems unwilling to address, or at least unaware of the original problem. That is, that she did some stupid stuff. The real question though is why she did these things. I can only guess at her actual intentions, but it would seem to me that in the process of growing up, she lost sight of whom and what she is and chose to pursue a straw man. This is certainly not a unique problem; as we humans are distracted every day by the bright shiny objects that we depend upon for our happiness and self-worth but which really only distract us. Our problems are of our own making, it is only once we realize this that we will be able to address them. Paul had it right when he wrote “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” We will go nowhere focusing on symptomatic issues, true maturity can only be reached once we have let go of our own pursuits.

YAY 13s

Some progress as far as dancing goes. I finally passed a legit 13 last week, which I was super pumped about, and since then I’ve passed 3 more. Infernoplex is a pretty standard and well known 13, and features some pretty long runs at 175 while being about 4 minutes long. That being said once you get past about 40% in you’re not gonna hit anything too tough. I then passed Indulgence and Boss on Parade the next day, followed by Bat Country a few days later. As far as my overall goals are concerned I’m going to have a hard time getting to where I want to be for the summer. I would be happy to pass even 1 Dragonforce song, but so far I haven’t gotten past 30% in either Above The Winter Moonlight or Reasons to Live. I’ve got 12 days to figure it out.

Did some dancing today. Nothing too special

Finally passed Energizer with a 71...I've failed it multiple times with higher scores (including once with a gold combo until the stepjumps...yea) but I'm fine with that for now. The slowdown and second half of that song kill me.

95.57 on Xuxa...got gyped out of my first * on an 11. I tried it again afterward and had worse FA...I'll get the star eventually.

That's about it...still need to work on footspeed...bleh.

Dancing

So I've been working on my dancing skills. You know, the ability to bust out such old favorites as the lawnmower and the shopping cart, and if I'm really lucky: the Robot.

Actually that' not at all what I'm talking about. The kind of dancing I'm talking about involves 4 arrows, a metal bar, original music, and enough whiny young adults to make a disco club owner cringe....after he's milked them of all of their money of course.

I play DDR. Except in my case it's called ITG. If you have no idea what those acronyms stand for you should probably just close out of the browser as fast as possible...or if you're particularly brave I suppose you can continue on to the next paragraph.

There's a HUGE difference between DDR and ITG. DDR or Dance Dance Revolution was created by Konami in 1999. It started in Japan, came to the US soon after, and became an arcade hit for several years thereafter. There are even Cracked articles about it, so you know it must have some comedic value. (It's a little below Robert Brockway's infamous insults but a little above anything written by Cody). It produced 8 iterations all based on the same premise. Arrows come up on the stream and you step on the corresponding arrow on the dance pad at the same time. Now I know that probably sounds pretty pedestrian. You're basically glorifying walking without going anywhere. In some parts of the US (hint: the parts that aren't full of obese people) people call such devices treadmills.

Unfortunately for me, Konami got smart and started instituting a SCORING system. OCD people, health nuts, and overly competitive people such as myself everywhere suddenly decided that scores made the game MEAN something. Instead of playing the game for fun, which would have soon resulted in a collective agreement to ban Konami from ever trying to enter US soil again (Seriously GUITAR GAMES? THAT'LL NEVER WORK.), Konami turned a very small core of people into addicts. We waste copious amounts of money each week in an effort to get better at the game.

Unfortunately for Konami, they got lazy. They stopped producing new games, which shattered the ILLUSION that they were actually introducing new content, when in actuality they were just reusing the same songs over and over again, and by shattering this illusion they let someone else get a foothold in the market. This someone else was a group of young guys who probably still got carded for alcohol and cigarettes, and yet they somehow managed to turn out a better product than Konami ever had with about 30 cents worth of funding and a rudimentary knowledge of the difference between music and the sound of an asthmatic breathing.

When Konami realized they were getting beaten out by a group of teenagers/20 somethings (one of whom wrote step patterns to songs drunk, high and ANGRY). They did the only thing a bunch of Japanese businessmen could do in the situation. They sued.

Long story short, it's 5 years after the lawsuit, DDR in the US still sucks (except now even normal people realize it sucks), but the weird thing is that people still play ITG. Granted they do so mostly because a hack was released that allows basically any song in existence to be played, but it's still quite an accomplishment that a game published by a company that went out of business 5 years ago is still going strong.

To give you an idea of the wide range of people who play this game I'll give you but two examples.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Sigatrev

Mad Matt is considered the fastest player alive. Just watch the video on his main page and you'll realize why.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Kote12TK#p/u/8/0GRvtvHQoBA
Kote12tk is a community favorite. You'll find out why pretty quickly.
http://aaronin.jp/boards/viewtopic.php?t=7157

Simply: Untitled.

Sometimes life just takes you and shakes you and won't let you stop to figure out what's going on. Sometimes second place isn't so bad. That's a lie. Sometimes I wish what I'm sitting here writing meant more than just putting these words on paper. I wish I could tell people what I thought. I wish masks weren't an everyday item of clothing that people unconsciously put on.

I wish the truth didn't damage people. Because I can't escape it, and it's making everything I touch, actually TOUCH, a poison.

What do you do when you've bared everything, and it comes back empty?

I'm just going to sit here and sulk.

So I need to write. To organize my thoughts is something that I do much of, but I really fail at putting them down in a physical format sometimes. Also I almost said alot in that last sentence...which is probably not much of a faux pas but I'm paranoid or something. Elitist most people would probably say.

Anyway here's the deal. There's this girl and...well, let's just say things happened. And then we lived happily ever after and got married and had 3 kids and dog right? Wrong. I was minding my own business last Saturday night just hanging out with my best friend when out of nowhere I had this sudden compelling urge to kiss her. Gross huh? The funny thing is she must have had some sort of similar idea because next thing I know I WAS liplocked with her. I think at this point I should probably warn you that I'm not really a very serious person, and thus I can be fairly self-effacing. Any sense that you might get that I'm making fun of myself in the next paragraph or so is probably pretty close to reality. Weird.

Anyway, so things are fine and dandy ya know? It was a good night, and for once I was the sketch kid, rather than being the kid who made fun of the sketch kid. But apparently life like to have the last laugh, and I was in for an uproar. Next day she says she has to talk to me, and BOOM she's dating this guy, as of 17 hours after we apparently didn't do much of importance. What exactly am I supposed to do in this situation you ask? Well I think that to answer that a reader might need a bit of background info. For one thing she had been interested in this guy for awhile. I knew this and in fact that was one of the main reasons that I hadn't tried to push ahead with any career defining moves the night before. By career defining I mean relationship establishing (get your mind out of the gutter boys). I just figured we would see where things went and hopefully figure it all out. I knew there was a possibility that things might not go my way, but is it really too much to expect her to maybe just give me a tiny sliver of a chance? We met at the beginning of this year and have slowly been building a pretty decent friendship if I do say so myself, second MAYBE only in my short 19 years only to my ex-girlfriend, who now happens to be engaged (irony).

Is it really wrong for my to expect her to at least see how she felt a little bit after the fireworks? I could understand if she waited a week or two and then decided that she wasn't feeling it, and that things had just been a mistake. But 17 hours? Talk about finishing a distant second. The problem with writing all of this out by the way is that I can think it so much faster in my head...haha. I'm already done with the story and considering implications but I still have to finish it all. Let's abbreviate. Long story short I was a little upset but then she was super upset that I wasn't exactly happy and pulls out the "What would I do without you card." SO now I'm here still acting like her best friend (plus a little bit probably but I'm bad at definitions). It's like friends minus any benefits.

The only bright spot that I can see is that I think God is telling me to wait it out. I dunno how that's supposed to work. Not that I doubt Him, it's more that I just doubt myself. Haha, I like that I just typed a short story to myself. I'm hilarious.

One of the big things that I think that God has been trying to show me lately is the importance of patience. Writing things down will hopefully force me to clearly define what I’ve learned and then help me to grow. I’d say that for me it’s very easy to get caught up in thinking that other people seem to be discovering and growing in ways that I wish I could, and then I end up sitting her questioning why I’m not seeing the same kind of changes or growth. But I think that sometimes the hardest part of growing is learning how to wait. I’m not saying that I should be content with myself, or excuse the faults and problems that I certainly have. But maybe sometimes we get so caught up in doing GOOD things that we forget where our focus should be. I applied for three different on campus positions for this semester and next…and got rejected by all three. My first thought was shock. I looked at the list of people who got the positions and KNEW I was better than some if not all of them. I was smarter, harder-working, better-looking (who am I kidding?), more engaged, more aware, even cooler. But maybe that’s why I didn’t get them. I’m reminded of the passages in Job 40ish after Job has spent pages crying to God about why so many terrible things had happened to him. God’s response? Where were you when I made the universe? The dinosaurs? Designed humans? Who am I to say that I deserve anything? Maybe I was a better choice than some people, but maybe that’s my problem. I think I’m so much better than everyone, but how can I ever compare myself to God? So yea, if it were up to me I would have and SHOULD have been accepted for all three positions. But God knew what was going on, and if it were going to be beneficial for me to have those positions I’m sure I would have gotten them. My message for the day:

Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD. Psalm 27:14

And don’t be self-righteous either…

I'm a nerd, and to top that off I also happen to be a sports nerd. So today as I read a Rick Reilly article about chess boxing here (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5083962), I had to wonder one thing: WHY is boxing considered a sport?

I understand the idea of wanting to bash someone's head in and I can see that the rest of America shares my fascination, but is boxing really more strength training than it is the ability to take a punch? Lots of things can be sports (frisbee golf, alligator wrestling, even dolphin-riding) but if a sport measures its ability in who can take a punch to the face the most then it's not a sport. It's masochism.

Wow it's been awhile, and in an effort not to be that guy who only writes in his blog once in a blue moon and always apologizes for not writing more in his post, I won't. Instead I'm going to talk about how much I fake people.

You know who I'm talking about. Those eternally smiling (emptily of course), forever babbling people who get by on nothing but good looks and an effervescent personality. They're stupid. They don't seem to understand how stupid they are, but that doesn't stop them from having an opinion about things. Like the moron at college who says "I wish I could go to college here without actually going to college." Why do people put up with that kind of crap? I do it. You do it (if you're not also a fake person). But no one ever tells them how stupid they are. Like "Hey stupid, you're paying 30k a year to go to school here, I really hope you're interested enough in your education to NOT end up like our resident 8th year senior (he exists). Or maybe "If you don't want to go to school maybe you could flip burgers in the cafeteria for the rest of your life? That would be the best of both of your worlds...."

I realize I'm perhaps mildly vitriolic, but sometimes things need to be said.

Inane Muttering

Day 2 arrives, and yet I still probably have little of consequence to say. I must admit that I'm not really sure what exactly constitutes blog etiquette. I'm writing this mostly for my own benefit I think. I hold no illusions about being funny or having anything too important to say, but maybe I do want to be somewhat relevant and interesting. Relevant. That's one of those words that I've decided to despise. I took a class on the "Developmental Processes of Leadership" in January, and the temptation of relevance was apparently something that a good leader should try to avoid. Ridiculous. If we aren't relevant then how can we hope to establish a connection with people? I understand the context of it, having to constantly update yourself to new things tends to be a waste of time, but I hate the way that buzzwords are thrown around in a manner that groups people together. I promise that some point soon I'll try to make a more coherent post outlining myself. Maybe.

Emptiness

So I'm dumb. Let's just say that right now. I decided to start this "blog" thing at 12:45 AM in the Student Union of my local University. Maybe someday I'll write the whole story down, but for now we'll just call it the Union. Anyway, I just wrote a pretty small lab report for my analytical chemistry class, and my best friend decided to tell me about her renewed desire to journal her thoughts. Somehow that got me here. This is the first and probably terribly inauspicious blog post. I have 12 minutes to get back to the dorm before the door locks. I don't have a key. So I have to write about SOMETHING pretty quickly. Continuing the I'm dumb theme, I have to say that I'm pretty bad at relating to shallow people. I'm trying to write this stuff down so that I can put together a coherent theory about my own personal worldview. I'm pretty sure it's one of the more twisted ideas you'll see written down, but maybe somebody somewhere might stumble across this someday and actually connect with something I say. Long thesis; hopefully shorter points. I think too much. Next on the agenda: overview/outline/Christian stuff/workable starting point. The end.