Thursday, August 19, 2010
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.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
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
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
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, April 23, 2010
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…
Saturday, April 17, 2010
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)