'I Say What I Mean' As 'I Mean What I Say'

The key, I have been repeatedly told, to a life full of happiness is to do what you love. This, I have discovered, is not as easy as everybody makes it out to be. "Oh yes," the seemingly ever-present "they" say, "Just find a job that allows you to do what you're passionate about. Then you'll love going to work every day and your life will be Elixir Of Life (which I will explain later) and Cheesecake."

I've found two problems with this philosophy thus far. The first issue is that I've had several jobs which I would qualify as doing "what I love" - I've been a maths teacher, and I've been a games programmer - and let me tell you, my experience with both of these jobs was less than stellar.

At first the experiences I was having with these jobs was wonderful, and I looked forward to work every morning - setting out with a smile on my face and a song in my heart (like some kind of bizarre Disney caricature.) Soon, however, I found my "free-time" passion for these activities waning. My internal monologue was something along the lines of "I just spent my whole day trying to make an electronic dog avoid disco fleas, why would I want to go to my own projects now? I need to do something different from that..."

This is the same issue that I have when I try to play games like WoW - the fact that you have to go out and kill 500 boars and collect six reams of paper from the haunted lumber mill three territories away, and that in order to actually get anywhere in the game you have to do this basically on a nightly basis makes makes the whole thing feel like something I'm being forced to do, rather than something I'm doing to wind down. That point, and the fact that if you're in an instance, people take it way to seriously, sucks the fun right out of it.

The second issue that I have with the "Elixir and Cheesecake" philosophy is that I'm lactose intolerant, so whilst I'd like to be able to enjoy cheesecake on a daily basis, I don't believe it would make for a lifestyle that is particularly conducive to pleasure.

Something that I have found, however, is that the secret is not doing what you love - rather it is loving what you do. The two concepts are most definitely mutually exclusive...(I suspect that my regular readers may expect some kind of link hidden among these words to a Charles Dodgson book - so I guess I'd best not disappoint.)

My current job has me as an Information Technology Service Officer (ITSO - It's fun to say, try it - email me video footage of you saying it - that's how slowly this day is going!!) which, you would imagine, could be quite boring and frustrating.

I, however, have a tactic that I use to ensure that I'm always engaged by my job - I make a game of it. Okay, so I know that sounds exceedingly lame, but it really does work wonders for my morale. I discovered on my first day here that people are awarded points for the various ways jobs are handled (for example, logging a phone-call job gets you 1 point, whilst logging and e-mail job only scores you half a point.) My mind swam with possibilities - there were points...there were collectibles.

Ever since then my day has consisted of me sitting, waiting for phone-calls and emails to come in, so that I may grab them while no-one is looking and get the precious beans (points) for myself. This isn't just a single-player game...It's not a co-op multiplayer game...It's competitive - and I play to win.

The moral of this story is that turning the most mundane activities into a video-game like reward system is often a great way to make them more fun. When I was younger I used to practice swimming by having various mathematical lap-counters running through my head (how many had I done, how many did I have left to do, what was that as a percentage, what was the simplest fraction I could make from that, and so forth) and I soon learnt to apply the same theory to cleaning my room, and so forth - though I'm yet to get any achievements, but I suspect they're just really hard to unlock at this level...

Roleplaying Games Are Cool

At some point in the near future I'm going to be running a role-playing game that uses a system which nobody I know has even attempted to test yet. The system itself doesn't look too bad, however I am slightly concerned about one aspect of it that may leave my potential players reeling - the main idea behind all games run in this system is that whilst confrontation and conflict are good things, the act of a player to actually engage in inflicting harm upon someone else is severely frowned upon.

Instead of just flat-out telling you what the theme of the game is going to be, I figure it might be interesting to do a guessing game kind of thing. I'll give you some clues, and you see if you get it right...What's that? You want incentive? A reward?! Well...If you get it right I will give you...love...Yes, that's right...Love...

-*Long Pause*-

Actually, you know what? Stuff it - I just spent ten minutes trying to figure out what to type here as far as clues go, and I got no-where other than writing the following down: Running; Adventure; Time; Space - if that wasn't enough to let you figure out just what kind of adventure I'll be running then I suggest you click here.

Now, because of the nature of the series in question, I want to be particularly careful about how I run this series of adventures - I want it to be every bit as epic as a season of the show! I am just now preparing the first "episode" of the adventure - entitled "The Honour Students" - and I'm constantly worried that I'm not putting enough into the details. It's no secret that my previous game was incredibly poorly thought out (mostly because I get bored of planning and just want to play play play!!)

So far I have plans for about 12 enemies, but all up I'm not sure how many "episodes" I want the adventure to have - I guess I'll just stop when the players get bored of it, or I can no longer write stories. The difficult part about writing the stories for this game is that I want to predominantly use enemies that are already established within the continuity of the series, however I'm somewhat limited to what I can really use as three of my targeted players haven't seen the vast majority of the show (and there is a lot of show to see.)

So I figure I'll post the outline of the first episode - kind of like the TV guide synopsis - and you guys can tell me what you think. If anybody has any ideas about how best to run the game then please, let me know...I'm always open to suggestions!

Episode 1 - The Honour Students
Setting: Australian Country University - Now
Synopsis: "The Australian Country University is an institution with a reputation for excellency, offering free (and mandatory) tutoring sessions to students who fail any of their units - tutoring sessions that never fail to bring up the GPA of those who attend.

Why, then, are the students who attend these sessions never seen studying - or ever interacting with others - outside of class again? And who is the mysterious new high-school aged student who seems to know more about the subjects she takes than the lecturers who teach them...?"

Other than that I can pretty much just tell you the "Episode Titles" for some of the other ones swimming around in the ocean of my brain...Spinning through the windmills of my mind...Round, like a circle...No! Focus!!

Episode 2 - The Diplomats Of Spite
Episode 3 - Being Human
Episode 4 - B.M.I.
Episode 5 - Maid To Order
Episode 6 - Tears Of Glass
Episode 7 - Echolalia
Episode 8 - Do You Hear Music?
Episode 9 - A Stitch In Time Saves None
Episode 10 - Playdate
Episode 11 - Clockwork
Episode 12 - Ashes To Ashes
Episode 13 - Revenge
Episode 14 - Betrayal
Episode 15 - Entrapment [Part I]
Episode 16 - Entrapment [Part II]

The moral of this story is that, whilst I can come up with episode titles that may breed intrigue within you, I honestly doubt my ability to turn them into a compelling game. We shall see, in due time, I suppose - and if you like...like...like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind! *sobs insanely*

9 Parts Inspiration

It has recently been discovered that there is very little difference, most often, between inspiring somebody to do something, and simply pestering them until they submit to your desire. Given my absolute raging infatuation with the scientific process, and ensuring things are "just so" you may well believe that this has actually been found during a long and needlessly drawn out study involving countless government grants and people in bitching white coats. If you'd like to verify, I suggest you check here.

So, assuming that you clicked that link, and didn't just skip over everything, I can say without spoiling anything that this is more of a personal discovery - something I have come to realise over the past few days as more and more of my friends start blogs of their own.

For me, blogging is a method of entertaining people - I write these things because I want to, of course, but my primary purpose in writing is to potentially brighten the day of someone else. If I am able to make one person smile through OHH, then I consider myself successful.

I have, in the past, tried many things in order to entertain people in various sectors of the community. I am a member of a radio-duo currently called Critical Hit (which was previously comprised of Josh and myself, but is now Spud and myself) however the show is currently on hiatus until Spud does his radio training and we get the proposal through. I've tried to write both fiction novels, as well as a series of mathematics books. I used to want to be a games developer, but then I realised that that life is just not for me.

It might seem, to the untrained observer, that what I really want to do with my life is bring joy and mirth to those around me - to everyone I can possibly affect. The untrained observer, of course, probably isn't aware that I would love to be a lecturer in mathematics, specially calculus and matrix algebra. My capacity to hurt, it would seem, is just as great as my capacity to heal (joy heals, right? I mean...That is its point yeah?)

Still, I love to believe that I'm able to overcome the great blob of wicked inside of me that is present inside all lovers of mathematics. Others have done it and lived to tell the tale - maybe I can be a force for good instead of evil...Or...Maybe...Just maybe...I could combine the two and become a force for neutrality! Yes...The wonder that is fiction writing combined with the pure malicious of pure mathematics...*finger tent of evil contemplation*

Math Fiction! Ho!!

The moral of this story is that, even though I like to think of myself as a "nice" person, my inherent capacity for evil cannot be ignored. Like it or not I am a mathematician, and I will always have the urge to solve an equation every now and then. Just count yourself lucky that I'm not tying you to something, whilst attempting to teach you how to integrate over the complex number system. My torture methods may not be orthodox, but by golly I'll stick to them...

Adventures In Foodening

If I were to summarise this weekend in one word, that word would have to be "owcosmuf" - a sentiment which, roughly translated from Tiger to English, means "Oh My God! Why did I cook so much food?!". The reason for this outburst of gibberish follows fairly logically...Well...Somewhat logically...Okay, okay - I may have spent 2 hours Friday (tea-stained eggs), 2 hours Saturday (Milo Cheesecake) and 6 hours Friday (the subject of this post) cooking. Geeze, give a guy a break will you?

Now, this may strike you as unusual, but my weekends are not typically spent in Harris Farm/Woolworths/The Kitchen. No. Nonononono. Whilst I do enjoy cooking, my aversion to doing things for any great period of time usually prevents me from getting too bogged down in any one recipe (especially ones that call for something to marinate, as I have been known to never get back to them...)

This weekend, however, I decided that I was going to be a good boy, and not buy a take-out lunch each day. Instead, I was going to prepare myself some meals to take to work and consume. Being the little otaku that I am, I've decided to go the bento route, and prepare a veritable tiny smorgasbord for each day's main meal. For those who don't know, bento boxes are a series of small portions of many different types of food, and they are the staple lunch meal in Japan.

In order to give myself the proper Japanese cuisine experience, I quickly jumped on the net and found six recipes to attempt, printed off a shopping list, and hit up the grocery store. All in all, I attempted to prepare the following: Eggplant Salad with Lemon Flavoured Plum Dressing; Yakitori; Sesame Flavoured Beef; Miso Marinated Pork; Sweet Pepper And Carrot Confetti; and Tamagoyaki (Egg-Roll). I swear, making that many dishes, I have never felt so close to Iron Chef in my life.

The only meal I would consider myself a failure at preparing was the eggplant salad, and that was because I left the eggplant pan-boiling for too long and it went all mushy - I managed to salvage it, however, by mixing in the plum dressing that I'd created, and stewing some seafood extender in there. The tamagoyaki also turned out a little worse than I'd have hoped, but I think next time I just need to make more mixture and have each layer be slightly thicker. Otherwise, all signs point to awesome as far as taste went (Spud, Lydia, and Andy were all suitably impressed!)

Of course, without actually owning a bento box, I kind of failed when it came to presentation, but that step can wait until I've become slightly more confident/speedy with my cooking, and further until I have managed to travel to Sydney to actually buy a decent bento box. For now, everything has been spooned into a disposable take-out container, and separated using kitchen paper (everybody knows that disaster occurs when two different flavoured foods meet each other...)

For today's meal selection I decided to take some of the Seafood Stewed in Plug-Eggplant, some of the Sesame Flavoured Beef, a handful of the Sweet Pepper and Carrot Confetti, and three Yakitori. I've eaten the yakitori for morning tea, and I'm not dead (yet - and they even contained mushrooms which is a pretty big thing for me). We shall see at lunch if I've created deadly poison overnight, so if I don't post tomorrow...Well...That's that I suppose...

The moral of today's story is the some people, when preparing bento boxes, have way too much time on their hands. Of course, I say "way too much time", what I mean is "an abundance of skill, why can't I do this? These are so cool I want to be the one to make such awesome foodstuffs..." Ultimately, of course, my jealousy will take one of two routes: it will either simmer out until there's nothing left but me eating my delicious, plainly presented food, or I'll obsess over it to the point where my kitchen is filled with tiny rice-ball animals. Would anybody like to place a bet?

Humanity Is Not Doomed...Yet...

Last night, instead of playing Spud's Rise of the Runelords Pathfinder game, we took a break and decided to play a one-shot discovered by Andy, entitled All Flesh Must Be Eaten. At first, I was slightly apprehensive about not playing Spud's game this week - I mean, Spud's game has been run (if I recall correctly) at least once a week since about May or June this year - and, as you may or may not be aware I am slightly averse to change.


Bu~~~t Spud is running his rogue game tonight, and he just needed a bit of time to prepare, and not worry about running his "big big" game, so Andy offered to run AFMBE instead. And, as it turns out, I'm glad he did. If you couldn't tell from the title of the game, AFMBE is a zombie survival horror game where you're trapped in an office building trying to make your way to the building's roof, in order to be rescued by a police helicopter.

Instead of creating a character from scratch with this game, like you do with most D&D-esque games, you play one of many-many archetypes. Lydia chose to play as an Ex-Goth Girl, Elmo was the Professional Student, Spud picked the Hacker, and I played as the Tortured Grade School Student. Basically, I was a kid whose parents, teachers, and class-mates didn't love him. Go me. Woo (and so forth.)

We started out in an elevator, traveling down to the ground floor of the building to purchase some snacks (we all wanted snacks at the same time...suspicious...) when suddenly there is a power outage, the lift stops, and all of the lights go out. My character (oddly enough named Tiger) decides to try the emergency phone, only to hear the sounds of gunshots and bloodcurdling screams coming from the other end. Sufficiently terrified by this, our situation was only worsened when the cable of the lift snapped, sending us hurtling about one and a half floors to the basement level.

So we then proceeded to make our way to the fire-stairs in the basement, in order to climb to the roof. This was an arduous process which I shall summarise thusly: we got into the corridor, only to be ambushed by the zombies. During this combat, Spud got bitten several times, I managed to shoot myself through the side with a .38 pistol, and Lydia smacked a zombie's head in with a toilet cistern lid. Following this, we cleared a couple of rooms of zombies (which led to Elmo getting bitten), and decided to lock some undead hoards in the rooms we found them in (because, let's face it, they're not going to be able to work door handles.)

Eventually, we got into the stairwell and proceeded to climb to the ceiling. Here, we managed to rescue a lady covered in dead bodies, gape in horror as Lydia goes crazy and runs into a floor filled with zombies, and I watched without remorse as Spud killed my mother. I then kicked her, and called her a bitch.

So, finally we reached the top of the roof, and signaled to a helicopter that "Hey, we aren't horrible undead." They promise to come back and get us (which they actually do!) and we get ready for the wave of horrible undead to surge out from the building to attempt to eat us. Before this happens, however, both Spud and Elmo succumb to the horrible zombie plague, and attempt to eat the lady we rescued earlier.

Following this turn of events, I proceed to kill Elmo, and narrowly miss Spud - and suddenly the helicopter arrives! I run through the hoard of zombies, only to be bitten on the leg by Spud. Still, I get in the chopper, and manage to convince the general at the camp that I'm not hideously infected *cough cough splutter splutter*. After a little while, my conscious gets the best of me, and I fess up that "Yes, um...mister military man...sir...I was bitten and I have a zombie thingy and please help me...please?" Suddenly, bang, I've been shot and am dead.


So, that's the end of the story - the moral of which is that it's not always best to confess to something, even if you know it's putting a whole bunch of people at risk. I mean, come on, if I hadn't had told the general that I was bitten by a horrid plague carrying zombie, I would have taken out the rest of the survivors and potentially doomed humanity. But instead, I just crapped out and took the moral high road - now I'm dead, and humanity goes on...For now at least...

TypicalPowers For All

If I were to select the unreachable dream that most often enters my mind and proceeds to taunt me with the simple fact that it shall never be achieved, it would be the following: Would that I were able to teleport.

It's no big secret, really - I want super-powers. Ignoring the fact that I would most likely be studied by scientists long after I had died, I cannot describe to you how unbelievably cool my mind finds it. Or perhaps I can. I assume, of course, that everybody is just as enamoured of having a super-power as I am. I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to teleport, or fly, or turn invisible, or manipulate water, or cast magic missile, or...I shan't continue, though I assure you I could - after all, the list goes on ad infinitum, I'm sure.

There are two things that I really love about discussing super powers with people. The first of these is the fact that, in a given room, two people will very rarely have the exact same list of super-powers that they would pick from. I mean, sure, people may have the same "top" power, but when you get down to others (if they couldn't pick their top power, for some unknown reason) there is just so much variety. I've already said that I would love to be able to teleport, my ex-work colleague Shibby would love to be able to fly, Dezzles desires telekinesis, Chris would like super strength, and Alex believes that the ability to heal via physical contact would be rockin'.

The thing that I like most about discussing superpowers with people, however, is the fact that in order to keep things a bit grounded - sensible if you will - superpowers have to come with caveats. Teleportation, for instance, can be grounded in several ways. My personal favourite is the fact that, in order to teleport a certain distance, you must expend an equivalent amount of energy. This would make teleporting short distances fine, but it would mean that, the further you wished to travel, the more difficult it would become. Of course, this would also prevent you from cheating the system by teleporting many short distances, as you'd eventually become fatigued.

The only problem that I have with that limitation of teleportation is that the place I'd most want to transport myself to (Birmingham, England) is almost on the exact opposite side of the planet to us, so I'd most likely have to make a couple of layovers first.

The other thing that would worry me about teleportation is the fact that, if you were to teleport to somewhere you'd never been before (or a place that you do not have a clear view of) you run the risk of landing smack-bang in the middle of a solid object. It would be fairly unpleasant, I would imagine, if someone were to, say, rearrange the furniture in their house without telling you and you wound up with an end table for a torso.

The obvious way around this is what I'm calling the matter replacement principle. This is something that I've previously discussed with Andy, and the way we figured it would work is that when you teleport to your destination, any matter that was in the space that your body would occupy (and potentially a little bubble around it) would be transported to your starting location, and so all of your bits would theoretically replace all of their bits, and vice-versa. This would of course, lead to some very...disturbing circumstances if you were to teleport into the middle of another person.

So I finish today with a question for you - if you could have a superpower, what would it be? And, for an added challenge, what caveats would you introduce in order to make it a bit more realistic? Hopefully I get some really creative answers to this, and may a nice little discussion starts between the readers. That would rock. But not as much as being able to teleport myself.

The moral of today's story is that, according to the ABC series Sleek Geeks, everyone is a Super Human. I think, however, that this would cheapen the definition of "Super" to the point where "Super" becomes normal, leading us back to the generic conclusion that nobody is super, after all. If more than 50% of people can do something, it stops being super, and starts being average or typical. I guess, then, that if my dream is for everyone to have a superpower, would lead to them not being superpowers at all, but being...well...typicalpowers I guess...

Selective Amnesia Is Not Recognised As An Illness

I'm often fascinated by various aspects of the human condition - I am in complete awe, for instance, of individuals who have experienced adrenaline rushes so great it allows them to lift a car in order to free a trapped loved one. There is one thing that people do, however, which never ceases to amuse me.

I love the incredible ability that the human race, as a collective, has for complaint - and before you any of you say anything, I am aware of the potential for irony in this blog post, occurring only when I start complaining about the whining masses. Of course, this post isn't really intended as a whinge in itself, so unless I get remarkably side-tracked then this post will remain about as ironic as the lyrical content of a song by Alanis Morissette.

Note that above I said the lyrical content, not the song itself. The song itself is ironic because, whilst it claims to be about irony and lists a number of situations which are purportedly ironic, it does not contain a single situation which is, itself, ironic. Maybe that's why she called it that in the first place? Perhaps Alanis is a lexical genius, and the rest of the English speaking population is so far beneath her that we just don't get her subtlety. Or perhaps she, like so many other people, just really doesn't understand irony (oh have I got a future blog post in me about that topic.)

Did you know that a cubit is approximately 45.72cm in length? That remark may seem rather non sequitor after telling you that this post would be about the ability of people to complain (and the small segue into irony). If you had heard the way some people are talking about the current rain situation here in Bathurst (as well as in Sydney, from what I have been lead to believe), however, then you would understand why I'd be trying to find out just how much wood I need in order to build an ark.

I have discovered, I believe, a sub-section of the population who will never be pleased with a situation, no matter which way it decides to turn. There are some people who, I have found, will complain about how dry it is, only to start crying that all of their plans are ruined the moment it rains. I've met people who whine all Summer long about how stinking hot it is, only to cry "Oh! I wish Summer would hurry back!" the moment it starts to cool down in Autumn. I've even known people who tell me that there is nothing for them to do on The Internet, and that they're bored with it, but then go into a frothing rage when their connection drops out.

My theory is that perhaps they are all selective amnesiacs, and forget the alternative to any given situation the moment it changes. Or it may just be because they're so dull that they have nothing else to talk about, and they just like to have a contrary opinion. Either way, it sometimes seems as though people believe that they have the amazing ability to change reality just be saying how much they hate the current one. Don't people know that they have to be the change that they want to see in the world? If they want it to rain, all they need to do is organise a large picnic at which everyone will wash their cars...

Of course, before I leave this topic, I should clarify that I'm not talking about people who like things a certain way. I know people, for instance, who don't like humidity or dryness in the weather, but start doing a happy-dance the moment it rains. That kind of complaint is fine (to a degree) because it ceases once the situation flips - only when the change brings about a different kind of complaint do things start to become both baffling and remarkable.

And so that's it - a relatively short post from me today, and also a fairly cohesive one. I wouldn't get used to it, though, as anybody who knows me even slightly could tell you that I have the attention span of - OH MY GOD BEES!!!

The moral of today's story is that Noah's Ark was, it is said, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. The conversion to meters makes it a  137.16 x 22.86 x 13.716 object. And some of that space is negated because the ark has to curve, in order to actually remain buoyant. Given that the Titanic had dimensions of 269.06 x 28.19 x 53.34 I guess it turns out that something of biblical proportions isn't really that spectacular at all.