Thank you, Google image search.
This is Mackinac Island, MI. It’s great because there are no cars and approximately 70% of the buildings on the island sell fudge or taffy. Also, historical stuff.
Day 5 – A pic of a place I’ve been
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Day 4 – A habit I wish I didn’t have
It’s been months since I last bit my nails, so I have to actually think hard about this one. Hmm…
Well, I fell off the coffee wagon recently. Or jumped on the bandwagon? Whatever. I hate caffeine dependence because I hate caffeine withdrawal headaches on weekends. It’s just hard to maintain the same sleep schedule in the winter when Mr. Sun is slacking off, so 7am starts feeling like 4am and everything falls to pieces.
Day 3 – A pic of me and my friends
I’m the groom in this picture.
On the far left is Mike, seated next to his brother Kevin. Behind them (again from the left) are Jeremy, Olson, and DonSlice.
The bride is Sarah. Seated next to her are Jenny and Melanie. Behind them are Beth, Adrienne, and my sister, Karen.
I don’t have any other pictures on my laptop, and I’m writing this from Starbucks, so I’ll just give a shout-out to everyone else: Denny, Matt, Autumn, Tim, Kate, Dave, Dana, James, Amanda, Joel, Holly, Troy, and anyone I may have forgotten because I haven’t seen you in a while (we should get together sometime). And of course Krista, who I stole these prompts from.
Day 2 – Meaning of the blog name
When I game, my handle is typically StanManX. In grade school, “Stan” became a communal nickname that I shared with two of my friends (no, I’m not telling the story of how that came about), but in junior high one of those friends bestowed it upon me. “Stanman” was guaranteed to be taken at all websites, so I stole a little from Mega Man X.
Offline, most people call me Stan — friends, coworkers, some of my friends’ parents – so it makes about as much sense as calling it “Matt’s blog” or something.
sleepthru
New music! Even though I technically didn’t start working on it until after the new year, I’m counting it toward 2011. Hope you enjoy it!
sleepthruAlso, I’ve bundled everything from 2011 into a convenient package at my bandcamp store.
Day 1 – A recent picture and 15 interesting facts about me
Aeris, Mikenna, me
Fact #1: I loooove me some brownies.
Fact #2: I have a BA in English, which basically only gets used when my coworkers are arguing about words and they need an official ruling.
Fact #3: I have been playing guitar for over 16 years. I’ve also spent some time on drums, bass, and vocals.
Fact #4: I am currently taking voice lessons from Maria Rose of Maria Rose and the Swiss Kicks.
Fact #5: Final Fantasy XI was the first MMO I played. I quit because it got repetitive, but occasionally I have dreams about signing up again.
Fact #6: Actually, I occasionally dream about doing a lot of stuff that I quit doing, like karate, guitar lessons, or playing in a band.
Fact #7: I get really stressed out at big social gatherings, even if I know and love everyone involved. My heart rate elevates slightly and I start feeling warm. I have found that deep breaths help quite a bit — especially if you follow them up with talking to someone.
Fact #8: I wear glasses because the thought of putting something on my eye gives me the willies. Someday, though, I will try contacts, because I’m really starting to hate glasses.
Fact #9: I have a younger sister.
Fact #10: I like anime. When I was a teenager and pretty obsessed, I couldn’t afford to buy the stuff I was interested in, but thanks to the magic of NetFlix, I can finally enjoy the stuff I wanted to see so bad in 1998.
Fact #11: I like reading, but I don’t read nearly as much as I say I would like to. I’m hoping to remedy that this year.
Fact #12: I hated cats until Sarah brought Aeris home. It was an instant transformation.
Fact #13: Speaking of Sarah, we bonded over discussions of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a single-player RPG. Now we’re playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMORPG, together.
Fact #14: My senior seminar was a class on James Joyce. No, he doesn’t make any more sense after taking that class. Dude had too much time on his hands. If anyone wants to fund me for 17 years, I’ll bring you the next Finnegans Wake.
Fact #15: I still really want to learn to play the piano someday.
Prompt-stealing
I’m going to steal some prompts that my friend Krista is writing from this month. Hopefully it will reactivate sections of my brain that seem to have gone dark. Here they are:
Day 01- A recent picture of you and 15 interesting facts about yourself.
Day 02- The meaning behind your blog name.
Day 03- A picture of you and your friends.
Day 04- A habit that you wish you didn’t have.
Day 05- A picture of somewhere you’ve been to.
Day 06- Favorite super hero and why.
Day 07- A picture of someone/something that has the biggest impact on you.
Day 08- Short term goals for this month and why.
Day 09- Something you’re proud of in the past few days.
Day 10- Songs you listen to when you are Happy, Sad, Bored, Hyped, Mad.
Day 11- Another picture of you and your friends.
Day 12- How you found out about blogging and why you made one.
Day 13- A letter to someone who has hurt you recently.
Day 14- A picture of you and your family.
Day 15- Put your iPod on shuffle: First 10 songs that play.
Day 16- Another picture of yourself.
Day 17- Someone you would want to switch lives with for one day and why.
Day 18- Plans/dreams/goals you have.
Day 19- Nicknames you have; why do you have them.
Day 20- Someone you see yourself marrying/being with in the future.
Day 21- A picture of something that makes you happy.
Day 22- What makes you different from everyone else.
Day 23- Something you crave a lot.
Day 24- A letter to your parents.
Day 25- What I would find in your bag.
Day 26- What you think about your friends.
Day 27- Why are you doing this 30 day challenge.
Day 28- A picture of you last year and now, how have you changed since then?
Day 29- Your favorite song.
Day 30- In this past month, what have you learned.
some fun reading
I figure a good way to get back into the habit of blogging regularly would be to share some of the more interesting things I’ve seen on the interwebs lately.
Sexism In Nerd Culture
When is it sexist? chart — A handy reference for determining whether the game you are playing is sexist.
False Equivalence — Why muscled men are not sexualized.
Male Avengers posed in the manner that female comic book characters typically are.
Video Games
I recently fired up Oblivion because I found myself pining for Skyrim and never really got the full Oblivion experience. Found some good stuff related to optimizing and re-texturing that have made me forget how old the game is. Also? Totally having a blast.
Since I’m now a budding programmer, I’m interested in this treasure trove of indie game development resources. Totally getting looked at… sometime.
Religion
It’s the time of year for rabid fundamentalists to get all uppity about the War on Christmas and do ridiculous things, like sing a non-religious song in defense of beliefs that no one is threatening.
Also, a fascinating piece about modesty.
Good Storytelling Requires Effort
Resurrecting a blog at the beginning of NaNoWriMo was probably not the best decision I’ve ever made.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that this might be my last year doing NaNo. I’m at the point in the month where I’m frustrated and insisting that “This is it!” and after this month I’ll be done forever, and I want to capture some of my thoughts so I can evaluate them and see whether they’re legitimate, or if I’m just whining.
I spent a good six weeks creating characters and coming up with a rough plot. I did a moderate amount of world-building. November 1 was tough; it took a few days to hit my stride, and I did so by treating each segment of the novel as its own short story, which I could theoretically stitch together later. Though I was getting further and further behind the target wordcount, I was happy with what I was writing.
Then I hit The Middle.
At least one other person I know has experienced this phenomenon. The beginning? Easy. The end? It’s all in the notes! Now, let’s put them together…
Uhhh…. what?
It’s the same kind of indecision you face when you’re trying to pick out a quart of ice cream. There are so many flavors! They are all ice cream! Ahhh!
It didn’t help that I went to a multi-region writing marathon and wrote 4,000 rambling words for the sole purpose of getting caught up (you know, the thing I said I wouldn’t do!). The random ideas are all getting stuck in the door, and what I need now is a good six weeks to sit down and plan out the next section of the novel. Unfortunately, that’s not how NaNo works. If I want to “win” NaNo, I need to bang out thousands of additional words, even if I know that every single one of those additional words exists to be destroyed in the rewrite.
That act, the desperate flailing to build a tower of letter blocks only to knock them down when I do my Godzilla impression, that is what stays with me when the month is over. I don’t remember that I was genuinely excited about the project I was starting, I only remember that all writing is futile and a waste of time.
So, I’m reining it in. Taking it slow. Falling ridiculously far behind once more. One of my throwaway characters proved to be really interesting, so I want to take the time to explore what’s going on from his perspective while my heroes are out gallivanting. Even if it doesn’t make the final cut, it’s better than the panic-babble because it builds my world and enables me to keep track of what’s going on off-camera.
And I’m doing my best to have fun with it. For this particular story, I don’t aspire to publication. It’s purely for fun. I’m seeing how well I can handle science fiction in the hope that it will help me when I try to fix one of the fantasy novels I wrote and abandoned… or write a better one. Or maybe it won’t help and I’ll end up with a pretty okay story that gets buried on my hard drive. Whatever. But I want to do it on my terms, so if that means I won’t hit 50,000 words this year, I don’t care.
The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to get people to quit wishing they had more time and to start writing. They have succeeded in getting me moving again, but I don’t think the format is ideal for me. If I continue to participate, I’ll proudly be one of those people who signs up, gets to 20,000 words, and then disappears, dragging the region’s average down.
Spoiler Alert! (this does not contain spoilers)
I am not into tumblr and I have not Googled this. My only source is Razorblade Sammich. The short version is this: Someone at Microsoft accidentally pressed the “Send The Mass Effect 3 Beta To Everyone” button and now the internet is full of Mass Effect 3 spoilers because some people are dicks and like to post spoilers in places where people don’t want them. Hence, I avoid the tumblr and the Google.
I recently became a “Software Engineer” at my job. The big thing that new developers are aiming for is the “Deploy” button. It allows us to publish our own changes to the production server, rather than having to undergo code reviews every time we do something.
We don’t have Deploy because if we did, we would break shit. We could do things like render our entire system inoperable or expose sensitive financial information simply by forgetting a single line of code. There are failsafes. For some things, even people with Deploy have to undergo code reviews, just to be safe. Shit is locked down.
I find it amazing that Microsoft didn’t have the necessary hurdles in place to prevent someone from accidentally sending the super-secret build to the “All Beta Testers Group”. I’m a terrible programmer, and I’m pretty sure I could hack something together for them.