I just noticed that my last journal post was fresh after the news about my medical woes with not follow up. Things mostly worked out and I didn't have to go on dialysis. A friend organized a big charity stream event for an entire week to help me cover my ambulance bill (I was able to get Charity Care to handle my direct hospital bill issues).

It's been three years and I don't know if anyone still looks at my stuff beyond courtesy upon me faving something of theirs but my main worry has shifted from dying to homelessness.

I know I still have a handful of watchers on here. I was hospitalized on March 18th and eventually discharged on April 2nd.

Why did I go in?
* couldn't physically urinate
* I felt like shit.

What happened to me?
* Kidneys had shut down and filled entirely with blood.
* My scrotum had swollen to 3x normal size due to multiple abscesses and infections.
* My white blood cell count was high enough that my doctors were concerned about sepsis.
* My urethra was 75% necrotic.

Now I'm sweating my hospital bills (went to shit Southern Regional, they couldn't do anything for my problems and had me transferred to Emory Midtown) and set up with a catheter until my urethra recovers (a process that will only take weeks).

Nothing much else to say here. Hope you guys are all having a blast however you plan to spend it.

Me? I'm probably going to marathon Stardew Valley (I stopped somewhere in the middle of Winter, year 1) or Skyrim (seeing how far I can stretch non-radiant questing before I nudge the Main Quest to the point that dragons start spawning-I've finished the Companions, Dark Brotherhood AND the Thieve's Guild stuff).

I'm also considering heading out for Chinese, especially after one friend's present was 75% off on Steam.

Just watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZXCrw3DHbc

I've known these guys for over a decade and they basically do a (hopefully) weekly news podcast. Their third man was MIA so I was able to fill in for this cast and the following one, likely to be uploaded next Saturday.

This one has us discussing the gun-toting Russian robot FEDOR, using an ASCII mask to confuse robots, rumors of Will Smith in Disney's live action Aladdin, fast food mascots and their social media presence, the bankruptcy of Mad Catz and many other topics.

http://www.robotboombox.com/blag/th.....xt-buford-now/

#GrowtheShow

So this was apparently an ad campaign for gambling on boat races. Thought I'd share it around.

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0f1IexYmwsE&quot; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

After having some anxiety from trying to remember my SSN, I saw that I had a letter from Social Security today. Opening things up, I see a bunch of BASIC text numbers in an itemized list and begin to freak out. Turns out that it was just a friendly explanation of what'll be required to receive full benefits upon reaching the age of retirement (assuming we still have a country by then) and it gave a full listing of my reported taxes from the first year I worked (2002) to what I filed for last year.

As of 1 hour and less than 30 minutes into this new month, I lost my mother to cardiac arrest. The eerie thing is that yesterday was my father's birthday and he also passed away from cardiac arrest (though not on his birthday). I just got the call maybe 20 minutes ago. The worst thing is that all of my friends are asleep right now, compared to when my dad passed and I could vent on AIM.

I'm an orphan now. Yeah I was expecting it in the near future, but not this soon. We're talking more like a year or two from now.

My sister's coming down as soon as she can so we can take care of releasing mom's body and clearing up her apartment. I guess I'm still in shock about all of this.

In an effort to clear off the old post (and its very dated headcount) and as a means of potential income, I'm putting myself up for commission as a writer. My base rate is 1.5 cents per word, but this is negotiable. Simply send me a note with your premise and I'll give you a rough guess on how many hundreds of words I see it winding up, if I'm interested or confident I can even write such a piece.

If you'd care for a more recent sample of my written work, something beyond my Thanatopses, ask away.

So I've already preordered Pokemon Y. But I've actually still got some work to do on Black (train a few specific monsters for example). However, i simply don't have the room in my boxes for extra mons to train and raise, so here're a slew of legendaries that I'm willing to trade junk (or a Jolly Dream World Leafeon) for:


Cresselia Lv. 68 Lonely nature
Heatran lv. 68 Timid nature
Ho-Oh lv. 70 Docile nature
Latios lv. 35 Quiet nature
Cobalion lv. 45 Hasty nature with Pokerus
Virizion lv. 45 Naughty nature
Regigias lv. 1 Quiet nature
Uxie lv. 65 Impish nature
Reshiram lv. 100 Bashful nature
Raikou lv. 40 Quirky nature
Regirock lv. 65 Bold nature
Terrakion lv. 45 Bold nature
Reshiram lv. 70 Hasty nature
Groudon lv. 50 Hasty nature
Zapdos lv. 50 Relaxed nature
Articuno lv. 50 Impish nature
Moltres lv. 50 Serious nature
Rayquaza Lv. 50 Modest nature
Entei lv. 40 Jolly nature

When SquareSoft was producing Final Fantasy 6, it had three directors. However, when creating the characters of that awesome game, writing them was divided among several individuals; Hironobu Sakaguchi wrote for Terra and Locke, Yoshinori Kitase wrote for Celes and Gau, Testuya "Belts" Nomura wrote for Shadow and Setzer, Kayori Tanaka wrote for Edgar and Sabin, etc. Then after all that was done, Kitase figured out how all of these characters, with their separate motivations, would be able to come together to form a group. How would they be motivated by the story's main plotline and how are they gonna react to it? Well turns out that is exactly how traditional paper-and-pencil RPGs are put together. However, this charming take on character development isn't something really shared by modern FF games.

In fact, FF XIII does everything in reverse. Toriyama wrote the story based on the setting, before any characters were developed. He then handed the script off to Daisuke Watanabe and told him to write the characters into the story such that they would fit. For example, one of the characters had to try and commit suicide and they decided that the comic relief should do it. Why? I dunno. Cuz the other characters were wrapped up in other crap I guess, and Sazh wasn't doing anything. The Script called for it! Someone had to do it!

See, if you know your traditional gaming, they call this railroading. And it's severely frowned upon. Deciding how a game is going to play out ahead of time, independent of what your players want to do, or what your characters are gonna wanna do. It's really not very fun. It makes it difficult to develop an emotional connection, to feel like you have any freedom.

Player: "Y'know I have a motorcyleplane. Why don't I go somewhere safe."
Game: "No! No, you have to go to the next point. A-a-and it's the only place that you can go. And when you get there your motorcycleplane crashes, or runs out of gas, or explodes or something so you have to stay there."

Then the character and the player are both thinking "Oh my god this sucks! I don't even want to be here." Then the player is mad because they feel they're being punished for a decision that the game developers made, and while you could argue that it's good that the player is now emotionally invested somehow in the stupid thing that's happened, it's not good if that emotion invests them in getting off their lazy butt to return the game to the store that they bought it from.

That kind of thing makes the game less immersive. The player doesn't feel upset because of something that's happened in the game; they're upset because of something that the game did to them--the player. The only way to overcome an obstacle such as "I don't want to be here playing this game in this particular way" is to turn the game off. It's a real problem when the obstacles get so metaphysical that it seems like you could blame the game developers for sending you to stupid places.

I've been scraping by working a sort of bounty board for two different writing sites. One of these sites requires me to work on so many blog-style posts before I can be considered qualified enough to take on flat-rate payment assignments. These blog-style posts don't pay a flat rate but instead pay out royalties based on page views/clicks. All I ask if that you click over these links (all legit I assure you, despite their wonky URLs), read them if you're interested, and then close the window tab. I have yet to discover whether or not it pays out based on just views per day from a given IP or views period. So if you don't mind, maybe you could bookmark these links and click on them each once a day? I really appreciate it:

NEWEST ARTICLE AS OF 8/27/13: http://www.nursesschools.com/what-s.....rse-aid-13624/

http://wwwentertainmentcom.com/the-.....ne-aid-6519-2/

http://coinpriceguide.org/an-introd.....ting-aid-6476/

http://www.nursesschools.com/a-few-.....ses-aid-13575/

http://wwwonlinegamescom.com/the-hi.....pgs-aid-13580/ <--the one piece I've written that I most enjoyed researching

http://www.nursesschools.com/the-de.....rse-aid-13620/

I'll update this post with new links as I submit more pieces. Whatever best alerts people. The high concentration of nursing articles is due to categorization; so far the only Education & Science jobs they're offering are NOTHING but nursing jobs. Once I handle one more of them, my classification within E&S jobs will hit the next tier, giving me the opportunity to work on flat-rate payment assignments.

Not 24 hours after uploading my Thanatopsis pieces to this site, Elizabeth Sladen, Sarah Jane to you Whovians, passed away from cancer.