Emmy 18 Month/Family Pictures
Emmy just turned a year and a half, so we went to get new family pictures as well as ones of just her. Thought I'd make a slideshow of some of them and post it here. Theres one of them that we call the "Hulk picture". See if you can guess which one it is.
Finding My Place in the Gaming World: Is There a Place for an Arcade Today?
This is sort of the journal entry of a soul searching individual. You see, I have no idea what I should do with the rest of my life as far as a job goes. I'm happily married, and have a beautiful daughter, but keeping the bills paid has become more and more an exercise in repetition. It's come to the point that I've decided I need to find something I enjoy doing, instead of just doing whatever comes along. My only jumping off point in this search, is my love of video games.
The world of video games is a big beast though, so where do I fit? Since I was little, I loved writing. I would create characters and tell stories of their adventures, I would even plot out and write sequels to my favorite games (not the perverted kinds). Around high school that all died down, but now I wonder if I could find a place in the struggling video game journalism field. It's the reason this whole website exists actually, so that I can get as much practice writing as possible and maybe get noticed while doing so.
Whether or not that pans out, there's another side of games that I want to explore. My family has the small business owner spark running all through it. From my fathers athletic store, to my uncles men's clothing store, to their fathers painting business, the Young's have always tried their hand at owning businesses. I definitely have that spark, and in searching for a business that I would want to run, I thought of video games.
My small town has very little to do in it, in fact most Saturday nights during high school were spent hanging out in 24 hour gas stations for my friends and I. If you weren't uncool like us though, you drank somewhere, or did worse. I would love to combine my fondness for video games, with a business that might give kids in my town a place to hangout, and an arcade is my best idea to do that. The only question is, can an arcade thrive in this day and age?
Before I got married and my income was still expendable, I got right to work achieving this dream. I hopped on eBay and before long I had a coin-op pool table and 4 arcades, Space Invaders Part II housed in a Space Invaders Deluxe machine, Captain America stuffed into a generic 2 player cabinet, a 1970's OXO pinball, and the unique but failed experiment that was Hyperball, a blend of video game and pinball that I can't get enough of.
But now I'm forced to pay bills instead of buy new machines, so the next step is a much harder one to make. I need to go back to school, as well as start searching for a better paying job that affords me some amount of extra income, and once I have that to fall back on, dive in head first by getting a loan to get a ton more machines and a building for them to go. I'm just not sure if I can take that step with the sinking feeling that it will ultimately fail.
I could bail out now and just sell Captain America on eBay and OXO to my dad (he's a nut for pinball machines of that era), and then keep the others for myself, but I'll always kick myself for not trying. So its do or die time. I don't know how it will work out, but I have to at least try. Let's just hope my town appreciates me trying to keep their kids out of trouble, and supports it.
Getting in Shape
End Weight: 230
Total Weight Loss: 18.5 pounds
So that's it, I've made it to the end. I must have messed up my calculations in there at some point because I thought I was at 19 pounds. It might be a little weird though because the 230 weigh in was done after being up all night working and during the week I always weighed myself in the morning. I think there's a difference in your weight when you first wake up but I don't know exactly what it is.
Now, let's break down the game with a nice, convenient list of the good and bad, because everyone loves lists.
The Good
- Takes what Wii Fit started to the next level: Wii Fit proved that people would buy fitness games, unfortunately it was extremely flawed. EA Sports Active helps take this blossoming genre the next step by fixing many of the things that Wii Fit did wrong.
- Workout is strung together: One of the most annoying things Wii Fit did was kick you back to the menu after every activity. Not only did this break up the flow of your workout but it left you to decide what to do next, and when people are given the choice they probably won't choose the tough exercises very often. Active makes up its own routine for you, which can be tweaked, so that it can concentrate on different parts of the body and keep your workout moving along and your heart rate up.
- Doesn't punish or scold you: The last thing I want my video games to do is to yell at me for being lazy when I've been too swamped to get in an exercise. Several days during my 30 day challenge we had to do hay, meaning I got plenty of workout tossing and stacking hundreds of heavy bales. When I returned to Active the next day, it was nice to see that it had simply counted my missed day as a rest day and let me get back onto my schedule without any problems.
The Bad
- Janky Wii controls: You can't really fault the games very much for this type of stuff on the Wii. It can still be frustrating when the game has to stop you if it didn't read that you had lifted your arm because the Wiimote or Nunchuk were facing the wrong way, or you moved it too fast. Perhaps Motion Plus will fix issues like this in the future.
- Poor quality equipment: The pack-in accessories for this game are some of the worst I've ever seen. My leg strap ripped in the first few days and only held together because of the edging, and reports are rampant of broken resistance bands. Even if the resistance band doesn't rip, its the flimsiest thing I've ever seen and provides almost no actual resistance without folding it over a ton to try to make it shorter.
- Could make better use of the balance board: The balance board seems tacked on. I imagine they were trying to separate their game from Wii Fit in consumers minds so that people wouldn't think they needed a balance board to play it. Still, the activities that actually allow the board offer little to no extra benefit from using it.
I hope that the fitness genre keeps improving. Active comes much closer to my ideal fitness game, but it could do so much more. I want a game that not only caters to already fitness conscious people, but to those who haven't exercised in years. You could allow the game to offer up advice on eating habits, calorie intake, stretches, and a slew of other things so that those who know nothing about being active can have help getting into a healthy lifestyle.
It was daunting for me to adjust my eating habits as I didn't have any experience with dieting. I wasn't a fat kid, I have just gained weight slowly over the last 8 or 9 years since I quit cross country after my freshman year of high school. It would have been a much easier transition if Active was the trainer to help me through it.
Like I said though, EA Sports Active is a huge step in the direction of how I want to see fitness games go, and given that its only the second major release in the genre (unless you count that EyeToy fitness game) that's impressive. It has been the first step on my way to getting back in shape, I now have the confidence to get outside for morning runs which I will probably do from now on instead of playing the game. Still, it's nice to have around in case there's a rainy or muggy day and I want to stay inside to exercise. Instead of doing it on a boring, monotonous machine I can play Active. So while I may have sounded harsh against it sometimes, I do think it's the best game out there right now for getting into shape, and would recommend it to anyone who's looking to do that.
Retroactively Follow my Saga:
Random Updates
I haven't updated here in a long time so here are some random tidbits. Unfortunately since our external hard drive has crapped out with all of our stuff on it we have no room to unload recent pictures, so I can't post any.
Emmy has grown extremely fond of the word "no", and says it for pretty much everything. When you try to give her a kiss and she doesn't want one she'll yell no and turn away. When you try to take something away from her she'll yell no and run away with it. She doesn't always yell it though, she's also mastered the sweet and innocent way of saying it that almost makes you want to give in.
She's also obsessed with the "Where'd it go?" game, which is hiding anything and then asking where'd it go over and over, then pulling it out and laughing hysterically. Her version of where'd it go is more like ere'd ee go however, and her favorite where'd it go item to hide is the television, meaning she'll turn it off on us and then stand there asking us where it went.
She enjoys watching us play EA Sports Active and grabs another one of the wii remotes to start lifting up and down along with us. I've been working on cleaning out a room for her to eventually move into and have a place to keep half of her toys as they are taking over the living room. That's about it for now. Maybe I'll have a montage of pictures at some point soon as eventually I'm just going to buy a new hard drive.
Story
I wrote this story quite awhile ago. I've always been interested in paranormal stuff so it figures I'd choose to write about that. I'm also fascinated by biblical type stories even though I don't believe in god, so it doesn't really mean anything. I would like to see something someday though, help me decide what I believe. Anyway, this story was getting lost in the Internet forum I posted it on so I thought I'd resurrect it here. I wrote it after a night of brainstorming while doing papers, which means I was on no sleep, and I've yet to really attempt to edit it or anything. Hopefully this will motivate me to expand details on whats already been written and write more, I just don't know where to go with it. Any constructive criticism or ideas for continuing the story is more then welcome.
You’ve always wanted to see something like it, at least that’s what you’ve always said. There are thousands of stories, but you’ve always wanted your own.
When you think about it there are more positives then negatives, delivering newspapers. That’s if you don’t weigh their value. That’s if you don’t assign them a certain point system based on their importance. Good money, only a couple hours a day, easy, no boss to answer to day in and day out. The one real negative though, is boredom. Mind numbing monotony.
On your first day, you think you’ll never be able to remember all those houses. Then your first week you start remembering parts of the route. Soon you stop using your list altogether. It’s not long until if you stopped and thought about a specific house, you’d have no recollection of ever doing it. You delivered to it alright, but if you stop and think about it, you don’t remember it. You don’t think about it anymore. You just do it. Day in and day out you drive the same route. You do it subconsciously now.
Nothing can satisfy your insatiable appetite for music. Every day you download several CDs and everyday you exhaust them. Soon you turn to audio books, anything to combat the silence, take your mind off the utter repetitiveness of it all. There are only so many books in the world though. So many stories to be told.
Out there with no one else around, everyone asleep in their beds, your mind begins to race. You begin praying for something to happen. You imagine pulling up upon a raging inferno, the family screaming from the windows. You dream of happening upon a white van with no windows backed into the driveway of a house that you know the residents are gone from, masked men loading electronics into the back. You beg to see silhouetted figures, one on knees with hands up in fright, one with hands clenched together, the shadow of a knife facing downwards.
Just so you can have a really good story to tell. Something to come from the boredom you face everyday, besides paying the bills. How you raced into the inferno, pulling kids out as the fire trucks pulled up. How you watched from down the street as the police pulled into the driveway just before the white van took off. How you sat on the witness stand and pointed toward the defendant saying loudly, “It was him!”
The story you get however, isn’t the one you'd hoped for.
One moment it’s just another day, another paper to deliver, but as you look back to the road, your life changes. A white flash, all it takes to start a spiral. You glance up and a bright, glowing flash of a white… thing, flies across the road in a matter of seconds. The left side of the road where it came from was a deep valley yet it appeared to have come from no lower then the road, so it must have flew. It only took a second or less for it to be up the hill on the right side of the road and gone.
It’s at this point in your reiterating the story to family or friends that you’ll inevitably see eyes roll and hear countless theories. It was just a deer and you didn’t see it well. You were tired and your eyes were seeing flashes of light that weren’t there. You’re crazy.
This is however Michigan. Doing a paper route during all hours of the night you see endless amounts of deer. You can’t even keep count. None of these deer, however, glowed white, no matter how bright you had had your lights, and even if they had they wouldn’t have done so the entire time they went by, just as they passed in front of you. Not too mention you have never seen a deer move as fast as that thing had moved. You weren’t tired at all as well. You hadn’t started to doze, you didn’t feel tired, you showed no signs of exhaustion. As for the crazy, well, that’s for others to judge.
After it had passed you just stared in disbelief, forgetting what you were even doing. You always wanted a story of your own. A real life, in your life anyway, paranormal experience to call tell at will. Proof for all those years you had believed without any proof to offer. A reason to have believed all the Sylvia Brownes in life.
You didn’t realize that this was nothing. You didn’t realize what this would do to you. One moment your safe and ignorant and believe just because you want to believe. The next you’re grasping, clinging to any scrap of proof to prove your point, desperate to have something to show all those people who think your insane that you aren’t. You failed to realize that all this story would get you was ridicule. It started you down a life obsessed with what you thought was the necessity of proving to anyone and everyone that you are right, and what you saw was real.
One thing leads to another and before you know it…
Whoever said curiosity killed the cat wasn’t bullshitting you.
Whoever said ignorance is bliss wasn’t fucking around
P.S. I was definitely channeling Palahniuk when I wrote this.
Sappy
So, this is going to be extremely sappy. It might be because I've been up all night, but I feel like saying it.
Since high school, I've had no clue at all what I want to do with my life. I've gone back and forth trying to decide what degree I should be working toward and what career I should pursue. Luckily though, I found the woman I love very early. She was always very set on children. When this subject came up, I was always scared beyond belief. I knew I would want children, but I still had no idea what I was going to do with my life.
Now however, it's fairly obvious to me. I want to be a father first and foremost. Emmy has changed my life. Watching her play, and laugh and ramble in seemingly another language. When I get home after work and she sees me, and throws down whatever she was doing and runs across the room to me. When shes climbing up the stairs and stopping every few steps to make sure I'm still behind her, or holding my hand as we walk.
It doesn't really matter anymore what I want to do with my career, because I know what my life really is. My career is just simply a way to pay for that. I could do the worst job in the entire world and coming home to my children will make it all worth while.
2 Years
More Emmy Dancing
The band Fake Problems said that they wanted videos of babys dancing to their music. So I figured that would be a good follow up to my previous video of her dancing. Unfortunately she wasn't very into it and wouldn't stand up and dance like she usually does now because she was more intrigued by the ipod. Either way, here's the video that resulted.
