Puzzled Piece

It doesn't fit anywhere.  It thinks differently from almost everything from the same box.  I think the boxes got knocked over and it got mixed in.  It has gotten along well enough with the other pieces.  It looks like a bit of the sky that meets the land in the horizon.  I think the colors match but I could be fooling myself.  Its the shape too.  It's almost like none of the style the other pieces are.  I'm pretty sure I've looked at all the edge pieces but can't find anywhere it connects to.  I could look through the other box but that will take up so much effort and I'm not interested in completing that picture.  The thing is I'm almost convinced it doesn't belong here.  I'm keeping it in a box of its own until the time might come that it is needed.  But that may never happen.  I lose interest easily and am already half hearted in my attempts to get the whole picture.

Year end company party

Bigger companies really have a different culture to them.  The Christmas parties I went to while working for smaller companies had the same basic units: drinks, dancing, raffles, a small program...  The company party I went to last night had things amped far higher; like the song seems to be constructed the same but the levels were different.  The hosts were hired professionals rather than people from HR. The venue was a thumping club rented out for the night instead of a small hall or the boss' back yard.  The prizes were the recent phone/tablet hot items as opposed to large electrical appliances.  I remember there being a sack of rice as one of the prizes people were talking about when I just got hired somewhere.  I'm pretty sure something like 'twerking' being the dance of the night is just a 'sign of the times' or weird cultural zeitgeist that my current industry is in.  "It goes up to eleven." 

The event had a theme that employees should dress up to but turned out to be a Halloween type thing which meant guys dressed up however and the women... God bless 'em.  It's like some of them were figuring out how to get out of the house with the least amount of cloth possible and still stick to the theme.  Like Amanda Seyfried's mouse ears in Mean Girls.  Whatever complaints I had about the lack of food or my team ditching the plan to meet at the office without telling me had faded into the background as I joined the rest of the men in ogling what was on display.  Oh; and fedoras everywhere.

All in all it was fun.  I got to meet a couple of old friends.  One that caught me completely by surprise and brought me back to grade school of all things.  Seeing them made a link in my mind to the past that jump started all the comparisons in the first place.  But no matter how complicated things are now in terms of the presentation, the message was still the same.  As a year end celebration of hard work.

Gadget Lust Or Keeping Interested?

Earlier today; I bought a Tech21 Sansamp GT2.  It sounds so good.  I was trying to find some way to continue practicing the couple of songs I was trying to learn on Rocksmith  when unable to use the PS3.  The living room television is shared by my mother's show viewing and video game playing that my brother and I get into.  I've been finding less and less opportunity to get some time on the PS3 just out of pure luck.  Practicing on the cheapo amp and guitar in my room lacks the interesting punch I get from listening to the song while I play.  I've tried doing the same with youtube as my backing track but found the sound I was getting from my amp unsatisfactory.  I figured the sansamp would solve that by modeling sounds that I was expecting to hear when trying to copy the performance on the original songs.  It doesn't make me sound better than my real skill level but it does make things much more interesting since what I hear from my playing is closer to what the guitar sounds like in the original.  After playing along with videos for Blitzkrieg Bop and Say It Ain't So and what I remember of how to play Volcano Girls; I was amazed by how different the amp sounded.  It had way more heft on it when playing the power chords, much more than it was capable of when I would try messing with the EQ knobs to match the crunch.  Then, I spent a lot of time just messing around with all the switches and knobs to see what other sounds I could get out of it and kept coming up with interesting ones.  I suppose something like it is overkill for someone like me who can barely get from one power chord to the next, but it has got me very interested in continuing my practices.  There's just so much it can do.

So tired; my writing is getting very incoherent.

Trying To Understand Why I play What I Play

After another frustrating session of getting my ass handed to me in Blacklight Retribution I started wondering why I kept playing that game even though I thoroughly suck at it.  I'm mostly feeding and not really improving in any one of the weapons.  I have had more success in Ghost Recon Online and have only gotten frustrated at GRO only when the team totally falls apart.

I have come to a few conclusions.  I like the challenge.  GRO still offers a challenge but not as strongly as Blacklight does.  There are very different nuances that I have to learn.  I have to know how to flank.  The GRO Recon class has Oracle which lets the whole team see enemy positions on the map.  In BR, everyone has that ability.  This creates some very interesting ways of approaching the enemy.  I've seen natural flanking occur without audio cues from team members.  Seeing where the enemy is and how they're grouped together gives a team an opportunity to react or prepare.

I think its that challenge that appeals to me.  This is the game I've heard the least from other players.  Its the smaller, quicker maps that frustrate me the most.  Its because it is more based on twitch skill and really fast flanking.  Helo Deck is the most action I have had but the least effective I've been.

So much more to learn.  So many possible options that I need to recognize which is the most optimal.  I'm having fun but I'm starting to get scared of getting a heart attack from the frustration.  LOL.

Black Mirror

Just wanted to say; I think Black Mirror is insanely good.

Microtransactions kinda screwed me over

Logged into Ghost Recon Online to check out what changes have happened to a really fun game.  It turns out that now the Critical Hit rate increase I have been chasing on the default gun for the Specialist class is now gated by the weapons.  And the weapons are now in classes so... I have to buy the near top tier gun, which is expensive (either with real world money or in game credits) or keep getting trounced by people who have spent on it.  There must be some people who held on to their credits and bought up the weapon scale instead of what I did which was buy accessories for the default gun and worked the experience route to get more punch per hit.

My play style has been mostly creep and take out people running out of cover without backup. I have gotten told by other players that I'm a camper even though I rack a good amount of points playing how I play.  Now that I'm gated from proceeding further when it comes to dealing damage; I'll have to play even more cautious.  I should just take up sniper rifles and at least be hated for exactly that: camping.

Rocksmith; why you so crazy?

I bought the ESP LTD EC-10 to replace the very old and heavily modded 1979 Fender American Standard Stratocaster I traded for a brand new acoustic guitar.  That old fender came with a beat up hard case, a couple of old zoom pedals (one of which was fried), an angled cable, a Fernandes tuner, and a ghost of a better life it had before landing in my hands.  It looks as much as it did when I first got it.  The body has a few dings and the back plate missing.  The tremolo seems to have been replaced; the arm was missing.  The frets had pits and the back of the neck had the finish on it falling apart.  The nut used to have a locking mechanism but that's gone. And I didn't love every bit of it.  I usually eat that sort of stuff up.  But this time it was different.  I didn't fall in love with whatever nostalgia it could have possibly given me as a geek.  The guitar's soul seems to have gone passed that way before it was traded to me.

The guitar I traded it for was brand new from Yupangco (I forget the brand).  A friend helped me pick one out.  I just have to add; it is a very weird experience picking up a Gibson Les Paul Standard, really holding one in my hands, and learning that it cost around a hundred thousand pesos.  I brought it to the office and the other guy seemed reluctant to make the trade.  It  may have had something to do with his offer being made out loud to anybody who could hear while we were out drinking.  I guess I wasn't drunk enough at the time to realize a good deal.  That was a lot of stuff for the acoustic, even though the electric looked like it was ready for the trash.

I had always wanted to learn to play an instrument and the type of music I listen to I guess would point the way of the electric guitar.  I have had a couple of cheap acoustics before and have tried learning chords/tabs from the little magazines anyone could get anywhere.  But I wanted something more.  Something that sounded closer to what I was listening to.  The Fender had enough appeal to get me through the door of practicing more than 15 minutes at a time.  Well, that was until I grew tired of it.  Or maybe something else took up my time.  I can't remember which.

Fast forward to the release date of Rocsmith 2013, which I picked up for the PS3.  I figured the old slab of wood might have another chance at seeing daylight.  Gamifying guitar lessons seemed like a pretty good fit considering my current interests of reaching back to music I listened to in high school and picking up video games again.  What I learned was that it was not an easy instrument to learn with.  At least not this particular example.  What electronics were in there had aged ungracefully.  The tremolo and missing string lock made sure that it kept going out of tune when I would strum too enthusiastically.  The back of the neck kept popping off bits which did not give me any assurance that I wasn't hurting the guitar.

But I liked the game.  I was getting into it.  I needed a new controller.  I settled on the EC-10 that is a cheap Les Paul copy that was at least built to be easier to learn with.  It has nothing fancy and does not give me the illusion of becoming a rock god after what the video game touts as its 'learn guitar in 60 days' or whatever it promises.  What it says to me is: it won't fall apart.  It wont go wildly out of tune whenever I sneeze in a different room in a house two miles away.  It won't buzz and hum like I'm looking at it the wrong way (although I have to admit that single coil pickups are very 'hummy' by nature).  It gives me confidence that even though I don't have talent, it will have just as much patience as I have.  Maybe even more.  It'll wait for me to come around and give me another chance when I want to practice again.

The game itself speaks to how I learn things.  If I make a mistake; do the whole phrase again.  If I get better; another layer of difficulty is added.  The only song I've been able to 100%  has been Blitzkrieg Bop in lead mode.  The rhythm mode is still too difficult for me.  Right now I'm getting into learning Say It Ain't So.  The game has made it so that everytime I practice, it lasts for about an hour.  Being a gadget whore, I've started looking at what I could add to my 'rig'.  I only have the guitar and a Washburn Bad Dog 25R for an amp.  I have been lusting at the pictures of the little Blackstar amp, Zoom multi effects pedals, or the good old Boss pedals...  But no, it has to stop there.  I'll live in my little fantasy land in my head while I'm practicing and leave the gadgets in the magazines.