Dark Souls Update 2.5

Today we learn my greatest enemy is still gravity.

Dark Souls Update 2

Oh hey, I promised you guys something not related to videogames, didn't I? Yeah, sorry.

Dark Souls Challenge Update

I've tweeted the details of my pain and suffering thus far, but I really don't care for brevity when it's forced on me. So instead, I'm doing a full update of my progress over the past few weeks. (I might ramble on a bit, so you're encouraged to skim)

Hell on Wheels Rant

I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to write this email on Sunday afternoon, but I figured you might find it amusing:

A Challenge Appears

I've been forgetting to put these jump breaks in lately, so if the main page of the blog gets ridiculously long, that would be why.

10 Outrageous Headlines That Will Grab Your Attention

Sorry to be misleading, but I don't have a list of items for you. I generally find those articles annoying, but at least I get it. There are two simple reasons why those sites use such shallow tactics: because they work, and because they have to.

About Coping

Our family cat passed away relatively peacefully. I wasn't there the moment it happened, or for the burial, but I saw her the night before. If you'd rather not read about this part, skip the next paragraph. Everything following it is more central to the point anyway.

Ghosts in the Machine

Having found the stories left behind by programmers past, I'm more than a little intimidated.

Just not buying it

Tonight's Lesson In Stuff You Should Have Already Learned In Preschool: Greed is not good.

Just one more thing

I'm going to allow anonymous comments again, with word verification still disabled. I'm doing this again because I really do want people to feel like they can speak their minds freely and easily here if they want to.

I'm also going to moderate all comments before they're allowed to be displayed on the blog, because I'd like to pretend I'm the president of Egypt or something for a while. We'll see how it goes.

Just figured self-congratulations were in order

It's been almost a year since I got out of school, but I've finally been offered a full-time job. Great pay, great benefits, nice people... I hope I can actually do the job they've hired me for. I'm pretty nervous, but prepared to dig in and do whatever's necessary.

Now might be a decent time to speculate about everything that has led me to this point, and the issues that have made finding good work so difficult (the economy, state education, the Catch-22 mentalities of major technology companies), but instead I'd rather just relax and count my blessings for now, and maybe get some studying done, because I have a good deal of new technology to learn in the near future. I certainly hope I'm as smart as the folks at the State Education Department seem to think I am.

Also, I've been meaning to practice drawing more, since it's apparently a hobby I care about a lot. I should really do that. I'll go do that just as soon as I'm finished with this.

Peace and love, readerkin. I'm sure I'll have more for you soon enough.

Just thinking about war and peace

No, not the book. This'll be much shorter.

Just a little pretentious?

I had a thought: Is it wrong to look down on someone else for the way in which they enjoy a piece of media? The knee-jerk answer is "Yes, you pretentious jerk," but I'd like to explore it a bit. Maybe I just love to hear myself write.

Just pondering social pressures

I got involved in another marriage discussion (but not that kind), so I thought I'd continue my musings here. This has to do with the way our culture likes to romanticize marriage, and why I have a problem with it.

Just going to define marriage for you

In an effort to avoid any future discussions about this, I've attempted to compile all my thoughts on the subject in this post. Maybe it's arrogant of me to think that a single blog post could effectively address every point of this issue, but I've given it my best shot.

Just needed to rant about charity

I found myself on Facebook, as I often do. A comedian I'm following posted a link which showed up in my feed. It's an indiegogo project titled Education for Rwandan Orphans, which seeks to... well, this snippet from the page itself explains it nicely:

Just ranting about the dangerous invisible man (or woman)

As I alluded to earlier, there is a reason that I worry about letting people speak their mind without having to show their face.

Just a couple of updates first

Before I dive into the subject I meant to opine on today, I have some brief updates.

First, I've been having more interviews lately, and have another on Monday, so I may yet find full-time employment soon, but even if I don't, I've signed on with a staffing company so I can start doing temp work. Data entry might not be exciting, but it's probably better than what I could be doing otherwise.

Also, I've been toying with an idea to write a book about my faith. It still surprises some people to hear that I identify myself as Christian. Well, it's understandable. There are certainly enough religious people in this world that I do not see eye-to-eye with. The way some of them talk about their religious beliefs has made me decidedly reluctant to associate myself with the term Catholic. Anyway, I've been thinking about writing a full-length book about my own experiences with faith, my previous crises with it, and the way in which I have resolved my views today. I mean, we don't seem to hear very much in the news and media from religious people who think the true wisdom of the Bible can't be grasped by getting hung up on the literal translation of individual verses. We don't seem to hear much from people whose faith brought them humility. And we don't hear much from Christians who want us to love and accept homosexuals. Well, maybe we should.

Of course, the obvious downside is finding people who would even want to read such a thing. I doubt conservative Catholics would want to hear my thoughts on our religious and moral differences, and atheists undoubtedly don't care about my experiences with faith. So, what's the target audience here? Would any of you be interested in reading a book like that? If so, please let me know, because at the moment I'm unsure if there is any point in writing it at all.

Just giving up on anonymous comments

Well, I think it's time for the open comment experiment to end. In the time since it began, I've had an unending stream of spam comments. Most of them are caught by the spam filter and don't get published, but a few slip through. Besides, whether they are published or not, I'm still bothered by their being there because I get comment moderation notifications every day now. I could just turn those off, but then I'd never be notified even when my input is actually needed, and that would defeat the purpose.

Anyway, I'm going to require a log in again for commenting. If you have a Google account or something similar already then this should be no problem for you. I still won't include a word verification, though, since everybody seems to hate those. I've never minded them, but then again, I was fine with the idea of getting a full body scan at the airport, so I'm hardly the right person to ask about that.

Really, even if spammers weren't an issue at all, there is a tremendous risk in offering people the ability to comment anonymously. The reassurance of an anonymous platform leads people to believe (often accurately) that what they say online will have no consequences for them, and frees a darker part of their psyche to express itself without censorship or reason. I could easily write a whole post about this phenomena. In fact, I think I'll do just that, but not right now. I need to go get something to eat.

So, in summary, while I do still want you to feel free to say anything you want about my purposeless ramblings here, I'd like it if I could know who you are while you're doing it. My real identity is clearly visible to you, after all. If it weren't, it might seem like I have something to be ashamed of...

Well, that's all for now. Peace and love to you, sons and daughters of Readerland.

Just added some new random greetings

Just in case anyone actually enjoys or even notices the random subheadings on this blog, I added a few more quotes, and deleted some of the old ones that I decided weren't all that entertaining.

If you happen to be one of those No-Script types, I'd appreciate it if you enabled JavaScript for this site. Yeah, the page will take an extra fraction of a second to load, but come on, I put actual work into this. And really, what's the worst that could happen to you here? It's not like you're surfing RedTube.

Anyway, if you're curious, here are the new additions:

• "I have never been in any rich man's house which would not have looked the better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all that it held." - William Morris (1834-96)
• "Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl." - Benjamin Jowett
• "The higher the monkey climbs, the more you can see of its arse." - old proverb
• "an unfortunate lunatic... a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain." - Examiner

That last one was written in a review of the work of William Blake, but it seemed oddly fitting here.

Anyway, I hope somebody enjoys them. Peace and love, readership.

Update:
One more for you:

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire