John Zeitler

I would love to say that today was normal, but when I didn’t get home until 12:45a last night and didn’t get to bed until almost 2a, one could easily say that I needed the rest. So I did.

Catch you folks tomorrow; hopefully the world will go easy on m– sorry, I really thought I could get through that sentence with a straight face.

The weekend is starting off in a good way. I had a fun time at an extra Smash session, then had a chat with Rick for a while. And now I’m off to bed, with nowhere to go in the morning. I can dig this.

(Yes, I know the lyric is actually “Situation: no win.” It just makes more sense as it’s misheard for the context… plus, it’s too peppy of a song to have such a depressing phrase as “no win”.)

This weekend has been… let’s not talk about it. It’s been frustrating. However, I’ve found the source of the trouble. See, every time I’ve needed something to happen, I’ve used the phrase “With any luck…”, forgetting one very important point.

My luck is, traditionally, horrible.

I would love to tell of the festivities partaken of over this past weekend. I would tell of grand adventures, heartfelt conversations, and an epic quest not soon to be forgotten.

But a) I’m really, really tired still and b) getting to the merrymaking was a journey through several levels of Hell.

On the bright side, I did get a lot of reading done. So there’s that.

Sorry I don’t have anything better to offer tonight than an excuse. Tomorrow I should be more able to be coherent.

Okay. Really, I’m going to bed early. Fortunately I have someone who can take calls in my absence tonight…

…uh, on second thought, maybe you’d be better off e-mailing me, and I’ll get you back in the morning.

Looking at me, many people assume I’m either younger or older than I am. When I say I’m 29, people look at me incredulously. The problem is, though, that the aphorism “Age is just a number” is a total lie. I’m almost thirty. Most days I still feel like a little kid, but sometimes I start to feel the weight of that “mere number”.

Case in point. Last night, after getting everything taken care of for the next morning, I decided that I wanted to play a little bit of a game to unwind. I started playing around 7:30p, and I selected a puzzle game on the Xbox Live Arcade– Yosumin Live, which got some mediocre reviews but is still an engaging game (I strongly recommend waiting until it becomes a Deal of the Week title, and also getting the $1 Adventure Mode DLC). My first goal was to grab one of the more interesting achievements: clear a stage in under 8 seconds. After managing that, though, I decided to keep going as it was only 8p or so and I was still a little wired. So I kept playing through the “Endless” mode, since there are achievements for reaching 100 million points and for completing Stage 50.

This was both a good and bad idea. It was good because I wasn’t aware that the score achievement was cumulative (the description doesn’t say so), so I got that somewhere around Stage 40. It was bad because I got to Stage 40 around 11:00 and didn’t stop then. I knew I should have stopped. I even saw the clock, and said out loud, “I should be in bed.” But I didn’t stop. I reached Stage 50 around 11:45. Fatigue really had started to set in, though, and even though I banged my head against it for about half an hour longer, I could not clear that last stage (even though I got a luck-based achievement during the course of that assault). It should be noted that the requirements to clear that stage were far beyond Stage 49′s requirements (49: “Clear 10 square sets, and a total of 600 pieces”; 50: “Clear the entire board four times and a total of one thousand pieces”). And I came within 32 pieces of finishing before time ran out on my best run. I’ve learned a few tricks since then, though, so I should be able to get through it the next time I give it a try.

Which would be a Friday night, or sometime when I don’t need to be awake in the morning.

Today did not start out well at all… those of you who follow the Twitter feed knew that I had run into some trouble last night. Something I ate, naturally, which was not at all happy about the matter and wanted out the emergency exit, so to speak. Given that I had been sick last week as well, I figured it was the best time to take a trip to a medical professional… who said I was just dehydrated, that the cold was nothing serious nor was it related to the nausea, and that I should be fine with an IV. I asked if I could just drink even more gatorade than I already was in lieu of getting stuck with needles, and that seemed to be an acceptable answer.

They also sent me away with a prescription for an anti-nausea drug. It wasn’t one I had heard of before, but apparently medical insurance does more than just irritate me: the ten pills prescribed would have cost me $25. EACH. So I didn’t get it filled because, well, I don’t have $250 to throw away on ten pills that were prescribed “as a precaution”.

Anyway, after a nap, some light dinner, and lots and lots of gatorade (it’s a good thing I got many flavors that I like, otherwise it would get really nasty after a while), I felt good enough to play around with Street Fighter IV for a while. 2-D games are a blessing for the ill gamer; the absence of a first-person perspective cuts down the chance for motion sickness. However, the sheer frustration of SF4 induces another medical condition: high blood pressure. Why didn’t I give up when Sagat managed to get three Perfect rounds off against me in a row? Well, a) I hate Sagat, b) it was the farthest I’ve ever gotten on Medium, so I felt committed to it, c) I really hate Sagat, d) there was an achievement in it for me if I finished Arcade Mode on Medium or higher, and e) I mentioned that I hate Sagat, right? So yeah. I wound up subjecting myself to more frustration than was really necessary– and then some, because after I beat Seth (the cheapest bastard EVER) I figured it would be another easy ten points to go online and get my first win there. Yeah, that wound up being another half an hour as I got my ass handed to me by nearly everyone… but in the end, by golly, I did get that coveted W.

Now that I have the irritation out of the way, I can play the game to have fun again, by dropping the difficulty down to Easy and just cutting loose. It can be easy to forget that games are supposed to be fun, but in all honesty if we lose sight of that, then it’s time to consider taking a break from gaming. In my case, it’s not the first time I found myself at an impasse with gaming– I got back into fighters (twice) because I was overdosed on RPGs, so I’ve learned the value of switching things up every once in a while… Speaking of that, I really should get back to Eat Lead later this week.

Anyway, for now, good night, all… hopefully tomorrow I’ll post good news without any new complications cropping up.

I’ve been… less than useful of late, particularly as my sleeping has been repeatedly knocked out of whack by circumstances. I’m trying to correct this. However, it should probably be noted that one of the reasons my sleep has been truncated was waiting for 1 vs. 100 Live to start up; last week it was a bust because of the completely unannounced attendance cap. Long story short, there was an Extended Play (ie not live) show running tonight, I was one of about 80,000 people playing, and I’m hooked. More to the point, Extended Play sessions are going to be run all week in advance of reasonable live sessions next weekend. Which honestly makes me very happy.

Good night, everyone.

Yeah, so much for consistency. On the bright side, unlocking weapons in Team Fortress 2 is both easier and more irritating.

But now I have the Sandvich. So everything is all right.