Drive

I just watched an amazing RSA Animate video which is a video that sketches out a lecture, usually in a comedic fashion, that talked about Drive. RSA Animate: Drive - The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is a talk I don't want to forget so I'm writing down these three factors that lead to a productive, healthy drive:

  • Atonomy - "Our desire to be self-directed"
  • Mastery - "Our urge to get better at stuff"
  • Making a Contribution

Rsaanimate

Reach

This game has dominated my life so much in the past few months that I feel that I need to write something, anything on it. There were a few days where I'd check the Bungie.net set religiously along with IGN and Gamespot. I was, and still am, on the tip of spear in terms of new images, video, leaks, and general information. Aside from campaign, I looked for anything and everything I could feast my greedly little eyes on. Why am I such a Halo fanboy? The big thing in Reach, for me, is definitely the customization. I mean, the amount of combinations is ridiculous. I just did the math and not including Elites, the alien badies you can play as, there are roughly sixteen trillion, that's right trillion, different combinations. So pumped!

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Decibel Venn Diagram

So, I have a brother and a sister and we grew up with this other group of three children who were almost exactly the same in age. We still get together a few times in the year even though some of us have moved out and live in other provinces and when we do it tends to get pretty heated and pretty loud. Inspiration hit the nerd sector of my brain when I got the idea to do this venn diagram. I brainstormed with my sister approximate decimals of each group of kids then I went to work on Adobe Illustrator. I think it turned out pretty good for my first vector image project. Even though it took 8 hours plus...

Venn
The coloured venn diagram is my family and the grayscale is the girls (that family has all daughters) and every mini-venn is them again. This was the best way I came up with representing every interaction. For example, the very middle is everyone. The darkest section in the purple would be my older brother, younger sister, and the eldest girl from the other family. Nifty? Yeah. Nerdy. Oh, hell yeah! It was a hit when I showed my friends what I'd done - they're already talking about making prints and shirts. Even people I don't even know are commenting on it. It's actually pretty flattering.

Self-Improvement a la Demetri Martin

After watching Demetri Martin's stage show "If I", I decided I could use a more structured method for evaluating my daily routine in a way to aid in my self-improvement. I decided to adopt a similar system with a few modifications. Thus, the Self-Improvement 35-Point System was reborn. In this system I have seven categories with five tasks in each. Some tasks are simple little things like making the bed, others are a little more out there like cooking a certain amount of meals, and some are kind of oddball like one a took straight from Demetri - demonstrate moral courage. Some tasks need to be completed every day and others just once or twice. I even added a bonus with more difficult tasks.

Thingiez

Every Sunday night, you tally up your score, jaught down some numbers, then start a new sheet. Revisions of the system might be needed if some tasks are too easy and the bonus should change. Well, let's see how long this phase starts. I'm also considering keeping this secret from everyone I know for as long as I can. I'm thinking 100 weeks of keeping them in the dark. Because it's kind of pretentious, right?

Well, that counts as a blog post for me. Three more to go.

Thousand Song Cloud

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One of the advantages of having a Last.fm account is that you can make these sweet tag and album clouds. It quickly, in under a second, takes all the artists you've listened too and puts them down in this sort of collage. The cloud is formatted so that the text size reflects how much you listen to that specific artist. Anyways, this is what my artist cloud looks like after a thousand songs. Neat, eh?

Oh Canada!

My home and native land. Well, I just realized how awesome Canada is again. This image says a lot of things. I'm a little disappointed at our ecological footprint because I thought we were a lot more conscious of our evironment than others - that may be just because I was educated in the field along with like-minded people. What really blew me away was the last three circles. Canada pretty much has a quarter of the natural world in it's pocket. That's insane!

Awesomecanada

Wildbow Poaching

In an older post I talked about how I managed to squeeze the awesomeness that is Final Fantasy Tactics onto my not-so-awesome netbook in all it's glory. I've been playing it on and off ever since - in the past two days I've been playing it pretty much non-stop. Once you get passed the first few battles you're imagination when it comes to team building makes the game highly addictive. I wouldn't be surprised if I was reaching double-digits on my game completion count in this little gem but I still run into hiccups here and there. Today, I ran into a rather big one. If you're not some kind of Final Fantasy Tactics idiot savant you can ignore the next few paragraphs. If you are, kudos and weep with me brother.

It's important to note that I'm kind of a purist when it comes to this game. I want all the special characters (including Rad, Alicia, and Lavian), all the special abilities, and all the unique equipment. This leads to a lot of second-guessing and hair-pullery.

Problem the First: For whatever reason, I thought that you had an extra character slot in your roster for another generic. I attribute this to the fact that I was ignorant on how to obtain special characters in my young, foolish days. So, I did what any self-respecting tactian would do - I went strait to the Soldier Office and picked up the first 80+ Brave, Scorpio, renamed him after myself, and molded him into an amazing soldier who stole the Genji gear from the Silver Ogre, one of many amazing feats of awesomeness. I started to notice things getting a little cramped when I picked up Meliadoul after absolutely handing it to Zalera and his posse of undead warriors. I counted two, not one, two, characters yet to be added to my roster. Stupid Byblos. So long super king Secret Hunt / Steal ninja thief. You will be missed. This also ties into my second problem.

Problem the Second: I want all the rare items. All of them. Even the shitty ones. Even the ones that you'll never touch because a superior version exists. Even the FS Bag. What's the FS Bag you say? Never heard of it you say? Well, it's pretty much the holy grail of uselessness in Final Fantasy Tactics. There is a beast in this game that is so rare that you never, ever see one in a random battle or a story battle. The only way to see the majesty that is the Wildbow is to breed one of it's lesser siblings, Uribo or Porky. Unfortunately for me, in all my infinite wisdom, I forgot to pick one up in the one story battle and the one hidden battle before Deep Dungeon: END which is where you pig up the afformentioned stupid Byblos. This means that my asexual little Uribos won't have any room to do the dirty. The only solution is a random battle somewhere that has the little piggies.

I scowered the internet for this shread of information that I thought would be quite easy to get. Eventually, I stumbled onto a forum post that made me laugh. A person with the user name fahrenheit had the exact same problem as me, to the tee. What made me laugh was that it was me. I am fahrenheit. Or I was Fahrneheit. Two years ago I posted a message asking for help out of the very situation I'm in today. Unluckily for me, everyone in the forum was utterly useless. Luckily for me, I had responded to my post in that forum with a solution. There was a random battle with an Uribo.I'm just going to throw this information out there on the nets - maybe it'll help some lost fahrenheit one day.

In the late stages of the game, you can still get an Uribos by entering Dolbodar Swamp from the Bethla Garrison pass. This is only helpful for poaching Ribbons and FS Bags before you've gotten the Byblos or Cloud if you want to keep all special characters.

Update: It took me about two hours to get my hands on my first FS Bag ever. It's just as lame as I expected. On the other hand, I now have more ribbons than I will ever need. Here are some pictures I snapped during the ordeal.

This is a tale as old as time, a group of soldiers trying to stop needless blood shed run into a pig who walks on two legs and save him from a group of young squires accompanied by a bull demon. Needlees to say, lighting and holy light was used. Afterwards, the same team that saved the pig allowed it to asexually reproduce and evolve into a new species. This new species was slaughtered to make pretty ribbons and bags for women. And they lived happily ever after.

Final Fantasy Tactics - Now for PC

So it took the better part of a day and a lot of patients, research, and messing around but I finally got the greatest game of all-time to work on my crappy little netbook. I'm especially proud because a lot of people seem to be having trouble running this game one even souped notebooks. I present to you: Final Fantasy Tactics.

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What is it that makes this game so insanely fun? I can brag about it's depth of gaming, strategy, and replayability. I could talk about the storyline that doesn't dumb itself down for the average gamer filled with twist, backstabs, and unsung heroes. I could even go on in great lengths of the customization in terms of job classes, abilities, and mix and matching. But when it comes down to it - you've got to experience this game for yourself.

Eating Time Along With Your Soul

So, awhile back I stumble upon a list of ten anime that didn't make it onto some prestigeous list of the decade and a few favourites of mine were on there (Full Metal Panic, Last Exile, Eureka 7, Samurai Champloo) so I decided to look into the ones that I hadn't seen yet. I immediately jumped at Sengoku Basara because it totally plays on my Dynasty Warriors heart string but the real hook was an anime called Soul Eater. At first I thought it was a chibi version of the other shinigami series Bleach but this anime puts a fresh spin on the death god genre.

Souleater
All of the characters are unique and fun to watch develop. In Soul Eater, the teams are comprised of meisters and weapons. It is the meister's job to help the weapon acquire 99 human souls and 1 witch's soul. I actually with the series played on this a bit more but other than that the pacing of this anime is superb - you never feel like it's going to fast or crawling. One noticable exception is the Excalibur episodes in which the plot pretty much hits a brick wall and you're treated to the antics of possibly the most annoying but oddly endearing anime character in any and all anime series.

Needless to say, this Soul Eater is an instant favourite. I mean, it's been two day and I'm already buffering the 42nd episode as we speak...

Oh Vista, I hardly knew you.

So, I recently got into the amazing global treasure hunt that is geocaching and I purchased my first GPSr - that's a Global Positioning System Receiver for you muggles out there. I got it for a steal at a liquidation sale and was quick to get used to it and load with all the caches in Winnipeg. I grabbed five caches with it before I ended it lossing it to my lousy, jacket pocket. Goodbye Silver.

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I am the habitual loser of things...

On a sidenote, I promise to start blogging more consistently for a few reasons. Mainly being done school and not being a job. Unless being a vagrant counts. No. Okay, no job.

The Shit

My engineering faculty is an amazing group of people and an amazing group of people deserves an amazing team logo. After much discussion we settle upon a few ideas and instead of doing homework and projects I decided to spend all night working on a mascot and logo. Here's what I came up with.

Theshitcolour

The design turned out pretty good considering I don't have any image editing software with the exception of MS Paint. I ended up using some fancy to-vector converters and an online image editor that could handled a lot like Paintshop.