Card games, work, and thou

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This weekend was the Salesforce 156 Sandbox release. It was the first release I was working for, and it was pretty exciting. Friday night there was downtime and I got to monitor application errors and such after the upgrade. Then I went into work Saturday and Sunday (I live so close I figured it was easier to do that than stay at home and use VPN) in case I was needed for bug fixes.
Fortunately, the release seemed to go well. My team didn’t get any bugs and the e-release that went out yesterday seemed fairly straightforward.

In the meantime, I’ve been playing Vegas Showdown online with Tim, Greg, Mars, Dan, and Keith (though not all at the same time). Managed to win for the first time today… it came down to the last renovate where I was able to move the Space Age Sports Book next to the Fancy Lounge and score an additional 6 fame from completed diamonds… won over Tim by 1 point.

Besides that, I’ve been working a bit on the RPG Get! Card Game. The first set is going to be PSO Episode 1. I’m rather excited about it… most of the basic spells and weapons now have cards (I need to get screenshots of a couple more weapons, but then I should be good) and I have monsters up through Mines complete. I need to work on Mission and Character cards though. If I continue working at this pace, I should have a tenative base set posted for playtesting sometime next weekend.

I’ve also been sporatically opening DBZ TCG boosters (7 boxes left, which will be opened next month). The distribution overall seems rather skewed. It’s not unexpected that, out of the 36 boosters I’ve opened, I have duplicates of some rares (despite the fact that I’m still missing over 2/3 of the rares) and uncommons… but the fact that I have 6 copies of some of the common cards while I have none of some other commons and that I have 4 copies of some uncommon cards while I’m still missing about 1/4 of them makes me feel like they purposely skew towards the basic attacks (Blue, Black, Red) and certain characters (the humans, mostly) while skimping on the more interesting cards (Saiyan, Namekian, Orange attacks and non-human characters).
I suppose we’ll see how the overall distribution ends up after 10 boxes.

I need to revisit Student Wars v2 and rebalance GPA. The game still seems incredibly skewed towards kill-counter win, and that needs to be fixed. Has anyone besides me actually tried it yet?

We Didn’t Start the Fire

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So today, when browsing the web for randomness at work, I came across In 2007, which most of you have probably seen before (I know, I’m way behind on internet stuffs).

Reminded me that, in 6th grade, my humanities/history class did our own version of the song (spanning the years 1986 through 1996, I believe).

It’s now posted here in case anyone is interested in listening to it.

Apologies for the crap quality. It was recorded from some professional equipment onto cassette tape… then duplicated on different tape… then digitized through a microphone into WAV format… then converted into MP3 (it was the 90s, give me a break :P).
As I recall, the class split into groups of 3 or so, each responsible for a year. We researched events that happened that year and assembled a verse. The verses were stitched together (hence why it mostly doesn’t rhyme) and we got a semi-professional artist to record it for us. Whee.
There’s a version of this with the entire class singing it somewhere on a cassette tape in my closet… I should dig it out if I’m back in Arizona at some point.

:(

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For some reason lately I’ve been missing the college environment more and more.
The feeling of always having someone around… having someone to sit in the same room with at night doing random things separately (like homework or games)… having someone nearby you can go bother when you’re bored…

Lately I’ve been feeling incredibly lonely. Somehow, it’s not the same having people visit on weekends. There’s no one around in the evening. There’s no one around in the mornings. There’s no comforting sounds of someone else in the shower before class or of someone else tapping away at their keyboard after dinner.

When David was visiting and we made dinner and ate it together and then sat around afterward drawing or sewing, respectively… When Greg was visiting and we sat around at night doing things separately on our computers… Back in college when Keith would play old video games as I sat around playing KoL… Ian would do Ian-things on his computer while I worked on cards…
Things like that are comforting… if just to know that you’re not all by yourself… to be able to look over and see another human.

Failing that… being able to walk up a couple floors to see people and just sit with them watching TV or doing homework… being able to walk 10 minutes to the cluster where you can be surrounded by people you know… being able to head over to one of any number of buildings where there’s always people you know…

I don’t know. I suppose it’s unrealistic to expect to have people around in the same way as in college since post-college life is 9-5 job followed by going home and sleep whereas college is 24-hour-a-day job interspersed with fun with people and sleep at certain intervals. Still, I somehow feel completely wrong in this environment.

Ugh.

I just need to be around people. I don’t care who. I just need someone in a way that’s more than just seeing people at work or having people over for random short periods on weekends.

Rant rant rant I’m so stupid wtf is wrong with me.

Blah

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I’ve been feeling rather off lately and I’m not sure why. I guess it’s a combination of lonely, bored, and frustrated.

I want to work on cards, but given that no one is interested in playing or anything, I usually end up not finding the motivation. Student Wars v2 needs some rebalancing since the latest testing confirms that GPA is underpowered and RPG Get! needs card making… but meh.

My other computer is still borked and I don’t really feel like fixing it (especially since that would likely involve a reformat and such).

Haven’t been interested in food at all lately. I eat when I have to because eating is good, but it seems to be more out of necessity than actual desire. There’s some interesting places that will deliver pre-made awesome meals (such as this one) of food that I actually am interested in eating… except the cost is way too high. (Over $40/day for 3 meals? One dinner meal of fish with a side costs $20? No thanks.) There’s also random take-out places that I’ll sometimes be in the mood for, but eating out every day at $10/meal (even just once a day) is a bad plan.

Work is going well and is enjoyable, but I really should have a life other than work and PSO.

I want to shoot photos but there’s no one to shoot portraits of and shooting not-people is only fun with someone else.

Relationships are funny. I guess it feels so normal at this point that there’s part of me that is interested in being single again just for the hell of being single. It’s not that I’m at all unhappy or feeling trapped or anything… just that I feel like maybe such a huge change (in my mind) would at least be *something* happening in my routine of work, sleep, work, sleep, games, sleep, work, sleep. There’s also the fact that I often take words at more than face value. I don’t know.

I suppose life is good, and I’m not unhappy, persay. I’m just feeling off.