Felicia, Finkle, and Felix...

I was sitting at work the other day, bored out of my gourd as usual, when I decided I would flick on a video to watch in the background while my boss wasn't looking.

I am a regular watcher of Geek and Sundry on Twitch, and by regular I mean every Friday at noon when Critical Role comes on (thank you time zones!). If you don’t know Critical Role, it is nine of the best voice actors around playing D&D live and uncensored. I started watching a few sessions in and got hooked – I even bought the T-shirt. I try to watch it at work, but it is kind of hard with an open planned office. I end up putting it on the more private of my two screens and tabbing out whenever I hear someone start to move from their desk.  Anyway, I think I have gone a little off point…

So I switched on to the Geek and Sundry Twitch stream from E3. I wasn't really into it, so I flicked over to Felicia Day’s channel (the founder of Geek and Sundry), not expecting it to be live, but just to check it out. It turns out she was streaming live whilst playing “Cook, Serve, Delicious!”. I had previously watched a video of the game being played by Felicia and her brother Ryon, so was familiar with the premise.

Firstly, I was amazed by how well she multi-tasked. I was having trouble reading chat and watching the stream at the same time, and yet she was playing the game, reading the stream, and carrying on a conversation to those watching (swearing like a sailor). I have seen her in a few things and am always amazed at how happy and vibrant she is. I don’t know if it’s an “on camera” thing, but it is quite inspiring to someone who is rarely as happy. Again, I digress…

I liked the stream so I subbed and started making some comments in chat (all nice, no trolling). Felicia was answering some of the messages and I was trying to make some intelligent comments in the hopes that she might respond. No luck. I kept trying to make insightful and/or witty remarks however they never made it to her attention. C’est la vie…

As is my way, when I get to the end of the day and go to bed my brain starts buzzing – coming up with new ideas, reviewing old ones, fantasizing about what I would do if I were a Jedi – the usual stuff one thinks about at the end of a long day.  I started thinking about why I was commenting on the stream. After a few hours of following various trains of thought I kept asking myself a simple question: why was I looking for validation from someone I don’t know?

I like to consider myself as being a fairly intelligent person. I not particularly social and spend much of my time on my own, which I am comfortable with for the most part. I don’t like being the centre of attention and shun the spotlight. I always thought of myself as a classic introvert. I’m rather introspective and like to exam both my thoughts and actions. This can often get me into trouble with my own brain as while a little self-examination can be good, a lot can be dangerous, and time + lack of external stimulus = very dangerous.

Don’t worry, there is a point to this...

So, given all those aspects of my personality, why was I making comments on a Twitch stream hoping that someone would answer me? Despite all my tendencies this would seem to be the opposite of my own psyche. This invariably led me to one conclusion:

Everything I thought I knew about myself was wrong.

Case in point: I play D&D once a week (usually). My current character is Finkle Fizzlebottom, Gnome Wizard Extraordinaire (his back-story will go up on my other blog after I have finished that of Raxogar the Paladin). For anyone that knows RPGs, wizards don’t wear any armour and should never be at the head of the group. Yet, as I now realize, I was always trying to lead the group, more than often from the front. I had done this with my previous wizard character, one Lord Argul Montok (a fire Genasi who was a bit of an ass), and he promptly died on his first outing after a spectre popped its head out of a door he was trying to open and proceeded to rip his soul from his body (ahhh… good times…). Looking back at previous D&D characters I saw that I had the same tendencies to try to lead the group. It also led me to realize that I often end up playing the “tank” (a character with high armour and health that is designed to take punishment) in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Star Wars:  The Old Republic. Despite me thinking that all I want to do is hide in the background and go unnoticed, all along I had been standing out front as the most visible member of the group. Being the tank also means more often than not you are the leader of any group, which further exacerbates the point.

My best friends recently had a baby and called him Felix. He’s a nice little bub, although I am deathly afraid of holding him. He doesn't really add anything to this story, I just wanted to use the name in the title as it made for good alliteration…

So because I skived off work for about half an hour and watched an internet entrepreneur play a video game about cooking food in a restaurant I realized I had been lying to myself for the last thirty years.

Thank you Felicia Day. I am in your debt.

TV, Movies, Games, and more...

Every now and then I get a little bit creative and come up with an idea for TV show, movie, video game, etc. Probably about half the time I  forget about it before I have a chance to put pen to paper (I normally come up with the ideas while I am trying to sleep, or during that time in the morning when you are half awake and have some control over your dreams). Every now and then though I am able to recall the idea long enough to get something down so that I can then elaborate on it later. I recently shared a couple of my ideas with a friend of mine and he made some good points about them which I had not considered, and which if addressed properly could greatly improve on the stories. So here are a couple of my ideas (FYI if you steal my ideas I will hunt you down and make you eat your own weight in haggis!):

Bounty 

A TV show set 100 years in the future about a mid-20s brother and sister combo of bounty hunters and their crew as they fly around the inner solar system catching criminals, doing random jobs, and figuring out their place in an increasing corrupt world. Sort of a live-action Cowboy Bebop, or an alternate side of Firefly. 

The main characters, Scott and Penny Lawson, are the twin children of a deceased bounty hunter Roger Lawson.  They inherited his space ship and along with their fathers former colleague, a former special-forces soldier and now pacifist Maurice Johnson, have just started to make a living following in their fathers footsteps. Along the way through various means they recruit several new crew members, including a career con man, a young girl with a gift for technology, and about three others that I am still trying to figure out.

Fallen

A video game about an angel Sam (Samael), who is kicked out of heaven for defying orders. Sam can at times be regarded as both good and evil, and as he fights through earth, heaven, and hell to find where he belongs the player must decide which path to take. Decisions are not always black and white, often they are varying shades of grey, and it is up to the player to make the decision as to who they want Sam to be, e.g. a Holy warrior with no mercy, a merciful assassin, a destroyer of worlds, or a pacifist. I am still trying to figure out what format this game will take, it seems to be leading me towards a hack-and-slash but I am not sure if that is the type of game I want it to be.

I know religion is a dangerous genre to play with in computer games, so this game is not meant to be an evangelical statement. It will include some religious characters but it is not meant to be a religious story, rather a story about good and evil and how they can often seem to be not that far opposite to each other.

Modern Ninja

Another video game, this one is an action-adventure/stealth games in a similar mode as the Hitman series. Set in the present day, you play as a ninja who has just finished his/her training when their clan is disowned and destroyed. Vowing vengeance (ok, not that original here, I know), he aligns him/herself with various factions and organizations, learning modern skills and weapons to complement his ninja training in order to to avenge his/her clan.

What I want to achieve here is a game where you can play it any way you want - you can go in guns blazing and kill everyone in sight, use your classical ninja training or stealth and secrecy and achieve your objectives without anyone noticing you, use high-tech equipment and the latest weapons, or go old-school and use your fists and classic ninja weapons. I really want to open it up what a classical ninja would be in the modern day.

I know some people will recall the classical ninja stereotype and say " A ninja using guns!?!?!? That's just wrong", but if you look at what ninjas actually where it is not that improbable that they would use guns if they existed in the modern age. Ninjas where created to accomplish goals that a samurai, because of their Bushido (a samurai's moral code), could not. A ninja was not bound to honor and was designated with achieving their objective by any means necessary. Pop culture often depicts ninjas in black garb, but usually ninjas where hidden in plain clothes or using disguises so as not to draw attention.

I have a few more ideas, but they are not yet as clear or fleshed out as the three here. I have done a lot more work on these than what is shown here, but I would be interested in any feedback.

D-Generation Strikes Again...

Well, not quite.  The mighty D-Generation of the North Shore Cricket Club were defeated by Cammeray today, but we played well and had a great day.  Here are some photos from our batting innings...

PP starts off the innings	I had no idea where this one went...	The boys watch on
Nice form	Good job boys, keep it going	Big D goes for a ig one
Back into battle after the drinks break	Go for it PP!	Brent hits out
Run boys!	Waddaya lookin at?	Great shot Rak!
Brent survives a close run out chance	The beautiful Gore Creek Reserve	Back at the pub
Who is that vagabond drinking a bourbon and coke?	So an Englishman and an Australian walk into a bar...	Our illustrious leader finally arrives

Next week is our last match, hopefully we can put on a great performance against Comenarra.  Thanks to Alain and Mini-PP for helping out with the photos.

Ground Control to Commander Chris...

I had been aware of some the awesome photos taken by Commander Chris Hadfield while he has been aboard the International Space Station, but I didn't know he had been shooting video as well until now. As he is about to leave the ISS behind, he made what is probably the most expensive video clip ever.



Welcome back, Commander.

The Soft Kitty Adventures...

I had dinner the other night with a couple of my best friends. I hadn't seen them since before Christmas, and they had a present for me... a kitteh! Not a real kitty, for none could compare to their own cat Morgan, but a singing Soft Kitty from the TV show The Big Bang Theory. He is very adorable and has come to have several adventures since he came home...

First things first - got to find the right bed for sleeping. This one will do nicely.

A comfy spot.

Playing in the garden, like a tiger in the jungle. Raaaarrr!

Being mischievous. Naughty kitteh.

Watching the tennis. Too close kitteh!

Morning tea - coffee and mini quiches.

Chin scratches are gooooood.

Studying hard. Soft kitty wants to be a smart kitty.

Watching Pride and Prejudice. Soft kitty likes the classics.

Hiding in the laundry basket, getting hair on the clean clothes.

More Soft Kitty adventures to come...

Wibbly-Wobbly... Timey-Wimey... Spacey-Wacey...

Every now and then I have a weird idea about the universe. Usually I have these ideas while I am trying to get to sleep, so they can be a bit weird. The last idea I had was about the dimensions described by M-Theory. It seemed weird to me there are all these extra dimensions that are there to make the math right. Now I'm not saying that's why they're there. I don't have a background in theoretical physics so I don't know how it really works, and as I write now I am realizing how silly my idea must seem to someone who knows about such things...

So my thought was that all these dimensions, while mathematically elegant does not seem to make much sense. What is the real reason that these dimensions exist? Surely the God that I believe in had some kind of purpose for them that we have not yet figured out. My initial thought was that each of these dimensions has a specific force or action associated with is. I initially started out by thinking that light was a particle in one dimension, and what we saw in our dimension as a wave is the interaction between the two dimensions. I then extended this beyond light to gravity having it's own dimension (a theory which is discredited in the physics community) and the 3 other fundamental forces.

This led me on to thinking about what DOES happens when these dimensions interact. When space and time interact in a basic way we get velocity (distance over time). So what happens when the other dimensions interact? Velocity is an integral part of kinetic energy, so does the dimensional interactions we don't know about produce other types of energy? Is energy conserved within each individual dimension or only as a sum of all dimension? How do these dimensions react in the extreme environment of the Big Bang and during the universes inflation?

Speaking of the beginning of the universe, what happens to matter when it is in such a compressed environment? I have read some excerpts from physicists that theorize on this, mainly at the start of the universe, and that got the brain juices flowing again. I started thinking about a black hole and wondered whether there is a critical mass at which the black hole collapses and becomes something else. By this, I don't mean the point at which a star collapses and becomes a black hole, but rather what a black hole becomes. If we were to extrapolate the universe forward to it's near end, and every star has collapsed into a black hole, and the black holes all converge into a single singularity (if that is even possible), what then becomes of the universe? Could the pressure become so large that it causes a massive release of energy and cause a Big Bang 2?

After considering all this I decided it was far beyond my pay grade to know the answers. If you have any answers to my questions (which I'm sure someone does), please tell me how/why I am wrong. I have no doubt that I am wrong on most of my ideas about theoretical physics as I don't really have much education on the subject apart from a couple subjects at uni, two Stephen Hawking books, and watching all of The Big Bang Theory.

And now my head hurts from thinking too much...

A good day...

After a long and exhausting day yesterday, this morning I woke up around 6am. For the first time in a few weeks I got a full nights sleep, around seven hours or so. Feeling refreshed I decided to go for a walk to the shops to buy some cream. It was a beautiful morning, and the cyclists were out in force. I began to wonder how it would be to be that fit again...

After downing a freshly brewed cup of coffee, I found myself cooking up a batch of scones. I have been itching to make scones for the last couple of weeks but have never had the "up and go" to actually do it. I used a recipe from the CWA and as expected - perfection. I have made scones a couple of times in the last few years and have never had them turn out this good. Adding Chantilly cream I made last night and some homemade strawberry jam from a "jam session" last week, I enjoyed myself a nice brunch.

Following brunch, the warm sun encouraged me to do a spot of gardening. Afterwards I spent some time soaking up the vitamin D on the balcony. Apart from some cement being laid in the park next door, it was a very relaxing late morning.

Noon - and it's rugby time. Australia vs Russia. Not the greatest game of the World Cup, but Australia occasionally displayed some of their freaky skills. Full props to the Bears on some great offense and their record score.

2pm - my first yawn of the day.

AFL Grand Final - I was studying and playing WoW for a lot of the first half, so I wasn't really paying attention. Luckily I focused on the football in the second half and saw the Cats beat the Pies. I don't really support either team, but I preferred Geelong to win.

Back to the rugby, and a great game between Scotland and England. The Poms won (unfortunately), but it was an exciting game right to the end. It was quite a contrast to how the Wallabies played earlier. England still exhibited their reckless play in the first half, but the kicking game from both sides was fantastic.

Following the end of the days sport, I whipped up a pizza and settled in to watch... me! Well, not me, but a man of the same name. And yes... bow-ties are cool.

And that was the end of my day. I put the clocks forward an hour and went to bed. So what made it such a good day? Nothing that happened made it particularly good or bad. There was nothing remarkable or memorable. I guess what made it good was how I felt at the time. I didn't feel depressed or tired (except for the odd yawn). I didn't feel lonely or sad. I felt like everything was right and as it should be. I wasn't happy, rather I felt at peace. It has been a long time since I felt like that. Whether it was a full nights rest or something else, I had a good day. That fact gives me hope that I may have a few more in store.