Challenges I've Faced Over the Last 3 Months

• Writing my concert reports for music appreciation
• Driving on 85 every morning
• Waking up at 0630 so often
• Forcing myself to go to computer science club
• Coordinating my University Success final
• Convincing Nye of the importance of nutrition
• Getting A's on all of my math tests

     My brain screamed at me for the entire thirty-minute drive to turn around as I made my way to my first computer science club meeting. I worried that no one would show up and the drive wouldn't be worth it, or that I wouldn't like the people who did show up, or they wouldn't like me. I had to continuously remind myself that all of those concerns were unfounded and irrelevant. There was no reason to suspect any of that be true or even likely, and even if the meeting turned out that way then at least I would know.

     While feeling awkward upon arriving, I surprised myself with how well I overcame my anxiety to break the ice. I spend so much energy worrying about everything going wrong, but I seem to have the ability to pull confidence and competence from thin air when the time comes. Despite my nervousness, I greeted all of the strangers warmly and asked their names and majors as if I wasn't panicking inside.

     I still go through a similar test of character every week when I get the email for the next club meeting. I question the value of going each time and if I really want to. Maintaining the small social relationships I've developed so far has made the meetings worthwhile. I know if I want to keep them I need to keep going back, even though the drive kills me.

    So far I've made it to every computer science club meeting, although I have skipped out on a couple of the math club meetings. They do math games in which I feel I wouldn't competitive considering I haven't taken Calculus yet. Perhaps those fears are unfounded too. Maybe enough people don't show up that they just goof off for a couple hours, or maybe the math isn't as intensive as I think. If only I was as good at imagining things going well as I can imagine them going poorly, I'd probably enjoy more success.

     

Process Writing - German Spaghetti

     This is a unique recipe I learned from my mom growing up. Unlike regular spaghetti, the German variety is made with brown gravy instead of tomato sauce. This may sound unusual, but the gravy and spices give the dish a unique flavor and it is one of my favorite meals.
   
     First let's run through the ingredients. You'll need:

• one pound of ground beef
• 5 cups of water
• paprika
• curry powder
• ketchup
• a beef bouillon cube
• four packets of McCormick brown gravy mix 
• one packet of McCormick thick and zesty spaghetti sauce mix.
• two ounces of spaghetti per bowl you expect to eat
• pepper, cooking oil (optional)

     The first thing you'll need to do is brown your beef in a pot. Crank the heat up on one of your burners to medium high and break the beef up with some sort of cooking implement. Be sure to stir semi-frequently. Once all the beef is brown and you don't see any more redness, drain the grease in the sink. I like to do this by placing a lid on the pot and flipping it upside down. For safety, be sure to turn off any stove burners that aren't actively in use.

     Now that you've got a pot of browned beef drained of grease, it is time to add the spices. I was never given a measurable amount of paprika or curry to add, so I sprinkle on what I call a "covering." I sprinkle both spices on top of the beef until the entire surface is colored scarlet or yellow. It may take a few tries before you find the ideal amount of each for you. Unwrap and toss in the bouillon cube and then squirt in just enough ketchup to bind the powder to the beef. Stir it all together with a serving spoon.

    Grab a shaker or some sort of closeable bottle and begin mixing the gravy powder with the water. You'll want to maintain a ratio of one cup of water per packet of mix. Combine the mix and water in the bottle and shake vigorously until uniformly dissolved and add to the pot, repeating as needed until all of the packets are used. When finished, return the pot to the burner and bring to a boil. Once the pot is boiling, reduce heat and allow to simmer while you cook the spaghetti noodles. Be sure to stir the beef occasionally.

     Fill another pot with an appropriate amount of water for the amount of spaghetti you plan to cook. There should be enough water to fully submerge the uncooked noodles. I like to add a bit of pepper to the noodles in the pot for aesthetic purposes, and pouring in a very small amount of vegetable oil can help prevent the spaghetti from sticking together. Boil the noodles per the directions on the box, or until tender, stirring occasionally. When done, drain the noodles through a colander.

     Your meal is now ready to serve! Fill your bowl with whatever ratio of pasta to meat-sauce makes you happy. Although unorthodox, Parmesan cheese makes a great topping. Enjoy!

Process Writing - Basic Training

     Air Force Basic Military Training is no walk in the park, although there will certainly be an excessive amount of walking. That said, it is far from impossible. Whether you grew up with a survival instinct or grew up sheltered, you can survive BMT. If you follow these simple instructions, you'll be sitting pretty on the parade field, graduated and in your fancy dress blues before you know it.

     Your first BMT interaction awaits you as you exit the terminal at the San Antonio airport. You will give your paperwork to the airman sitting at a table and the nearby military training instructor, or MTI, will order you to stand in a nearby formation with the other arrivals. Once enough people arrive, you'll file onto a nearby bus. This is a good time to get some final text messages sent out or do some last minute goofing off on your phone because this bus ride is your last moment of freedom for a few months.

     The bus stops outside one of the many basic training dorm buildings and then the head games begin. Another MTI will step on the bus and give specific instructions about how to get off. Despite being tired and confused, you'll be given specific, detailed instructions and be expected to execute them flawlessly. This is the central theme of basic training. Starting at this moment and continuing for two months, your flight will be given detailed instructions set against a seemingly impossible timetable, and your delightful MTI's will do their best to make you feel like the world is ending if you don't succeed.

     Communicating with the MTI's is the most daunting part of basic training for most people. If you've never been yelled at before or dealt with difficult people, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Keeping a few simple ground rules in mind will help you communicate effectively. First, they cannot hurt you. No matter how loud they yell or how far they twist their face, they are not allowed to lay a finger on you. Second, their harshness is designed to teach you how to keep calm under pressure, so even if you do everything right, they will find a reason to be irritated with you. The sooner you can dissociate from your immediate emotional response, the easier you will find it to communicate with them. Third, and this is most important, know how to listen and how to ask for clarification. You may be belittled for not hearing right the first time, but you'll make the entire flight suffer if you consistently get things wrong.

     The next thing people struggle with at the beginning of BMT is realizing that your training flight is a team. All fifty or so of you have a common purpose: to learn and survive training together. Throughout your Air Force career, you'll hear the motto One Team, One Fight over and over and over again. The central idea behind this is that one's success is everyone's success, and one's failure is everyone's failure. There is no you, there is no him or her in basic training. There is only the mission and the team. One of the most difficult tasks in Basic Training involves the strict tidiness standards for the dormitory. Initially, people want to focus only on their own space to ensure they personally do not get in trouble, but this thinking is flawed for two reasons.

     One, the standards are designed around the idea that you will all need to work as a team to maintain them. Take the time early on to identify who among you is best at each task, and specialize. If you are best at rolling up socks, be a sock roller for the flight and let someone else dust your locker. Two, even if you have an impeccable wall locker, the MTI's will hold all of you responsible if one of you is below standards. Focusing entirely on yourself is counterproductive in addition to being selfish.

    You'll notice as you observe older flights that they have a solid handle on the two main concepts I've outlined here. As individuals, they've learned how to tune out their emotional response to stress and focus entirely on the instruction being given to them. Their calm demeanor allows them to communicate effectively with their MTI's and as such they are treated with more respect. As teams, they've embraced the reality that they are all in this together and need to help one another out.

     

   

     

Favorite Genre 2: Electric Boogaloo

     If you've read my first blog post you know I'm a fan of fantasy games, and one series I love passionately is Dark Souls.  All of the classic fantasy tropes are present: swords, sorcery, dragons, castles, dying kingdoms and plots to seize power and take revenge. I love the genre because of the artistic possibilities it gives creators.  When you base your world on magical elements, you are able to design and create spectacular worlds that aren't restrained by conventional logic.

     Take for example the Iron Keep in Dark Souls 2. The location is a bit silly, given that you take an elevator ride from a giant windmill in a poison swamp up to a mountain range you would think you could see as you approached the windmill.  Questionable development choices aside, the Iron Keep is made up of an ancient castle made entirely of black iron which was so heavy that it began to sink into a lake of lava. The story in Dark Souls is told passively, so there are few cut-scenes that hammer in "This is exactly what happened here and why." The developers instead choose to tell the story via the environment and descriptions of items you pick up as you travel through areas.

     Subtlety is where video games shine as a story-telling medium compared to books and movies.  With Dark Souls, players could choose to ignore the story, focus entirely on the gripping combat and get through each beautifully designed zone as quickly as possible, but if they slow down and smell the corrupted, dying roses, the game weaves an enigmatic tale of tragedy and decay. The Iron Keep was not originally built over a lake of lava: a silly design choice even for a fantasy game. The lake was created when the King of that castle sold his soul to an ancient and indescribable evil that lurked in the Earth below, generating a monumental fiery explosion that caused the castle to sink and transformed him into a giant demon not unlike the Balrog from Lord of the Rings.

     Other diverse locations in Dark Souls 2 include a haunted forest, a spider infested village, an ancient fort located in the woods, a painfully dark crypt, an underground gutter, and of course, a mountainous dragon lair. Each of these locations has its own tragic story that explores the main themes of the series: the disparity of light and dark and attempts by the powerful to escape the inevitable decay of time.

     Dark Souls would be considered dark fantasy, due to its mature, mostly humorless tone and oppressive, haunting atmosphere. World of Warcraft, another game in the fantasy genre, is quite the opposite. On top of being obscenely massive, it is dripping with humor, both clever and trite. All of the same tropes are present: the swords, the magic, the castles, the dying kingdoms etc. The approach taken, however, couldn't be more different.

     The story is told explicitly, mainly through dialogue text with non-player characters and the more thematic content through cut-scenes with voice acting.  Unlike Dark Souls, Warcraft presents its story in bombastic, almost melodramatic tones not unlike Game of Thrones or other blockbuster mainstream fantasy series. The game has been around much longer than any game has a right to be, and its writing has become more absurd over time.  Most games are made as one-and-done features, or perhaps if they're successful enough they'll have a few sequels.

     World of Warcraft has been around for almost fifteen years.  The developers are forced to up the ante for each expansion, so it's no surprise the narrative has become ludicrous.  For context, the original game has received eight expansions so far.  The previous expansion culminated in the players banishing the space devil to prevent him destroying the planet.  How could they possibly one-up that?  I don't know where the story is going to go from there, but the absurdity and humor of it all, again made possible by the outlandish high-fantasy concepts, are what I love about the game.

     When designing a fantasy world, the only limit is the creator's imagination. The endless possibilities that keep the genre fresh and interesting also keep me coming back again and again. Whether fantasy games take themselves seriously like Dark Souls or can laugh at themselves like Warcraft, they hold a special place in my heart. 

  

Thanksgiving

If last year was an accurate blueprint, then for this year I can expect the following for Thanksgiving. I will be given the expectation that my wife's parents will arrive sometime in the early morning, so that I will wake up early and clean: sweep the floors, wipe down the bathroom, take out the trash, etc. After the house is spotless we'll wait around awkwardly for several hours because I was given a gross misestimation as to when they would arrive. As my vision becomes clouded and my strength fades from hunger, they will finally show up about four to six hours later than I anticipated.

My mother-in-law, Julie, will set up shop in the kitchen, baking and baking until my table is completely covered in tiny cakes and other finger-foods. My wife and her sisters will help her make little blueberry muffins, cookies, and an odd sushi-like snack made from ham rolled around cream-cheese and a pickle. My table will be completely covered in entirely too much food for us all to eat and my kitchen will be a disaster within hours.

My father-in-law, Steven, will set up a grill on his tailgate because he refuses to use the nice propane grill we got for Independence Day for some reason. Before he starts grilling steak outside, he'll microwave some chicken breasts because that's a thing people do apparently. I'll  have a bite because I'm too polite or too stupid to refuse it, but really, who trusts raw chicken breast cooked in a microwave? The already busy table will then be covered in entirely too many steaks for us all to eat, especially considering we're already full from the baked goods.

While everyone else is cooking, I'll be sitting at my computer in the vice-like grips of anxiety feeling like I should be helping, but also feeling like I'd just be in the way. All the noise and bickering going on around me will prevent me from enjoying whatever game I'm trying to play or task I'm trying to complete, so I'll probably just run in circles on-screen and try to pretend I'm somewhere else. Julie will have gotten tired and taken a seat on the couch just before Steven arrives and I'll put on an old holiday movie for her while Steven chides her for sitting around, despite having spent hours baking before he got there.

I don't mean to be a grinch, and I know that sounds like what the kids call, "a straight-up lie." I enjoy the holidays and I love spending time with my wife's family, but the hustle, bustle and tussle wears me down. When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was a calm, quiet day where my mom would cook everything, we'd eat dinner at three in the afternoon and then that would be it. Too much commotion and chaos betrays the purpose of the holidays.   

Once Steven and Julie leave, I'll wind up cleaning the entire house again with the added chore of packing all the leftovers into tupperware, but at least this time my wife and her sisters will be awake to help me. That weekend, Stephanie and I will drive down to Florida to see my mom. She'll probably spend a bunch of money on a large dinner for the three of us even though I ask her not to, or at least to let me pay for some of it but her pride won't let me. At least it will be much quieter and calmer than Thanksgiving at my house.

After Thanksgiving is over, I can look forward to adding Christmas flavor to the Halloween decorations we never took down. We like to celebrate a variant of Halloween and Christmas called Spookmas, which starts on Halloween and ends on Christmas. The holidays are functionally normal, but we have a bunch of skulls and pumpkins wearing Santa hats everywhere for three months.

creativewritingprompts.com #27 - empty glass story

     I set my supplies on the table: the poison, the wine, and the empty glass. For too long has my country been subjected to the will of an evil and tyrannical king. His endless decrees have seen the poor torn from their homes, children torn from their mothers, fathers and brothers sent off to war to die and for what: an endlessly swelling royal treasure horde. The terrible King Dante sits atop a mountain of gold like a dragon, drunk on his own wretched power. Soon enough, he will be drunk on more than just power, more than just wine.

     I pour the wine in first. Its deep crimson is a reminder of all the innocent blood spilled by his regime: the same dark hue as the blood caked on the guillotine responsible for countless political executions. Vengeful souls laugh gleefully in the sound of rushing liquid as it fills the glass. Next, I add the poison. I need no more than a drop of the sickly green liquid, corrosive to the skin and lungs when pure, but when diluted in wine is absolutely undetectable. A quiet hiss rises from the mixture as it bubbles and settles, as if the drink itself is now laughing at the king's impending demise.

     I enter the king's bedchamber and set the tray of fruit and wine in front of him. He looks up at me briefly, his red, drunken face grimacing at sharing space with a lowly servant. Without a word he waves me from the room, and I am happy to oblige. He mutters something about executing me for forcing him to wait so long for his evening snack as I close the door and peer through the keyhole. Surely enough, before long, the tyrant begins swaying in his seat. As he sputters and falls over, his eyes glance toward the keyhole as if he sees me staring back at him. I am ashamed to admit that I have enjoyed nothing more in life than watching his eyes turn cold, and my only regret is that I could not give him the more humiliating, undignified end he has served to so many.

Kirby Ferguson Ted Talk - Remix

     Considering how many people are alive today and how many more have been alive in the past, the odds of any one idea being completely original are  astronomically low.  As obsessed as society is with the notion of originality, it doesn't seem to reward it much.  No one has an idea and is then showered with grant money simply because no one has ever heard of it before.  Ideas are rewarded when they show some sort of practical potential, either by addressing some economic concern or sending a novel artistic message.
   
     That is the line for what separates a shameless rip-off of previous ideas with a useful remix. Someone who takes the ideas of others, copies them, and slaps their own name-tag on them are not contributing anything new.  They only seek to feed on the attention that the original ideas afforded their authors. I've seen this before in all sorts of foreign bootlegged merchandise for American media properties. Rather than buy an action figure of Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, grandma might accidentally buy Barry Star-Boy: Space Wizard Maximum Fun Time.

     The video game Overwatch just released a new character called Ashe, a spaghetti-western aesthetic female bandit.  People claim she's a rip-off of a similar character from the video game League of Legends. The irony is that that character is itself derived from a character in a game called Defense of the Ancients, which in turn is based on the game Warcraft 3. Because Blizzard made both Warcraft 3 and Overwatch, should we conclude that they plagiarized themselves? Does it matter if they did?

     Many great intellectual properties are simple spins on classical stories. Super Mario is a reiteration of the knight-saves-damsel-from-dragon story, except in this case the, "valiant knight" is a short, pudgy plumber with an Italian accent.  The creator of Link, the hero from The Legend of Zelda, said he based the character design on Peter Pan. Other than the green outfit complete with silly hat, Link and Peter have very little in common. Mario is very similar to its source material and Link is mostly different, but both are unique enough to be identifiable as distinct, separate entities. They are more than shameless copies like Barry Star-Boy.