PixlBit

I'm in the middle of crazy start-up time at work, so not a lot of time at the moment. I am reading your blogs, I just don't have time to comment on all of them. May not have much time to write any for a bit, either, other than random updates. I spent the past week trying not to catch whatever Jason's whole family caught at Easter, but Friday I had to call in sick. Pretty sad, considering I just started on Tuesday, Thank god sick time accrues and rolls over!

Ranger stuff: As of today, I am once again gainfully employed in my chosen profession. My boss is overjoyed to have me back on from seasonal layoff, I'm overjoyed to be back. Highlights of the first day back: getting one of the projects Andy (my boss) has been feverishly working on (and stressing out over) typed up and ready for him to send out tomorrow AM (thus removing the stress), seeing the male osprey on the nest and having him do a low fly-by about 15 feet away from me, getting the back room at HQ organized and stuff separated out that needs to be gotten rid of. A project that has been on my last for a year now. A not so wonderful thing was having to scrub poo off the outhouse toilet seat. We have no running water in the park until the danger of a hard freeze is completely over and it is a major pain in the ass to clean messes like that up. Andy had gotten the worst of it off, but he ran out of water in his bucket before he could finish. Other than that, it was a good first day back.

No theme today. Themes take more work than I felt like putting in this week, so today it's just a dozen songs I really like. Playlist is here, for easier listening.

It was a busy week for everything other than gaming, it seems.

First of all, thanks for everyone who commented on my last entry. I was looking to get a discussion going, and that's what happened.

My new issue of Game Informer arrived in the mail yesterday. Most of it was skim-worthy, as usual, however, the Opinion page got my attention. This month's page was written by the senior associate editor, Jeff Cork, and was titled "Destroy All Humanoids?". In it, he discusses whether combat and killing are necessary to tell a good story and questions the game industry's assertion that the reason why they saturate the market with the same-old, same-old is because that's what gamers want. He uses Journey as an example of a good game that doesn't use combat or violence as past of the game mechanic. He's not stating that all the ills of society are based on violence in gaming, he's just saying he's looking for a different mechanic to tell a story other than killing everything in sight.

And now for Part 2 of our Irish music extravaganza. Sorry if I'm a little loopy, I'm suffering the effects of staying up way to late and getting up far too early.

Today's theme is Irish, because St. Patrick's Day is in two days. My criteria was pretty broad, the song or tune had to either be Irish, or the group had to be Irish. Leaves a lot of wiggle room. Two notes before I go any further, not all of these songs/tunes or artists will be traditional (warning all you folkies checking in ahead of time), and the difference between a song and a tune: a tune is instrumental, a song has words (for my non-folkie friends reading this). I tried to balance out songs and tunes, but I'm not sure how successful I was.

I seem to be in what I refer to as a gaming lull. The games that I've been playing just aren't interesting me, and I just don't feel like going and finding one that does. So here's what I've been doing instead.

Originally posted on 1up on June 20, 2010