Coverage of our game:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48643.html

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/04/29/joystiq-hands-on-mag/

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/mag-hands-on

http://blog.seattlepi.com/digitaljoystick/archives/167606.asp

http://www.destructoid.com/preview-mag-130125.phtml

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/977/977670p1.html

http://totalplaystation.com/ps3/MAG/previews/8310

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48619.html

Because I care so much, I went ahead and did the free courtesy for you of looking up the word "epilogue" in the dictionary. It means "a concluding section that rounds out the design of a literary work." Alternatively, it could also be "the final scene of a play that comments on or summarizes the main action."

Now I know that you folk in Québec aren't exactly fond of English there given your history and culture, and so I realise that we may not seem eye to eye on all things. But as I understand it, "epilogue" is a word that is, in part, derived from French. Call me crazy, but I just sort of have this gut hunch that, if you're going to go and call something an "epilogue," by God you would actually mean it.

By no means am I overly disappointed with my purchase of Prince of Persia and the appropriate downloadable content misleadingly called "Epilogue." However, as advice for the future, if you're going to actually ship a game with an incomplete storyline and expect us to pay full price for it with the expressed, "according to your master plan" intention to release the "real ending" to the game a few months later for ten additional dollars as DLC, it might behoove you in the future, oh, I don't know, to actually end the stupid story? Just a crazy idea. I'll let that one sink in and get back to you later, mmkay?

Sincerely,
Mr. Hanging from a Cliff

"There Will Be Brawl," Episode Three

"Next time, maybe, show me your moves." XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

It is WAAAAAAY too late. XDDDD

Here is written the ramblings of an LJ hermit.

Busyness. I'm honestly not sure when it was that society attached a positive connotation with the phrase "being busy." The pastor at my church has a humorous take on the very notion as he always, in mock-dialogue with himself, awards himself a gold star and places it on his sweater after he responds to "So how've you been?" with the phrase, "Oh, you know, been busy." I'm not sure if this is a manifestation of Moore's Law in a much broader spectrum of life or if things have always been this way regardless of the technological advances of the late 20th century, but we've always been promised the notion that this new gizmo will save you time and make your life much less busy. Weren't refrigerators and sewing machines and vacuum cleaners supposed to do this very thing? While it may be true that it has opened up some small quantity of time in our lives, human beings, the great optimisers that they are, only filled that space with other, lesser important things. Despite all these "time-saving devices," we -- myself included -- still use the phrase "making time for family" or "squeezing time in for friends."

What's so remarkable about this is that, if you were to take an informal survey of any number of people, provided they answer you seriously, if you asked them what they would do if they found out that they'd have 30 days left to live, the number one (or at least near-number one) answer on everyone's list would be to spend time with family and friends. If wisdom is gradually attained as we progress in years, then I think it's plain to see that maintaining healthy relationships with others is perhaps one of the wisest insights that one could possibly divine. What's amazing about this, however, is that it's plain to see this even in foresight; most people seem to either not care about this or distract themselves sufficiently until, suddenly, in a flash of panic, they realise that the objects in the mirror really are larger than they appear! But by then, it's usually far too late to do anything about it. The opportunity is gone or lost, and time has pushed you beyond the instant where an old wound of a problem could have been properly treated and healed.

I've always maintained that God has a healthy sense of irony. (My friend and colleague, just the other day, wistfully declared to me that it would be cool if the vacuum of space were actually filled with Irony. I laughed.) I'm reading The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren just as I'm about to leap over the last few hurdles of our biggest crunch period remaining at work. Now I'll be the first to admit that I honestly do love my job; making videogames for a living is fun, but I also work for a company where I cannot find a single person to honestly hate. I can work with every single member of the company that I've had the privilege of talking to, and that's a powerful motivator for me. It's an amazing feeling. But enough about that; having come (mostly) off of crunch, there have been times that I've worked late into the evening and occasionally over the weekends only to come home exhausted and wanting to do little. It's been in this time where I promised myself, "Well, once I get back into the swing of things, I'm totally going to get back and kick start it all again."

However, the words, as full of intent as they are, aren't all that valuable. Unfortunately, now that I'm out of college, I've also grown to being a heavy procrastinator. If you need proof, just look at my LJ; no long diatribes about anything the entire month of February. That's telling you something. Though I want to better manage my time, though I want to spend more time with the people who mean the most to me, though I know I should be focusing and prioritising my time upon the people that mean the most to me, I haven't. An if there's one basic premise that I believe is true, it's that Time = Life = Love.

Life is equal to time because, let's face it, we only have so many seconds in our individual lifespans, and there's little we can do to "buy" more time. Despite this, time is often wasted ever so frivolously that it makes you wonder if we even realise just how precious a quantity it even is.

Love is equal to life because, after having done some serious reflection, I come to realise that my computer, my job, my accomplishments, my gamerscore on the XBox 360, my copy of Tales of Symphonia (good as the game is), my 3D jigsaw puzzle of a castle, and my green T-shirt with the Mario Piranha Plant and the words "Oh snap!" will one day be sold by my children in a garage sale for 25 cents... or worse yet, 25 cents for the whole lot. If you take away everything tangible, all you're left with is the intangible. And if almost dead men tell wise tales, it's relationships, loving others, that is a key to life. As another anecdote from my pastor, you tend to see only two types of old people -- the crotchety kind, and the super sugary sweet kind; I'm not so sure I want to be the "get off my lawn" type.

So, provided you believe the three-way equality, then you yield two very startling mathematical truths. The first being that Life - Love = 0, or life without love is meaningless. And the more startling, Love - Time = 0, or live without giving time is nothing.

As an open letter to all of you whom I know personally or moderately well, I know I haven't always been the most attentive person in the world. One of my "glamorous" faults is that I could probably be easily distracted by butterflies fluttering in a field... and then have tunnel vision on it until the next distraction comes along. I'll admit quite strongly that, yes, my priorities have been misplaced, that I've not always been the best friend I could be, and that... well, I've not always given the love, time, and thought that my friends deserved to them.

If you feel like that's the case, that I have wronged you, I am sorry. I could probably go down my friends list and easily fill up on my two hands the number of people I should have paid more attention to, and then I'd have plenty more to add from the people I know who are regular Internetians. I admit I'm not the greatest time manager in the world, though I always hope to try to be better in the future.

Comments are screened on this post, just in case you feel the need to say something to me personally.

"Tagged" by darkfeather. Enjoy!

1. Pick 15 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search or other search functions.

( ...Annnnnnnnnnd here's the list! Good luck! I think you'll need it. )

As one of my pals in a previous entry mentioned, there was a second LJ archive utility that was recommended, and in order to give you the full breadth of the utilities, I provide you with a review of that one. That one so happens to be LJ-SEC. (I completely missed this in my Google search for such devices, and LJ is rather reluctant to list this one on their page, just like ljArchive.)

This one has some features that are better than ljArchive and some that are worse. Most notably, LJ-SEC does not download comments. As a result, for community backups (such as RP communities and the like), you will NOT want to use LJ-SEC. Granted, it will do all of your journal entries fairly nicely and quickly, but it does not handle comments. However, on the flip side of the coin, LJ-SEC does allow you to make mass security changes to your existing entries as they exist on LiveJournal. You can highlight entries en masse and globally change many settings about them, namely the public/friends-only/private/custom-group permissions level, bulk-entry find and replace, and tag management, not to mention edit existing posts as well. They do warn on the main page of their website that this does access the entries directly from their website, so they recommend you using ljArchive to download your posts first before using this tool; while it may be a precaution for just in case, I think it's probably mostly harmless all in all, but I haven't done any research on that.

One feature that this does have is the ability to repost any and all your entries to another journal, not necessarily LJ. However, the journal system does need to be LJ-compatible at the very least, and it does warn that all possible settings and flags (most notably, the adult content flags) may not transfer over correctly depending upon how new the server is. The journals is by default supports are LJ, Greatest Journal, Dead Journal, Blurty, About My Life, JournalFen, and Insane Journal, though there may be more.

As for communities, it will allow you to download the community posts, just as ljArchive does. These can probably be reuploaded too, although I cannot guarantee that, especially since I haven't actually tested the feature out. Note that since you have no comments, the effectiveness of this may be limited.

WARNING: If this LJ posting makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, there is a really good reason. As I type this message, I am listening to the 62-hour-long MIDI of my entire LiveJournal contents. And honestly... I cannot take this seriously. At all. XD

For those of you concerned about LJ and its relative longevity, I promised some friends that I would try out some LJ archiving software, and try it out I have. My first Google hit (not to mention a program referenced by someone else) is called ljArchive. The software seems to be relatively robust. And... honestly, it's rather fully functional. To download my whopping total of 288 entries over the past six years, it took less than a minute, comments to my journal entries included. And it saves them in a nice custom format which you save onto your hard drive, which will pull up all your journal's contents within the application.

It supports multiple journals (for those of you with Multiple Personality Syndrome... or with RP journals) as well as communities (which is important for those of you who REALLY want communities backed up, however note that to download a community's comments, you need moderator access). It will automatically sync up with your journal to get new content should you archive stuff now and then add entries later. And it gives you a nice convenient database of all your entries (and all the comments applied to your entries). As far as export abilities, it will export to HTML, XML, and (as aforementioned) MIDI (lol). It can search your entries for specific searchable words not to mention perform all sorts of statistics and analysis on your journal, such as who comments on your journal the most, what words you use most often, and your emotional profile in comparison to other LJ users. It will even read your entries back to you. (I apparently didn't have this set up though, so I haven't actually tried it out. Not that I really WANT to be able to hear my entries aloud. Shudder!)

The only question remains how easy it would be to re-upload this sort of stuff to another journal-like thing, though my hunch is that such a task would be relatively difficult in general since I doubt there are many cross-journal pieces of software out there on the market.

At any rate, if nothing else, I recommend this one.

For all of you-ins at the party last night who want to know the recipe I followed, here it is:

SEVEN-LAYER COOKIES

Things you need:
- 13"x9"x2" glass pan (don't know if it'll work with metal or the like)
- Rolling pin
- ¼ lb butter or margarine (approximately 4-5 good teaspoons works)
- 1 - 1½ cup graham cracker crumbs (if you crush them yourselves, about one package of graham crackers works; I used cinnamon grahams for my batch last night)
- 6 oz chocolate chips
- 6 oz butterscotch chips
- 1 cup shredded coconut
- 1 cup chopped or crushed English walnuts (if you buy them as halves or shelled, you'll need to crush these)
- 1 14-oz can of sweetened condensed milk

Steps
1. Preheat oven to 325°.
2. Add butter to pan and melt it in the oven until completely liquefied.
3. Crush graham crackers (provided you bought them whole) and English walnuts (if shelled or halved) with a rolling pin.
4. Once butter is melted, remove the pan from the oven.
5. Sprinkle each layer evenly over the pan in the following order: graham cracker crumbs, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, coconut flakes, English walnuts.
6. Pour condensed milk evenly over the top of everything.
7. Bake in oven for 25-30 minutes.
8. Let cool.
9. ???
10. PROFIT!

Notes
- Most of the amounts are approximates, and adding more is usually perfectly alright.
- Most of the ingredients can be omitted or substituted rather easily, though you probably want to keep at least the butter, graham crackers, and condensed milk (and at least something in between).

While I was home for the holidays this past week, I found myself alongside some of my best friends in a bookstore. The bookstore is a particularly dangerous place for me because I always tend to find something that my deep, inner workings crave to devour, this despite the fact that I have a stack of books that are still unread, books that remain unread for some excuse or another. (Such things include the remainder of the Sword of Truth series, the books of Shannara, the Wheel of Time series, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Michael Crichton's Timeline (why didn't anyone tell me he passed away a month ago!?), a few Star Wars novels, amongst many others.) As I was prone to do, I picked up a new book that had caught my eye, something that had the makings of something that I'd be fascinated by, and something that might prove to be a quick read (other than the fact that it has two sequels). The one book almost became two when I did my ritual scan of my favourite author Orson Scott Card; there's a ninth (tenth?) Ender book out, though I can't buy it yet due to my fascination with paperbacks and the current lack of production of them.

However, on his shelf was a book that I've oft seen but have never picked up for purchase (namely because I just don't think it'd be my style). The book is called Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The title of the book should be enough to give you a basic idea of what it's about (no, I haven't read it, but Wikipedia knows all); however, this entry isn't about the book; merely, it's about an idea inspired by the book.

As I begin to close the year 2008, I can't help but begin to look back at the year in review, not to mention the several years in review. Sure, this year I failed to keep my New Year's resolutions past April or June, but hey, that's a big improvement over someone who didn't make resolutions for many years. (However, some resolutions made mid-year have certainly been avidly kept to, I'm happy to say.) One thing I can definitely say that has happened in 2008 that hasn't happened in years past is that I can genuinely say that I'm truly content with just about every aspect of my life. While I've been in that "happy" phase of life before, I can't help but look back and see unsettling issues that had masked beneath the surface, realising that those "happy" moments, while mostly legit, were perpetuated by a short-term high that came from something or other. While not technically a bad thing, it's certainly still something that needed addressed, and 2008, thank God, has been a year to clean out the cobwebs and throw them out the window. I'm honestly glad I had the chance to do that this year.

Yet with the ending of the year comes the end of the second year of my "one-year experiment" out here in the American Northwest. I can't help but look back to the previous two Christmases and be somewhat surprised by the results. After my first Christmas flight back from the land of my birth back to the land of my residence—a flight made less than two months after my initial move out here—I'll admit that I cried at the airport. I didn't want to leave. As much as I thought that Ohio was a boring state without much potential, as much as I thought Ohio was an insignificant state, I couldn't help but create a mental list of all the things I was "losing" by being a few thousands of miles away. High on my list were my parents and my good, close friends, some of which had been close friends with me for years, and with some I had practically spent every weekend together. There were things I didn't miss, but all in all, it made me wish deeply that my job would just magically get teleported back to Ohio and let that be done.

The next year was quite different. As my parents and I drove home from the airport, I casually remarked (in surprise!) that "you can see forever here," that some states (I kid you not) "don't actually have hills and mountains everywhere." After having lived in Washington for a year, I had grown accustomed to the way the Northwest felt, and I honestly felt like a foreigner in my state, someone that only came for a visit to sightsee and move on. Honestly, Ohio is different in many subtle ways; they'll cut down a forest to build a new Wal-Mart in the blink of an eye (just so that they can move from their already existing one some 2000 feet away), the layout of cities and communities is drastically different, and even the attitude of drivers is like night and day. Ohio went from being a state I pined for to being a state that I didn't truly feel for. Harsh as it may be to say it, when leaving the airport that Christmas, I didn't shed a single tear, even as I waved goodbye to my parents at the airport. Yes, I missed them in that moment, and I certainly missed my friends, but the emotions never caught up with me as I walked down the lane past the TSA agents into the concourse beyond. I honestly thought I'd "gotten over" Ohio.

Yet this year, like a pendulum, I find myself recanting last year's foolish belief and believing something completely different. Honestly, for all the "faults" that Ohio has, I find myself missing the subtle beauties I had never really appreciated before about my home state (or at least my home city). For all the bad "feng shui" that the city has, my birth city certainly doesn't have the clustered feel that Seattle does. Here, it feels like everything is built atop one another, that every single piece of flat land (and indeed, many pieces of land that isn't flat!) must be used for some purpose, either buildings, housing, roads, or necessary and clearly defined green space. Almost humorously, Ohio is finally getting a wide array of Asian cuisine, something I've always lauded about western Washington. And then... there are the friends that I've only seen a few times over the past years... and I honestly and earnestly miss them and now just realise how good things were back then despite all the then-problems with my prior job. It makes me wish that I could carve out a new, imaginary state that takes the best of both worlds—friends from both places, my parents, my current job, and then all the subtle things I like—so that I would never have to "choose" between the two...

But that's just wistful thinking and dreaming. And in the end, one has to come to grips with the fact that one can't have it all. Because if we did have it all, well, first, how exciting would that be, but second, we would find something else to want as well. While greed does make the economy go round, greed has to be carefully balanced against reality and contentedness. I realise I don't need to live in my imaginary dream state in order to be happy; I have everything I need at my fingertips, and what I don't have, I have fond memories of as well as the possibility of relighting the sparks later on should I be so lucky. I realise that I truly am blessed, that there is so much going for me that I shouldn't look at the delta between what I have and what I could dream about. I should look at the delta between what I have... and how little I could have; that is so much more significant a number.

Honestly, if I could describe this past week for me, it would literally be titled Pastwatch: The Redemption of Ohio. If nothing else, it's a very bold claim to make.

Tonight, after baking brownies, I enjoyed a guilty little pleasure as I cleaned up after my culinary exploits. I turned out all the lights in my apartment except for the small night light in my kitchen and the green glow from my microwave's clock in order to light a single vanilla-scented candle. And with (practically) the light of a single candle, burning brightly against the shadow of darkness, I realised that it is totally possible to do chores under the faint light emitted from it -- not to mention so much more pleasing than basking beneath the fluorescent glow of the overhead lights. As I scrubbed dishes, I couldn't help but be amused by the dancing flame flickering back and forth, struggling to provide just enough light, burning brightly from the melted wax.

And yet, a little random thought entered my head, and I couldn't help but think that, in many ways, our society is just like the little candle. It seems that so many people these days seem to feel like they're all alone, shrouded in the darkness by economic woes, personal finance, relationship problems, you name it. And the only way they know to keep the flame burning is to keep on burning wax, to consume like there's no tomorrow, to constantly keep burning brighter and brighter to push back the night and the darkness, to keep the nightmares at bay, to keep the hope of light alive just a little longer. Keep living, keeping moving, even if it isn't necessarily better or forwards.

What's so sad is that people don't truly realise just how many other candles are immediately surrounding them, doing the same fiery dance. And if every candle in the world -- or even all of them in just a small area -- tries to burn as bright as they can, soon enough, the combined efforts of everyone will cause a fire-storm of unbelievable proportions.

If we willingly, genuinely, openly, honestly shared the light with one another, we wouldn't have to try so hard. Two candles working together can be so much more than just a single candle in the dark. Together they can share and brighten each other so that they both don't have to try so hard.

Physically speaking, I want a second candle. Abstractly speaking, I'm glad I have so many.

To all of you who saw yesterday's post and commented, thank you. Hearing perspectives both like and unlike mine certainly aided the process in comprehending what I could not fathom. While I may not agree with every point made, I believe that to understand the opposite perspective is at least half the battle, and you made that possible. Thank you.

First thing's first -- If you've recently seen a "de-friending E-mail" or what have you, really, don't get offended or anything. For me, my primary use of LiveJournal is keeping track of the lives of those individuals who are really close to me. And, after a while, sometimes I just stop reading individuals' journals. It's nothing personal really; we've just gone our separate ways, and that's easy to do on the Internet, especially when you don't chat to one another on a day-to-day basis. So, sorry. Feel free to keep reading my journal if you find my stories (when I do post them) inspiring.

---

I couldn't begin to tell you the number of times over the past many years when I thought I had this whole "love thing" figured out. Back in the late '90s (nearly a decade ago, don't I feel old? K'yuk k'yuk), I, like most fellow high schoolers at the time, thought that I understood everything. I thought I understood (quite clearly, to boot) the ABCs of how to be a good boyfriend, about how two people in love should feel for one another, as well as the answers to about a zillion other similar questions. My very first perspective on how to benchmark "love" was to indicate just how many "first time" thresholds you had passed. Boy, was that a complete waste of time, in retrospect, keeping a complete log of them. However, I learned from my mistakes, and eventually I came to the point where I thought, many years later, that love was mostly a function of willpower, that one could simply "want to love" someone enough that it could happen, but then I learned about how some people just plain aren't compatible with one another. (Surprise!) Oh, and the times I've thought that "taking a break" from that someone else were a good idea? "Taking a break" most often is just a euphemism for "trying to find the emergency exit" so that you can escape the building without your significant other seeing you leave as she comes up the elevator to see you.

Ah, the memories of my stupidity. Gag me with a spoon.

However, beneath all of my misconceptions was a naïve hope and dream that, despite all of my prior errors, I thought it still was right beyond the shadow of a doubt. You see, I am, quite honestly, a complete sap when it comes down to it. Though I shun romance novels out of my firm believe that it would eliminate what little masculinity I had left if I obsessed over them (not to mention my personal bias to believing them to be clichéd at best and overdramatic and unrealistic at worst), I personally relish a little dollop of romance as condiment to my buffet of science fiction and fantasy novels. In fact, most of my personal favourites always have some pairing that makes the story just shine out brilliantly. Two souls coming together and overcoming adversity... and then finding themselves hopelessly in love with one another once the story ends. Two soulmates finding one another at long last.

Yes, I am the hopeless romantic in that I've always believed in the soulmate story, that God had put one other person on this planet that was my perfect match, the missing puzzle piece to my jigsaw, the lock that matches the keyhole on my heart, or the gas pump to my gas tank (or the other way around, I would imagine, har har). I believed it because I wanted to believe that, despite all of my flailing around in hopes of understanding just what love was, I wanted to believe that I just hadn't been lucky yet, that there was some greater plan of destiny in my life that would inevitably lead me to the place where I wanted to be. It was the safety net to catch me despite myself, and I willingly believed that, yes, that had to be true. Because I wanted it to be true. After all, "The Princess Bride" and "Stardust" can't be wrong, can they? Can all those færie tales be so wrong?

Yet a funny thing happened that made me question the crux of my whole belief on love. Someone suggested an alternative way of looking at my core belief, one that made all the more sense, one that, honestly, not only had the smell of truth but one that seemed to be backed up with empirical evidence from personal experience, all in all. I think, in a way, I wasn't truly wrong, but I certainly wasn't right by any means. Though I understood the big picture, I was looking at it completely upside down and backwards. It was really simple though and completely elegant: "Soulmates exist. However, soulmates aren't found; they're made."

What sweet irony.

One of my favourite anime movies of all time is "Whisper of the Heart." Throughout the anime, a boy and a girl are at odds with one another, finding each other at opposite ends of rather silly arguments. Yet over time, the two of them find that they have a common bond, and that they confess in the end that they had both been pursuing one another the whole time, even if it was in secret. Through shared experiences, the two decide run into an seeming insurmountable wall, an obstacle that they must overcome, and it's something that most young children would've faced only to fail, thus going their separate ways. Yet instead, they both dedicate themselves to separate tasks, each wanting to prove to themselves -- and each other -- that the two of them really can make it in the long run. A boy and a girl who originally couldn't stand the sight of one another... eventually commit themselves to running the gauntlet and seeing where they end up.

"Soulmates aren't found; they're made." It is true; I just know it is.

I guess "The Princess Bride" no longer is allowed to hold my favourite movie slot anymore.

I hope that, one day, everyone will find a few minutes out of the day to sit down by themselves, alone, and allow themselves to be intellectually honest to themselves. I hope that, in that moment, people would find the courage and audacity to admit, ever so quietly, that they don't know all the answers in the world, that there are many questions to which they do not have the answers, that they have many biases and unfair predispositions that cloud their judgements, and that they are not the one-stop shop for the world's problems. I hope that people will be able to put away the self-pride to say aloud to the mirror that they aren't perfect, and I hope that people won't be tempted by depression when faced with that realisation. I hope that people would then, having conquered their own mind, might be free to converse and peaceably debate with one another, to share opinions and ideas and to fairly critique each other, even if neither truly wishes to change their opinions after all is said and done. I hope that, having started a dialogue, that people would be able to put their differences behind one another and work together in order to tackle the problems that face all humankind; I hope that people would view themselves not as the project's foreman but rather as a piece of the whole, integral yet not all-powerful. I hope that people would, as part of this project, be willing servants as they serve others, to place the needs of others before the needs of themselves, to realise that there is no such thing as "first place" in the game of life. I hope that neither greed nor sloth would tempt the hearts of the world, that they would truly fight for the global good.

I cannot help but be a naïve idealist. Still, I would rather be an idealist that has my hopes and dreams fall to pieces than to compromise upon my own hopes in order to be right.

( Halloween meme )

So I haven't updated my journal in a while. Okay, it's been a long while. It's not been the fact that I haven't had anything to say. Several good prompts have come and went, never to be written about. Yet nevertheless, one of the things I realised is that I no longer depend upon writing quite so much as I used to. It's not that I don't appreciate it anymore or that I suddenly dislike writing; that's quite far from the truth! But one of the things that has always been true about writing and me is that writing has always provided a much needed catharsis during rough times. If I wanted to get over harsh feelings, I'd write. If I wanted to intensify a wonderful event, I'd write. It's one of the reasons why I still roleplay and write fanfiction; writing takes me places that my mind could not go strictly on its own except but on paper... or at least, that's what I thought.

Since... oh, whenever it was I wrote in this thing last, I've been busy. Or at least I'd like to claim that. Mentally, I have been busy. Physically, significantly less so. I fell into a basic routine that has only experienced minor variations. Work from Monday to Friday, Japanese class on Monday night, anime night on Wednesdays, a Saturday Sabbath, church on Sunday morning (complete with parking duty), and then Sunday evening I do my Japanese homework. There have been disruptions to that mantra, like when my father was in town... or when I wanted to cook something a little extra special, but that's the basic gist. It's not a busy schedule, but I have been spending my free time having fun and doing what I want. I've falling into step with the gentle beat of the cosmic drum. It's a good feeling, really. It's a feeling I never got at my old job.

I've found an undercurrent of peace.

What's surprising about this is that I've found this uniform peace despite how chaotic the actual mental events in my life have been. I've gone through several arguments with a few friends, a few desperate discussions with someone that is slipping through my fingertips, a deepening in a friendship that was already deep, the blossoming of new friendships, the gradual difficulties in finding desire to do some things... while new passions are now bearing sweet fruit... It's weird having looked back on the past few months and realised all of the emotional highs and lows that I've been through... yet I don't feel as if I ever were on an emotional roller coaster at all. Really, I've been more or less at peace the entire time. The constant ebb and flow, the pushing and pulling of the sea upon me, it's as if it had never existed all this time. Instead, I've found peace, the sort of still peace that one can attain by floating upon one's back upon the surface of an otherwise still swimming pool.

I'm still amazed at how much of a difference turning off the car radio will do to focus one's frame of mind. I'm amazed at how letting go of my constant worries over politics and culture and letting it be what it will has lowered my stress. And I'm amazed at how awesome it feels that, when I received a bonus at work, that I no longer think of the money or even the fact that I'm a valuable employee first... but that I'm thinking of how much my actions has helped others.

I've found that the secret to living life to the fullest is not about wielding control as if it were a weapon but about letting go of one's control and flying wherever the winds take you.

It's not about the destination, but the journey. And I'm flying.

(And incidentally, my favourite Zelda remix starts playing as I finish revising this post. It's so relaxing and amazing. And so coincidental.)

A few weeks ago, a few of my friends went out with the intent to roll 12-pound balls down some oil-slick lanes in hopes of knocking down pins. That didn't happen. Apparently bowling has become the in thing with the younger generation once again, and every possible lane was already filled up. (When did that happen? We could always get lanes at the spur of the moment on a Saturday night in Ohio!) At any rate, we decided that, having been thwarted in our mission, we decided upon doing the next best thing: using long wooden sticks to smash balls into other balls in hopes of pushing them into pockets. In short, billiards became the entertainment of the evening. And unbeknownst to my friends (well, unbeknownst to them at the time), I'm actually moderately okay billiards. I'm by no means a pool shark (I have no fin sticking out of my back), but I've got a small knack for it.

I mean, in some respects, it's not that challenging. It's really a basic physics simulation that any college-based physics class will go over with you. (Then again, slot machines are all about probability, and we see how many fools stick quarters into those.) However, as I played billiards with my friends, I came to a realisation about midway into my second game. I could actually see the trajectories of the balls in my head. I could, more or less, based upon the angle of my pool stick, predict the first impact or two of the pool balls with one another, determining whether or not a given ball would hit the pocket or not. It just clicked, and I could see the lines drawn in my head... drawn in my vision. The game became less about determining what shots to take... and more about successfully performing those.

Because, I'll be the first to admit, my form in billiards is not great. Yes, I committed an uber-scratch in the game. Both the cue ball (as well as the number-two ball) went flying off the table at one point, bounding down past several lanes before some younger folk nicely picked them up for us. And then later on, at the end of the last game, I messed up the shot, hitting the cue ball slightly askew, sending the eight-ball for a different pocket than I had called out, losing the game ultimately.

Looking back on this simple game of strategy, mathematics, and chance, I can't help but feel that there's a strong lesson deeper within this simple game.

I was the resident pool shark of my band; I "knew" what I was doing. I had this plan worked out... well, more or less at least! (I'm not the pool shark that can stop a ball on any point on the billiard table.) Yet miscalculations in my foresight of the physics eventually crept into here and there. Shots were made too hard or too soft, improperly struck with the pool stick, or attempted even though I thought they might fail. Scratches were made, and I think I probably chalked up the most of all three of us that night, much to my chagrin. Regardless of my experience or my confidence, I made a good many mistakes that night, some of them quite stupid mistakes I shouldn't have made. Some of them -- a simple scratch -- were quite harmless; others, like the eight-ball in the wrong pocket, lost me the game.

Life seems to be exactly like this very framework. Even the best people make mistakes, even if they're experts, even if they know what they're doing, even if they're following some elaborate plan. Humans are gifted in finding ways to screw up everything from complex circuitry to PB&J. And certainly I'm no exception to the rule! We're bound to make a few scratches here in there in life. And, most certainly, we're bound to accidentally bean someone we care about with an eight-ball in the wrong pocket, destroying something that we thought was very precious. The one thing that I can say is that, in life, like billiards, while a single game might be lost, there's always a possibility for another game to redeem yourself, to make up for those mistakes. Second chances. Saving throws. Opportunities to turn life around. Goodness knows how important they are and how relieving it is to know that, though we hit game over sometimes, someone might just be kind enough to lend you another quarter to stick into the machine and play again.

I know I'm oh so very fortunate to have received second chances in life. Thank God for that.

I had an amazing knack for mathematics as a child. My mum loves to tell stories about how my favourite place in all the world was Bruning's Clock Shop right next to K-Mart, about a mile or so away from our home. Now out of business, sadly, I would long to go in there and for half an hour watch all of the cuckoo clocks display their fancy routines and to hear the long chimes of grandfather clocks. (Those stories will never get old, really.) I was doing addition and subtraction before I even hit kindergarten, multiplication tables soon thereafter, and long division by second grade. From all this experience and passion for the logical rules of algebra, geometry, and calculus, I have this naïve belief deep down that the rest of life should follow the same simplistic rules that I've seen in mathematical books for years. Yet few of the important rules in life are so well-defined that they can be summarised in a few short sentences, and there are few invariants in the world, most of those familiar "constants" instead being replaced my ugly variables that will can any balanced life and quickly unbalance it.

One of the many ugly differences between pure mathematics and reality comes with a classic problem that makes me want to bash my head against a wall every time I encounter it in reality. In theory, as I'm sure we can all say, the shortest distance between two points is a single, straight line segment. (On Earth, of course, this is actually a curve due to the non-Euclidean surface that is the Earth, but that's another story altogether.) However, once you try to apply this principle in real life, sadly things start getting much more complicated. A quick search on Google Maps will show you that the shortest distance between two points is rarely a straight line... and moreover that the shortest TIME between two points is often quite different than the path representing the shortest distance. A great example of this could be found back in our college days when trying to get to the movie theatre on Friday evenings. Since it was on the other side of the interstate, and the few bridges spanning the highway were ridiculously crowded or had bad traffic light management, we determined that the quickest way to get from our dorm to the theatre was to head south about a mile in a half to get on the Interstate, then travel back northward for two miles... just to get successfully to the other side of the bridge... so that we could then quickly drive to the theatre, which was one mile EAST of campus.

The whole concept of switchbacks, while understandable in theory, just boggles my mind really when they're put into practise. The whole concept of taking a step backward so that I might take two steps forward seems completely illogical to me. It's counter-intuitive. It's silly. It's ridiculous. But life isn't perfect. Life is only a blurred reflection of the mathematical and physical principles upon which it is based, but everything else functions as an approximation. One of my old co-workers loved to drive me nuts with that tease, that engineering and physics is really but an approximation of the true laws that govern the universe. There's an obvious disparity.

Things just don't work like they should. Things aren't always simple. Things aren't always elegant. Things aren't always easy.

Switchbacks up the mountainside make logical sense after a deeper investigation. Even switchbacks in life, switchbacks in friendships, switchbacks in relationships... all of them make perfect sense once analysed.

Yet... yet... despite that comforting thought, still I find myself frustrated, confused, hurt, lost... the moment that I find that I cannot press nor push my way one centimetre forward unless I backtrack a full two miles in a direction that doesn't directly benefit me just to cross a bridge or bring me to a pass through the mountains or somehow otherwise help me reach my goal.

Life is like this for good reason. But... but... that doesn't mean I have to be fond of life for continually throwing these stupid curve balls at me.

I leave it up to faith to show me that, by taking these steps backwards now, they will help me move forwards in the long haul.

Life is such a bizarre thing, when you look at it. As children, we see magic everywhere and in everything. We don't even have to strain our eyes to find it; it's just there everywhere you look for it. As we grow older, that magic begins to become more difficult to discern. Gradually the sparkles of every little thing lose their shimmer as we come to understand more and more about the world. The stars that aligned for us so often as children fail to do so with the same frequency. Small bits of good news still are received, but the magic of that never seems to wear those dazzling sequins or flashy colours we oft saw as children.

Yet every once in a while, the glitter of something magical still can be seen. Sometimes those stars still find themselves in perfect alignment. And we are consequentially filled with euphoria the likes of which we can barely remember from long ago.

And you can't help but imagine if that magical light has just appeared right then and there... or if it's been there before you all this time, with us just too blind or too distracted to find it. Regardless of which it is, one thing is decidedly certain: There is something out there in life that's always worth celebration, and no matter the hardships one faces, it's always worth moving forward... for the dancing sparkles of magic are all around us, ready to touch us if we let them.

The human psyche is truly an amazing piece of machinery... so infinitely complex and impossible to truly predict. Yet at the same time, it actually is amazingly simple... surprisingly simple. Yet it's that simplicity is the feeling that somehow the psyche is wrong or that it has violated some rule. People seem to thrive on complexity -- or, that is to say, they don't really thrive on complexity, but there is a natural tendency for people to complicate matters. Small, subtle rules have become cultural mores or taboos, and somewhere during our development we start basing personality off of those imagined rules instead of simple common sense. Between perfect strangers, there isn't a great deal of difference between the two really. The societal norm was meant to apply to such, and that should not be a surprise. However, when you start looking at intimate relationships -- friends, family, and all points closer -- sometimes those "rules" about how you should treat someone else just seem to be rather petty.

While thinking about this subject, I'm reminded of a certain comic strip by one of my absolute favourite webcomics, XKCD:

It took me quite a while to understand exactly what this comic was trying to tell me. Originally, this was one of the ones that I just gave a passing glance to when going back through the then archive of 200-some comics, and so I smiled at the absurdity of having a room full of playpen balls and moving on. But it recently came to me exactly what this meant, that this whole concept of playpen balls -- while absurd to cultural norms -- doesn't have to be absurd at all... because there comes a point where we can say, "To hell with your stinking rules! I get to play by my own rules!" This is impossible, of course, while out and about with strangers; societal order needs to be kept. But when you deal with those closer to you, the standard set of rules don't apply. In fact, oftentimes, there aren't any rules after all.

It's weird that it's taken me so long to accept this very fact. I mean, technically I've had friendships for years now that have proven this thing to me over and over again... yet my incessant need to complicate kept getting in the way. I don't know when I signed it, but somehow I subscribed to the idea long ago that there are just certain "ways" that you should feel about other people regardless of the situation, and if your relationship falls outside that set, it's just improper. You're not allowed to do that... no, I don't care how natural it feels. Good people just don't do that.

You know what? Screw the rules. (I have money!) I'm playing by my own now. And this time, I darn well mean it. And I'm going to start with the definition of love.

Love isn't something that just lovers feel. Love isn't inseparably intertwined with romance. Love isn't just a vehicle that leads to marriage. Love isn't just happily ever after. Love isn't just that magical, queasy feeling that makes you weak at the knees. Love isn't just your fancy schmancy, trite concept of "love."

Love can exist outside of "love." Love can be present without "love."

That much is darn well undeniable.