Words On Wednesday

I do not care about Halloween. There, I said it. Everybody I know seems to love Halloween. Tons of people consider it their favorite holiday of the year (as if something could dethrone Christmas). They go to spook trails and haunted houses nearly every weekend during October. They decorate their houses with elaborate graveyard scenes and the like. These people go all out for Halloween, and I just don’t get it. That isn’t to say that I *dislike* Halloween. Before I had kids, we used to go to a spook trail or two each year. If we could get reliable child care now, we probably still would. We take the kids trick or treating, but I feel like that’s a big fuss about nothing when we usually end up throwing away half or more of the candy anyway. Lots of adults I know throw parties for Halloween, but how does that differ from any other weekend during the year besides donning a costume? You want to have some friends over and get trashed, that’s called a normal Friday night for a lot of peo...

As I come up on the end of my first term at Southern New Hampshire University, I figured it's as good a time as any to give an update on my progress so far. First and foremost, I'm doing remarkably well in class. For IT-510 Advanced Information Technology, I have 386.9 of the 395 possible points so far, resulting in a 98%. For the first few weeks, I read the textbook like a good student should. Lately... I've just Googled things as I needed them. Concepts that I didn't understand, I look over the first few Google results and wing it. Clearly, it's worked well for me so far. The only points that I have lost through the entire term have been based on formatting, since I didn't adhere strictly to APA style. Did I mention that I hate formatting? On the other hand, I feel like the people that I'm in class with are surprisingly ignorant for a master's program. The spelling and grammar errors in discussion posts are prolific. I figured people that would pur...

A lot of video games allow players to create their own character, selecting gender, build, skin color, and facial features. Some people stick with the default character or one of a number of preset characters. Others like to create characters at random, with no real inspiration other than what their imagination comes up with. I, and players like me, try to create an avatar that resembles me as much as possible. If I’m going to be playing the game, and there isn’t a protagonist created specifically for the game, I want the main character to be an extension of myself. The Problem There are a number of problems with character creation systems when trying to make a character look a certain way. For one, the way people look can be very hard to describe. I could spend pages describing myself, or I could include a headshot and a full body shot in this post, and you’d have a near perfect idea of what I look like instantly. “A picture’s worth a thousand words” may actually be an understa...

There is a sensation that I occasionally experience that I frequently describe as “that high feeling.” I have no idea what causes it, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to when it happens, and nobody I’ve talked to about it has experienced anything similar. I’ve been having this sensation from time to time since I was about 20 years old. Calling it a “high feeling” may be a misnomer, as I’ve never actually been under the influence of illicit drugs to compare the two. I call it that because I have no better way to describe it at the moment. It doesn’t happen often, maybe once a month or less. Sometimes it will happen fairly regularly, other times I’ll go months without feeling it. The sensation itself comprises a number of different symptoms. The first that I notice is a sort of light headedness. Everything gets fuzzy, and I find it hard to focus. This facet of the sensation is very similar to what happens when I go without sleep for a long time. After I start to lose foc...