OK so I failed NaNoWriMo. Again. I think a major contributing factor is that, especially at this time of the year, life tends to get in the way of writing. As the middle of the year approaches, school assignments are due, and that means I have to mark them.
Speaking of which, except for the time commitment, I really don’t mind being a TA and teaching a lab. I hear other TAs and teachers complain about their borderline-retarded asshole students all the time, but in 4 years of teaching, I haven’t had one student that was a major problem. Not to toot my own horn, but maybe it’s because I don’t expect these people – who are just a few years younger than me, really – to be stupid little children. If a TA goes in with the mindset that they are wise old superior caretakers, constantly battling against an army of brats who only want marks they didn’t earn, well, maybe that’s exactly what they’ll find. Psychology instructors in particular should know about the power of self-fulfilling prophecies.
This “holiday season” also provides another reason for failing to write a novel: A bunch of good video games are coming out, which has renewed my addiction to them. My latest fixes are Mass Effect and Super Mario Galaxy. Mass Effect is an amazing old-school sci-fi RPG, with voice acting and a story that are better than most movies. Super Mario Galaxy is just fun as hell, in the same way that Mario 64 was when it first came out. Its fucking-with-gravity premise sorta hurts my brain, though. And with all these new games, I’m stuck with the dilemma of having to choose between finishing old games before starting new ones, or abandoning the old ones and hoping I get bored enough to get back to them later.
Life is hard.
Speaking of life and video games, check out this clip, about video games, from the show “Life” (see how clever I am with segues?). It’s sorta sad that depictions of video games and computers in movies and shows are still either stuck in the 80s, or warped to the future, or as is the case in this clip, a combination of both.
Next time I want to hide something, I think I’ll install Windows and Excel on an old Xbox, reverse-engineer a game to run off the hard drive, have “levels”, and activate Excel to open a file when the player beats the last level. Then I’ll hope that nobody thinks to, you know, just open the file by clicking on it.
Phronk.com 
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10 responses to “Life”
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Okay, third time’s a charm…Great post… It reminds me of the ol’ < HREF="http://www.uploadgeek.com/uploads456/1/ipv45.png" REL="nofollow"> CSI IP<>
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Okay, third time’s a charm…Great post… It reminds me of the ol’ CSI IP
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it’s kind of cool that the girl is better than the guy at the game.I laughed out loud at the end of that post… clever
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it’s kind of cool that the girl is better than the guy at the game.I laughed out loud at the end of that post… clever
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Sachz: Heheh, nice. Even I wasn’t nerdy enough to know what was wrong there without looking it up, though. 🙂Sharkboy: Yeah, that’d be cool, except for the fact that she revealed her skills by playing with the controller in the air. I can understand that for Guitar Hero or something, but for an action game? Where you have no way of predicting what the person playing will do next? It makes no sense.
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Sachz: Heheh, nice. Even I wasn’t nerdy enough to know what was wrong there without looking it up, though. :)Sharkboy: Yeah, that’d be cool, except for the fact that she revealed her skills by playing with the controller in the air. I can understand that for Guitar Hero or something, but for an action game? Where you have no way of predicting what the person playing will do next? It makes no sense.
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There’s self-confirmation bias too when you convince yourself that all your students are idiots, creating a “halo effect” of you seeing only their idiotic qualities. I have to guard myself against that while working at a call centre where people often call in to ask a question whose answer they already know, though they don’t know they know it.
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There’s self-confirmation bias too when you convince yourself that all your students are idiots, creating a “halo effect” of you seeing only their idiotic qualities. I have to guard myself against that while working at a call centre where people often call in to ask a question whose answer they already know, though they don’t know they know it.
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