Life | Mumbology

Tagged: Life

25Nov

Cash Is Never A Good Thing

Posted in Games, Hardware, Random | Leave a comment

As you might have noticed from some of my comments before, I might have a bit of an issue when it comes to buying things that I really have no need to be buying. If the steam sales aren’t enough proof, I got some news for you today. I got a new Nintendo Wii U last night so that I could play the new Super Smash Bros.

Let us go back to the beginning for a second on how this came to happen. I was watching a stream one day of the new Smash and realized that it looked pretty cool. I was somewhat sad that I didn’t have a Wii U to be able to play the game, but wasn’t interested enough to be bothered going and picking one up. I had also heard they were much more expensive then the last few Nintendo systems. Then we come to last night when I get home from work and realize that I have a giant wad of cash in my pocket. Having cash on hand is probably the worst thing that can happen since it just sits there mocking you daring you to spend it on something you will never need. Then I was at Wal-Mart with my roommate buying some food and we walked past the electronics section. He stops in since he just bought a DS2 the day before to check them out. At this point the money was practically screaming at me to spend it on something and really the only thing on my mind that day was Smash. So we try to get a Wii-U at that point to appease the money gods.

Of course Wal-Mart doesn’t have it, which normally would be a good thing since that means I didn’t spend the money. I think the money had somehow absorbed into my body at this point because the only thing we could think of was how the decision was already made to get a Wii-U. So we drive down to GameStop just to buy this stupid console and spend this useless paper that was somehow still in my pocket.

The cash might have been gone, but the inner gamer in me took over at this point. As I was sitting around today trying to finish up a bunch of stuff I had to do at work, I was thinking how dumb it was looking that my Wii had exactly one ipad shaped controller and one game. What kind of self respecting gamer would I be if I let that stand. A quick trip to Amazon fixed that issue with some additional controllers and useless games that will probably never get played arriving tomorrow…just in time for when my family comes down for Thanksgiving.

Hopefully the system will look much less lonely once those things arrive, and who knows maybe I’ll break the trend and actually play a fighting games more then once this time. I mean it has to happen eventually, right? I wonder if this is what women go through when they start looking at clothes.

18Nov

Technology Bites

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Well, I can no longer say that I’ve never had a hard drive fail on my before. It’s kind of a shame really since this was still drive wasn’t even a year old, and I’ve trashed many hard drives for much longer then that and never had a problem, but I guess that’s technology for you. The good news is that I still had the hard drive from my old computer laying around, and it wasn’t dead. The bad news is that I lost a lot of cool stuff because I’m a lazy dumbass who doesn’t backup shit nearly as much as one should, and it took me most of the weekend to get the hard drive and clean it up from all the dumb shit I had on it before.

If you haven’t made the connection yet, that is the long way of saying I didn’t have a working computer this weekend to do anything I wanted. I’ve probably said it because how much I live on a computer now, but I died a little inside when I tried to turn my computer one one morning and it didn’t boot up. Similarly to when the power goes out, I kind of curled up into a ball for a few hours and tried to adjust to life without a computer for a few days. I wasn’t sure if I would make it but with the help of some close friends to get me through these tough times, I can safely say that all is well again and I can hopefully find some time to play games.

On the plus side with this hard drive is I recovered all my old programming ports I was doing to help a friend learn some C# and SlimDX. I also remembered that I had Osu! on this computer. On the bad side, I lost the cool prototype for a project I was working on to be used with ArcheAge. I also remembered that I am really bad as Osu!.

04Nov

A New Roommate

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It’s possible you’ve heard but I’ll be getting a new roommate in a few weeks. If we’re lucky, it will turn into one of the greatest things to ever happen to me. In the perfect world he will end up giving me lots of money to buy new games, while we play lots of games, drink lots of alcohol, and I end up streaming all that shit for everyone to laugh at together. In the worst case, he drinks all my alcohol, blows up my internet, and crashes into my car when driving home from the bar. Either way it should provide lots of fun times and plenty of new stories to tell.

He is actually a pretty good friend of mine so it all should work out pretty well. The biggest problem we will probably run into is that he is a console gamer and doesn’t really do much of the pc side of games. That can be fixed though and then I will finally have started my dream of turning my house into a real gaming house. All I need is to find 4 more people and my professional gaming career can finally begin.

I guess the thing that everyone else probably really cares about though is how any of this matters to them. It will either work out to be a great thing for you guys or one of the worst things that could happen since I became really busy with work. With my friend living here, I will no longer have to take an entire weekend out to go hang out with him anymore since he will always be around. On the other hand, with him always here it will make it that much easier for us to go do something stupid together. Maybe I should just go out and buy a GoPro and strap it to my forehead. Then you would always get to see all the stupid stuff that we end up doing.

Maybe that is going a little overboard though. I should probably just stick to my original plan and turn my house into one of those weird stream houses with webcams in every room that seems so popular these days.

04Jul

The Real American Way

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Today being the 4th of July, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about something we all know and love, America. But what is there to talk about you might ask? I could write about how we should be celebrating 2 days earlier than we actually do. Or perhaps we should talk about two of the founding fathers died on the same day with a third passing away years later also on the 4th. Instead I thought it would be interesting to talk about a true American symbol, the bald eagle, and how Benjaminn Franklin was wrong.

Bald eagles and Americans share many things in common. Like most Americans, the eagle can be found all over North America. Last I checked, it is also illegal to shoot both bald eagles and Americans. Apparently these many many reasons were not enough to convince big Ben and he still had his doubts about the eagle being on the national crest. You see way back in 1784, Benjaminn Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter where he talked about his real thoughts on the bald eagle being on the new republics crest. In part of the letter he wrote:

“Others object to the Bald Eagle, as looking too much like a Dindon, or Turkey. For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.”

When he puts it like that, it does make a little sense but if you stop to think about it for a second, it turns out the the eagle was a perfect bird to represent the most badass nation in the world. After all why go through all the work of catching the prey yourself if you could just wait until it is done for you and then eat the rewards? Does it really matter how you got the fish or does it only matter that you ended up with the fish in the end?

So what did he think should be the bird to represent America? The turkey. I guess it could make sense to make a big fat bird the official bird of a big fat nation. But if we did do that, then what would we eat at Thanksgiving?

30Jun

Back To Work

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Well it went by faster than I thought it would, but the vacation is over and now we’re back at it once again. Of course now that we’re back we will have to get back into the swing of writing these posts and streaming amazing games and with a short week before the holidays I’m sure we will have loads of fun again. There will be plenty of time to go over all the random interesting things that I see every day so instead of going into that, lets get the quick hits of the vacation out of the way today.

World Cup madness:

Was a great time to take a week off from work since it was smack in the middle of group stages for the World Cup. Tons of great games and a lot of surprising outcomes from the group stages, but getting to go to the bars for the last two USA games against Portugal and Germany were so much fun. I was surprised how hard it was to find sweet USA swag in the stores at the beach, almost like the beach hates America. Since we weren’t able to get stupid crazy with full face paint, dyed hair, and flag capes (had this happened there would have been a picture for you all…Blame America hating beaches); instead we made up for it by getting crazy stupid drunk for the games. The golden rule of not asking the price on the beer special bit us in the ass for one game when we ended up paying way to much for not enough beer, but the 50 jello shooters we had before the Germany game made up for it. Overall loads of fun was had and I’m mostly sure the we remembered the entire game.

Did the dew:

The Dew Tour was in town the week I was down and as much as I didn’t know anything that was going on, it was a lot of fun. Extremely crowded which I don’t care for, but watching all the skaters and bikers going around doing their things was pretty cool. Outside of the actual dew tour action the best part of them being there was probably the beach concerts at night. The music was decent enough but that isn’t really why they were the best. They were the best because they happened late enough that you could enjoy a nice evening at the bar drinking more then you should, and then go hang out on the beach and be stupid with a bunch of other people who are also being stupid while listening to good music. It might not have been the amazing stuff on the stream playlist, but it was good enough to get stupid with.

Do you have an older sister?

I must have ended up saying that more times then I care to think about last week. I don’t know if it was my boyish good looks, my slothy attitude, or my extremely humble personality but there were so many girls coming up to me on the beaches. Normally I’m not one to complain about things like that, but when you are over 10 years older then they are, then it becomes a little strange. I think the saddest part was that no…they did not have an older sister.

The bad stuff:

Like everything not all was great. Nobody likes bad stuff and this is already longer then I wanted so lets just get through this one quick

Why no Nintendo? For all the years that I’ve gone down to our condo, this was the first year that the Nintendo Entertainment System could not be found. Was probably one of the saddest moments of my life when I realized I would have to go a week without any real games.
Waiters blow. Multiple nights when we went out to eat, we ended up waiting over an hour for food. This wouldn’t always be a problem except for the fact that while waiting the waiters did not come check if we needed more drinks which significantly cut back on the drink intake.
Arcades are expensive. It’s been a while since I’ve been to an arcade, but man have they gotten expensive. Everything is pretty much at least a dollar now and outside of better graphics aren’t that much different then they were years ago.

17Jun

The Hangover Moment

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If you’ve been around the stream before you’ve probably heard my talking about my life goal of having a bachelors party in vegas to recreate all the best moments from The Hangover. Who wouldn’t want to wake up one day after a long night of partying to find a tiger in the bathroom anyway? Today I found a backup plan just in case I am unable to make it to Vegas.

Turns out this other group of guys went camping for their bachelors party. Not quite the big spenders that Vegas would be, but who doesn’t like going into the woods with a ton of alcohol and adventuring around. I can only assume that while they were running away from some wild animal that they poked when they shouldn’t have that one of them tripped over something in the sand. That had to be the point when they see a giant face staring up at them and they realize they found something kind of interesting. The next part is what I actually found most interesting in the story. After they found the head they went and called the experts to come out and take a look to see what they found to later find out that it was a couple million year old stegomastodon fossil.

They did what now?

Yep, you heard it correctly. At a bachelors party in the woods, after finding something strange they call the experts? Maybe it’s just me but if I was at a bachelors party and found something strange, the last thing on my mind would be to leave it alone. I would have probably tried to dig it up, wear it as a hat, and then eventually strategically place it somewhere in the camp site to scare the shit out of my friends the next morning. Maybe it was one of those new bachelor parties I’ve been hearing so much about where they go to a pancake house for breakfast instead of doing anything fun.

07Jun

Why I Took a Break From Streaming

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Image By: martinblaaberg

Since I started streaming again, one of the questions I get asked the most is why I ever stopped streaming to begin with. I’m sure everyone has heard me answer how I got busy and had to stop, and how my computer was overheating so I had to take a break from it. Those are all true for certain periods of time during the break, but there is so much more behind the true answer.

The Rise of the Stream

When the stream started, I happened to be in a right place right time scenario. Twitch had just broken off of Justin.tv and the Team Fortress 2 community was lacking quality streams. Because of this the stream was able to quickly rise up the ranks to being, at the time, a relatively successful stream. In a few months it went from having 10-20 views a session to easily getting over 1000 a day. Everyone was having a grand ole time and things were looking up.

During that time streaming in general was becoming more popular, and specifically in TF2, the community was blowing up where more and more streams were popping up every day. Soon after streams from popular YouTubers and invite players were started and it was looking like things were going to continue going strong.

The Big Mistake

Being the dreamer that I am and the early success of the stream, my mind started racing with different possibilities. We were on the cusp of hitting a pretty big milestone at the time of average over 100 concurrent viewers, hit over 1000 followers and 100,000 views. The first failures we ran into were in trying to expand to be more then just a TF2 pub stream. As I got deeper into the competitive scene, my attention to the stream and the amazing viewers we had at the time started to slack off. I didn’t realize it then, but one of the major reasons I was having the success I did was because of the interaction with the chat. Once the interaction started slipping, the viewers started to lose interest and go somewhere else.

The big mistake however, was losing sight of why the stream was started and what it was all being done for. Somewhere along the ling, I started to think less about just relaxing and having fun with all the cool people I had met, and instead started focusing on the numbers. When the numbers started dipping I started to get frustrated at the situation and instead of keeping to the regular stream schedule, would regularly skip days between streams. Over time the overall quality of the stream decreased, and eventually streaming became a chore instead of something I was doing for fun. It was at that point that I took some time to reevaluate what I was doing and put my focus on something else for a while.

The Other Reasons:

The break ended up being a lot longer than I had planned because this silly little thing called life kept popping up in the way. Here are the other major things that happened to delay the comeback:

I left my dream job to take a more secure position in the more boring industry of financial markets
Bought a house. There was significantly more involved in buying a house then I had thought.
House fell apart. I believe it was Murphy who said “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. So of course after I bought a house, everything on the house started breaking causing endless headaches and time to get it all fixed.
Computer couldn’t handle it. When I tried to start streaming at the beginning of the year, my computer started overheating which made it so I had to choose between saving my computer of streaming. At the time I chose to keep my computer alive longer.
I just plain got old. It happens to all of us, and as it happened to me I had to take some time off from games to focus on other things

So now you all know the full story on why I took a break, and why the break ended up being so long. It’s all better now though because things have settled down, I finally remembered why I started streaming to begin with, and we are back at it and having a blast. Got anything else you want to know about, contact me or simply leave a comment here.