Chuckie's Journal

I used to be Mormon, but as of now I function as an agnostic. In certain debates people tend to assume or believe that I'm atheist. While I find myself unable to accept a world in which there is no god, I also cannot accept the fact that there is a god that cares about our every action, whim or desire. If there is a god, he's too tied up keeping the universe in order to give a damn about any single person.

Two close friends of mine have recently departed on life altering journeys. My friend Ava has gone to Africa to educate people in order to help the AIDS epidemic and my friend Jocelyn has just flown to China where she will be teaching elementary school children English for at least a year. What I've recently been thinking, is how amusing it is to know that as children we all focused our energy in being close to friends 100% of the time, our parents pulling us out of the houses of our friends to our own homes where we felt isolated, but never alone.

Now a days it seems as though the most important path we take must be walked alone and sometimes those paths leave us feeling strangely alone in a world so technologically knit.

I've recently and finally obtained my license. I've taken a course on driving, gotten a certificate to lower any future insurance and have already taken advantage of my license twice (I know, scary!) Manny moved in two days ago and needed someone to drive his car when he picked up his U-Haul and someone to take his car to the U-Haul depot when he dropped off his U-Haul. I drove with no incident.

Omar will be arriving in about 8 hours, car and family's truck packed with his belongings. I don't believe he's ever lived on his own before now, so I'm hoping will all get along and he'll have a good experience.

School starts in 12 days! Why am I still in school? It feels as though I've been attending a university for half my life, but this school year will hopefully be the end of it with at most two classes more to take Fall of 09. It's hard to tell with some of my prior credits still not correctly transferred.

Not much is going on. I'm still unemployed and my funds are still tight until the money for the coming semester is transferred into my account. I've mostly been biding my time handling moving people in, Mike moving out, exercise and gaming (a lot of it.)

Until I write anything further, just know that you need to play Braid and that screen shots and reviews cannot express how well this game executes what only a video game can do.

As Cathedrals were drawn up, new citizens lined up to be adventurers, and I ran from place to place to raise people's morale, it was as though Square's My Life as a King was a reflection of my own life.

My city is Mylak, where my original attempt had the awful name of Esterlind, from god knows where, it's a complete improvement. Esterlind failed in direction,planning, and understanding of the game mechanics. See, in My life as a King, you can't simply build things where they look best, or spread the shops around to give fictional people a reason to walk to every corner of their new city, no, you must build things in specific kinds of spots to meet the highest level of success. This games a fucking ocean, it's got depth, well, it's atleast a lake, a really big lake.

When I started Esterlind I had no idea how stuff worked, for Mylak, I mastered the process of city building, and can say pretty confidently that you know what, I got this shit down. My way of making cities could be streamlined across peoples Wii's, like Starbucks on street corners. Each city of mine fucking delicious.

Anyway, Esterlind didn't fail because I'm an idiot, it failed because their were aspects of the game that I couldn't possibly have known when I began it's creation.

For example; Adventurers like myself, like to shop all fucking day, like to browse even, most of the time they don't even buy shit, so when you HAVE TO send your adventures to a distant land, and you have your Armor shops, your item shops and your weapon shops spread out like they got a disease contagious to one another, these fuckers spend their whole time shopping and browsing, and before they get all the way to that distant land, their time is spent and they're coming home, bitching that it's too dark.

First off, how fucking annoying, second off, Mylak corrected this, by forcing the shops to hold hands.

My point however, hidden in that tangent to educate future players, is that Esterlind failed because I didn't have knowledge that I had to learn for myself.

Outside of my Wii, life is changing again, Trevyn (T Hot) is living with me again, Omar should be moving down in late July and I'll be in a situation that I've been in before. Sharing an apartment with 3 other guys, but this time I know what I'm doing. What also makes me happy is that my life before was clearly Esterlind, lacking direction, lacking efficiency and knowledge. Well I got that now. I got a year left of school, maybe a semester on top of that. I'm getting driving lessons again, I've been burning over 360 calories on the days that I don't work and the days that I do work I'm averaging a lot more an hour then I've ever made. Plus who says I still can't fuck around?

I dunno, my life could probably be better and I'm always trying to improve, but for now, I feel like a King.