Beyond Occident

It’s 1:30 am here, and I’m leaving in just under 3 hours to go to school and hop on the tour bus and begin our senior class trip to D.C. I tried to get a few hours of sleep but since it’s about 80 degrees hotter upstairs than it is outside, I only got really sweaty instead of getting any rest.

I don’t think I’m go to go with my flickr plan since media emails apparently cost a pretty penny and that just doesn’t sound exciting. So everyone must just have to wait breathless till I get back. I know you’re crushed. Well, I’m off to go play my 360 for a couple hours before leaving for school. See everyone on Monday.

It’s my final semester of high school. I have all my college stuff taken care of and all I have to due is make it to graduation. As most seniors find, it seems senioritis is kicking in. I was talking to a friend and we deciding that maybe a B wouldn’t be to bad of a thing to aim for instead of an A on our next history test. Suddenly, understanding that tough concept in Physics doesn’t seem important since you just think “Who cares? It’s not like I’m majoring in Physics in college anyway…”. With my senior trip coming up, our schedule is fragmented and just coasting through should be easy.

Yet here I am, blogging about this while doing my calculus homework and typing a religion paper at 3:00 am on a Sunday morning! On a Sunday morning! I never ever do that. Lately I’ve noticed that while I’ve gotten lazy over some things in high school I’m actually becoming more interested in academics. I was just thinking about how I wish I could go back in time and redo the 4 years I spent in Spanish class. I think that if 1 person spends 4 years learning a language, then they should be pretty fluent in that language. I am most definitely not fluent in Spanish. Why? Because I never cared enough to actually grasp it. I did enough to earn my A and that’s it. And now, at the very end of it all, I actually want to be fluent. Oh well.. life is always ironic I suppose…

I won’t lie, over the past couple days (once my Linux kick ended… more on that later) I have been on a social network high. I have been looking at Twitter, Radar, Zoomr, Flickr, myspace, and other *web 2.0* applications and I must say… they are pretty nifty. Anywho, I just joined Last.fm, a service that takes the songs I listen to on my computer and compiles it all into charts and lists. I then get matched up with similar “neighbors” who share my musical tastes. You can stream a radio station built around my songs as well. If you check out my Myspace page, you can see my the five songs I most recently listened to. I suppose that could be seem as kind of creepy but… whatever. You can check out my music page here.

Anywho, have you heard about Twitter? It’s a new service that has the possibility of being the most annoying and the most incredible app at the same time. You build a list of friends and send out 160 word (or is it 140…) messages. This message is sent through your Twitter page, your instant messenger service, and your cell phone. The problem is you could be bombarded by everyone telling you where they are and what’s for dinner every day which would get old fast. However, if you can avoid that, it could be pretty neat to post your random thoughts and have all your friends instantly receive them (or to coordinate group gatherings).

Radar is a similar offering as Twitter however instead of text, it does it in pictures. You take pictures using your cellular camera then send it as a picture message to radar. Radar then sends it to all your friends radar profiles and cell phones. If you have a message plan from you wireless carrier, this is a really really cool tool.

Oh and my class trip to DC is coming up (next Wednesday). I think I might experiment a bit with flickr. Here’s how I hope this goes down: I can take a picture of something nifty in DC, email it to flickr, and they post it to my flickr page and through RSS, it ends up here on my blog. In this way, I can instantly keep everyone updated on my trip through pictures without being near a computer. Sweet!

I finally got my flickr sidebar going. The good news: The pictures show up. The bad news: It looks ugly. Because of this I placed it way down my sidebar so scroll past my RSS feeds and the archives to glance at it…

Okay, I’ll be honest. There are some true idiots in this world. And usually when I come upon them on the internet I just shake my head and move on. This time however, the Young America’s Foundation had a stunning image that I just couldn’t forget. No matter how bad of a day I have been having or how sad I am, just by looking at this I get a hearty laugh and feel instantly better.

Young America’s Foundation – Brainwashing America’s young conservatives as only propaganda can!

First off, I’m sorry for the huge lack of postings lately. Physics, Hamlet and Physics has been sucking my time away! Hopefully, in a month, when my school year starts breaking up (for the better!) I should be able to return to a more regular posting schedule. But until then everyone will just have to wait. Why not pass the time by playing Geosense? Anywho, onto the news…

I gots me a full ride to Louisville! Wohooooo! Which in effect means that the Anthropology area of campus is about to become the coolest place to hang out (because I’m there! well… I’m sure it already is the best place to hang out) and I’m going to be impressing some people with my mad skillz in Ultimate Frisbee. I can’t wait. Speaking of Louisville, the basketball team is on the move. They just beat West Virginia in the Big East tournament and are now moving on to the semis. We can only hope for continued success.

More importantly than school, college, ultimate frisbee, Louisville’s basketball team, or Anthropology’s area of campus however is the fact that Worms for the Xbox Live Arcade came out Wednesday. I went to bed around 9 on Tuesday night and woke up at 4:30 on Wednesday morning to download it. And download it I did. There are some slight disappointments and they all have to do with the old 50mb size limit imposed on Arcade titles (until a few days ago). The weapon selection is missing the Super Banana Bomb, the Holy Hand Grenade and the Super Sheep (plus some other not as exciting as the ones I listed weapons), the map background choices are inadequate (only 3), you can only have 4 worms on your team, there isn’t enough sound choices for your worms, and there is a 13 character limit on your team and worm names (Therefore, Enforcers of a Thousand Evils wouldn’t fit… yes, I was severely bummed).

However, the inclusion of Xbox Live play and the updated HD graphics make all those complaints obsolete. Easily. My first game online was a 4 player match and all the hilarious action of Worms was there except it was multiplied by a big number. The ability to talk with your enemies is priceless especially when everyone is rolling on the ground in laughter when a stunning kamikaze attack is used, you miss your enemy and instead hit your own worm on the other side of the map, or instead of detonating the sheep on some unsuspecting enemies, your worm instead jumps off a cliff. In short, the game is incredible. The achievements are not too hard to get (I almost have half of them) yet they are varied and enjoyable to work towards.

As an interesting note, the Xbox Live Arcade is really taking off. Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, some mini golf, and Castlevania (among others) are really putting the service in its stride. This is the time of the year when consoles struggle due to slow software releases and this is true for the 360 in terms of retail disc games, yet the arcade is carrying gamers through this season with plenty of fun games to play (that don’t cost $60).

You may have noticed I mentioned Geosense earlier. Geosense is an online browser game in which you are presented with a map of world, and given a country and city. You have to click on the map where that city is in ten seconds. Depending on how close you are and how fast you are, you will get points. The game is incredibly addicting and is actually helping me relearn all the geography I forgot from World History two years ago. Just be sure to ignore the retards that just spam the chat function.