overidon.com Central Database for Overidon Omnimedia

August 29, 2011

Male Energy Cultivation Experiment 006D

Filed under: MECE — Tyler @ 3:40 pm

It’s about three and a half months into this cultivation cycle. One thing that I’m noticing is that risks don’t seem as risky. They’re still risks of course. But there’s stuff to support the outcome whichever way things go. So I’m not as concerned with second-guessing.

I’m moving to Pasadena this week. There’s risks involved with that for sure. Lots of unknowns. But I know its better for my productivity and development than staying in my Dad’s literal closet-room. I say literal because there’s so many books in there.

I’m actually looking forward to packing. I’ll get some boxes on my way home. The idea of wrapping things up in such a visceral way…it feels good.

A strange thing about the cultivation is that the focus comes in cycles. It seems like everything is a cycle these days. There will be a couple weeks of wanting to read a lot of actual physical book stuff. Then there’s a transition to wanting to exercise a lot. Now I’m in the phase where I want to watch interesting videos. I’m sure when I move it will all just cycle again.

Nauticaboy  has been talking about Valuetown all the time. That’s interesting because I feel like I’m getting more “value” out of life. This is from a sheer time-existence point of view. There are days where not a single minute goes by that didn’t have a place. Everything has a spot to go into. It’s obvious that I’m going to take this as far as it goes.

My car is getting maintenance right now. It is going to cost me over 600 dollars to have a 3 year maintenance. That is a lot of money to me. But the cultivation helped me think with some foresight. I saw the letter come in the mail that said I needed to do the 30k maintenance or else 3 years…whichever comes first.

It has been a little less than 3 years so I’m like, “OK whatever dude.”

But a little foresight says that I’ve already had the letter in the back of my mind for the past 3 days. I know getting the maintenance will decrease my stress and keep my focus on work and productivity…but there’s the financial sting.

So here I am…at Starbucks. I’m not at home because I’m getting the maintenance done. I’d rather just do it and not have to think about it, than second guess myself later down the line while commuting between Pasadena and Newport Beach for work. I don’t need to double check to see if it’s the right call. I know it is. That’s what cultivation is doing at this stage in the cycle. Risks aren’t really the same as they used to be. There’s still variables, there’s still unknowns, but the constant is that I’ll have the energy to deal with the future.

Creatively, things are going well. There is a new story I’ve been working on that takes place in Iraq of 2003. It’s exciting but the characters are just about to enter a deep hole in the desert into an unknown area. This entering the unknown has been a barrier because there haven’t been a lot of unknowns from me to draw from. But moving to a new place which is a basement room is kind of like entering the subterranean depths…hopefully it comes across in the writing.

-Tyler

Starcraft 2 is gnarly

Filed under: Gaming — Tyler @ 2:02 pm

Okay, so I got Starcraft 2 and loaded it. It was so awesome with the music and everything. My computer is a beast now. It is 6-core AMD monster and I have a dedicated hard-drive just for big progs like starcraft 2 etc.

I especially wanted to test it because I wanted to stay on top of the current trends in computer gaming technology. But seriously, it said that I should run the game on ULTRA settings because of my video card and CPU capabilities.

So I’m running this puppy and it is HUGE on the impressive and epic scale. Everything is futuristic and the interface definitely feels like they did years of work perfecting it.

There’s only one problem:

The game is gnarly on my fan. I mean, I was on headphones and I could hear my fan. I was like, “What the heck?” Not even Fallout 3 is this demanding on my computer. It blew me away.

My computer has several fans and enough CPU’s to handle intense video encoding for HD. Running a PC game shouldn’t make me “worried.” But that’s exactly how I felt. I felt like I need to wait till I get my next-gen computer in a few years before trying the run the game again.

This is a serious departure from Warcraft 2 and Starcraft…maybe even Warcraft 3. When you loaded Starcraft on your computer, it didn’t matter if you were top of the line. It pretty much ran on a basic computer. That was because it was 2D sprites happening on a battlefield. But Starcraft 2 is totally 3D with homies talking and throwing Molotov cocktails like it’s going out of style.

I think what’s happening is that Starcraft 2 was meant to be played on “Normal” settings. But, the game is already a year or so old. I don’t get it.

Now that I think about it, Fallout 3 is actually much older than Starcraft 2. So comparing the two doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Fallout 3 was 2008 and Starcraft just came out in 2010. Even though this is only a two-year gap, it means a tremendous amount when you factor in technology leaps.

Honestly, I doubt I would be as stressed about running this game if I had an extra solid-state drive. But I can’t risk putting this bad boy on one of my solid states because I’m using them for my OS and the other one is for my music video project.

So, what I’m thinking, is that I’ll hold off on Starcraft 2 and wait till my next computer that will pretty much have solid state drives for everything.

It is so funny how PC games work. It’s almost like they are already doomed because the new ones require a computer that isn’t affordable until 2 years later. Also, with patches and bug fixes, there is no real reason to jump out and buy a new game for the PC right when they come out.

Also, with the advent of Console gaming requiring an internet connection, programmers get a free-life. I say this because they can always use the HD-system for console games to require a patch.

This wasn’t possible back in the days of NES and SNES. All bugs had to be worked out before the release date. If that didn’t happen then they would have to live with the bugs in the game. I never heard of recalls of cartridges. I only remember that there were different versions of the battery system for Zelda.

All-in-all I’m actually glad about this. It was extremely satisfying to wait so long for Fallout 3 to come out and then get completely blown away when exiting the vault. I can’t express how huge that felt.

I had a similar pumped feeling when digging into Starcraft 2, but the fan sound really did pull me back. So in a couple years I’ll jump back into it on a more powerful machine with some dedicated solid states and hopefully I’ll be able to do a real review at that time.

-Tyler

 

Powered by WordPress