IRL – Page 5

24 Days of Desire (5): The Always Pan

I’m not much of a cook. I try sometimes, but for the most part I’m just too lazy to be making anything that requires more effort than turning the oven/microwave/air fryer on. That said, my frying pan is more or less my best friend in the kitchen, and I use it all the damn time.

I’m a sentimental fool, so the idea of parting with my frying pan after nearly a decade together seems unthinkable. But the old girl is getting on in age; she’s developed a pretty severe tilt which ensures that oil and eggs always pool over to one side, and more than a few permanent battle scars. It’s time to move onward and upward, and the solution to my problems came to me in an unexpectedly helpful YouTube ads.

I say that because YouTube ads are typically for trash products that I would never even consider buying into. (Especially YouTube Premium.)

24 Days of Desire (2): A better GPU

Last December I got a lot of extra money from sources I will not mention, and since I was planning to start creating more video content for my YouTube channel, I decided to spend a bunch of said money on a new computer. In this sense, it was a complete success! The new machine was more than capable of taking on the heavy video processing load that was making my old PC wheeze worse than me after 20 seconds of light jogging.

However! When I selected my new computer, I did not put any consideration into VR capabilities. Any why would I? I bought an Oculus Quest 2 specifically for the fact that it doesn’t need to be tethered to a PC. Fast forward to summer 2021 when I bought an (off-brand) Oculus link cable for reasons I can’t remember, and through some sequence of events ended up trying to play some PC VR games. It did not go well.

The Incoherent Dream

Have you ever tried Googling something in a dream? To my recollection, it’s only happened to me once, last night, and it was strange and vivid enough that I feel like it’s worth sharing.

Every Dream Google result that I clicked into was effectively the same: news articles made of paragraphs made of words. But that’s where normalcy ended. The websites were circa the late 1900s: white pages with little more than the text of the article in them. It was like the internet before ad revenue was a thing. The articles themselves were complete nonsense; they included my search terms and some related words, but were otherwise just collections of random words. I think that I actually woke up because my brain was being overloaded by Dream Ryan desperately trying to read and comprehend these gibberish reports.

Now I’m sitting here wondering if there’s an explanation for this, or if it’s just dream weirdness. Could my brain not generate fake articles on the fly? Probably not. So it just filled the dream with words and hoped that I was unconscious enough to notice. But I strongly recall the feeling of frustration that was caused by being unable to actually make sense of what I was reading. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything in a dream before, so maybe that’s something dreams just can’t do?

This is just another reason why Elon Musk needs to get moving on that dream recording technology!

Celebrity(?)

One of my brothers has a new girlfriend. She is -in his words- a “Facebook stalker”, and somehow that lead to her having watched all of my Ryan’s Pop-Tarts Reviews videos. Which is lovely. I already like this one.

I know I have a tiny and (questionably) devoted fanbase, but it always feels good to hear that something I made brought joy to someone else. You know, that feeling of validation and whatnot.

Though it always confounds me when I hear that somebody watched one of my Pop-Tarts videos, and then decided to watch all of the other ones. That’s basically the opposite of what I expect to happen.

And it’s the weirdest feeling to meet someone for the first time and learn that they basically know you already. Is this what it’s like to be be famous? Except that it happens all the time instead of once per decade?

Game Boy Advance: A Collectro-spective

I was poking through my chest of forgotten video games, systems, and accessories the other day, just looking around at things. No practical reason or whatever. Just the semi-annual “maybe I’ll find my lost GBA SP this time” rooting around. During this particular adventure, I pulled out the Ziploc baggie that holds all of my GBA cartridges. Wanting to look at the beautiful collection, I spilled them out onto the floor and lined them up. What I found was nothing short of shocking.

Somehow, I only own nineteen Game Boy Advance games. As someone whose GBA was as good as attached to his hands, I find this very hard to believe. I know that those were days when I was poor, rentals existed, and far fewer video games were actually being made, but it still seems unreasonably light. At some point I could have sold some to lighten the load, but… these are GBA cartridges. They take up virtually no space, so there’s no big incentive to sell, other than desperation for cash.

Book Learning

I’ve mentioned it in passing on this blog probably many times now, but I don’t know if I’ve ever really written about how over the last five years, I’ve been oh-so-slowly working towards my Accounting certificate. You know, so that I can finally own a paper that says I’m qualified to do accounting.

And while I don’t know for sure when or how I’m going to get said paper, as of December 22, 2020, I handed in my final project and officially finished the program. Hooray me! I did something meaningful with my life!

I could probably write about the long journey, or where I go from here, but I don’t want to. Instead, I’ll just leave this little tidbit: In the last course that I took, I somehow got perfect marks on the gigantic research project. This if baffling because halfway through said project, it was already confirmed that I passed the course, so I half-assed the rest of it. Quarter-assed even, in some parts. And then I got perfect marks. INSANE.

My hypothesis on how this happened is this: The project was supposed to be a group project, but since COVID-19 forced the course to be changed to online, the project was also changed to be completed individually. I think this had the net effect of making the instructor grade the projects a little more leniently, since they were designed to be completed by a three- or four-person team. I’ll gladly accept the grade that I’ve been given, but I don’t actually believe that I earned it.

The Most/Least Memorable Xmas

So 2020 was bad. And the worst part of it, bar none, were the people who would deny that COVID-19 exists, and the people who just couldn’t give a damn and totally defied any efforts to suppress the virus. It’s because of those people that I’m expected to spend Xmas day completely alone.

On a merrier note, I have a “gift” of sorts for you, dear reader. You may have (but probably didn’t) noticed that I didn’t post a Top Ten Video Games of 2019 list at all this year. The truth of the matter is that I wrote it all out, and then decided that I didn’t like what I wrote, and instead of re-writing it all, I just left it to die in Google Docs.

But I’ve changed my mind! Having gone back and re-read it, it’s actually not so bad. Still not good, but not materially worse than anything else that I write. So I’ve gone and stealth-posted it back in January, when it should have originally gone live. Go have a look-see.

I know that’s not a very good gift, but it’s 2020. You should be very much used to disappointment by now.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 24: Rudolph’s Tipsy Spritzer

It’s here. Finally, this stupid thing is over. Every year that I do this, I always come to regret it by like, Day 11, but I always push on through because it’s too late to stop at that point. Sunk cost fallacy and all.

So I’m sick of writing blog entries, all stressed out by having to think up 24 things (it’s a lot, right?) and then write something passably thoughtful about them. What’s the best way to forget your troubles? A severe head injury!

That’s probably not an avenue that you want to pursue, though. I don’t particularly fancy the idea. I do have an alternative suggestion, though: alcohol! Yeah, that’s much more plausible. You probably won’t actually forget your troubles, but if you drink enough, they’ll be replaced with a whole new set of troubles. And that’s… something.

Specifically, I want to mention a concoction that my mom has been making on Xmas day for the past couple years now: Rudolph’s Tipsy Spritzer. I’m not sure where she got the idea -probably Pinterest- but a quick Googling reveals that there are dozens of recipes with that name, so I’m just not going to credit anyone. How about that?

I’ve never watched it all come together, but my understanding of the ingredients is this: Vodka, 7-Up, vodka, orange juice, vodka, and maraschino cherries. It goes great with breakfast, and is the only cocktail that I’ve ever really grown attached to. Probably because it’s a once-a-year thing and is attached to happy memories of spending Xmas day with my family. Also, it’s the one time a year I have an excuse to be wasted by breakfast time.

I don’t really know how Xmas is going to pan out this year, but the plan was for my (immediate) family to get together and just hang out and spend the entire day drinking, eating, and napping. It sounded like a perfect Xmas to me, but the current public health orders restricting people from entering a house that is not their home are kind of spoiling that. Whoops! Looks like I’ll just have to spend the Xmas long weekend all alone in my condo!

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 22: Pop-Tarts House

We’ve already had one gingerbread construction project disaster. How about adding another edible construction project to the list of my Epic Holiday Failures? Sound good? Rest assured, it is not.

…

Okay, I wanted to just let it breathe, but I have to talk about this.

My video content, admittedly, does not have a high bar to clear. It’s mostly been just raw footage with a little cutting to smooth out the rough(est) spots. Lately I’ve been adding a little more love – taking close-up shots, adding music, splicing in images and end cards, so on and so forth.

The beast embedded above is, at this point in time, my pièce de résistance. I’m actually rather proud of what I’ve put together here. I was going to add “despite the ridiculousness of it all” to the end of that last sentence, but that ridiculousness was kind of the point all along. I did a thing that was gleefully silly, and put in an awful lot of time spit-shining it in an effort to make it more presentable.

Normally I don’t much care about how the general public sees my content -I do all of this for my own enjoyment- but I actually hope that people like this one. I think I might actually be a little sad when nobody watches it.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 21: Light Drive

That title is… not the most descriptive, is it?

What I mean, is to take some time to just go for a drive to look at the Christmas lights and decorations around your neighborhood. Or maybe a different neighborhood, if you find your own to be lacking in this particular type of holiday spirit. Obviously, this kind of thing is best done at night, but daytime works too, if you’re more interested in the kind of decorations that don’t light up.

Point is, it’s nice to just boot around with no real goal other than to simply appreciate the work that others have put into making their houses light up all pretty and such. Take an hour or so to just go out and appreciate the beauty of the season.

I don’t know about other places, but there’s an annual tradition here of a huge festive lights display that’s put together just outside the city limits, made specifically for people to drive through. I’ve heard that people were complaining online about it being cancelled in 2020, but the website seems to suggest that it’s still happening? My parents took me once as a kid, and all I remember is being bored to tears. I’d probably enjoy it more as a mature adult who doesn’t simply long to get home to his Nintendo, but this isn’t the kind of thing that I care to pay real money for. Also, driving all the way to the other side of the city is not on my to-do list.