Month: September 2012

Categories
Blog Project 2012 Personal Photography Purdue

Topic 2: Greyhouse

Topic 2: Take a picture of something you see on a regular basis, and write about it…

I live a dual life, kinda. I live in The Region. That is where I go to school, and live during the week. However, come the weekend, I travel the 70+ miles to my second home, West Lafayette/Lafayette, IN. It’s a strange lifestyle. I don’t have a permanent residence down there and it has forced me into a nomadic lifestyle. I have just about everything I need within my bags and go from place to place.

Some would ask why I do this. Seems expensive and quite a hassle. To an extent this is true, but the pros far outweigh the cons. All my friends (like the one’s who are doing this very blog project with me) are located in Lafayette. My girlfriend is there. My improv group is there. The entirety of my social life is in Lafayette. Strange as it might be, this is how it is.

Having no place to call my own is kind of difficult. Especially when you have a lot of work to be done for school (engineering is quite a lot of work) and said improv group. That is where Greyhouse enters the mix.

Greyhouse is a local coffee shop located in the Chauncey Village area of West Lafayette. It’s hard to express how much of a sanctuary it has been for me. I have previously written about my troubles with school and to be perfectly honest, the redemption portion of that is mainly situated at Greyhouse. In the process of getting myself back on track I needed a place to focus. A place with great atmosphere and great coffee. Greyhouse has and does fulfill those requirements and then some. It always has diligent students, hard at work (I count myself among these), as well as people milling around just hanging out and having a good time. This combination just puts me into the zone.

I have spent countless hours and drank countless gallons of coffee at Greyhouse and I attribute a lot of my success to Greyhouse for providing me a place to focus and get work done. I am actually writing this entry from a leather chair in Greyhouse after putting in a good 3-4 hours of work. This place is my home and I would have a hard time without it.

If you ever find yourself in West Lafayette, pay yourself a visit to Greyhouse. It is amazing.

*Since I brought up what has made me successful  I want to give a special thanks to all my friends. Among them I want to single out Tim and Mary Franklin. I have stayed a their house countless times and I would not be able to have this portion of my life without them. Thank you guys, truly.

Categories
Blog Project 2012 Personal Video Games

Topic 1: Mega Man X

Topic 1: A First…

That was all it took. One screen.

I was around six at the time, in love with video games (how things have changed), and really into one game series in particular. Mega Man.

Let me indulge you with a small backstory to give context. All you want to be when you are a little kid is cool, like your older cousins. I was the youngest of my cousins (until my sister came around in 1990 and my other cousin years later). They were all about video games and thus I became enraptured while young. I got my first NES from one set of cousins when they upgraded to the Super Nintendo. I would try games like Zelda and even though I knew there was more to the game, I couldn’t figure it out. This resigned me to easy to comprehend and play games such as Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man. Now while Mario was fun, you pretty much only jumped, but with Mega Man you could jump AND shoot. I mean, no contest. Even as a youngin’ I made it to the Wiley Stages, but never beat them.

This brings us to that screen. Now, in my mind I want to say it was a Blockbuster commercial. I keep thinking it was some generic Blockbuster commercial showing the latest games to rent, but I can’t find evidence of this anywhere on YouTube (I looked for hours). I did however find two old SNES commercials for the Play It Loud advertising push by Nintendo which illustrate my point swimmingly.

If you watch carefully they contain minute traces of Mega Man X sprinkled in with other games from the time. This is about as long as the potentially, figment-of-my-imagination, Blockbuster commercial showcased Mega Man X.

When it first came on I was like, “Was that Mega Man? It kinda looked like a more modern Mega Man.” I would wait for the commercial to come on just to get the chance to examine that one second clip. You have to understand, now it’s super easy to find this stuff out, but this was pre-internet and pre-me-having-a-subscription-to-Nintendo-Power.

I finally did find out from my cousins that there was a NEW Mega Man for the SNES and it was out NOW.

Here is an accurate account of my reaction.

 

I proceeded to pester, bug, annoy, and terrorize my mother until we figured out a way that I was going to bask in the glory that was this game. It was decided (yes, let’s make this sound like there was a choice) that I was to get a SNES for my birthday. Here is the nuts part, I was so crazy obsessed that I actually went out and purchased the game before I even had the system.

I remember holding that box, trembling with excitement as to what adventures lie within.

I read that manual cover to cover just about 100 times. I read it about every day until my birthday when the day of reckoning would be upon all of us.

The game turned out to be magnificent, even by today’s standards. It remains one of my favorite games ever and many hold it up as a pinnacle of great game design.

This video exemplifies exactly what I mean:

I have to say it, if you haven’t played Mega Man X. Play it. Now.

 

*UPDATE 8/31/2018*

I found the commercial! This post popped back into my head the other day when I was listening to a podcast about Blockbuster. So, I opened up Netscape 1.0 and started looking at YouTube and lo and behold, there was the commercial. I modified it from the original post to restore it back to it’s proper aspect ratio, but here it is. It is almost exactly what I described about six years ago. My memory isn’t that bad yet.

Categories
Personal Philosophy

On Stuff I’ve Been Thinking About.

I am starting this blog project with some friends of mine that is similar to the 24-Hour Blog Day 1 and 2. If you took 24-Hour Blog Day and stretched it out you’d have this project. The basic concept is that a rotating person (a new person chosen from a rotation of people not a person who is spinning. Duh, guys.) chooses a topic and we all have to write a posts on it within a week. Simple. To prepare myself for it I decided to write just a short post just to sand some of the rust off.

Basically, I want to just present you with some things that have been on my mind grapes.

  • VCRs, Cassete Tapes, Film Cameras, Vinyl Records. They are all analog devices. We are, or are getting very close to being, completely off analog storage standards for our media. Given our high definition video and audio and it’s storage being in a digital format; Do you think that we could have achieved this kind of fidelity with analog devices?
  • How everything can be described by a mathematical function, eventually.
  • How incredibly elegant computers are. I mean we take fantastically enormous functions and problems and break it down to a series of functions on 1s and 0s. How amazing.
  • How the SNES is great. It really is great.
  • Why people who claim to be Christian forget the golden rule of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Would you want another to restrict your rights as a person? My guess is no, but it’s hard to look at things from another’s point of view. That being said it’s important to try. Tolerance and acceptance can only be found in another’s shoes.

These are just some of the myriad things I have been thinking about. What do you guys think about any of this? Lemme know and stay tuned for at least weekly blog updates thanks to the blog project. First one is coming up in a couple days.