EVE Online

So the game I have been playing a ton of lately has been EVE Online. After giving up World of Warcraft, this game really has most of what I enjoy in a game.

There is so much to do in this world and it's all on one server! Basically, you start out as a pilot and can learn all sorts of different professions: mining, hauling, being a pirate, flying ships, trading, running a corporation or manufacturing. Skills are trained over time, so you don't need to level at all. You just plug in the skills you want to learn and off you're go to do whatever you want to do.

The PVP in the game is very exciting. There is so much to learn about piloting ships, and even after playing for a few months, I still only have a basic understanding of it.

The community is amazing and there are always new things coming out for it. The best thing right now is the new character creator that the have made. The characters are amazingly detailed and fun to play with.

I'll likely be playing this one for a long time to come!

So Bad!

So I haven't posted in here in over a year as can be clearly seen by my last post. This is not good at all!

I think most of the issue is that Facebook has really taken the sails out of a lot of blogging. However, blogs are great for posting long and detailed articles which Facebook really can't handle properly.

I should really keep updated with this more and plan on doing just that with some upcoming articles on what I've been playing and enjoying lately.

Breathtaking Dream

Sometimes I wonder how the mind and dreams really work. I had a dream last night that made me question exactly the nature of how I dream sometimes.

I was outside in the middle of a street in the dark of night with some others. There were little shops around, but high above, the night sky was beautiful and clear. Someone mentioned that it was the month that the moon was closer to Earth than normally, and sure enough the moon moved by slowly on its celestial precession. But then, I saw two more large heavenly bodies. One, I thought was Jupiter, but someone told me that's not what it was. It was perfectly spherical with a blue a bluish tint on its dark surface and alongside it were two more smaller spheres of the same type. Around all three spheres, tiny rocky satellites followed...about two dozen in all. They traveled slowly and moved across the sky behind the background of the night.

I fell to my knees in awe at just exactly how beautiful and amazing it looked. I almost cried in my dream at how it looked. I'd never seen anything like it before.

And now that I'm awake, I have a beautiful memory of something my mind created. I can see it perfectly and it still gives me chills with how beautiful it was. How could my mind come up with something that was essentially so artful and amazing that it would take my breath away from its beauty?

I don't understand how it works or how that dream affected me so, but I do know that I carry with me something special that seems just as real as any memory I have.

End of Decade Realizations

It's almost the end of 2009 and what 10 years has done for me. In 2000, I was still in college par time, struggling with life and the rigors of the Army as well. I was a pretty conservative Republican at the time.

Almost 10 years later, well...I have a career I love, a self I love, and I'm a very liberal person as well. You wouldn't even recoginize the me of 2000 versus the me of today. Not only do they look radically different, but they think and have evolved much differently. I grew up so fast this decade.

In 2000, I was lost and didn't know myself. Now, I know who I am and what I really want out of life. It's amazing what 10 years can do. I've lost friends, parted ways with family, made so many new friends, come out to other friends who love and care for me for who I am.

The biggest realization is that I love my friends more than my family. In fact, I have almost no family ties. Mother, father, sister....relatives...they all are just words compared to the real love that I experience with my friends. What this really means is that the loss of my friends in my life will be my most difficult times compared to the loss of my family members. Is it right to feel like this? I guess I don't know any other way.

The happy moments I've had with my friends in the past few years have more than made of for the saddest and darkest moments of my past. Whatever happens in the future, I know that I am loved and will always be a part of friendships which make me whole. I desire nothing more than to be a great friend to those who are a part of my life. I only hope I can live up to the happiness and joy that they have brought me.

Surgery Fun

So I had gallbladder surgery yesterday. It was actually pretty neat! I got there around 11 am and they got me prepped for surgery. At noon, I was taken into a big surgery room and laid down and like that I was out like a light! When I came to, I was recovering very nicely in a recovery room. it was pretty surreal to go fade out and then wake up moments later and everything's all done!

Everything's a bit sore. I have several small incisions that are taped up. They did exploratory surgery in my abdomen to see if anything else was wrong and found everything to be ok. They also found a gallstone in my bile duct and got rid of that too.

I'm on Vicodin and it is good stuff! I've never been on a painkiller before but this thing works. Monica, Jeff, Laura and Josh got me some beautiful flowers that are on top of my nightstand so I can peek at them all the time when I wake up or need a pick me up!

All in all, I'm happy to have gone through this and hope to be ouch free soon.

Crazy Yet Cool Nightmare

I don't really have nightmares anymore....though I think last night might have qualified as one. It was actually pretty cool though. Sometimes it's just amazing what your mind can come up with story and visual-wise. Or maybe there's something else behind this particular one?

Anyway, we're in a Victorian house. Me and several girls and some guys I have no idea about. Mostly a collegey crowd. Suddenly, one of the girls is killed by a slasher in this eerie well lit white basement below. It's pretty gruesome and we saw the slasher. He had a huge square cleaver and a burlap bag over his head, but then he disappeared.

So we're all freaked out by now and head up to the living room to stay together since there's safety in numbers. The living room is a mix of modern and Victorian items and we're all hanging out when one of the older guys in the bunch tells everyone to close their eyes for a story he's going to tell.

Suddenly, as the story is being told, a doppelganger of the guy that was about to tell the story, emerges through a weird squeeze in the wall and the guy who was going to tell the the story gets sucked sideways into the wall to vanish forever. The doppelganger continues his story telling about a being that's been there since 1910 and that someone has died in the house every year since. While he's telling the story of the house, the inside of the room does some cool shifting and changing of colors and warping as new things are added. When everyone opens their eyes, they have no clue that it's the doppelganger there and don't seem to care about the new arrangement of the room.

So they begin to depart and I see some of the people gathering and talking about going out for the night. One of the girls is smoking and looking like she wants to leave. To my shock, I find myself left alone in the creepy house. I start looking for a way to escape when this young boy with spikey auburn hair finds me and holds my hand. But he's not just holding my hand, he's leading me out the front door, then the front yard and gate to just outside the house.

He then tells me, "You're too good to be here for what I have planned for them. But you better stay good the rest of your life or I will come and find you and kill you." I'm freaking out as I walk away down the sidewalk and suddenly the boy laughs and vanishes, then a crow appears and buzzes past me as the laughter still rings in my ears.

Wonderful times

Life has been very good to me lately. My family came to visit over the weekend and we had a great time catching up on things. And a few weeks before that, I got to see Monica. What more awesomeness could life bring me?

Anyway, I've been very happy. What I did notice though is that not fully presenting as myself leaves me very uncomfortable. It's a weird feeling. I guess it's a very unauthentic feeling. Thankfully, I haven't had to feel that way in a long time.

Work has been very busy this month so far, as we deal with budget cuts and have to make do with less. It's been a bit stressful and now we have new servers to get ready as well. Some days I don't have to work as hard as others, but lately it's been non-stop crazy action!