New Blog

Some of you might have noticed that WordPress took a universal dump and was down all day. This made me decide to get off my ass and get wordpress going on my personal domain so I could customize it and back it up, as well as limit shit like this happening again.

So the new blog is located at http://www.jaksplace.net/blog and I have already imported the recent posts. They are not formatted correctly but I am too fucking lazy to actually go fix them all. Anyway, please update your feeds/bookmarks to the new site =)

Retro Indulgence

So here I sit this weekend in somewhat of a funk.

I have a multitude of things available to me to keep me occupied however none of them seemed particularly interesting.While I am almost through my game queue, I am unable to summon the desire to play any games. I also am in the middle of reading the Halo Trilogy (Currently on The Flood) which is a great series, but I do not feel like reading right now. I also have a ton of backlogged web articles to read, podcasts to listen to and so on. However, NONE of it strikes me as particularly entertaining this weekend.

So yesterday, while sitting in my chair contemplating what to do to occupy my time, I suddenly had a huge urge to indulge in retro movies. So I began downloading things that I wanted to watch. Obviously, this took some time so I was still bored for most of yesterday. However, last night and this morning, I was able to satiate my boredom with movies I had not seen in far too long.

First on the list was The Goonies. It has easily been 5 years since I last saw this film and I was curious if it was still as good as I remembered. Luckily it was and I sat there in a nostalgic haze remember what life was like back then.

Next up was The Wizard, a film that has (rightfully so) been criticized as being a 90 minute commercial for Nintendo. However, I did not care about that. While there were a few groan worthy parts (Anything with the Power Glove), it was still really enjoyable. Video Game geeks like me can point out any number of factual errors in the video game scenes, but who cares! I was reminded how much I loved this movie when I first saw it and I still love it today. I just wish they would release it on DVD in the U.S. (Lucky Europeans)

Then we had License to Drive which was made at the height of the Cory Haim/Feldman craze. While it also has its share of groan inducing scenes and dialog, it was still fun. I did not enjoy it nearly as much as I did when I was a kid, but I do not regret re-watching it. I wonder how many of the Haim/Feldman collaborations are still enjoyable today, and which ones are complete ass (IE Dream a Little Dream 2).

The next viewing was of Stand By Me. I can honestly say it had been about 10 years since I last saw this film but the scene that I always (and will always) remember was the Lardass Hogan scene. I discovered that yeah, it still grosses me out even now. The movie really is amazing though and I will be purchasing this DVD for my collection.

After that I watched Transformers: The Movie, which I can honestly say I had never seen (at least that I can recall). I was more into GI Joe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles myself. However, I really did enjoy the movie and I think I will start picking up the DVD’s of the G1 series.

Finally, I watched The Monster Squad which is another film I had not seen in about 10 years. The only thing I remembered was “Wolfman’s got nards!” and I sat there with a shit-eating grin on my face when that scene came up. All in all, this was still a great movie and I will try to watch it more than once a decade.

I am still downloading Flight of the Navigator which will be done within the next few hours. Now that I have time in-between movies, I attempted to do something else but again found I have no desire to. Most likely I will sit here browsing the web until the next one is done upon which time I will happily start it up and regress to a happier time in my life.

Luckily, tomorrow I should have two movies from my Blockbuster Online queue arriving. Those being Rashomon and Throne of Blood which are both Akira Kurosawa flicks. As some of you may know, Kurosawa is my favorite director of all time so I can always enjoy his films.

Should be a post later today..

I have been playing King’s Field: The Ancient City all day so I haven’t had a chance to browse news. I have about 35 RSS feeds marked to read so I will sort through them and should make a post later today with the cool shit of the day.

If I don’t…

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Finished…sorta

So I finally completed the "Main Quest" of Oblivion toda. Final clock in time was around 36 hours in less than 6 days.

While the Main Quest is complete, the game is by no means beat. If I wanted to, I could easily squeeze another 50+ hours out of the game with all of the side quests and faction quests. However, I have devoted so much time to this game this week that I am done for now. 

This means I now have time to get back to working on Kings Field: The Ancient City and Half Life 2. After I beat those, I will probably come back to Oblivion for awhile but it will not be to the exclusion of all other games as before. 

Life Update

So a few people have been E-mailing me asking how things are going so I thought I would give a quick update.

I feel better than last week but I am still fairly "fuck you" in general. I had a meeting with HR yesterday at work which went rather well and we now have the ball rolling on the paper work. I have to see a therapist today to make sure I get "approved" for Short Term.

I have been neglecting my Portable Gaming Revolution duties although I informed by ZW and Dasme that I would be taking some time away from it. I have not looked at the front page or even really the forums all week so I do not really know what is going on.

I have not even kept up with gaming, movie or news in general and I am only keeping track of a handful of sites via RSS (maybe 10). It is quite refreshing not having to worry about it right now, although I am by no means leaving the site staff. I will probably start posting there next week again.

Other than that, I am pretty much just hanging back, playing games and watching movies. I am ostensibly playing 3 games at the moment (Dungeon Siege, Oblivion and Kings Field: The Ancient City), but obviously I am really only playing Oblivion. I have gotten some time in Kings Field since I started but not much.

I have also caught up somewhat on my downloaded videos. I finished off Neon Genesis Evangelion finally and watched the two movies as well (Death and Rebirth, End of Evangelion). This is an anime series I had been meaning to watch for litterally years but never got a chance until now. I am now watching FLCL which is another one I have heard a lot about and I just have to say that it is easily the weirdest fucking anime series I have seen in a long time. I am not sure if I like it or not right now, but since it is only six episodes, I will finish it off.

I also finally worked my way through my Blockbuster Online movies I had sitting around and already have 2 of the 3 new ones. Which ones I couldn't say as I haven't even opened them yet.

So yeah, there is your update. Suck it down!

Well this is interesting…

So as I stated previously, I intentionally moved away from the “This is what my life is..” postings as I honestly find them to be annoying and the internet is polluted with them. While there are a handful of people doing it that I can stand (Jaded, Yabo, and uhh…) for the most part, I fucking hate them. So I feel somewhat stupid making this post, to those who read this blog and are friends or mine, something has happened recently that is fairly major.

One thing that I have not told many people is that I have been in an escalating mental health downward spiral. I can assure you that none of you who know me have seen me this bad (save for TJ) as I have not been this bad since I was first diagnosed as Bipolar. At that time, I had for all intents and purposes alientaed all my friends and was flying solo.

So because of this, I have not been medicated for over a month. Many of you understand the importance of that statement. To be honest, I am sick and fucking tired of living my life ona ntipsychotic drugs (Lithium is NOT enjoyable) and I want off. I cannot remember what life is like prior to the drugs, but I do remember that I was a different person. I was outgoing, friendly and happy. I have been none of those in years.

So what is “Interesting” as the title of the post suggests? Well, work called me in yesterday for a meeting. This meeting ended up being a conference between me, my manager and my HR Rep. I was informed in no unclear terms that I am now officially out of work until a therapist has deemed it appropriate for me to return. I was honestly worried that this might mean my job is in danger, but I was assured that this is not the case. I am being put on Short Term Disablilty (full pay) and FMLA protects my job.

I am not sure how to feel about this. To be 100% honest, part of me looks forward to this time off. However, I am a work-a-holic and very much prone to Karoshi so I also feel terrible about being out of work because I am depended upon for a LOT of work. I feel like I am abondoning my team and my responsibilities and this is not something that you just “get over”.

My manager (who is the coolest mother fuckering manager on earth) has basically said that he does not care about that and he wants me to get better first. One thing that I was surprised by was that HR is apparently concerned for the saftey of the OTHER people I work with. Based on some of the things said in this meeting, I get the impression that some of the people on my team went to HR as they were afraid of me. I cannot blame them, nor can I say their fears are unfounded. I am an extremely violent person right now and I have done things of late that I will not relate here that would confirm that fact.

So now I wonder what I am going to do with all of this time off. I have mandatory consuling of which I do not yet know the frequency (Weekly? Twice a week?), but other than that, the only instructions from my manager is “focus on getting yourself better”. This is a fairly overwhelming proposition. I have nothing but time now for at least 2-3 weeks and possibliy a month or two. I have a lot of games to play and movies to watch, but how long can that last?

Well anyway, that is the big news of the…well year I guess. On that note, I am going to make some breakfast.

Blogspot is retired

The old blog at http://jakanden.blogspot.com/ is no longer going to be updated. All of the old posts will remain and perhaps I will export them and upload them here, but probably not.

I have purchased a new Domain and Hosting so I am waiting for that to go active and to set it up before I announce it. For right now, use this site =)