Narzack

So, I’m in a pretty crabby mood right now, what with the terrible connection up here, the lack of sleep, and the failure of that Twine game.  And it’s too dark to read, and the interruption every two minutes kills any momentum I gain.  I’d like to get out of this little funk, so I decided to list all the things that I like less than Doo’s cooking.

With no further ado, here is a list of foods that aren’t as good as my wife’s meals.

• Outback filet
• Spicy chicken from Checkers
• Spicy chicken from Wendy’s
• Double cheeseburger from McDonalds
• Chicken Mcnuggets
• Chicken nuggets from Chick-Fil-A
• Original chicken sandwich from BK
• Five Guys burger
• WHATABURGER
• Dominoes pizza
• A Junior’s Deluxe
• Pizza Joes
• Market Garden breakfast
• Market Garden philly
• Tennessee Truffle biscuits and gravy
• Cheesy Gordita Crunch
• ‘Kesh chili dog
• Sunday chicken from Cracker Barrell
• That weird chicken thing we loved from Cheesecake Factory
• Shepherd’s pie from Raglan Road
• Shepherd’s pie from TooJays
• Rachel from TooJays
• Don Pablos chicken fajitas
• Stuffed chicken marsala from Olive Garden
• Breadsticks and alfredo from Olive Garden
• Sheetz MTO
• Grilled chicken salad from Eat-n-Park
• Chili dog from Steak-n-Shake
• Pepperoni slice from pizza truck
• Hot wings from Wing Zone
• Chicken tender sub from Publix
• Spaghetti Bolognese from Smiling Bison
• Chicken teriyaki from Subway
• Famous philly from Jersey Mike’s
• Texas cheese fries from Chilis
• Chicken and cheese skillet from Fridays
• Chicken philly from JJ’s Seafood
• Shredded beef thing from Habaneros
• Chimichanga from Habaneros
• Pot roast from Golden Corral
• Sushi from Fuji
• Victor’s Lo Mein
• Victor’s General Tso
• Number 31 from Miss Saigon
• Hot sausage from the dog cart
• Burger and hashbrowns from Waffle House
• Chicken philly melt from Dennys.
• Manuel’s on the 28^th.

There’s a little list of food that isn’t as good as my wife’s cooking.  So, basically, lucky me.

Narzack

Bit of preface.  I haven’t thought about Mass Effect in a couple years.  Not terribly interested in Andromeda, since Bioware quality has severely declined, and AAAs in general don’t interest me anymore.  And I wait for sales on everything, anyway.  Plus, reviews haven’t been kind. 

Regardless!  I haven’t thought about ME in a while, and out of the blue, my best good friend Matt brings it up.  And commits the cardinal Kyle sin of not only being okay with something I vehemently hate, but also bringing up the fact that I hate it so much.

So, long story short, I am a shit person and I should not care about videogames.  Also, sorry, Matt.

(mild spoilers)

Narzack

Time heals all wounds.  How many times have I read that?  And it sucks, because I haven’t found that to be true.  Dad died fourteen years ago, and every ache, every single pain of that loss, is still just as raw and burning as ever. 

I don’t get it.  I just don’t.  You’re supposed to get over it and move on, the pain fading to a dull ache and eventually being replaced by a gentle nostalgic fondness.  Well, that hasn’t happened for me.  In fact, just yesterday, during the drive home, grief hit me so hard that breathing hurt. Jars of Clay’s first album started playing on the ipod.  That was one of the first and only bands that we ever liked together.   ‘Worlds Apart’ started playing and I was taken back to the late night when we drove to the grocery store in DC and that song came on the radio.  Finding out we both liked it.  That memory is a sweet one.

Couple days ago, I was in the thrift store and among the many junk items from someone’s garage was a stack of early 90’s baseball cards.  On a whim, I skimmed through them and bought four different Ruben Sierra cards.  He was an outfielder who used to play for the Texas Rangers.  Now, I don’t know anything about sports, really, and I don’t know if he ever was a player of note, but for some reason I latched onto him as my favorite player.  I think about it a lot, because I don’t know why I thought he was the greatest.  And the one person in all the world who could has been dead for the past 14 years.  That hurts. 

And the dreams.   Once, well before he got sick, I dreamed that he’d died.  I remember frantically digging in the backyard of the Jackson Center house for something he’d buried for me.  I cried and dug and dug, but never found anything.  It was horrible.

Now, the dreams are different.  His death is an absolute in the dreams.  He’s dead, but he comes back, sometimes years later.  A few times, he remembered being dead, a few times he didn’t, and frequently he’s different somehow.  An infinite sadness weighs on him and I don’t know why.

Each time I wake it up it hurts anew. And I hate it, because I still don’t know how to grieve for this man.  A few more birthdays, and he’ll have been gone from my life longer than he was a part of it.  That terrifies me.   Even now, as I write these words, my vision is blurring.

Dead longer than he was my dad.  A few years after that, and maybe it’ll be like he never existed.  Maybe that’s why I can’t grieve.  I can’t let him fade or it’s like he was never there.  If I get over the single most impactful event of my life, will he disappear?

What exacerbates the problem is that I have no one here who knew him.  I feel like I’m the only one who holds his memory, and that precious fragile treasure is all that remains.  It’s like, if I’m the only one who remembers him, was he real?  Or just a thirty year delusion?

Him being dead, it feels wrong somehow.  Like something went awry with reality, and now I’m stuck in this dark world with no father.  Maybe I’m crazy.

I don’t know.  Anytime I try to write about Dad I get all jumbled up and start to ramble. 

My dad is dead.  The pain hasn’t gone away.  That’s about the long and short of it.

Narzack

I saw The Force Awakens.  And I have some thoughts on it.

 (Nerd Words)

Narzack

Yesterday at work, I saw a message scrawled into the seat of a bench.  It read: “Today was a bad day.  Tomorrow will be better.”

I took a picture of it, because it gave me pause.  What is the story behind that?  Some poor kid had such a terrible day, that he was compelled to scrawl that message on the bench.  Yet, he still maintained the belief that tomorrow will be better.

There’s something about it that moves me.  The simultaneous pain and hope.  What did this kid experience that was so bad?  And what a wonderful outlook to say, that yes, tomorrow is a new day. 

I don’t know.  I feel like I was that kid, but I never had the strength or the courage to think that, yes, today is the worst, but that doesn’t mean tomorrow will be.

It’s kind of parallel to things that are happening to us right now.  For years now, I’ve been the realist.  The one always bracing for the next blow.  Haley is the optimist.  But, now, especially with the move coming up and our landlord taking full advantage of our lease, things aren’t exactly easy.  And since we haven’t been able to afford therapy in a while, and her meds are taking forever to fill, she’s really struggling.  She can’t really see that the glass is half full, because the glass itself is so cloudy and dark.

So it kind of falls to me to be the one who will carve that message into a bench.  It something I have to believe.  This is a role I’m not used to, but I’ve gotta do it for her.  It’s become my daily motto.  Though life is tough right now, there is a wonderful future just over the next hill.  On top of that, we don’t face it alone.  Together, she and I can ‘take on the whole empire [ourselves].’

Narzack

2015 was the year of Haley and Kyle.  We got through a lot.  We got a Little Blue House of love.  We got a Paxie- Boy.  We did therapy, though that journey has not come to an end.  We met three very good friends for the first time.  First, Josh came to see us.  Then, we had Jill and Matt at the wedding- the two people who helped the most through our Black Days.  

We got married.  Our ceremony was held on the shore of Moraine State Park in Pennsylvania in wonderful weather.  My bride was like an angel made human.  A vision.  Though it sounds cliché, she radiated.  I was undone.  There, in front of friends and family, I wept, so moved was I from seeing her walking down the aisle toward me.  I was so, so happy.  (in fact, a few days previous, I had a breakdown in the car.  I was so happy that I didn’t know how to process it.)   Haley was my Evenstar.  It was a perfect, sincere wedding.  Small and intimate.  September 27, 2015 was a very good day.  A very, very good day.

We honeymooned at Disney.  Two wonderful days at Port Orleans and then Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.  It really was a time of utter joy. 

A very close friend reconnected after an extended, bitter absence.

We spent our first Christmas as a married couple.  Newlywed bliss.

Some things have been hard, but on the whole, it has been a good, exciting year.

2015 was the year of Haley and Kyle.  2016 is the year of The Myers.

Narzack

After seeing some of the information coming out of E3, I really want to get my Wii U gamepad fixed.  Last I looked online, it was going to cost something like $100 to have it repaired.  Which is insane.  That’s a little less than half the cost of the entire system.  Ugh.  It’s been in ruins since before Christmas, when I lived in my apartment.  Our in-all-other-ways awesome dog Noli chewed the dickens out of it when I was out.  She also tore my Lord of the Rings Extended Edition bluray set to shreds. 

I was very angry.

Luckily, I had already purchased a Pro Controller, so I can still play most of my games.  Can’t co-op Hyrule Warriors, which is a bummer.  I just haven’t had the money to get the bloody thing fixed.

I didn’t buy anything during the Steam Summer Sale, either.  Nothing really appealed to me.  I’m waiting for a good GTA V sale, but that one stubbornly refuses a price slash.  Far Cry 4 hasn’t been discounted to my target price, either.  Everything else, I either already own or don’t want.  I still have a load of games to get through on both PC and Wii U. 

E3 had some exciting announcements.  No Man’s Sky is looking pretty incredible.  When I first heard about it on the Crate and Crowbar podcast, I thought it was going to have some pretty retro graphics.  Or maybe some kind of Minecrafty, super stylized graphics.  I finally saw some videos of the game, and it looks totally beautiful.  I’m interested to see how the developers approach the problem of players using obscenities to name new discoveries.  I mean, it’s a cool idea to let players be the ones to discover and identify new planets and creatures, but we all know how mature gamers are.  Which is to say, not mature at all.  I really want to play the game, I’m just not thrilled to land on Cockshitpussycron IV.

I saw the trailer for the FFVII remake.  Color me interested, but wary.  Square Enix has kind of stumbled of late, and I can easily see them cutting out a lot of the fun weirdness and minigames from the remake.  And DLCing the heck out of it.  I wouldn’t put it past them to turn the entirety of the Golden Saucer into a $9.99 DLC pack.  Furthermore, according to an interview, the gameplay will be updated to be more modern.  I dunno, I really liked the ATB system that FFVII had.  And materia is super fun to play with.  Even still, us supernerds have been clamoring for an HD remake of FFVII for years, so it’s nice to finally get one.

One the Nintendo front, Splatoon looks super fun, like all Nintendo games.  Star Fox is a no-question purchase.  And yet another reason to get my gamepad repaired.  I love Hyrule Warriors, so I’ll for sure get it when it releases on 3DS.  I hope it has some kind of neat cross-platform play.  I saw that a Metroid game is also coming to the 3DS, and that a bunch of people are super salty about it.  They’re so angry, that they’ve started a petition to cancel it.  In their defense, it does look kind of crappy, and definitely not like the Metroid games I remember.  Still, petitions to cancel a major release never work.

Earthbound Beginning is on the VC now!  We’ll buy that and cast the dickens out of it.  Earthbound and Mother 3 are the two best 16-bit RPGs I’ve played.  I actually think Earthbound is better than Chrono Trigger.  Which, I’m sure, is an opinion that will earn me few friends.  Playing the first game in the Earthbound/Mother series will be awesome.

Oh, and Ryu in Smash?!  I fricken love Nintendo.

I didn’t really pay much attention to the other announcements, other than Xbox One is going to be backwards compatible.  That might convince me to buy one, especially since our 360 doesn’t work, and Remedy’s next game, Quantum Break, is going to be Xbox One exclusive. 

On the PC side, Haley is really excited for Fallout 4. and I want the new XCOM, of course.  I’m surprised that it’s a PC exclusive, but I’d much rather that than something like PS4 exclusive.

I may have forgotten one or two, but those are pretty much my thoughts on the little I saw of E3 2015.   Looks like a pretty strong showing from Nintendo.  I’m a loyalist, though, and will always be excited by Nintendo stuff.

Narzack

I wrote a letter to Stephen Baxter this morning.  He’s my favorite living author, and definitely in my top three of all time.  I wrote it because I’ve never written to an author before, despite wanting to for years.  It was really just laziness that kept me from doing it.  I’d wanted to write to Ray Bradbury and Terry Pratchett, too, but they passed.  I’ve found out that hard way that people don’t live forever, and if you want to thank them, now is the time.  I never got to tell my dad how much he meant to me before he died.  I never got to tell Ray Bradbury just how much he meant to Haley and me, and Terry died before I got off my butt to tell him how much I loved Discworld.

So, yeah.  I wrote to Stephen Baxter.  I told him how much his books influenced me, and how much I love them.  I told him about how my dad brought a couple of his books home one day, because he figured I’d like them.  Dad was always able to do that.  Somehow, despite not being a reader, he always knew if I’d like something.  He was the one who encouraged me to read The Hobbit, even though I’m pretty sure he’d never read it.  He just somehow knew.  I read that in 8^th grade and never looked back.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that he was the one who got me into Frank Peretti when I was younger.   Dad was a pretty awesome guy.

I dunno, I just encourage you to make the effort to tell someone how much you appreciate them.  Even if it’s a guy in England writing nerd books for super nerds.

Narzack

I posted a short piece on my writing journal.  I've always like 'Hub' settings.  A place where worlds join and travellers meet.  I'm sure my idea has already been done to death, but I wanted to get it down before time and distraction and plain ol' laziness killed it. 

For me, the idea of the Library is neat, because that means you can tell any kind of story and have it still fit in the same megaverse.  Kinda like Not One Zombie, it's an open-universe idea, so anyone can tell a story in it.  I dunno, I just really like the idea of shared-settings, even curated ones.

Click here to read The Library