Somehow it is hard to believe that I am now more than halfway through the pregnancy! It seems like just yesterday we found out (on Mark’s birthday, nonetheless!) and now here we are, I am starting to get a proper bump and Little Doodle, at 22 weeks, now weighs a whole pound!
We went in for [...]
Random photos I’ve saved over the last couple years, posted for your enjoyment/horror.
Last week I canceled my World of Warcraft subscription, burnout strikes again. I couldn’t simply leave it at that, being the massively multiplayer online (MMO) hobbyist that I am, so I went on the interwebs to see how previous games I had played are fairing in the shadow of the unstoppable juggernaut that is WoW. Sadly, I found nothing more than merged servers, dwindling populations, and development teams who had all but quit every which way I turned. That’s when it hit me: WoW has killed the genre.
Don’t get me wrong, I like WoW as a game; my current burnout is sure to last a few months and, barring I don’t find something that captures my imagination, I’m sure to renew my account down the line. But as far as MMOs are concerned, it really is the only popular MMO. Looking back over the dozen or so titles I’ve played over the last ten years, I find myself adorning the rose colored spectacles of nostalgia for games-gone-by and “how it used to be.” And these are my thoughts.
Can you pinpoint the exact moment in time where you grew to like something? Where you knew you’d develop a desire for something? A singular moment in an infinite stream of experiences and passing seconds we take for granted, moving faster than life itsself. For MMORPG gaming (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) I can. The obsession began nearly ten years ago, in Best Buy, with the exact same artwork shown in the banner above. I had watched my cousin play Asheron’s Call for no more than a lazy half hour one afternoon, and I can remember being stunned by the concept: an online world in which many players worldwide played and interacted in. Gaming for me up to this point had been a solitary activity, or one done on a simple multiplayer mode with one’s siblings. This was new.
Call me an oddball, but one of my lifetime goals is to be able to go to Pripyat in the Ukraine and photograph it. Prypiat was a city built to house the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant. It was completely evacuated in 1986 following the Chernobyl disaster. The city is situated in the Zone of Alienation in Northern Ukraine, a 30km exclusion zone around the reactor. Most of the area is concidered relatively safe, and many Ukraine companies offer guided tours.
The Ganzfeld Experiment is a technique in parapsychology to test people for ESP abilities, with one notable side occurrence of causing one’s volunteers to, for lack of a better term, “trip balls.” Being a curious party with a love for science and an unusual amount of time on my hands, I decided to recreate this supposed hallucinogenic, drug free, experience with only a ping pong ball, a red light, and some white noise.
In the original intent of the Ganzfeld Experiment, volunteer subjects would lay back in a dark room with two white, translucent coverings on their open eyes, facing a red light. With headphones playing only white noise (flat frequency noise), they were to relax whilst another volunteer consentrated on a singular thought and attempted to send that thought to the sensory deprived volunteer. The experiment is said to have a 32% hit rate. However, volunteers who underwent the mild sensory deprivation did report on having pseudo-hallucinatory experiences and some even think it may induce global functional state changes (altered consciousness ie out of body experiences and astral projection). It is only the latter I was interested in, the idea of inducing an LSD-equivalent experience without the chemicals or twelve hour bad trips (in all honesty, I’ve never tried LSD or any hallucinogenic). Thus, the quest of epic proportions began.
