Help me Out or Just Chat

Hey lovely people, I think that you guys who read my blog are pretty cool people.  I would love to know you guys better.  I kind of love "meeting" people on the internet and I can't follow every single person who follows me anymore (Seriously, since when do I have over 100 blog followers?! Oh yeah, since this month.)  If I don't follow your blog through GFC, I might actually still follow it through Bloglovin', but I have so many blogs that I follow, I need to practice restraint and stop following more unless I see one and go, "Wow, we need to be virtual BFFs this instant!"  I can hardly keep up with all of the blogs I follow as it is.  That being said, I still find people fascinating and would love to email with you guys or at least chat in the comments section.  My email is jaythejedi@live.com, because I'm a Jedi (in case you didn't already know).  Feel free to email me about anything you want.

Second thing: I have started featuring a Blog of the Month and Shop of the Month now.  I have decided that the Blog of the Month will be a blog of any size that I am particularly in love with that month.  The shop will be an Etsy shop with amazing products and fewer than 50 sales.  I feel like this is a great way to help other Etsy sellers who haven't sold a lot yet and might be feeling less-than-thrilled-and-positive about that fact.  Each month the featured blog and shop will receive one month of free ad space on my blog, as well as a feature post about them.  The shop portion will include three of my favorite products from their shop.  I'll also include any social media links that the shop and blog owner would like to share.  I already picked out the blog and shop for next month, but I could use your help for the following months.  I would love it if you guys would share all of the lovely little Etsy shops you come across on your travels.  It could even be your own!  They don't have to have less than 50 sales.  I still do occasional Etsy Interviews and those will be with shops of any size.  Besides that, I also love Pinning like crazy all manner of wonderful Etsy products to my Etsy Pinterest boards.  I love to do everything I can to support handmade businesses of all sizes.  It's really my passion, so I would love your help with doing that.

To summarize, email me about anything your heart desires at jaythejedi@live.com, comment on my posts if you'd like (I don't even have annoying CAPTCHAs), and share all of the lovely Etsy shops with me.  Please and thank you and have a lovely day.

The First and Only Time I went Snowboarding

When I was either in middle school or early high school, my youth group went on a snowboarding trip to Mount Hood.  I had never been snowboarding before.  We rented our gear and rode the ski lift.  At the top, I surprisingly managed to get off the ski lift without falling flat on my face.  I followed my brother to the top of a very very very steep slope.  To me it seemed to be about an 85 degree angle, but it was probably more like 60 degrees which is still very steep.  My brother told me that all of the slopes are that steep so I started going down it.  (For the record, he had never been to Mount Hood before and he actually did think that they were all that steep.)  He was going to go after me.  I was doing great and going increasingly super fast when I realized that no idea how to stop or even slow down.  And then I fell while going really really way too ridiculously fast.  My glasses flew off and I couldn't find them so I sat there and waited for my brother and hoped he wouldn't run over my glasses.  I sat there for what seemed like 20 minutes, but was probably only 1 or 2.  It was enough time for two teenage boys to ride by and laugh at me.  Jerks.  My brother rode down and stopped and I asked him to find my glasses, which he did, and then told me how to slow down and stop before I took off again.  I rode down the remaining half of the slope without falling down again, by turning my board almost sidewise to slow down and then I stopped at the bottom.  I rode the ski lift back up with my best friend and we discovered the bunny slope, where we stayed for the rest of the day.  She was way worse at snowboarding than me and spent most of the day sliding down on her butt while I kind of got the hang of it and only fell occasionally.  At the end of the day, we all went back home and, wihtout the numbing effect of the freezing weather that had been present on the mountain, I realized that my neck hurt terribly.  I went to the doctor the next day and found out I had whiplash and got a super-stylish (sarcasm) neck brace that I had to wear for a week.  It turns out that I got whiplash on the first run when I crashed, then kept going the rest of the day with whiplash, because it was so cold that I didn't realize my neck hurt.  I was lucky that I didn't injure my neck worse.  And I have not gone snowboarding since.  I'll stick to sledding or making snowmen (and snow owls), snow angels, and having snowball fights.

There are no pictures from that trip, but here is a snow owl I made in January of this year.

Indie Game Reviews: Story Nexus

You might remember me discussing Fallen London a while ago.  It is on a website called Story Nexus.  Since I shared Fallen London, the Story Nexus website has added the ability for anyone who wants to, to be able to create their own storygame.  Storygames are sort of like choose-your-own-adventure books, which you might have read as a child.  You read a story and then you get to choose what the main character does, which affects what happens in the story.  These games are like those books mixed with a traditional role playing game, where your choices affect your abilities and you develop specialized skill sets.  These games are made by different people.  Some are authors, some are game developers, and some are even scientists.  You can play all of the storygames other people made or you can make your own.  My favorite, and the most developed, storygame is Fallen London, which I discussed before.  In this game, your character lives in a seedy steampunky version of London, hence Fallen London.

Other storygames I have played on the site are Cabinet Noir and Zero Summer.  I didn't really enjoy Cabinet Noir.  In that storygame, your character is a French Detective.  It's just not the sort of book that I enjoy.  Surprisingly, I really enjoy Zero Summer.  It seems like more of a Western and takes place in Amarillo, Texas.  I think I enjoy it because the main character, who you play, is a man with amnesia who has to rediscover who he is.  Somehow that appeals to me.  The other game that I am the most excited about playing, but haven't yet, is called The Hour.  The premise is fairly simple; you have to live through the same hour over and over and over...forever.  It sounds like it should be very thought-provoking.

Update: It's not at all surprising that I really enjoy Zero Summer because now I learned that it is set in post-apocalyptic Amarillo, Texas.  I don't think I've told you, but you may have realized, that post-apocalyptic worlds are my favorite settings for both books and movies.  Insane asylums are a close second.  Reason 5,981 why I'm weird.

There is a storygame for everyone, humor, history, romance, scifi, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, educational, and quite a few that defy all labels.  Also be sure to check out the Winter 2012 World of the Season winners, Samsara (1st place, Zero Summer (2nd place), and Evolve (3rd place). (I forgot to mention that there's a competitive element involved in the world creation part.)  Click here to see all of the worlds and find one (or six) that you enjoy.

The O of OCD

I have OCD.  I have talked about it a bit before.  I have mostly discussed the "C" portion, which stands for compulsive.  It means that you feel the overwhelming need to do a certain thing and if you don't do it, then you can't concentrate until you do or you just have to remove yourself from the situation completely.  For me, my stongest compulsion is straightening pictures.  If there is a crooked picture in the room, I have to straighten it, even if I am out to dinner and the picture is all the way on the other side of the room and I have to walk past numerous other diners to get to it.  If I don't straighten the picture, I have to stare at something else so I don't accidentally look at the crooked picture again.  It makes me feel uncomfortable when there are pictures that aren't hanging straight.  A compulsion that I had when I was youger, but outgrew, was much much worse.  When I put on my pajamas before going to bed, I had to put my dirty clothes into the hamper a total of three times.  I couldn't toss everything in at once.  I had to do it in three separate times.  For example, I would put in my socks, then pick up my shirt and put that in, then my shirt last.  It had to total three times, not four, not two, not one, three.  If I didn't do it in three, then I felt like something very very bad was going to happen.  If I was just putting my socks into the hamper and nothing else, I had to put them in one at a time, then take one out and put it in again, so that it totalled three.  My parents were not aware of this behavior and therefore I was not diagnosed with OCD until I was in high school.

But I am not talking about compulsions today; I am talking about obsessions.  I'm sure that everyone knows what an obsession is.  Maybe you're obsessed with a famous person or a band or a certain TV show.  An obsession is something that you are so fascinated with that you cannot get it out of your head and can easily devote a large amount of your time, and in some cases money, to it.  It is possible for anyone to become obsessed with something.  It is much much easier for a person with OCD to become obsessed.  I'm not sure if I told you this story before but if I have it was a long time ago so I'll tell it again. 

When I was about 12 years old, my brother and I shared a Game Boy.  Not a Game Boy Color, but an old black-and-white Game Boy which had no backlit screen.  This was old technology at that time but it was what my mother allowed us to have so we were happy with it.  We were each allowed to play it for 20 minutes a day and not a minute more.  My uncle hit a deer on his motorcyle and became very badly injured.  He was in the hospital for a very long time.  He has recovered now, aside from brain damage.  When he was in the hospital, my mother and my grandmother would go to Portland to visit him every single day.  Since it was during the summer, my mother would drop my brother and I off with my grandfather while they went to the hospital.  We were allowed to visit later, but at first his injuries were so awful that if a kid saw them, they would be scarred for life.  Of course my brother and I would bring the Game Boy when we went to our grandfather's house for the day.  Our grandfather would sit in the dining room and watch TV while my brother and I were in the living room.  He didn't really check on us that often, except for when he brought us our lunch.  He definitely didn't enforce the rules.  Our mother allowed us to play Game Boy for one hour each while we were at grandpa's house.  We always played for much longer than that, but took turns, because we knew how to share.  We got this game called Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle and it was one of those games where you couldn't save but you did get a password every time you beat a level.  My brother and I would each play until we died three times and then let the other one play.  We were trying really hard to beat this game, which must have had about 50 levels.  It took many days.  On the day that we would beat it, we played for a long time and then finally reached the last level, where the final boss was a big witch.  My brother tried again and again to defeat her, but couldn't figure out how.  He got frustrated and left me to defeating the final boss.  I tried and tried for hours and then I finally beat it!  Later our mom came and took us home.  I was in washing up for dinner and there were Bugs Bunny's floating in my vision as I washed my hands!  I was really frightened but my mom knew right away that I had played the Bugs Bunny game for too long.  The thing with the screen on the old Game Boy not being back-lit is that it causes much more eye strain than today's screens.  Bugs Bunny stayed in my vision for a few more hours and it was long enough that I never played longer than my time limit after that. 

The point of me telling this story is to illustrate how I can become obsessed with things fairly easily.  My brother quit when the game got frustrating but I had to keep playing until I beat it.  To this day, I get this way with computer games, which is why I can never ever start to play World of Warcraft.  I stick to Flash games like escape the room games and point and click games.  These games are shorter and can be beaten in the course of a day.  When I discover a TV show that I enjoy, I have to watch every single episode that exists all in a row until I'm done.  When I first started reading blogs and in fact up until the beginning of this year, when I discovered a new-to-me blog that I enjoyed I had to read all of it.  I would take days just reading through the archives and stopping only to eat, sleep, or take a bathroom break.  I don't do that with blogs any more.  I have managed to outgrow that obsession, but I do still love to read blogs.  Don't even get me started on websites where you earn achievements or badges.  I can stay on those for days until I earn all of the badges.  There is this really difficult Flash game called Achievement Unlocked.  Your character is an elephant and you have to traverse the small game area earning achievements.  You can see the names of the achievements but that is it.  There are over 100 different achievements.  You have to try things and push random keys on your keyboard until you figure out how to do things.  A random key will turn everything orange and you earn an achievement for that.  You earn an achievement for having your elephant hit the spikes 100 times.  I played that game for an entire day straight and most of the night until I earned all of the achievements.  By the end I was no longer having fun.  I even had to look up the walkthrough and then do everything it told me until I got the remaining achievements.  Most people would have been satisfied with just reading how in the walkthrough or even just quitting the game, but not me, I couldn't stop until I earned every last achievement.

The reason I share all of these personal things with you is to help you understand why I do some of the things that I do and also to be real.  I personally can't stand blogs where it's nothing but cute outfits and fun outings and yummy foods and nobody ever even gets a splinter.  I like to read about real people doing real things.  Real people make mistakes.  Real people don't have perfect lives.  Real people have things that make them weird and unique.  So this is me letting you all know that I am a real person, just in case you didn't already know that.