Although I wanted to continue to blog on a regular basis, the reality is that August was pretty brutal in terms of time available.  As a wise man once said, “Let me ‘splain.  No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

August was our last month in the duplex in which we’ve been spending less and less time in every month.  It works in the way that we get out of the duplex and save a modicum of money and it helps the owners in the fact that they can turn it over and rent it to prospective new tenants.  Apparently there was a plant closing and some of the jobs are coming over to Grantsburg.  Not the best news to be sure, but that’s how it goes.  The owners knew that we weren’t going to be there forever and we no longer don’t have to pay on a place we’re not really occupying anyway.

That means though that we had to pack up and move which took a good share of time in the month.  We’re still not completely done yet, but should be able to finish up in the last couple days of August.

Secondly, the house we initially had an offer on completely went to shit.  I’m not sure what the thought process was on this, but from our perspective, it appeared that it was more important for the seller’s bank to  scuttle the offer and attempt to push it to foreclosure rather than accept a reasonable offer on the table.  Like I said, this is from my perspective and I’m not aware of all the facts, but it became obvious that we could be waiting for months on this house in which we’d have to a fair amount of renovation upon moving in and doing so around the holidays in winter became less and less appealing.  We decided to start looking for another house.

Through a sheer amount of luck, we found one that was only on the market for a few days which we fell in love with.  We made an offer the next day and through a few counteroffers, we came to a good agreement.  We “bought” a house, contingent on closing.

Throughout all of this, we’ve been out of town on three of four available weekends.  Add all this up and it’s a busy month with not a lot of extra time to update the blog.  September might be better in the fact that we won’t have to do much other than due diligence for the closing.  Moving will actually be easier in the fact that everything is already packed and ready for the move, but that won’t happen until October.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of updates, but things will get better.  More news/blogs on the house are coming up and I think you’re going to like it.

But there was something else planned that weekend, something wonderful and magical, something I haven’t done in over a decade.  I broke out the dice, bought a couple of books and played a game of Dungeons and Dragons with my friends.

My Old Dice

Oh yes.  It had been so long since the last time I played, I cannot honestly say that I remember it.  But this was something I really yearned for.  It’s weird as 2010 continues to be my geeky renaissance and one thing I miss from my old geek days was sitting down amongst friends, rolling some dice, drinking some cheap beer and getting our game on.

Not pictured: a bag of Doritos, classic Mountain Dew and young adult angst

When my friend Eric mentioned we were going to run a couple of rooms in a dungeon crawl, I completely geeked out.  I “found” myself at a games store and just happened to find myself  *cough* *cough* at the D&D display rack which just happened to have a sale on a couple of books.  I studied up, drew up a character (an Eladrin Wizard with a bit of a detective background) and dug out my dice from one of the packed boxes.  It was just the matter of a wait for the actual weekend to game with some friends.

My Character in Page Form

We gamed on the first night there and took about twenty minutes for everyone to settle in and get rolling, but once we did, gaming goodness abounded.  To make the visualizing easier, they bought game grids to help you picture where you are in relation to the enemies and also where you can move in any given turn.  This was really a simple dungeon crawl and we only managed to clear a couple of rooms, but the experience was better than I remembered.

Many traditional players have been quite vocal about the 4th edition D&D rules being too much like World of Warcraft in that you’ve separated the classes into essentially four categories and simplified too much of the combat.  It’s true that the rules seem to be easier, but really roleplaying is what you make it.

When we played, I pushed the bounds of what the rule book said what some of my spells were able to do, but because the idea was so intriguing to Eric who was running the game, he allowed it.  Fortunately, I rolled exceedingly well and made a couple of unexpected things happen.  Things like that are fun, and that’s what the game is really all about.  I really can’t wait for the next time for us to play again and maybe, just maybe can finagle a monthly game.

My personal geek reinvention continues.

Secondly, this is a single platform release, only for PC.  The next best selling game was released on two platforms and was still beat by over 30,000 units.

And here’s the coup de grace.  These sales are only for the last four days in July whereas all the other games had a good measure of the month to sell.  The August numbers should be very interesting to see.

I’ve seen many a post on many a tech forum saying that PC gaming is dead, that the console is now king.  These numbers seem to fly right in the face of such perceptions.  Starcraft definitely is not being ported to console.  Can you imagine how fast some console player would get their ass-kicked by even a mediocre PC player who knows a couple keyboard shortcuts?

Having no television myself for well over four years, I started to think about my past dealing with this very thing.

When I was a kid, I remember when we talked about this girl in my brother’s grade whose family didn’t have a television by choice and I remember specifically thinking how weird that was.  The concept of no TV was entirely foreign to me.  How will she know what’s going on?  How can you relate to people who are talking about a television show we just watched?  Of course, the girl was talented and smart and later in high school, we became friends.  The issue of the TV never came up because it didn’t matter.

In an entirely different incident a couple of months ago, I was talking to the server at the local Subway and she started on about some commercial that she was certain I had seen.  Of course, I hadn’t and really had a hard time relating to anything else she said about it because I had no context.  My end of the chat was peppered with “uh-huh”, “okay, sure” and “hmm” as I tried to navigate this conversational mine field.  She wasn’t even talking about a show, but rather an ad.  With sandwich in hand, I left the place rather confused and had no idea what she just said.

When I talk with people, I try to engage them on subjects as best I can.  However,  I have been noticing more and more though that I have a difficult time talking to people about anything on television.  Not that I don’t enjoy watching some television, but I like to do so under my own terms.  I don’t like advertisements every eight minutes.  I largely despise reality and talent shows.  For every tidbit of good programming, there’s a sea of crap you need to wade through.  Most of what I like can be found legally online or through Netflix a few  months later.  A TV is just an encumbrance, one that sucks you in and before you know it, you’ve watched hours of programming on TV that you don’t even enjoy…it’s just there.

The reason we don’t have a TV is not to feel superior to others, but just that after taking a good look at our time and how we value it, we’d rather be doing other things.  I like to take time to read books, blogs, play games, listen to music, write, play hockey; just a number of other things than watch TV.  I understand that people are fine with spending their time watching TV.  That’s cool.  I’m just not into it like I used to be.

Unfortunately, this is the trend I see happening lately more and more in the game-space and in particular with MMO games.  Another game I almost bought but held off doing so was APB, which was meant to be much like the Grand Theft Auto of the MMO world.  Reviews for APB have been scathing and I’m very glad I saved the $50 by avoiding purchasing the game at all.  What have been the main complaints?  Buggy play, limited mission types, repetitive action, unbalanced play.  Sound familiar?  It’s because these were many of the complaints I had against STO as well.

It is just a part of a distressing trend of foisting a poor product onto an eager fan base and then attempting to fix it through new releases and content as they go along.  Companies often talk about how “they are listening to the fans” and about how much their fan support means to them.  The problem is that if they would have actually cared about their fan base, they might have attempted to put out a decent game first.  Let me share two examples of companies that I believe actually care about their fans and do right by them.

First of all, again Bioware did the right thing by putting off the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic until next year.  The more and more I see from this game, the more I’m expecting it to be great.  This is from a company who put out two top notch games this year (Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2) which is a lot to do for any one company.  It could be argued that many of their games seem the same, and that would be a valid complaint.  However, this one minor con is entirely outweighed by everything they have done right and the improving quality of their games.

The other company is Blizzard with their recent release of Starcraft II.  This was twelve years in the making.  Twelve YEARS.  What did they get for their waiting so long?  Oh, pretty much universal acclaim from critics and fans for a well beloved franchise.  Not that there hasn’t been some nitpicking and valid complaints as well (let’s face it, every game does have a wart or two), but everything people loved about the original is still there with an engaging single player mode and fantastic multiplayer.

This is what it is all about and really, what gets me to purchase one game over another.  A company like Cryptic (makers of STO) is not getting another dime from me as they do not have the player’s interests in mind but rather their bottom dollar.  Bioware and Blizzard?  Both of them put out great games and their decisions are made to focus on the quality of the game rather than a purely financial motive.  Let me throw Valve in there too as a company that sticks to this mantra and also produces top notch games.  They get it and because of that, they get my money.

Probably doesn’t sound very exciting to most people.  However, it is exactly what we want to do today and that’s what counts.

Although it may sound like I’m being aloof about all of this, it’s difficult to put into words how  lucky I feel to be married to such a wonderful woman as Melanie.  On one hand, it may not seem like we’re doing much at all, that there are no grand romantic gestures happening on this day.  But on the other, we don’t need grand romantic gestures as we really try to show how much we love each other every day.  The milestones in a relationship are nice and it’s nice to reflect on those good times, which we will do, but it’s much better to enjoy the whole ride rather than just a few points along the way.

I am looking forward to dinner tonight and celebrating our anniversary.  But as it’s nice to look back now and then to see how far we’ve come, Melanie and I have always looked forward to our future together.  I’m sure that we will continue to do so tonight.

As some of you may know, right now I’m sitting in a hotel room in a suburb of Madison, WI.  My wife is here for business reasons over the next days and it was a good time to bring Audrey.  Last night as I was sitting in the hotel room, it occurred to me that I actually enjoy these moments in a creative sense.  Separated from the comforts of home and only having a modicum of my own items here, it does wonderful things for the creative juices.

But this has always been the case for me.  When stripped down to the bare essentials, I’ve not only made sure that one of the things I bring is something to write with, be it pen and paper or my laptop, but I’ve easily found time to do some interesting creative writing.  In fact, it is much easier for me to write in unfamiliar places that to do otherwise.

I’ve been busy today outside of doing some writing.  Between taking care of Audrey, doing some very necessary shopping and taking some moments to read, I’ve been able to jot down some things today.  Which is great because if I were at home, I’d probably have nothing more than the random thoughts in my head that are never acted upon.

Perhaps someday I will build or buy the perfect writing enclave for me.  It will have windows, a sturdy desk, a comfy chair, a music player, dictionary, thesaurus, pen jar, legal paper pads, and a place to plug in my laptop.  That should be about it.  Till then, I should try to fake that environment somewhere, but may not get the chance until we actually buy our house.

It began the quest for me to maybe try something different with the look of my blog.  I found this very nice, very customizable theme called Suffusion (link at the bottom right) that I’m using today which I think reads better as well.  I find the lighter color, the better contrast and the more natural font seems to agree with my eyes a bit better.  I hope it does for you as well.

There are lot of customizable options here that I’m not even getting to at this point.  I’m excited about it as I could really dress up the site with a some background pictures, give it a bit more personality that it currently has.  You might be seeing a few more changes then, but nothing too bad.

1. Posting your indignant mouth frothing is never a good idea.  Before you completely embarrass yourself, read through the comments again and make sure that what you think was said was actually what was said.
2. If the blog owner/site runner/moderator calls you out for not being civil, start reining your behavior in unless you want to meet what is casually called the Almighty Ban-Hammer.  Not quite as powerful as Mjöllnir, but its ability to silence you is pretty powerful. For example, if the site owner is telling you that you should stop being a dick, then you should probably do so.  Getting offended by being called out as being a dick to other posters and pointing out how very offended you are is, well, pointless.
3. If the blog owner/moderator let’s you know that you’re being a dick in comments, do not try to turn it back on the blog owner/moderator.  If your best response is “no, you’re a dick”, you lost.  For good.  You have no credibility left with such a response.  It shows your capacity for restraint, self-reflection, rational thinking is basically non-existent.  On a comment thread, you have your moment on the soapbox to either build consensus, present your argument or be funny.  Don’t spoil it by acting like a whiny two year old with a full diaper.
4. The blog and/or post is not about you.  There can be exceptions to this, but in almost all cases, you are commenting on a post written by someone else on something else.  Diving into the comments and trying to make the comment thread about you and your precious feelings is childish.  Taking digs at the site owner because you feel slighted are hilarious to everyone but you and maybe the site owner.  Your fuming is unintentional comedy.
5. If you were expecting democracy on a blog, you are in for a very big surprise.  Blogs are dictatorships and can either be benevolent, tyrannical or any varied mix in-between.  Your participation is entirely voluntary and if you want to be a happy, commenting serf, then abide by the rules set forth.  Complaining about said rules and/or equal time is idiotic.  You have every right to leave.
6. Don’t leave “you suck, I’m leaving this blog and never coming back again” posts.  No one cares.  Seriously, no one.  If you are going to rage quit a blog that has so offended you, just leave.  Announcing that you’re leaving brings us back up to Rule 3: the blog is not about you.
   1. If you feel so compelled to leave a rage quit post, then for God’s sake just leave and don’t come back.  Returning to the comment thread later and saying “I’m just back to see if anyone retracted their comment” looks like a child who keeps threatening to run away but never gets past the door, always looking back to see if someone will stop them.  Again, unintentional comedy.  That snickering you hear is other page viewers laughing at you.
   2. When constructing your rage quit post, mentioning things like “if this is the way you treat people, no one will come” or any other weird threats about how no one will visit your blog anymore mean nothing.  This is especially true if the blog you are on has no ads.  They’re not doing it for you;  the blogger likely does this because they need or want to blog. Threatening something like this to someone who gets tens of thousands of page hits a day is like the one rain drop threatening not to fall during a severe thunderstorm. Just a note; I personally do not get that many page hits, but even my small blog gets a few hundred a day.
7. If you are so offended at said blog and really want to get even, start your own blog.  No, forget I said that.  Don’t.  See, blogging isn’t easy.  Thousands of blogs are started every day but most of them have a couple of posts and then they’re done.  It takes a certain commitment to stick to your blog.  If you can’t keep up with a simple comment thread without losing your shit, then I’m guessing your temperament is not cut out for regular blogging.

Have some helpful additions?  Leave them in the comments.  Nicely.

• Audrey turned five months old.  Melanie took some adorable pictures of her which I need to get up on the website as well.  Look for that in a couple of days.
• Still nothing on the house.  We wait with baited breath that someday we will get the call and someone will say we’re in the final stages.  Right now, we’re just waiting for the seller’s bank to give the official A-OK.  It’s hard being patient on this.
• We have a new nephew!  My brother Wayne and his wife Gretchen welcome into the world Zane Asher Boerger.  Very exciting and now Audrey is no longer the youngest Boerger of that generation.
• Writing is going on.  Yes, it is.
• You probably haven’t noticed but I’m on the latest and greatest WordPress system.  Nice improvements and the best blogging software keeps getting better.  Oh, I also did some work on my email situation so I can respond more quickly to any inquiries, but that’s likely about as exciting as the WordPress update.
• My friend Grace has joined the blogging world where you can find her musings at Social Grace.  Great name, by the way.

Posting still might be a bit thin in the next couple of weeks and August in general.  Besides Melanie taking the Wisconsin Bar Exam in the next couple of days, we’ve got a lot of travel to do and hopefully, getting ready for moving into an new house.