Becoming MacGyver

Last Saturday, I got a chance to feel like MacGyver. You know, the guy who could blow open a door with some gum and a paperclip.

Yeah, this guy. Source.

Materials

My friend, Jen, and her boyfriend were giving a class on how to cheaply and easily make some pretty useful item. The class was mostly centered on making things out of cans, with one exception.

The exception was a Paracord bracelet. This was the first thing we made and was fairly easy to make. The idea of it is to pack in as much Paracord into the bracelet as possible. Paracord is actually pretty useful, especially when camping, hiking, or for survival purposes. You can use it for lacing up your shoes to using it as a tourniquet to unraveling the inner stings and using them as emergency stitches.

We made or were shown how to make a good number of items, but for me the Paracord bracelet and one other item stood out the most. Probably one of the most awesome things we made was a SuperCat stove. Again, it is something that is pretty easy to make and requires only a few materials. It required an empty, clean cat food can and a hole puncher to make. If you want a hotter fire, you punch in more holes. If you want the fire to burn longer but with less heat, you put in fewer holes. To make the fire, you just put in a little alcohol and light it on fire. It’s an incredibly lightweight stove that won’t take up much room in your backpack and costs a lot less to make than pretty much anything you’ll find on the market. We were able to boil a full pot of water over two of them and have tea at the end of class.

This was kind of a preview class and I was fortunate to be invited so I could learn the sorts of things they were teaching and give my opinions. Overall, the class was pretty good. This was a very basic class to figure out flow and the sorts of things that work and getting used to the space, but it was well done and I came home with some pretty nifty things that I got to make.

This is a popcorn maker

I’m excited to see what they are going to do for future classes and, from talking to them, am pretty excited for the other things they want to teach. They are currently working on a website for the MacGyver classes and I will update when it is up. In the meantime, if you would like to contact Jen about future classes, email her at jen@peakperformacesd.com.

A Brief (personal) History of Gaming

I graduated about 4 months with a B.S. in Game Design. It has been an interesting road and I have learned a lot along the way, but I constantly felt that I was behind. Yes, I did grow up on games, but not really on video games that much except the ones I played on the Commodore 64. Up until I was in middle school, the only times I played console games was when my mom made my brother let me tag along to his friends’ house. They set me in front of the TV and stuck the controller in my hand and went off to do their own stuff and I was making Sonic roll across the screen so I wasn't too worried.

Mostly I played board, card, and word games and there are always strong memories associated with games. My mom is so sweet almost all the time and everyone sees her as being so sweet and mild. They have never played a game of Monopoly, Risk, or Scrabble with her. She is ruthless. She is a merciless goddess on the board game battlefield. 

And. She. Is. Glorious.

My mom has a scorched Earth policy when playing games (Source)

My strategy when I was younger playing Risk with my family was to pit my brother and dad against my mom. It was relatively easy since I was the youngest and not seen as a threat, but it never worked out quite how I planned. She slaughtered them and they only whittled her down a little but not nearly enough.

This is what one of our games might end up looking. I'm the blue. She ran out of pawns.

 As I got older I got better, and a lot of this can be attributed to my mom and the lessons I learned playing against her. Another skill I honed from playing with my mom was a certain level of stubbornness that keeps me trying even though the odds aren’t good.

While I have a lot of good memories associated with games, I also have some painful ones. I have sprained my arm three times during playground and other made-up games, bruised my hand playing the crocodile game, and managed to get tendonitis due to overplaying video games. To this day I still have an aversion to chess and checkers because my brother taught me checkers with a baseball bat. But even with all that, I still love games because even sometimes an injury is a time to take comfort in playing games. As my dad and I sat waiting tor one of the many times I had to get an x-ray, we played Octo. I made up the name because I can’t remember if we ever had a name for it. In  Octo, you build words of a part of speech such as the prefix oct-. It takes no paper, no score, just a spoken game where you imagine the results. To this day I still remember waiting to be called in and, even though pain was shooting through my arm, I was laughing at the thought on an octopan, a pan with eight handles.

Two things happened when I was in middle school: my grandma’s neighbor had a granddaughter around my age and she had an SNES and my brother got an SNES. I loved playing with my brother, but it never lasted long. I am 5 years younger than him and each year apart, seems to increase the annoyance factor exponentially. We’d play until my constantly moving with Mario annoyed him enough and I was kicked out. It was always a lot easier with my friend; she really didn’t care if I leaned when jumping a chasm. One day she got Zombies Ate My Neighbors (ZAMN) and that is when I fell in love.

ZAMN was the first game I remember playing that was truly co-op. We didn’t have to wait for one person to get through their turn or die; we could both play at the same time. It was also one of the first console games that I have played where one of could play as a regular girl. It may not seem like a huge deal and a lot of people see it as a feminist thing, but it is so much simpler than that. We want our PC to be an extension of ourselves and we want to be able to identify with it. It’s the same thing when you play Monopoly and fights break out over who gets what token. All Hell breaks loose if someone has to be the iron. While ZAMN had its flaws such as too many weapons to scroll through and a level that can act as a stop point but even with these flaws, it has my heart completely.

My first love

When I got into high school, my brother went into the Army and left me his SNES. It wasn’t until later that I got my own copy of ZAMN. The SNES moved around with me and for my 22^nd birthday, I finally got my wish. My parents asked me what I wanted and the only thing that I could think of was a copy of ZAMN. My parents took me to Corvette Diner right after my play and presented me with ZAMN and a couple of Scooby Doo birthday cards. It was the absolute most perfect birthday.

This game remains my most played SNES game and is the game residing in the console as I write this. It continues to influence and inspire me. Whenever I find I doubt myself or question if I chose the right field of study, I start playing. I remember that even when I die, I get a little further each time. I may never have gotten through the whole game, but I never give up. I play and all the connections from my past bubble to the surface sparkling and I am renewed.

Recipe For a Great Cook

I’ve had many people tell they can’t cook. I’m not the best cook, but I know how to cook and for my tastes, I consider myself a good cook. I was very fortunate – I had three people who taught me how to cook. These three people were my grandma, my dad, and my grandma Lee’s neighbor, The Major.

I'm here to help (Source)

Many people will go on about ingredients, temperatures, recipes, and preparation techniques being the most important things about cooking. Some overly sentimental people will tell you the most important thing is the love you put into the food. While those are all important (though the jury is still out on the love thing), they aren’t the most important. You can have all of those things and still mess it up if you are lacking the most important aspects of cooking:

1.     Patience

2.     Imagination

3.     Bravery

Full Disclosure: This did happen once...(Source)

My grandma embodied patience. She taught me how to wait. When to check on things and when to leave them alone and let them cook. She taught me to take the time to prepare the ingredients from a meal properly. She taught me stirring and letting things cook to savory perfection. Patience is the hardest for me to learn and I still struggle with it today; this is why I am only a good cook and not a great cook. But patience is the difference between having a moist and flavorful chicken breast as opposed to a dry and tasteless thing.

My father exudes imagination in everything he does, and cooking is no different. My dad is always ready to try a new recipe or just throw things together and see what happens. Not everything turns out perfect, but some things do and if there were no experimentation, we would miss out on those great dishes.

The Major wasn’t called The Major for nothing. He had been in the military and I never knew his real name, he was always introduced as The Major. He only taught me one dish, orange chicken, but the lesson in bravery may have been even more important than the dish itself. It was an instance and that one instance has stuck with me ever since. We needed some eggs and he taught me to crack the egg and empty its contents with one hand. My first egg fell on the floor. He didn’t get mad about the mess, we just cleaned it up and I tried again and this time I got it in the bowl.  Such a single, simple moment, but it taught me not to be afraid in the kitchen. Being careful is important, but not being afraid of messes, sharp objects, open flames, and errors is also important.

Be Patient: They’ll be done when they’re done.

Be Imaginative: Feel free to experiment and create new combinations.

Be Brave: Don’t be afraid of failing, just clean up and try again.

This took all day to make, the recipe for the
potatoes is my own design, and it was delicious

You Sunk My Battleship!

I was walking along and all of a sudden I saw a poster for Battleship. I had heard about it and seen the posters before, of course, but this was the first time it really hit me: there is a movie coming out based on the game Battleship. I’ll admit, this complete revelation came out of nowhere, walloped me a good one, knocked me on my ass, and, just to make sure it really sunk in, hit me with a lead pipe. As I lifted my bruised self from the pavement under the watchful eye of the Battleship-Revelation, it finally sunk in that this was really happening. On May 18, Battleship will be in theatres and my only question is: Why?

Near the Wilshire/Vermont station

So what I got from watching this trailer is that aliens hid in the ocean because they could. And then they attack, because why not? Then we fight back… with boats. Yeah, that was pretty much what I got from it.

Who knows? Maybe it will be a great movie with a great plotline and not just some thin shadow with a bunch of special effects that is desperately trying to capture the audiences’ sense of nostalgia by forcing it into the ill-fitting frame of a board game.

Source

I will admit now – I’m not a huge movie person. The last two movies I saw in theatres were Hunger Games a few weeks ago and The Muppets back in November. Both were movies I knew I would enjoy. Hunger Games because of the books and Muppets because of all the memories that tied to them. I also admit that I’m not super-snobby about movies. I’m not lamenting how everything is a sequel, a remake, or filled with FX instead of plot. What I am saying is that maybe not everything needs to be made into a movie.

Source

Source

Time to switch gears to the videogame industry and the crash in 1983 Follow me, trust me, I’m getting to a point. Anyone play ET on the Atari and think this is what caused the videogame crash? It wasn’t the cause, merely a symptom. ET was like the achy shoulder in a much, much larger flu. Basically anything was being made into a game. It wasn’t just Atari making games, they had little control over their systems and pretty much anyone could make a game for their system and did. Also a lot of games were being rushed into completion.

Source

With the videogame market being inundated with so many low-quality games that were just made to be made, the game industry in the U.S. sank for a while. Now lets get back to the movies and my point. My thought is that, in some ways, I can see the movie industry paralleling the gaming industry of the 1983. It’s expensive to go to the movies but most of us are a fairly forgiving audience…up to a point. Battleship feels like a movie being made simply to be made and it almost feels that this may be the beginning of the inundation of movies made to be made.

Please let this one be made before the crash  Source

Infinite Undiscovery...Will Remain Undiscovered

Not too long ago, I attempted to play Infinite Undiscovery and I really didn’t give it a fair chance. I have no idea if it was a good game or not because after 20 minutes I stopped playing, put it in its envelope, and mailed it back to Gamefly. In those 20 minutes I got to press buttons (and not to get more text to appear on the screen but for actual gameplay) for maybe 3 minutes. And I’m being generous on calling it 3 minutes. There were so many cutscenes and things to read that I just got annoyed and called it a day. For an actual critique from someone who clearly had more patience than I did, here you go.

I had chosen this game after reading about it (I think in GameInformer, but I’m not exactly sure) because of its unusual name and decided to give it a try simply because of its unusual name with no knowing of pretty much anything else about it. This could be the greatest game ever…but I will never know because I got annoyed with all the cutscenes and textboxes.

A friend of mine once told me that part of dating is figuring out what you will and will not put up with. I’ve found, as I’ve gotten older that this advice applies to pretty much every aspect of life. When I was younger I put up with a lot but as I got older, my propensity to grow annoyed has gotten stronger. In my youth (see early 20s), I would put up with long cutscenes, but now I won’t. They simply have started annoying me and I have outgrown them. Realized that an overly long cutscene is not something I will put up with in my videogame relationship anymore.

A game should be more than just a string of cutscenes where the player gets to intermittently mash a button in between. I’m fine with cutscenes if they’re brief and don’t interfere with the flow of the game. A cutscene should not be so long that I can fix a bowl of Froot Loops (and some have been so long I can even eat said Froot Loops.) The story should be integrated into gameplay with cutscenes being minor and not tedious. 

Was able to eat the whole bowl

 Infinite Undiscovery could be the most fantastically awesome game ever, but I will never know. I don’t know, give it a try – maybe you’ll have more patience than I did.

On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams

I live in Los Angeles. The land of broken dreams. The place where it is so easy to become lost. My heart goes out to them and I want to take them home. I am, of course, speaking of the abandoned stuffed animals and toys. It is hard to pass by and not try to rescue them. They call to me and I feel guilt as I walk on by. 

Huggably, snuggaly lost

I don’t feel that guilt when I walk past a pair of discarded sunglasses, but I do when I see a lost toy. Perhaps I have seen the Toy Story trilogy too often, but I have a feeling I would feel this way even if Pixar had never brought it to my attention. 

Yes, I cried. A lot.

A lost-asaurus

As a child, I had a lot of stuffed animals and toys that were animal-shaped and these became my steadfast friends. My brother was 5 years older than me and the kids who lived around us were my brother’s age and male. They’d occasionally allow me to hang out with them, but mostly didn’t want me around and I was left on my own a lot. I was young and short for my grade and, on top of all that, I was quiet and socially awkward. This did not make for a great combination when trying to make friends. The few friends I did have, I only saw at school. My parents didn’t have a lot of friends outside of work, so there were never any children that I became friends with even out of simple, mutual convenience.

Looking back, it seems like it would’ve been a lonely childhood, but I don’t remember feeling very alone. I had my stuffed animals and, to me, they were alive and they were my friends. So when I see these abandoned anthropomorphic toys, my heart feels a twang. They are lying there and they have no friends and they been unceremoniously ostracized from society without any thought or care. And on some level, I see them as my old childhood friends and see my younger self in them.

Denny's: For Those Times When the Edges of Reality Fray

I feel as though I’ve been here before. Sitting in a Denny’s, looking at the menu and not knowing why I’m here.

I look out the window at people walking. There are people around me in the restaurant. I feel numb. Disconnected with everyone. Even the voices and conversations around me seem muffled, as though we’re not really in the same place. Perhaps they’re not real or I’m not real. Everyone is out of focus and muffled, except the waiter. He blinks in and out of different worlds.

That is what it really is; they have their world and I have mine. They can come out of their world and briefly show up in mine, but I cannot escape from my world into theirs. Occasionally they blink into my world, only to blink out again just as quickly. But mostly they stay in their world with the obscuring barrier separating us.

And, thus, I end up at Denny’s where the coffee flows 24/7 and I can have some breakfast at any time of the day. Denny’s: the place I go when I’m caught in an existential quandary. I start walking and all of a sudden my feet have taken me to Denny’s, perhaps because I am conditioned since this numbness and constant questioning of my own and others’ existence and reality usually comes upon me in the early hours of morning and Denny’s was always one of the few places that was close and open.

Now I’m in a city where there are many restaurants open 24hrs and I can get just about any food I want, but I shun them all. My feet take me to Denny’s, because in those moments (hours? Years?) when I doubt the strength of reality, none of those places truly exist. When I’m too far gone to be reached by anyone or anything else, Denny’s is the only place that can penetrate into my reality and make itself on the same level of existence as I am.

Yes, Grand Slams really are the glue that holds the universe together.