Christmas Creeper: Minecraft

Christmas Creep: When the timer on your tree’s lights can’t keep time properly 

Christmas Creep...when you find a guy dressed as Santa Claus sitting in the bushes in front of your house.  

So back to my point...

I've stated before that I'm an engineer, and engineering is little more than the art and science of laziness.  I am therefore lazy.  As such, when it's tome for Christmas, I like to maintain an air of festivity, but at a minimum of effort on my part.  I have gone to certain lengths to make sure this happens.  

I, like many people around this time of year, have lights outside my house.  Because of the house's design and the landscaping, it is remarkably difficult to reach the eaves on my house without a large extension ladder and preferably, somebody to hold said ladder when I'm climbing on it.  Because of this level of nonsense, I do not hang lights from my eaves.  I have four spotlights that shine red light onto the front of my house, lighting the whole place up for the holidays.  Christmas...done.  

Moreso than that, I have this entire setup hooked up to a photo sensor with a timer.  I don't even have to turn the lights on...they turn themselves on when it gets dark and turn themselves off 7 hours later.  Laziness...done.  

Inside, I have candle lights in each of my front-facing windows.  Photo sensors on all of them.  They turn on when it's dark, turn off when it's light, and I don't even have to think about it.  Candles...done.  

And I have my tree.  400 cool white wide angle LEDs, 100 multi-colored wide angle LEDs, 20 color-changing LEDs in the star topper, and I'm ready to go all Corey Hart, wearing Sunglasses At Night while my tree is lit up like the surface of a small star.  Do I put any effort into this on a daily basis?  If you've read any of my drivel to this point, you will know that the answer is a hearty and full-throated "of course not!"  All of that stuff is on a timer which turns on at 5:00PM and turns off at 11:30PM.  Tree...done.  

That is...until the tree turns on at 5:45...and 6:15...and 7:00....wait, what?  

All of my hard work getting to this nirvana of holiday laziness undone by the fact that my tree's timer can no longer tell time.  

I need a new timer. 

If You Catch Them All, They Can't Fight Other People's

“But officer…I only broke into the bank vault to catch an Arcanine”  

Ladies and Gentlemen, Jeremy has fallen victim to the scourge that is Pokemon Go.  He may never be seen again.  We now present you the new Blag, "LIR Is In The Office"...

Yeah, no.  

So, on the off chance that you're living under a rock and don't have access to the internets (at which point, I would have to ask how you're reading this, but that's beside the point entirely), you're aware of the new game Pokemon Go.  It's based on the entertainment empire that is Pokemon, a series of fictional POKEt sized MONsters that you are canonically supposed to catch all of.  Then the idea is you force them to train and evolve for the purpose of fighting each other.  Why one of these monsters isn't named Ivan Drago, I may never know.  Then again, there are somewhere north of 800 Pokemon that have been created at this point, so there may very well be an Ivan Drago out there and I'm just not aware of it.  

Either way, the newest thing going is a mobile app which uses every expensive and quickly consumed aspect of your smart phone (ie: battery, GPS, and Data Plan) to alert you to nearby monsters so that you can point your phone's camera at it and take a picture of it...and subsequently catch...or something.  I'm honestly a little fuzzy about how the whole thing works since I've never been all that into Pokemon (if there was a Transformers version of this game back in the late 80's, I'd have been all the heck over it, believe me).  I've discussed the matter with some friends in order to gain a rudimentary understanding of the concept, and have even seen the game in action, in the form of somebody yelling at me because I was driving too fast so they couldn't catch the Pokemon that was apparently sitting on my dashboard.  I'm not making that up.  

The whole concept has gone unbelievably popular in an unbelievably small amount of time.  The game debuted just about a week ago now, and already people have blamed car accidents on the game, people have wandered out into traffic to catch a monster, people have been lured into muggings, and one person found a Dead Body while playing the game.  Good wholesome entertainment here. 

All of this made me start to think about potential locations for Pokemon, and how the locations are determined and controlled.  There exists the possibility that monsters are now located in areas normally off limits to the general public and that there will be some trespassing issues as a result.  Also, areas whose locations are even more strictly controlled (such as my work site which, like many, has digital badge locks on every entry door) may start to see problems with people trying to get in to hunt imaginary digital combatants.  As usual, my brain took things to an extreme, where Pokemon Go can be used as a criminal defense where a cornered bank robber can try to convince the police that he was only in the bank vault to catch a prized legendary Pokemon.  A quick Google search yielded the name Arcanine as a rare Pokemon, so I went with it.  

Happy catching! 

Just So Many Zombies

Strangely enough, I think I’ve actually been more productive at home since I got Fallout

Ladies and Gentlemen, Jeremy has officially fallen for it.  He got totally duped and hoodwinked.  He just won't admit it.  Also, it bears mentioning here that this Blag entry is not sponsored by Bethesda Softworks, though it probably should be.   

So, it's no real secret that I enjoy the occasional video game.  Over the years, various different games have taken turns dominating overly significant portions of my free time.  Asteroids, Wolfenstein, Blake Stone, NHL95, Quake, Warcraft II, NHL Hitz, Grand Theft Auto V...you get the idea.  Well, not long ago, I was made aware of a new mobile game that came highly recommended.  It was called "Fallout Shelter," and life was never quite the same.  

The game itself was reasonably fun, but relied on the standard mobile-game play technique known by gamers as "Sitting around waiting for stuff to happen."  The idea is you are running a fallout shelter based in a 1950's-era world after the world's destruction via nuclear war.  You wait around while rooms create resources.  You wait around while settlers roam about the vast nuclear wasteland searching for goodies.  You wait around while settlers improve their skills.  You wait around while your radio beacon tries to attract new settlers.  There's a lot of waiting around.  That said, the game is stupidly addictive.  I found my stupid self coming back to the stupid game many many times trying to get the next stupid lunch box full of stupid bottle caps.  

What I didn't realize at the time (because I was blissfully ignorant of the universe), was that this little mobile time vampire was simply a teaser for the next generation of the "Fallout" series of real video games to come out.  They friggin' roped me into their little post-apocalyptic world, wanting to play the real game instead of this little shelter game.  

I bought Fallout 4 not too very long after it came out.  

Now, I've set up about a dozen new settlements, linked the supply lines to 5 of them, figured out how to wire up generators and laser turrets for defense, joined the Minutemen and the Brotherhood of Steel, killed a zombie with a jet-propelled teddy bear, built a basketball court, and killed three, count 'em three Deathclaws.  Go Jeremy!  

You'd think all of this would ruin my ability to actually do anything else...ever.  But, quite the opposite!  Since I've resolved myself to the fact that as soon as I sit down to play Fallout 4, I will be doing that until usually after bedtime, I force myself to get all of my standard errands done before I let myself play video games!  I'm so much more productive during that time than I usually was pre-Fallout.  I just have to tell myself "Okay, Jeremy...you're cleaning the kitchen before you let you play video games."  Sure, I sound like my own parent scolding myself, but it seems to have been effective so far.  I don't know if it will still work after I learn how to electrify the teddy bears.  That just sounds like WAY too much fun.