Author Archives: TheBlackhairedGuy

About TheBlackhairedGuy

I'm a guy. And I have black hair. Well not really because it is slowly turning grey. I suppose TheNotquiteBlackhairedGuy doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it? I have a few blogs at EverythingSucks.blog and MyElectricCar.blog and write freelance occasionally.

Junk Mail Sucks

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I got this envelope in the mail today. As you can see it looks really fancy and important, so if you lived life at all you should realize that it’s total junk. It’s pointless and unimportant simply because it looks important. If you’ve ever applied for a credit card or recieved a debit card you know the bank mails them in the blandest, boringest, unmarked envelopes ever. Think of a bill from Comcast, the electric company, or from wherever; they’re always in boring envelopes. If you get a flashy envelope from Comcast, you know they’re just trying to upsell you on a new package deal or whatever and that it isn’t a bill.

I open the envelope to actually see who is trying to sell me stuff. It’s from a car lot. Look at how fucking flashy and gaudy it is. I’m surprised these things don’t cause people to have seizures. I’m also surprised they don’t send these without tiny batteries and flashing LEDs to make it even more ridiculously over-the-top and gaudy.

Also note who it is addressed to. It’s addressed to me, by name, but also says “or current resident”. They don’t give a fuck if I really do open it, and if it made its way to another horse, any dipshit can open it because they’re “the current resident”. While the envelope makes you feel special by receiving this gaudy-ass piece of mail, it undermines itself by also stating that “if you’re not this person, no big deal, you can open it too!” Imagine if a bill said that. Billy Johnson owes $230 to ComEd for electricity, but if you’re the current resident you can pay it too, if you want…”

The ad goes even further down the “what the fuck” path by including a car key. I guess this is to symbolize that you can win a car if you’re really lucky! There’s a fucking scratch-off area like a lottery ticket and a symbol to match. And if it matches you might win the Grand Prize!!!!!!!! Holy fuck, I (or the current resident…) am lucky! I can win the Grand Prize™!

Now you know what’s going to happen even before I scratch it. Of course I’m going to “win” the Grand Prize™ because why wouldn’t I? I scratch it and HOLY SHIT, I won!

HOLY SHIT I WON

Now I don’t know what the Grand Prize™ really is because I know it’s just a ploy to get your ass to the car lot to buy something. I imagine the “prize” is something like $1,000 off a new car or something trivial like that. Something that sounds good on the surface but still nets the car dealership a bunch of new sales to gullible idiots who think they’re special while still taking out an unnecessary car loan.

And I guess that’s why this Sucks: ads like these are just so obvious it’s pathetic. But like I said in my post on pre-screened credit offers, even if they are pathetically obvious they must work otherwise people wouldn’t mail them out. Even if them being so obvious is stupid, the fact that people are actually that gullible to believe that they (or the current resident!) won the Grand Prize™ is even stupider. I almost think that ads like these are meant to capitalize on old people being gullible and even if the fine print does give all of the details, you know the damn thing is misleading. Every level of ads like these are upsetting: how obvious they are, how people are gullible and fall for these tactics, and how companies actually make money off these unsubtle pieces of shit.

It’s like those TV commercials with the really small print that lays out all of the legal details but don’t show them long enough for anyone to actually read them.

But after taking the pictures and writing this quick little post I did what I was going to do originally. I walked over to the trash and tossed the thing in where it belongs. But don’t be like me, please recycle if that is offered in your area. Or, better yet, use up a stamp and mail the shit right back to them. Which I wish I would’ve done earlier…

Giving Up Sucks: Blogging

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First off let me say that I really don’t like blogging about blogging. It seems like a really cheap and easy way to get people to read your stuff, because obviously people who blog are interested in blogging so would like to read a blog about blogs. Yeah. And I also don’t like writing about “success” or “being successful” because I’m not successful so why should I be spouting shit about success when I know nothing about it? It’s like listening to financial advice from a poor person or dieting tips from someone who’s obese or anorexic. But here we are anyways. I guess what I’m trying to say is that on the path to success (which I think I’m on I guess) there’s about a million difficulties you run into and if that’s causing me so much frustration and anguish I might as well write about them. Other people are probably dealing with some of the same struggles and feelings. This is called Everything Sucks and being successful is probably the hardest thing ever, so it fits I suppose.

This post is about a blog and failure and how I suppose it’s nice to quit sometimes. This obviously don’t feel good which is why it Sucks. I started a blog in February that was about electric cars. I had purchased one about a year ago and since there are tons of misconceptions about the things I thought blogging would be a great way to enlighten the masses about how great they are. I really like my electric car because of a ton of reasons and I wanted to get that information out into the world.

I was enthusiastic about the blog; it had focus, a narrow topic, and seemingly tons of things to write about. I’ve said before Everything Sucks is a mess because it has no real “tight theme” which apparently blogs are supposed to have so I felt excited about finally have a good blog idea. You read articles about how to really blog and they usually suggested those few things. I set to work on it immediately. I made a post every two days, made sure the design looked acceptable, and even made a Facebook page for the blog. Hell, I even advertised for the blog! It took about a week for the page to have over 100 “likes” and I felt good. Things were moving along nicely.

And then I didn’t write as much for it. It wasn’t for lack of motivation either; I just couldn’t think about topics to write about. When it came down to it an electric car is nearly the same as a gas car and there’s only so much writing you can do about how efficient and cheap they are to operate. One of my premises — namely the one about having a ton to write about — was wrong apparently. There wasn’t much to write about.

You end up with two choices. You can either give up, accept failure, and move on or keep trying to make progress. It’s a choice we all make in regards to nearly anything: a difficult job, relationships, careers, and goals. This choice is made more difficult by the often-heard adage about success: it’s all due to persistence. The people who are successful don’t give up at the first sign of difficulty and if you give it you feel like shit. You’re a failure. You’re [insert goal here] is an automatic failure if you stop working on it.

What did I do? I gave up on it. Do I feel like shit? Sort of, just because it was wasted time. But strangely I don’t feel too bad about it. Even though we’re conditioned to feel like failures sometimes it’s best to realize when you don’t have a way forward and try something else. You can keep banging your head into a wall trying to make progress but sometimes that wall isn’t going to give and you need to move on. Accepting this is probably the hardest part.

I think of what Hunter S. Thompson said in a letter to his friend asking for advice:

“We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.”

He gives the perspective of a child who wants to be a firefighter when he grows up. Everyone wants to be something cool like that, either a firefighter or a veterinarian or an astronaut. None of us actually become these things but we don’t feel like we failed out dreams because we eventually outgrow them, or rather see the goals from a different angle, as Thompson puts it. It’s this ever-changing growth in ourselves and our ever-changing perspective on life that forces us to also make ever-changing choices regarding our goals and dreams. It’s simply not set in stone: you have to constantly figure out what it is you need to do.

I guess it’s with that perspective that I gave up on my blog. I had a good run for a few months and for once I hit it hard with tons of motivation and little procrastination: two of my biggest flaws. Eventually I found that there wasn’t much to write about and that maybe my idea wasn’t that good. I felt terrible about this at first because I had wasted so much time on the blog and I obviously felt like a failure for “giving up” but fact is fact. With my ever-changing perspective on the state and future of the blog I was able to realize that my time would be better spent elsewhere. I still learned a bunch of lessons and those won’t disappear either. So don’t feel like you’re a failure because you had to give something up. Obviously try to make progress because persistence does seem to be key, but realize when something has run its course and don’t be afraid to move on to new adventures (like trying to sell goddamn t-shirts)!

Zelda Intros Suck: Twilight Princess

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(As you can see, I nearly gave up on the header image. I couldn’t be bothered to play the game again to get a decent picture so I screenshotted some dudes YouTube video of the intro cutscene. I couldn’t be bothered to properly caption it so I tossed up some Comic Sans because why the fuck not? I just didn’t care.)

In my last post I shit all over the The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword because it had an insufferable introduction filled with dialogue-tutorials and it was frustrating having to “play” for over an hour just to get to play the game. Even after the intro I was constantly interrupted by ~~whatever~~ my sword and couldn’t enjoy the game at all. I also hinted that The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was just as bad, if not worse, although I didn’t elaborate on it because that would’ve turned into a very long post. So here it is! Why Twilight Princess — at least the introduction — is fucking awful.

I’ll recap the introduction the best I can because it’s been awhile since I played the game. This is probably good because you can see how nothing coherent happened, at least when you try to recall it. It goes something like this: There was something about kids and a sword and a slingshot and a shield and somewhere along that mess you turn into a fucking dog with some wierd whateverthefuck Midna following you around. You fish and get some random lantern from a stoner and can buy oil from a parrot. You can use grass to call hawks to get mice or something. Twilight descends, monsters appear, and three or four kids get kidnapped. And then they make you herd goats. Twice. Eventually, after an hour and a half I made it to the first fucking dungeon after saving some kids and finding some glow-ball thingys. After an hour and a half. I legit timed myself too. The beginning was just a mess. I had no idea what was going on.

The game catches its stride after that (be wolf, find glowy things, be human, beat dungeon) but holy fuck they could probably design a game intro better than that. I understand the idea of plot and world building and tutorials at the beginning but Twilight Princess beat it all into the ground with about 20 random things tossed at you in an hour. It’s a fucking mess and in that first hour you’re seriously wondering what the fuck, if anything, is actually going on. I think I’ve started Twilight Princess like 3 or 4 times and only finished it once. The beginning is that fucking bad. I thought Dark Souls was hard to get into…

I guess I have this idea of “the Great Zelda Game” in my head. The last game I played was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and while I shit upon it a little bit for the Master Sword “quest” it’s an amazingly wonderful and beautiful game. Nostalgia goggles aside it’ll probably be one of my favorite Zelda games ever. At the very least its intro blows Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword out of the water because of one primary reason: there isn’t an intro. Whereas those two beat you over the head for over an hour with tutorials, cutscenes, and random shit like fishing, Breath of the Wild says “Hey, grab that tablet over there. Have some clothes. Here’s how you climb a cliff. See ya!” And you get to play the game right away. The one dude that can give you some idea of plot or purpose doesn’t say a whole lot and you can just ignore him if you want. The game doesn’t force you into the plot at all, and when it does you’re about an hour or so into the game and can deal with a short cutscene or two. Breath of the Wild succeeds because it tosses you into the game and the world without any explanation. It’s a big and mysterious world because the game didn’t explain a damn thing to you and you’re left to explore and discover things on your own just as intended.

What about Ocarina of Time, the definitive “Great Zelda Game”? The Great ~~Dickhead~~ Deku Tree needs to see you. ~~Dildo~~ Mido won’t let you pass until you have a sword and a shield. You find those in about 5 or ten minutes and BAM you’re in the first fucking dungeon after the Great Dickhead Tree explains a few things to you. You get to play the game right away.

What about Wind Waker? You overslept and need to go to Granny’s house because it’s your birthday. Something happens with your sister and you save her and BAM! You’re on an adventure with some pirates and you get to play the game right away. Sure the game doesn’t really pick up steam until you get your ass off Windfall Island but at least you feel like you’re progressing the game. Wind Waker has its flaws but they sure don’t occur in the first fucking hour of the game.

Well…yeah…

And don’t even get me started on Majora’s Mask! You’re walking in the woods about a minute into the game and BAM! Some dickhead steals your horse and makes your day very shitty by trying to end the world. Within a minute or two of starting you’re playing the goddamned game.

Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword beat you endlessly over the head with total bullshit before you even get to play the game. It’s frustrating especially as a person replaying the games because I have fond memories of them as great games. But I’d like to play the game and not watch an hour of cutscenes, random tutorials, and pointless plot elements at the start of the game. This is probably made worse because the last game I played in the Zelda series was Breath of the Wild, a masterpiece of minimalistic design that didn’t beat you over the head with anything (other than Koroks). Even compared to older Zelda games the introductions of these two are bloated and do nothing to let you have fun playing the games. While they’re great games at their cores, you need to actually get to the gameplay to find the greatness! I loved the games and will probably power through to get to the actual game, but fuck, those intros almost broke my fucking spirit and will to play. They fucking Suck.

Zelda Intros Suck: Skyward Sword

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My three year old daughter is on a Mario kick. I recently beat Super Mario Odyssey and she was there to witness the final battle and ending cutscene (which was marvelous). Her being a little gamer it’s no surprise that she’s fucking nuts about Princess Peach now. That’s all she talks about: “Dada I wanna save the Peach! I wanna save the Princess Peach!” Okay. So I thought it might be fun to hook up the Nintendo Wii so she can save “The Peach” in Super Mario Galaxy. After all it has motion controls and that will be fun and easy for a kid, right?

This isn’t about Mario though. What happened was I hooked up the Wii, she played a bit, and then wanted me to play. My game in Mario Galaxy was so far along that I didn’t feel like dicking around with the upper level stars that I had left. Coming back to games after awhile is hard because you’re not used to the difficulty curve anymore. You lost all points in GIT and GUD. Anyways, I decided to hop over to Twilight Princess and tried playing that trainwreck of a game. I had an older file where I had just beaten the first dungeon (forest temple? The Great Dickhead Tree? Idk.) and was headed to Kakariko Village. I was teleported back to wherever to find some stupid-ass bridge and I had zero patience to play that game anymore. More on that in a future post. So I tried starting a new game in Skyward Sword.

Skyward Sword was a Zelda game I played quite some time ago while working both full time and part time jobs. Life was shitty then and I don’t recall the game. Like at all. Something about a bird and some clouds and a sword controlled by the Wiimote. I remember some of the game but it’s like a vague dream recalled hours after you wake up where you have a general idea of what happened but everything is really fuzzy. It would be nice to play again, and would be a change from that shitty Twilight Princess ordeal that I just wasn’t in the mood for.

So how did Skyward Sword go? It was awful. Apparently all the first hour of Skyward Sword is fucking cutscenes and dialogue that you cannot skip. You can’t even make the text appear quickly; it slowly types out letter after letter and there’s nothing you can do about it. Anyways, the game does this, I’m assuming, so you get involved in the plot which circles around Zelda and Links “friendship” and some fucker ~~Gaston~~ Groose who is jealous over the whole ordeal.

Like, whatever. You start the game and there are tutorials all over the place “disguised” as dialogue. You talk to some fucker and he makes you get a cat thing he lost. This is so you can be taught how to climb and move boxes. What a dickhead. After that you sit through about ten minutes of cutscene with you and Zelda talking and looking around at clouds. You find your flying ostrich bro is gone and discover ~~Gaston~~ Groose is behind it (SURPRISE!) and you have to find it. You need a sword and the game forces you through another tutorial by showing you how to get carpal tunnel syndrome from the Wiimote. Finally (rather eventually), you find the bird and the game gets underway. Except not really. Not yet. Fuck you Link: more dialogue for you to hear. You do a race, win the race, pass out, and Zelda is lost. Now is the time you get to save her! Her dad, the dude in charge of the entire village tells you to go find her, so you do. Or you try to. You walk outside your room, ready to finally start the goddamn game and some stupid-ass NPC stops you for more dialogue! He gives you a satchel he made and suggests you buy a shield. Fuck that guy, I didn’t buy a shield and took off for the world under the clouds immediately. Fuck the shield, I’ll play the entire game without one if I have to. I’ve played Bloodborne so I can fucking dodge the shitty Zelda enemies with no problem. When he stopped me and started talking I literally yelled at the TV “Can I play the fucking game yet?? Come the fuck on!”

This is the entire first hour of the game…

BUT BEFORE ALL OF THAT you have to get another sword and deal with even more dialogue. It’s such a goddamn pain. Even once you make it under the clouds there’s even more talking with some old lady and anything that is alive. I seriously played for an hour and a half without doing a damn thing.

Your sword also interrupts you every 2 minutes to say something stupid and obvious. “Do you know you don’t have a shield? That’s a bad idea. I highly suggest you acquire one before you proceed.” FUCK YOU I DON’T NEED A SHIELD FI THANKS THO. If you’re low on hearts she states the fact, rudely interrupting whatever world-saving quest you’re on. The beeping the game makes to signal you being low on health isn’t enough apparently and she has to point it out.

“…were you aware that I’m a massive pain in the ass?”

I mean it works okay the first time you play the game because it’s new and you don’t know what to expect, but fucking hell, it’s brutal sitting through a second time. Even as brutal as sitting through Skyward Sword’s introduction was there was one game that somehow topped that…

Remember Twilight Princess? And how I griped about it earlier? Yeah…That’ll be in another post in a few days because this one was surprisingly long for me to complain about a video game.

Easy Money or Easy Money?

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Everyone wants to earn money and everyone wants to do this in the laziest way possible. I think this is why multi-level marketing schemes like It-Works and whatever else have such success on gullible people. Those who don’t know any better are hypnotized by the possibility of making an easy thousand or even “millions” of dollars by selling some stupid-ass products that doesn’t work and by recruiting others “under them”. Anyone with some sense of logic will know that this just sounds too easy; money that sounds too good to be true probably is. But that’s the holy grail we’re all searching for: Easy Money. Whatever that means…

We think of the popular YouTubers, bloggers, and freelance writers that make a living by doing what amounts to (more or less) a hobby. I see parents playing with their kids on YouTube having millions of views and I think why can’t I do that? Why don’t I do that? Wouldn’t we all like to plop up a blog or a few YouTube videos and earn thousands by just having fun? Of course! You’d be stupid to not want to do this. This is the definition of easy money: getting paid to do something fun and that occurs on your own time. It’s getting paid to do a hobby.

Anyone who actually tried to be a writer, blogger, or a YouTube superstar knows where this is going already. This idea of “easy money” is a goddamn lie. Yes, if you “make it” by doing these, good job, you’re earning easy money but it came at a steep cost that people seem to forget about. What people tell you, and what people don’t seem to listen to, is that succeeding with those takes something called hard work. While you can earn easy money blogging or doing whatever, you need to invest hundreds if not thousands of hours “gitting gud” before you can earn anything. Yes the money is easy, but it’s only physically easy and not easy in any other form. It takes a ton of cost in terms of hours, effort, and persistence. When you look at it that way this easy money isn’t really easy.

If you’re writing or YouTubing you probably shouldn’t be expecting to get rich or earn money. Because then failure will be obvious as soon as you start because you’re not making anything. You’ll plop up a few videos, get zero views, and give up. Sometimes you even lose money by paying for equipment or website hosting fees or whatever. If you want to make easy money, there’s another idea of easy money but no one likes it, including me. It’s called “getting a job.”

I’m serious. If I wanted easy money that was guaranteed I could stroll on down to McDonald’s, show them my Associate Degree (they’re seriously useless otherwise), and I’d probably have a job within a week. I wouldn’t be making jack shit, but that 8 or 9 dollars per hour is guaranteed. If I work 20 hours I know for a fact I made 180 dollars and all I had to do was show up and do some fairly straightforward work. I don’t know how much easier you can make money. Like I said, it’s jack shit for money, but it’s easy to obtain money.

There’s always a fucking tradeoff though in case you haven’t realized it. At McDick’s you don’t earn shit, the work can be physically demanding, and you’re at the will of your employer but it’s a paycheck. We don’t like to view this as “easy money” because it doesn’t fit the mold from above which was working on your own time doing your own thing earning cash. But working shitty McDolan’s doesn’t have a huge upfront cost in effort. You trade off this “effort requirement” for instant (and paltry) money. It’s almost like a laziness or desperation tax. It comes down to what you want to do though. If you need money quickly, work a shitty job. If you don’t need money and want to put in the tons of effort for that “easy money” then get to work doing whatever it is you want to do.

There are many areas in between this “easy money” and “hard money” too. College sounds like a good idea until you realize it’s a combination of both of these extremes. You get to do a job you sort of like and make a ton of money but guess what? You still have a huge investment in the amount the schooling cost you. This is my point: everything has a tradeoff. Want to invest in stocks? That’s easy money. Except it’s not. It takes time, effort, and risk. Hell, you could even lose money which is a bad thing if your primary goal is to make money. Want to sell drugs? That’s cool, that’s easy money, but you shoulder a bunch of risk on yourself, possibly your family, and could end up in jail for a long time. You could also get murdered. Prostitution might be the easiest way to make money because it doesn’t cost anything to get started and you don’t have to “practice” at it, but — holy shit — there’s an expense called “personal degradation” that is rather costly. You also might get a disease. Most people don’t want to feel like shit by screwing random people for money even if it is “easy money”.

So there’s basically two types of easy money. The most popular idea of “easy money” is doing some cushy job like a hobby and being rich. At the very worst they can be total scams like It-Works and at the very best they takes years and tons of hours of practice, failure, and toil to actually get somewhere. If you can’t tough it out don’t even try it. Then there are “easy money” jobs like working some shit job and getting paid an hourly wage. Here you have to physically work and while the pay is a sure-thing you will probably hate your job and not be fulfilled in life. If you don’t want this easy money or that easy money there are millions of in-betweens that you can try that each have their own drawbacks. There is no easy money, there’s just different levels of bullshit you have to work through depending on your personal ability to weather pain and difficulty. Want debt? Go to college. Want to bust your ass for no return? Be a writer. Want to either be totally rich or totally poor? Trade stock options. Want to have instant money and hate life? Work fast food. Want to risk jail? Sell drugs. Want to sacrifice your personal dignity? Try prostitution. Easy money Sucks because there is no easy money. Everything has some downside and it’s up to you to find it and deal with it on your own terms.

Life Sucks (as a Video Game)

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The author Kurt Vonnegut touched upon the idea that everyone thinks they’re the protagonist of the world they’re in and everyone else are NPCs — the people that only exist to serve the protagonist. Check this out from his novel Breakfast of Champions:

I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

He then goes on to blame the current state of society on this flawed outlook promoted by stories, writers, and other artists. It’s a decent book, Check it Out!

I don’t think we all have that extremely dark view of society but I do think most of us view ourselves as “the primary hero” while other people are just sort of there. I also think the only people that really get outside of that worldview are probably Buddhist monks or something. This obviously becomes a problem because, well, we’re probably not the main character and are most likely random NPCs ourselves. By thinking you’re the hero and living a pretty average and mundane life you think you’re a total failure. You’re not saving the world so what are you even doing?

Video games are guilty of promoting this worldview and self-image in everyone the same as other forms of entertainment. In games you usually play as a hero and do some hero shit like saving the world or defeating some Evil Power™. This obviously isn’t realistic and considering that, what would a game be like that was as accurate to real life as possible? Many games have mechanics that simulate parts of real life (the Grand Theft Auto series comes to mind) but those occurs on a superficial level. Sure you can drive cars like in real life but the lack of consequences in GTA breaks any real comparison. The Sims do a good job too, especially with the game-breaking existential crisis that inevitably occurs after playing for too long. Real life also has much more due to chance while games put you in charge of nearly everything. So, what would that game look like?

To start, it’d be boring and no one would want to play it. The Life Game would consists of you doing some stupid and boring task for hours and hours while earning hardly any useful in-game cash. Everything you need to buy is also really expensive. Instead of buying the best car ever you can only afford a shitty, 15-year-old vehicle to get you to and from work just so you can continue to make shitty money. Food also takes up the rest of the cash you earn. It’d be hours upon hours of absolute nothingness to just buy food and other essential items.

As the game starts you could randomly die as well. This is mostly dependent upon where you’re born which is totally due to chance. You could spawn in a poor country and die in the first few minutes thanks to malnourishment or disease and there’s nothing you can do to change your fate. Once you start the game that’s what you are given. You could end up in a decent area where healthcare is abundant, but you could also, by chance, end up in a shithole and die within a short timespan.

You could be born into a family that has tons of money, but that would be really rare. Once again you don’t have any choice in all of that because it’s all random. Being rich would also take all the fun out of The Life Game because you can do whatever you want with little to no challenge. At least starting off poor gives you a challenge somewhat. If you’re not starting off in abject poverty that is.

Another fun aspect of The Life Game is that you could randomly die at anytime. You could be in the safest area possible but someone could randomly kill you with a bus or a gun or whatever. Sometimes even airplanes fall onto your house although that is reserved for only the most unluckiest people. The same is true for lightning. But the fact is that anyone could die at anytime with little to no warning. The Life Game doesn’t care about what quest your on or how important you are or how much cash you have and you’ll just randomly die.

The most interesting aspect of The Life Game would be the lack of a main quest. You’d think this might be fun because you can “make your own goals” but after a few hours the gameplay just lacks meaning. It’ll be like Minecraft or The Sims where you have a pretty decent time exploring and learning the game mechanics and creating useless bullshit, but then the lack of a main quest gets to you. Eventually in Minecraft or The Sims you look around the world and realize this is it. Then you quit playing because you’re bored and the game is meaningless. The same happens in Kerbal Space Program after you’ve explored the entire solar system. There simply isn’t anything left to do. The same would happen in The Life Game because there’s no reason or purpose for you to be there. There are side quests to accomplish but those are usually shitty by giving you little reward for completing them or by being too hard to actually accomplish in the first place. You could sell your furniture on Craigslist or get a PhD in astrodynamics for example. Or you could blog about how shitty The Life Game is. But you don’t have to because they’re side quests. There is no world to save, no overarching evil to destroy, and no princess to save. You could just do nothing. So what do you even do in this game?

And one last thing: The Life Game only lets you play once. Some people think that you might get to play multiple times but they don’t know that for sure. If you’re the unlucky soul that dies in the first five minutes of the game, well, too bad but that’s all you get! The ones who make it farther into the game should feel special for doing so well, but since the game is so shitty no one really feels good about it. Hell, some people even quit the game on purpose. That’s how terrible The Life Game is.

If life was a video game is would fucking Suck. There wouldn’t be a main quest and the difficulty curve would be ridiculous but in a really lame and cheap way. You’d just die randomly and without good cause. Sometimes you’d just die as soon as you started the game, once again without cause or reason. Some people spawn in ridiculously privileged ways and others are spawned in ridiculously unfair conditions. You dick around trying to keep yourself busy but since there isn’t a main quest nothing ever seems very pointful. The Life Game Sucks.

Snow in April…

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It was around 50 degrees here in Northern Illinois about a month ago. It was a sure sign that spring was upon us and I was even able to get out and enjoy a bike ride and a run or two. It was what my sickly, atrophied, SADdened, and vitamin-D deficient self needed: some nice weather where I could be outside enjoy life again. That apparently wasn’t to be because despite being about two weeks into official spring it’s still cold as fuck outside. It’s actually been cold as fuck ever since spring started! Making things even worse, we got snow today! It wasn’t the snow that flurries a bit and then instantly melts once it touches anything either. No, it was snow that actually sticks to the ground. We got a damn inch or so of the stuff. You know, the snow where you have to clean your car off, and where the roads need to be salted, and where people forgot to drive, and where all the flowers coming up in the yard are having a shitty time.

I’d also like to point out that it is April in case you weren’t aware. April 4th to be exact. As stated, the Earth’s northern hemisphere is now tilted back towards the sun and should be getting much more sunlight and heat than it was a few months ago when daylight was non-existent. I’m to the point where I almost forgot how far into the year it was; it gets cold in November and stays cold until it isn’t cold anymore. That’s when you think “Oh shit, it’s spring again!” Not this time. This year I’ve noticed the date on my phone — April 4th — as I looked up and seen that snow was coming down. Seriously? April fucking 4th. Indepence day is 3 months away and we’re getting snow? Come the fuck on.

At least the everyone’s having a shitty time…

But we’ve had snow in April before, I’m sure of that. I recall my grandmother saying that we can have snow as late as May, and while I don’t doubt that I’m sure it is a rare thing indeed. I wouldn’t be too upset by snow in May because it would probably be pretty warm beforehand. You know snow in May is sort of a joke that isn’t to be taken seriously because it’s May. Go ahead Old-Man Winter, have one more go at it. It’s May and in a few days it’ll be 60 so who gives a shit about your snow. Snow in April is just fucking stupid though. It’s not special enough to be amazed at but it’s special enough to be a rare pain in the ass. Snow in January is typical, snow in June would be unique and something to remember, while snow in April is a fucking piece of shit.

A few years ago I was running everyday. Even in the middle of winter I’d run at least a mile. At least a mile. Obviously once it was warmer I’d run farther. In 2015 I was doing 6-8 miles by April meaning it wasn’t cold and snowing, and in 2016 I was doing 6-9 miles by April which also meant it wasn’t fucking cold and snowing, and in 2017 I had quit running so whatever. My point here is that in the past three years I was out enjoying the beautiful springtime weather well before April 4th. Thanks 2018.

I can wait, sure, but since it’s been cold for so long it’s getting to where I need it to be nice outside so my mental health can improve. I don’t see how anyone lives further north than 30 or 35 degree latitude enjoyably because it seems so unnatural. Humans need to see the sun, be outdoors, and enjoy nature. Sitting inside for months upon months because you could get hypothermia and die outdoors is brutal and the longer it takes it to be nice outside the worse it is. Maybe it’s just me and others love the winter and the cold, but fuck, it sure isn’t me. I can’t wait to get outside and run, bike ride, or just be outside when it isn’t cold. Snow in April Sucks.