Monday 27 February 2012

And So It Really Begins

As is now pretty obvious I didn't end up doing any work on this blog whilst I was away at NF.

Instead I just spent a week playing board games, card games and video games. Mostly video games and mostly minecraft.

As mentioned in the previous post I logged all of my board/card gaming over on BoardGameGeek. I only played a dozen of those games over the 9 day period I took up probably twice that number of games. Still it was good to have the choice whilst up there. 

I particularly enjoyed the large games of Analyst that were played. There were two primary groups at NF that are only partially integrated, one consists of a group of my high school and uni friends that I see and speak to regularly, they are all part of the IRC channel on which I spent a lot of my time and I know them all very well. The other group is a group of friends I made at uni primarily through one of them who I will mostly end up referring to as Grublord. It is also a group that mostly formed in high school and has remained fairly closely knit. I do talk to them fairly often, but I do know them less well, and each group know the other but I am the primary point of intersection.

This is what made Analyst so interesting. In Analyst you have a randomly determined subject and a rotating position of Analyst. Every non-analyst knows who the subject is and the group as a whole is asked a question which each of them must answer regarding the subject.

Some paraphrased examples of questions are:
If the subject were a smell, describe what kind of smell they would be?
It is a year from now, the subject has just committed a murder, what would the crime scene look like?
What kind of places, other than the bedroom, would the subject most likely have sex?

These groups of friends interact occasionally during the year, generally by playing games together and heavily at NF. This means that some answers are relatively shallow and reference recent activities and very obvious aspects of someone's personality and other answers reference events from years ago and silly memes from high school. Both times we played the game we had a lot of fun and also got to learn a bit more about each subject.

That was NF however, to this point from finishing up at my job it has felt more like I have simply gone on planned leave. Even had I not quit I would have spent the past week up at a beach house playing games. The only real difference was the deliberate logging of all the board game and card gaming.

Today however, I got up at about 10am, had nothing that I absolutely had to do only what I decided to do. No time I needed to be at work by or anything.

Thus far I have completed a few of the early android tutorials, currently learning about and playing around with the basic layout functions, attended my first two karate classes (one after the other, earning me 880xp on fitocracy, woo!) and I have started on creating a fresh and accurate list of all of the computer and console games I have and intend to finish.

Pretty happy with my first normal day off the job =)

Friday 17 February 2012

What this blog is for


Hello there,

I am a 26 year old aussie gamer. I live in Sydney and today was my last day at the IT company where I have worked for the past 5 years. I quit in order to return to study full time. I am spending this year completing a Masters of IT at Sydney University in which I intend to major in both Project Management and Business Information Systems. The actual contact hours involved in this are surprisingly limited but the plan is to not procrastinate regarding the associated study and work. I do have plans for how I will spend the extra free time this year. This blog is intended to help track these plans especially the to log the time I have spent and my thoughts on the overall progress.

Broadly speaking this is going to be a mix of the kind of thing I have seen done by Timespike at http://clearingthebacklog.blogspot.com.au and tracking both time and progress regarding my personal projects for the year.

The plan is to keep up to date lists of my games and other media that I would like to finish. Things can be removed from the lists when I decide I am done with them, this ideally will be when I have finished playing, reading, watching or listening to them. This will not always be the case, if sufficient rage is induced or the media just bores me that also qualifies the item for list removal. I kind of hope that focusing on noting additions and removals I can make the latter surpass the former for a while. As you can see the current list of games is somewhat... large.

The masters is focusing on non-technical skills, but I would like to continue to work on my technical abilities. I have a few ideas for projects the first one involves android development.

I want to keep track of various aspects of my life and hopefully my self improvement, I will be keeping track of my exercise (via Fitocracy), my gaming via Raptr and Boardgame Geek and doing some manual work to keep track of my reading and cooking. I have some vague ideas at this point to then use this info for an XP system because such things appeal to me.

In any case, I am headed off on a short holiday which means that my gaming for the next week will be somewhat extreme... hopefully I can get some info updated and on the site during the week though.