Today is Applebee's Day

There is a tradition that I exercise from time to time. This is the so-called "Applebee's Day". This is a holiday that is so amazing that space and time itself tries to collude in order to prevent me from being able to experience the celebration of such a day. I speak of course of the trip to Pittsburg and subsequent feasting at my not-so-close "neighborhood" Applebee's.

It seems that any time such a trip is planned, something always comes up. Either someone gets sick, someone has no gas, a meteor has destroyed the Applebee's building, or something along those lines. If there's a way for the plans to get messed up, it happens.

On the off chance that such a trip does happen, I am excited beyond reason. I always seem to get the same thing, and it's delicious every time. The meal generally starts with an appetizer of hot chicken wingy things. These are quite good and not bad for you. They aren't breaded. I didn't even realize that until it was pointed out to me because the pieces look and taste breaded. Sure enough, an entire order of these things is like 500 Calories.

My main course is usually the Brewtus Steak Burger which I'm pretty sure is code for The Fat Man's Burger. It is a 10oz burger with chuck made from sirloin steak. While I'm sure the steaks that go into this burger aren't the best cuts in the world, it does tend to come out with a very nice flavor. Grilling preference for me is typically medium-well, and it still comes out juicy and loaded with savory goodness. They also include an order of "meh" fries that look like typical fast food fare, but they're good regardless.

The last time I managed to consume this meal, everything was uber-salted for some reason. It was the first "off" experience I've had with the Pittsburg Applebee's to date, so I hope this doesn't turn into a repeat. It was good anyway, but it could have been magical.

I guess we'll find out.  :)

Working 3D at Last

It looks like cosmic disarray can only keep a person down for so long.  After fighting with DirectX all weekend starting on Friday, I've finally got a working Direct3D engine with natural-looking, smooth terrain.  As you can see from the image below, there is no longer an issue with random triangle patterns and terraced terrain stepping.  It's just smooth, buttery goodness.  =)


I've also modified the engine to use pre-processed meshes in a custom format.  This allows us to directly load in the verticies and indicies without any real processing on the part of the client.  This is good since there is about a 30-60 seconds pause due to terrain processing on my 3GHz Phenom II to get a nice, natural mesh from a simple heightmap.  Now that we're in pre-processing land, it only takes a couple of seconds to load up the terrain.

More on this in the future, providing it retains my interest now that I've solved the main technical challenge.

Fishy Terrain

Not all is well in 3D land.  I've been trying to get into DirectX programming for a few days now.  More accurately, I've been meaning to get into it for ages but until a few days ago I never put in any serious effort.  With XNA & Game Studio 3.0 (which is really a misnomer since there's not really anything particularly gamey or studioy about it), things are a lot more organized than they used to be.  Five years ago my only real choice was to use C++ and access DirectX directly.  Boring.  I hate C++ because it over-complicates even the simplest of tasks.  It's also not appreciably faster for most tasks than the generic .NET framework is these days.

Enter my recent progress.  I started by ripping the art assets from a Microsoft terrain tutorial and re-wrote the game engine in my preferred language:  VB.NET (3.5 pref, but anything 2.0 or newer is fine).  It ran great and I was excited to expand.  Unfortunately, everyone is eager to give away art but not explain how it can be produced, so I had to quickly abandon the thought of creating a bigger terrain mesh, etc.  Instead I've had to rely on generating terrain meshes based on programmatic means.  Today marks my first successful result:  Using a PNG as a heightmap, I've created an engine that will generate a grid and apply the height information from the image.

As you can see, something is awry.  Theoretically, this is what should be happening:
- Grid of points on the X and Y axises with Z info from bitmap
- Two indexed triangles created from each point (excluding the last row and column of points)

While I'm certainly getting terrain, it's haphazard.  Instead of smooth hills I get something like SimCity 2000 where everything looks like it is terraced.  Very fishy...hopefully I get this ironed out soon.

Racist Cartoon?

For any of you who haven't observed the controversy yet: 
New York Post Political Cartoon

Apparently, Al Sharpton and the rest of the attention seeking Racism Alert crew are all getting worked up about a cartoon depicting two police officers having shot a monkey with a caption lampooning the stimulus package.  For those of you who aren't familiar, a few days back a woman was mauled by a chimpanzee that went berserk.  When it tore the door off of a responding officer's cruiser, he shot the chimp multiple times with his 9mm service pistol and it ran away, dying shortly after of its wounds.

For those of you not familiar with the linguistic custom of mindlessness to be equated to monkeys, I'd like to remind you of that part of our heritage.  If you put a monkeys in a room with a typewriter blah blah you'll get Shakespeare.  Is that saying about black people?  No.  It's about monkeys randomly banging on a typewriter producing Shakespeare, eventually.  Mindlessness.  Code monkey--slang for the job of low-level programmers' jobs writing boring, tedious code.  Is it slang for black programmers?  No.  It's slang for the mindlessness of the position.  What does it mean when you are monkeying around?  Does it mean you are pretending to be black?  Hell no.  It means you're not being productive, you're just mindlessly doing whatever.

So now that you're familiar with these non-racist concepts, it should be fairly obvious that the cartoon (which you can see at the link provided at the start of this entry) is meant to combine the two current events together:
- Lady mauled by chimp being shot
- Stimulus package that conservatives consider...you guessed it...misguided and mindless

The cartoon is only racist if you are looking for it to be.  Every time anything can be twisted or seen in a racist light, in come the Anti-Racism Brigade being as loud as possible.  Guys, chill.  Your cause prevailed like 35 years ago.  I'm 22 years old and I cannot remember a world where race was a big deal unless old people were actively making it one.  Just because you folks are living in the past doesn't mean that you share the same relevance in the present.  Are these jokers just addicted to the lime light or something?  Have they been crusading for so long that they're just blind to realizing the world they wanted is the world we're largely in?

If they're going to continue to make a big deal out of everything, we'll never be able to completely move on.  Seriously guys, there's no big deal with this article.  Why make a soap opera out of it?

Friends Are Important

If there is one thing that this most recent episode of social drama has pointed out to me, it is that friends are important.  That's the general realization.  There is also one thing that this situation highlighted specific to me, and that is that my friends are a rare resource.  I simply don't have many of them.

This is a radical departure from how I existed all throughout the public school years.  It simply wasn't possible for anyone to go through grade school and high school without making friends...lots of them.  Even if I didn't talk to everyone on a regular basis, it was clear that I knew everyone and that they were only an arm's reach away should inspiration for conversation be encountered.  I like how this felt, but I didn't realize it until post-high school.  During school, I always imagined how nice life would be if I could somehow move to a deserted tropical island.  The point of this was that I would be away from people entirely and would be free to relax and do whatever I wished unencumbered by the impedance of social contact.

Today is of course a different matter entirely.  Once I began my college career at Kansas State University, my contacts were much more limited.  Only a few people I had known my entire life at school were present, and I struggled to maintain an adequate level of social contact.  Suddenly I had my island and instead of being a tropical paradise, it was a tropical prison.  I imagine that this is why I've become less introverted and less anti-social in recent years.  In order to maintain that same level of contact, I had to open up and try harder.  It wasn't an issue of avoidance to maintain the proper level anymore.  It was an issue of actively seeking out enough contact due to scarcity.

It's harder to make friends these days.  I think this is primarily due to my location and not my age group.  My old friends are still young enough to be largely unmarried.  Marriage, of course, being the point when old friends completely quit hanging out with their other friends.  Location-wise, I work where I have no age-based peers other than the chemical department, and I'm still anti-social enough to have problems even talking to women I'm not seeking a relationship with.  I don't even know why that is considering the origins of that problem were with the initiation of puberty.  I've established who I am and I exercise control over that aspect of my life since I'm 22 now, but that legacy of social problems remains.  heh  It is kind of funny really.

Back to the incident from the weekend though:  These things have made me realize just how valuable friendships are.  I need a minimal level of contact to remain in a non-depressed state, I think, and I'm barely running on fumes as it is.

Maybe things will shape up once my friends complete college and move back to town for a while.  I don't know how many will end up staying, but there will surely be a few that don't go to random, far-away locations.

I could only be so lucky.

There is Always an Option C

Curve ball.  It looks as if real life is not as exciting as movies are after all.  Larry messaged me last night inquiring what my Facebook status meant.  I had set it to "Particle is pretty sure he's been played and should probably seek new friends," earlier that day.  I explained to him how I thought I had been played and was upset about it, and he told me that there had been a grand misunderstanding.  Yesterday I talked about how I could wrap this whole thing up, but it looks like I was hit by Option C instead.

Of course, I was suspicious about this since he'd been ignoring me for two days already and had gotten so mad at me for nothing.  He told me that he and his girlfriend were pseudo-wrestling and things got out of control a little bit when Kate had fallen off of her chair.  He'd pushed too hard and knew that so he apologized and everything, but she got upset and left.

The story seems simple enough, but it is at this point that one always has to apply the test of logic and previous experience.  Here I will be going through the check list of my thoughts on the subject and why I currently believe him:

1)  It is simple.  In my experience, I've found that lies tend to be overly complicated compared to real life and they almost always have lots of small plot holes that make them not line up quite right.  It isn't always easy to prove it, but one often gets that feeling of "something isn't quite right about it."  That leads us to #2:

2)  It lines up perfectly.  It explains all the weird parts that existed already in the story delivered to me by Kate.  It explains why she didn't know if he was mad at her following this incident.  She had told me a story where if someone had done what she said, there would be no question of if the person was upset with her.  She also didn't have the expected reaction in that case of being mad at him.  She was just concerned if he was mad at her.  She also continued to stay at his house following the event instead of trying to leave.  This all fits with a recreational activity gone wrong.

3)  Apology.  Kate has since apologized to me for having told people the story she told.  She didn't admit lying, but that's not what really happened.  She had delivered the story without any context.  In that case, it comes across as an assault and not what seems to have actually happened.  Oh, you were wrestling?  Yeah, that makes a pretty big difference for the story.  Larry had also apologized for blowing up at me.  He was just mad that she was telling people what she was telling.  I'd be upset too if people were telling others I'd assaulted someone if we were just playing Twister and I fell on them.

One and two really should be together for it to mean much, and they certainly are for this case.  Number three is just icing on the cake for the believability front.  So tentatively I believe that this was all a misunderstanding.  That's good for the meat of this story but what about the other peripheral information I covered?  I still need to find out what the deal is with:

- Pushing Dane's dad and slashing his car's tire.
- These prior assaults as they were told to me.
- The Applebee's incident.  That really seems messed up.
- The dodging me thing I can live with.  I don't subscribe to that practice, but lots of people operate that way.

The first two points came from Dane.  I'm great friends with the guy, but he understandably has a biased view against Larry here since his wife is dating him.  I don't know if perhaps these stories are without context, exaggerated, lies, or completely true.  I'll just have to try and find out.  In the mean time, I'm content to just know nobody is angry with me.

Life is not a soap opera, but some times it can get damn close.

Post-Chaos Resolution

An odd feeling overcame me today as I sat down at another computer I hadn't touched since Friday.  I saw that the person I had called a friend on Friday was still on my contact list.  At home I had removed him already since he had taken the liberty of removing me from his Steam Friends list and had been ignoring everything I'd said to him over MSN for days.  Every time I would open my contact list at home, I'd get excited to see a friend online which sucks since immediately after I always had that "oh wait" feeling of disappointment.  Even if I wanted to talk to him, it isn't like he'd reply.  So that's why his contact card ended up in the trash.  I can re-add him later if things change.

What is there for me to do in this first post-chaos day in Normal Time?  Let's go over what my fragments of consciousness have to say:

My internal optimist is inexperienced, and it shows because it wants me to somehow reconcile everything and get back to being a big happy group of friends.  Since my friend (which I will continue to call Larry) won't respond to me, this means I need to talk to the one I will continue to refer to as Kate.  This is not an easy accomplishment since calling or messaging Kate is likely to end up as a communication intercepted by Larry.  They have that kind of relationship to where they're both extremely distrustful of each other and read each other's emails, message histories, text messages, etc.  Larry even makes a habit of keeping Kate's phone for days on end and pretending to be her on MSN and email.  She is equally nosy but does not have the penchant for masquerading as the other person.  As you can tell, it will be difficult for me to get in contact with her even if I want to.  Should I be successful though, I'm not sure how she'll respond.  She has clearly played me out to do exactly what happened, but she has a vested interest in being mad at me for the same reason that she played me to begin with.  Chances of success:  35%

My internal pessimist is old and tired by this point in my life.  It complains about low wages and long hours, but that's just the kind of guy it is.  It wants me to cut these people off from my circle and throw away the key followed by a "good mad" that propositions a snarl from my face every time I so much as hear their names.  This is impractical and would be ultimately futile because this is not the kind of person I am.  No matter what a person does to me, I have a hard time staying angry at them.  I always just want to make up and go on because that internal optimist in me has such a loud mouth at times.  Chances of success:  15%

My internal realist likes to *surprise* be realistic and level-headed about things when possible.  It draws from both my internal optimist and pessimist and takes the middle ground.  This isn't always a good strategy, but some times it is still the best one.  What it wants to do with this case is uncertain.  It has two distinct ideas:

1)  Forget about the people but without the angry connotation.  Just move on and look for new ways to exercise the social tendencies like watching movies and playing games.  It remembers that it wasn't me who did anything wrong to begin with and that the only people who are sore here are the drama movie team.  Chances of success:  85%

2)  Try to make up as well as is possible but then write them out of future interaction.  It realizes that these aren't the kinds of people that I should be around in the first place since they obviously don't respect me.  This would provide some closure and still accomplish the same end result of disassociation.  Chances of success:  45%

So those are my options as I see them.  Current predictions lead me to believe my inner realist is going to try its #2 idea first at this point.  If that doesn't pan out, it'll probably be down to its #1.

The spot light has kicked on and I'm standing here holding the bag.  At least I learned something about who I was hanging out with.

My Friends Love Drama

It isn't always easy to talk about one's friends with complete objectivity.  Everyone has their own character flaws, so it always ends up making whoever is to be discussed sound worse in description than they seem in day to day life.  Some times there are exceptions to this.  Today's topic, for instance, discusses a few of my friends.  In this rare exception, the description does their respective characters justice.  I'll try to be as straight as I can about it all, but it may be difficult considering that this is a story about how I've come to realize that my social-stuff-like-food friend apparently isn't the person I thought he was and how his girlfriend appears to have played me out.

For this to make sense to any of you, you must understand a few pieces of background information.  I will be using name and location substitutions to protect the players from any relationship with this account of what happened (to prevent harassment by potential readers, reputation damage, etc).  Anyway, the story starts last year:

My friends Dane and Kate got married after years of courtship.  They had a child and moved to Detroit shortly afterward since they both liked it much better there than here.  Kate decided she was no longer happy with Dane since he didn't "appreciate" her enough and moved back to her parents' house with their child.  Within a week or two of being back another friend of mine, Larry, decided to make his move on her.  Within no time, they began dating...secretly at first but later openly.  Kate is still married to Dane and all this time has refused any kind of troubleshooting procedures as well as divorce (sorry, I'm an engineer).  She also believes she should have full custody of their child despite not being able to (or even trying to) hold a job, but alas that is all another story.

So fast forward to today.  Larry and Kate's relationship has been one of those where they break up faster than anyone can keep track of it, probably literally averaging about once every week or two.  A few days ago, Kate messaged me on MSN and asked me if I had talked to Larry.  I told her no and asked why.  She told me a story about how they had got into a fight and he had physically assaulted her.  She then tacked on a request for me not to tell Dane about it.  I told her that I'd have to think about if I would be morally justified to withhold that information from him since it's kind of a big deal.  It's not like she had told me the guy had eaten her sandwich out of the fridge without asking or something.  She then told me she understood and rapidly changed the subject.

Now, I didn't think much on this.  The next day Dane messaged me that Kate had told him to ask me about the situation.  This made my moral decision much easier since I knew it was the right thing to do to tell him and she must have really accepted that I would have to tell him since she herself had told Dane to ask me about it.  He wouldn't have known to bring it up unless she had mentioned it after all.  Because of all of this, I didn't think twice about sharing the story Kate had told me with Dane.  I didn't exaggerate or stretch the story to make it juicier gossip or anything.  I just told him the story as she had told it to me.  Dane then filled me in on some history that I hadn't yet known:  Apparently Larry has made a habit of anger management issues.  This is supposedly the third girlfriend he has assaulted in some fashion, and even the same day as the Kate incident he had shoved Dane's father and slashed his car's tire.  This is where I begin to realize that Larry is not the person I had thought I had known.

Later that day, Larry got on MSN and started harassing me about having told Dane the story Kate had shared with me.  He insisted that she had told me not to tell anyone and that I must not value that.  He also claimed that what I had told Dane was inaccurate.  He then proceeded to harass me some more about how bad of a "friend" I must be and that what I had done was really wrong and it makes me a bad person.  Yadda yadda.  I tried to reply (he'd messaged me while I was watching Rambo with my father), but he has ignored me for nearly a day now.

Reflecting on what must have transpired, I realized that one of two things had happened:
1)  Larry became really angry and what he messaged to me was inaccurate due to his emotional state.
2)  Kate had played me.  She understood that I would need to tell Dane and even told him to ask me about it but had told Larry otherwise (that she had demanded I never speak of it).

The first one seems unlikely.  The second one makes sense considering the type of person she is.  She must have set me up...she wanted Dane to know about it but didn't want to tell him herself so as to spare herself from Larry's inevitable angry response.  She then used me as a way to tell him about it and is lying in order to spare herself from any kind of angry response.  Instead, he is now pissed off at me.

Some "friends" I have.  The first one may very well have a chronic problem with anger management leading to assault among other things.  The second played me in order to spare herself from her boyfriend getting angry.  If that is the extent to which she respects me, I want nothing more to do with her.  Larry, while having been my socializing friend for the better part of a year now, is also not the person I thought I knew.  I don't see myself wanting to do much hanging out with him anymore after all of this.  Mentally, I need some closure though.  I need him to not be mad at me for having done not a damn thing wrong.  He doesn't see it that way.  The way I see it is perhaps he shouldn't have assaulted her to begin with if he's going to be upset that her husband finds out about it.  Of course, I can't hardly expect that to make sense to either of them.  They're having a relationship when she is married to another man to begin with.

That reminds me of another fun fragment about Larry from long ago (it's all starting to come together to paint a picture of what he truly is):  Once when the three of us were out at a restaurant eating, Kate went to the bathroom.  Her child (that she'd had with Dane) was there and began to cry.  I didn't know what to do about it, so I asked Larry.  Larry had had a child of his own for over a year, but instead of doing something he just ignored the child.  He shrugged and said "not my kid".  While at the time it disturbed me, I didn't really see it for what it was--a glimpse of his true character.  It also makes sense (here's another fragment) considering that I've known for a long time that he lies to me any time it is convenient.  If he doesn't want to fulfill a commitment he's made for a meal or such, he makes something up about why he can't go.  I've many times caught him in his lie by being able to disprove his story, but I never confronted him about it.  I had just accepted that he was going to be a little shitty to me from time to time.  I needed him for social interactions like meals and movies since my friends these days are sparse (everyone is away at college and new jobs and what not).

I think I'd have been better off just ditching the pair of them and looking for new friends a long time ago.  Now if only that were easy.

Purpose is the Spice of Life (Also)

Yesterday, I mentioned the idea that experience is the spice of life.  I was originally going to title that entry "Experience is a Spice of Life" but that came out sounding much weaker than using "the" instead.  The truth of the matter is that there is no single ingredient that will make life interesting or not.  Just like any real recipe, there are multiple factors at play.  Today I will mention the second major one that I keep coming back to:  Purpose.

Finding purpose in one's life and activities is not a given in adulthood.  This is unfortunate for people around my age (early 20s) because up until this point everything was given explicit purpose by external factors.  Life had purpose in school because of the superior authorities present in that environment.  The teacher assigns homework and the student either does or does not do it.  Either way there is a reaction.  If the student did the work their performance would be rated in the form of a grade, and this feedback would be largely responsible for the student's sense of performance and purpose.  If the student did not do the work, he/she would be punished for not fulfilling the obligation.  This also establishes a feeling of purpose and direction.

In a post-school environment, there is no external entity instilling a sense of direction or purpose in life.  There is no teacher telling you what it is you should be doing, and there is no gradebook anymore.  One is left to find their own motivation and this often is completely dependent upon a feeling of purpose once again.  Self-motivation can be difficult for people around my age, once again, because up until this point motivation was given to us.

So what hope is there for those of us in this situation?  Unfortunately, the answer appears to be years of struggling to adapt to the newfound vacuum of superior authority in adulthood.  Every person is likely to find his or her own way to cope with this fact.  There are no absolutes.  For me, it has meant depression.  I didn't even realize what was really missing until just recently, and the truly sad part about this is that until the problem is realized there can be no hope of resolution.  I've found that my job helps take over the role my school used to.  I'm still left to self-motivate for the most part, but it helps to have at least some kind of structure even if it is minimal.  My work helps to give my life purpose, but I still lack direction.

Purpose and experience are not the only spices of life, but they are two of the biggest.

Experience is the Spice of Life

It may not be the only "Spice of Life", but I certainly believe that experience is one of the most important.  As I continue to try and define my post-childhood life, one of the things I keep coming back to is the realization that life genuinely feels less exciting than it did as a child.  When I try to explain to myself why that is, I always find myself resting on one major reason:

Experience, specifically new experience, is what keeps things interesting.

That's a major problem for us as individuals since our culture is geared toward codifying everything and "settling down" into a routine.  Think about that last sentence.  It is a simple way to describe how we live and it isn't possible to go five words without tripping over a description of anti-exploration.  That's a real obstacle for someone who wants to continue that feeling experienced in childhood of continual discovery.

Life as usual (man, don't we have enough expressions to describe sameness already?) for most of us consists of:
- Wake up
- Get ready for work
- Go to work
- Have lunch
- Go back to work
- Go home around 5:00
- Do whatever it is we routinely do
- Sleep

Realizing this, I began to contrast the above routine with what a childhood routine is like.  Children go to school, after all, and the only real difference in schedule is that children go home at 3:00.  So if it isn't a difference in schedule that makes life more or less boring, what is it?  I think it is the state of being ignorant.  I don't mean that in a degrading way at all.  I just mean that children haven't yet experienced or experienced as many times the things that we as adults have.  Somewhere around that 3000th game or so, somehow first person shooters seem less exhilarating than they did at first.  Endless variations exist on the central FPS theme but the familiarity with that type of activity dampens the excitement even for FPS games not already played.  This same principle of familiarity applies to things other than games as well.  You could apply it to meals, shopping, television, and even sex.

Repetition is a major component of that which kills what makes things and experiences special.  Just think about your favorite music.  Somewhere around the 250th time you've played a track that really felt special to begin with, it somehow seems less exciting, doesn't it?  That's just another example.

Knowing this, it's really too bad that our society's culture depends on repetition and burnout for normality.  Granted, there are only so many things that one can actually do in life, but it might just make things more interesting to be as diverse as possible instead of purposely living in a rut.  Now if only that were easier.  When we were children this took no effort as we were blank slates.  Everything was new and exciting regardless of what it was.  Now as adults it takes an active effort.  That's why I think that experience is the spice of life.  Now if only it came in plastic shakers instead of being so difficult to maintain.

The Slorge Mystery is Over

In retrospect, I think I may have actually enjoyed the mysterious ride on this one.  It all started about a year ago when Slorge stopped posting videos as often.  He had been doing a sort of video blog for over a year by that point and had done so with reasonable frequency.  I always enjoyed watching his videos, and it was that process that allowed me to get to know him on a personal level.  He was just another person I knew by that time, just like if he'd been a friend who lives here locally.  Anyway, his infrequent posting eventually became no posting at all by about 9-10 months ago.  This by itself wouldn't be so strange as I imagine anyone would eventually reach a point where they feel burnt out.  It was when his Youtube account completely closed that I began getting worried.  His Flickr account also closed.  This was a man who had been well connected on the Net for years, and I found it strange that he would totally disappear like this.  I feared that something bad may have happened.

It was with this motivation that I began to search in earnest for what had happened.  I emailed Slorge through an address that I found on an old email from him, I searched around, and I found pretty much nothing.  He never replied to the email and all activity from him everywhere seemed to stop altogether at the same point ~10 months ago.  I began to contact other people that had known him and didn't receive any replies from them either.  Looking around for context clues, I started a thread on the PCRPG forums about it.  I eventually (along with another member) found this bit on his old band's Youtube profile:

"UPDATE................We are getting back together ......It looks like it will be all of us except Scott Goodhart.....I will miss that voice and bass."

This bit didn't really answer any questions--it just made things more mysterious.  Had Slorge (Scott) declined to rejoin or had something happened that would prevent him from even being able?  The bit was worded in such a way that made things more interesting but less certain.

Josh (a PCRPG member) then heard back from someone he had messaged:

"I haven't heard anything from Slorge for months, myself. I was curious as to why he closed his account, as well."

This reinforced the firm position of "nobody seems to know anything" which is a little worrying in itself.  Why hadn't anyone heard about this?  Had anyone but us noticed?  I started to look at videos from others who were in the Slorge circle for clues.  I quickly discovered two things:  First of all that Slorge had effected more people than I ever knew and secondly that others had noticed too.  Brick72 had posted this three months ago:

"where is slorge gone?
I NEED SLORGE!

Is he on other sites?
His Account is deleted.
I NEED SLORGE"

A month later, whuffie posted this in the same video's comments:

"I see slorge is missing, too. Account closed?! ACK!"

Considering that these people's comments had gone apparently unnoticed for months, I didn't figure there was any point to posting, but I did anyway just so anyone in the future would have that much more to go on.  Unexpectedly, I received a reply from egglooke to my comment just a couple days later:

"Well, i know him personally.
he lives around the corner
his account got banned when someone posted a responce to a contest video.
but before he could deleted youtube kiked him off!"

This was a promising development.  It seemed that Slorge is alright but had probably just decided to heck with it all.  Questions remained though since this didn't explain why his Flickr account had closed simultaneously.  Not more than a couple days later Josh and myself received replies from Slorge's wife that confirmed all was well.  Her reply to me was as follows:

"Hi Geoff,

Yes, Scott is fine. He decided to go off-line and, basically, quit all of it in one day. I don't know about emailing him. He still has his account, but I don't know if he checks it regular.

He's changed jobs, spending more time with the family, and has become more involved at church - so, he's still in the limelight. It's just a different kind.

Scott is terrific and it's nice to know that other people appreciate him too! I will let him know that you are trying to reach him, as well as, others. If you don't hear back from him, please feel to write at this address again.

Sincerely,
K. Goodhart"

So that's the end of the mystery.  It seems that when his account got banned for whatever BS reason Youtube came up with, he must have decided he was done with the whole online thing.  It really sucks for us because he always had such interesting content to post.  After over a year of it, I really felt like I had come to know the man and I regarded him as a close friend.  If going offline makes him happy though, more power to him.  I'm completely satisfied just to know that he's alright.

Some times stories do have happy endings.  I'm going to try to remember that.

Depression is a Funny Thing

It's true.  Depression is somewhat of a funny creature.  It's primarily fickle, but it can be humorous as well.  First of all, it's something that I imagine most people don't ever tell anyone about.  Being depressed is like being crazy, and it isn't really that much of a stretch considering that it is in fact a mental unbalance.  So, instead of cluing anyone into the fact that there is a problem, the depressed person just holds onto it.  Maybe they vent about it on a random blog online *looks around* after desperately wanting to tell someone...anyone about it for ages.

Well, here we are.  My last post was about getting over the depression by starting to forget about yearning for the past and instead looking forward.  It is true, too, that I've been successful in doing that to an extent.  The most important thing I've found is that childhood probably doesn't have as precise of an ending as I previously thought.  These days I find myself still watching Nickelodeon shows like Spongebob or iCarly and Jake & Josh.  The first one is fairly normal for people in their 20s I think, and I don't hesitate to mention that I watch it to people.  The second two are a bit tougher to admit, but I don't think it falls into the category of weird.  That's good considering that simply trading passive nostalgia (missing the past) for active nostalgia (being that sad guy in his 50s trying to re-live high school) is probably even less healthy.  I just find the shows enjoyable since they're just like every other sitcom--absurd plots that would never happen in real life and end up with funny rivalries.

Another part is that I'm actually beginning to feel again.  The warmer weather helps here, too.  It has become rather clear that in the years since 2005 I had developed a sort of callous that prevented me from really "feeling" much of anything at all.  There was a phrase that I liked to use from a song periodically to describe how I was feeling:  "I don't really feel anything, anyway"  It's interesting to go back to feeling things after not for so long.  I've began to feel that sense of anxiousness again, and that's a big part of how life always used to be.  The sort of anxiousness I'm referring to isn't so much a negative thing, it's just that feeling that there's something ahead of you at all times even when there isn't a particular plan of something you're waiting for.  It's that sense of future where you know there is something waiting for you even without any idea of what it is yet.  I'm happy to have reclaimed these things without having to resort to active nostalgia.  I wouldn't yet consider myself completely out of the woods, but all the time I can feel myself regaining what life must mean to most people.

It's a good feeling.