Graduation Rap

(Just imagine this with a beat-box in your head)

I just graduated from the UNC!

I have now conquered the university!

The world is now my oyster, now time to dine!
Because that college diploma I've earned is MINE!

It wasn't easy, that much I can say!

I wanted to quit almost every day!
I cried, I stressed, I complained to my mom!

Yet it was all worth it: graduating's da bomb!

Back when I was young, it was very rough startin'!

My parents thought I couldn't go to kindergarten!

High and middle school was never where I stayed,

I was homeschooled from third all the way to twelfth grade!

I started at a local community college,

from which I started my academic knowledge!

Then I went with my buddy to a school far away!

But it wasn't a good fit, so I didn't stay!

At UNC I met over a hundred friends!
Ones I'll keep in touch with after school ends!
I went through classes both great and horrific,

But I never failed, so that's kinda terrific!

Now I'm out of school, and I say PEACE!
I've worked through gallons of elbow grease!

And now that I'm done, who knows what'll happen!
But life is a dance, so I better start tappin'!

Through twelve semesters and almost six years,

Through my ridiculous and irrational fears,

I have walked the walk, and made it through!
If I can graduate, then hell, so can you!

Chilly Loquaciousness

(For those who are unaware, "loquacious" means "excessively wordy," which I think describes this post in a nutshell)

How cold is it today? That's a question that cannot be answered in just a few words. Big words will be needed. Huge words. Gigantic words in lengthy descriptions will be needed to describe just how completely crazy cold, how frostbite-funneling frigid, how bone-bitingly brisk, how indescribably icy, and how horrifically hypothermic today was.

Walking to class through fiery cold wind chills and flurries of piercing snowflakes, my fingers went numb within seconds, and sparked to drink the heat as soon as I walked into the relative warmness of the school building. Then as soon as I walked back, same thing, only this time the wind changed direction so it would still blow in my face and ignite my skin regardless of the direction I walked, as if the storm had a vendetta against my attempts to stay comfortable. The wind would occasionally blow the hood of my coat up and expose my face to the elements for a few brief yet torturous seconds until I frantically brought my hood down. As I like to listen to music when walking to class and back, most of the time I don't wear gloves, and thus keep my hands in my pockets when they're not being used to control my iPhone, so bringing my hood down exposes my fingers to the unfathomable cold as well. Sometimes I wonder if I should just sacrifice my music for the ability to keep my hands warm, but without it I'm not distracted from the freezing temperatures and thus I feel even more frigid. Either I'm really cold yet focused on my music, or slightly-less cold but more focused on the temperature. Picking the lesser of these evils is the bane of my walks to class.

Getting into the car requires brushing the snow off the windshields, a process that can either be mercifully brief or long and grueling depending on whether the ice from the snow stuck to the car. Then, once I can finally see through the windshield from within, I endure temperatures that can seem even colder than outside due to the stillness of the air inside the car. Turning on the heater only works when the car itself is warm enough to create heat, which can take up to five agonizing minutes of the engine running thanks to my car's age. Then, once the heater's finally emitting warm and wonderful air, I've already reached my destination.

How cold is it today? To say it's freezing isn't doing it justice. To say it's unbearably frigid isn't using enough adjectives. If the ice planet of Hoth crashed into the Earth, the resulting nuclear winter would be a welcome change. If a radioactive snow golem born in a freak Antarctic blizzard fell in love with Elsa from "Frozen" and had a kid who inherited his mother's ice powers and his father's inhuman frigidness, the kid still could not fathom such low temperatures. It is colder than an evil overlord's glare. It's more frigid than the shadow of death. It is more unwelcome than a crazy stranger barging into my house, and more unforgiving than a murderer on a killing spree. It is cold, cold, cold, cold, COLD.

Well, okay, it was only 10 above zero today at the coldest, but I don't like cold, okay?!

Things about new technology that just push my buttons

Ninety-nine percent of the time, I embrace new tech. Heck, I usually embrace new things in general. While I do have nostalgic feelings for certain things, mainly LEGO's Bionicle, old video games, and other childhood stuff, I recognize my feelings for them are indeed nostalgic. I don't think something's better purely because it's older or from my childhood, instead I welcome the future with open arms, ready to see what changes are in store.

However, this doesn't mean I love everything new, nor does it mean I think everything old is outdated. These things are some of the changes to our current technology--the main thing that drives my life--that really, for lack of a better term, push my buttons and make me wish the older ways were still the norm.

Firstly, wireless tech for a computer. Now I know that some wireless tech is indeed very helpful, especially for phones and tablets. I'm talking about stuff for the computer. The concept of wireless keyboards and mice is nice, but for me anyways, that means spending extra money on batteries that run out after a few weeks, plus I tend to lose them if I absent-mindedly put the mouse or the keyboard in a weird place when I'm done. Having a cord to connect them to the computer helps with both stuff. And don't get me started on wireless internet. Maybe I'm just in bad places, but wired internet works faster and better every flippin' time. At my house I can barely stream a YouTube video with wi-fi, but plug my computer into the router and I can watch full HD with no issue, or download game clients within less than an hour, or just load pages with a lot of bandwidth in less than the thirty seconds plus it takes with wi-fi. I don't think it's just a bad internet connection: everywhere at my college people complain about the wi-fi and immediately have all their problems solved by plugging the computer directly into the router port. Overall, I'd say in terms of personal computers, wired wins every time.

Secondly, programs where pressing the X button at the top-right doesn't really close it. This is actually more common than you might think. Skype does this, Curse does this, most game clients do this, and most chat programs do it as well. With any other program you press the X to close it, and press the little dash button to minimize the window. With Skype and such, X also minimizes it, rendering the actual minimize button completely moot. In order to really close the program, you've gotta go into the program's menu or right-click on the icon on your taskbar and select "quit." Well, what do you think I'm trying to do when I press the X button, you silly program?! I've lost count of the number of times I think I've quit Skype to do computer homework, only to be interrupted by a message or a call, as the program, even though I pressed the X button that closes every other program I can think of, is still running in the background. What's the point?! Why not just have the X button close the program, the minimize button do the minimizing, and remove the whole special "quit" button altogether?! Just add one of those "are you sure you want to quit?" thingies when you press the X button and everything will be fine. That just seems far less complicated.

Finally, and admittedly this is more of a personal thing, touchscreens. I get the concept on phones and tablets: it makes it a heck of a lot easier to use and allows so much more stuff to be done. What's the point of it on computers?! Is that little insignificant thing called a "mouse" too inconvenient? This wouldn't be too much of a problem, except for having desktop computers use operating systems like Windows 8 as the default, a system which is built for touchscreens. You know all those super-special touchscreen features for Windows 8? Can't use any of them, and based on what I've seen them do on other computers, the traditional way to look at pictures or listen to music or whatever on computers works a lot better. I just don't get why they'd make programs that have all these features meant only for touchscreens and yet also run on desktop computers. Trust me, I'm not missing a thing not using any of them. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but then they sacrifice essential features for regular computers just to allow more cool stuff for touchscreens. Like, you know what I miss? Start menus. The touchscreen one built into Windows 8 can work with a mouse, but it's layout is far too messy and hard to customize compared to a traditional start menu. I've heard there are ways to get old start menus on a Windows 8 now, but when I first got a Windows 8 on my desktop, I had no clue of that, and I had to adapt to using the computer without the convenience of a start menu. All in all, touchscreens are a wonderful idea overall, just keep them away from my computers!

And that's all for now. My rant, typed on my wired keyboard without the use of a touchscreen, is over. Once I post this, I'll close my internet browser with the X button. Oh, the simple joys in life.

The Digital Evolution of Bullying

I was bullied quite a bit as a kid. At summer camps, at computer camps, at school, and even at church groups, there was always some guy who constantly reminded me why I sucked, every day, all the time. They were never physical. I was never shoved into lockers or punched in the face. It was all verbal. "You're so stupid!" they would shout. "Does everyone get to have fun? Everyone except Matt?" they would say. All throughout my childhood and even a bit into my teens there would always be that one guy. There was never more than one at a time, but when an old bully retired, a new one came in. I hope they didn't realize how much they hurt me, because if they did, they're evil people. I really, truly hope they didn't realize how they made me cry. How they made me permanently wary around new people. How they made me hate myself.

Once I grew older and reached my current height of over six feet, obviously the bullying stopped. Or so I thought. For not every kind of bullying is face-to-face. In fact, in this day and age, most bullying is fought in a battleground much harder to moderate: the internet. People in the safety of behind their monitors say horrible things to others they don't even know, things they would never say to someone's face. Now that online games are a thing, there are now many new ways for someone to lower their self-esteem. Online bullies are a rampant disease, one that will probably only die when the internet dies. For people like me, who have been permanently psychologically damaged by face-to-face bullies, it makes me wary every time I boot up a game. I don't want to sacrifice the fun times I have in most of my games. But every now and then there's that one game with that one player who spews out horrible, toxic things to his teammates, to strangers he's never interacted with before.

I shouldn't be bothered by it. They're just meaningless words, spat out by a random loser whom I'll never see again. But for someone as sensitive as I am, those meaningless words hurt. They hurt bad. I've been told to kill myself just because I played badly at a video game. Not just once either, but frequently. I hope they don't really think that. I hope they don't realize how evil they sound. And the worst part is, there are people out there who are more sensitive to this stuff than I am. Some of them actually do kill themselves because of these monsters.

Bullying has always been a problem, but now that people can hide behind their computers, they can be even worse bullies and get away with it. Anonymity is a huge part of it. Studies have shown that if you video or voice chat with the people you're playing with rather than just type through a chat system, the rate of bullying goes down a huge amount. But not enough.

Internet bullying will never go away. Neither will bullying in general. There are always going to be people who need to bring down others to feel better about themselves. I speak to all those who are like me, who bring themselves down even further when they're bullied: I know you can't help feeling horrible, but please, don't sink to their level. Don't bully back. It may be tempting, but it won't help. Treat others the way you want to be treated. It's the golden rule for a reason. It's been said for thousands of years, and it will be said for thousands more. Because it's true. Because it's right. Because it's the way people should be. When I play an online game, I try my best to be friendly. I call "good game" after a match even if I've lost horribly. I help others who may not know as much about the game as I do. I use a lot of "lols" and ":P" faces in my chat messages to let people know I'm a good-natured guy. And more often that not, people appreciate me for it.

I say to all: don't be a bully. I know what it's like to be bullied relentlessly. I've felt the pain. Don't bring that on other people. I don't care if you're face-to-face or in an online session with others thousands of miles away. Bullying is never the answer. I'm still recovering from the psychological damage. Others might not be so lucky.

Bionicle Park Tycoon - The Sweet Child of Two Parts of My Youth

When I was a kid growing up in the early 2000s, there were two things I loved more than any of the plethora of other interests I had: LEGO's Bionicle line, which ran from 2001 to early 2010 (and will return in 2015) and Chris Sawyer's masterpiece Roller Coaster Tycoon. All day I'd play with my Bionicle sets, build new ones, and participate on Bionicle forums, and all day I'd build massive theme parks with thousands of guests and crazy roller coasters in Roller Coaster Tycoon. Both of these things allowed me to harness what many people I know call my best trait: my creativity. I could create the most colorful and awesome-looking figures with my thousands of Bionicle pieces and give them elaborate backstories. I could construct the most thrilling and twisting roller coasters, as intense as the guests's programmed intensity limits would allow them to ride, and decorate them with an assortment of scenery items that almost told a story itself.

Now that I'm grown and have more resources available to flesh out my creativity, I've put these two interests of mine into a fully self-created game, programmed with an incredibly flexible program called Game Maker Studio. It hasn't been an easy path, nor has it been a short one. I first learned about Game Maker in 2005 from a friend of mine who recommended it to me, and my early games were quite amateurish to say the least. Back then I had neither the capability nor the skill to create a game as complex as a theme park simulation. The idea had always been in my head, but for several years I stuck to more simple games like puzzles and mazes. 

It wasn't until 2009 that I felt I had the skill to undergo the creation of a game of this caliber, and the resources available to actually make my vision a reality. The result was Bionicle Park Tycoon, a molding of my two biggest interests as a child. It was the natural choice. Not only did I love Bionicle as much then as I did as a kid, but I was also an active participant on Bionicle forums across the web, giving me an audience for my game. At the same time, Roller Coaster Tycoon was still a game I played when I had the time, even all those years after it first came out in the late nineties. I had a better understanding of how theme park simulations worked than when I did as a younger folk. It's not just about building awesome roller coasters and other rides; the player also has to manage their money, figure out how to make a profit, figure out how to keep your guests happy, and understand the huge differences in even the placement of a burger stall. Don't put food shops right next to a huge roller coaster! Don't create a coaster so large and intense that no one rides it and you can't make back the money you spent building it! All these are strategies a theme park builder, whether virtual or actual, must learn to be a success.

I finished Bionicle Park Tycoon in late 2010. I obviously couldn't sell it, as Bionicle is a trademarked brand. Nonetheless, I considered all the effort I put into it well spent. According to the website I hosted the file on, it's been downloaded thousands of times. I constantly got messages from Bionicle forum-goers about how awesome the game was and how many hours they spent playing it. If it sounds like I'm bragging, it's because I've never had so much positive feedback for any of my creative works as I did with Bionicle Park Tycoon. That, more than anything, is what I'm proud of the most. Obviously the game is nowhere near as complex as Roller Coaster Tycoon: I'm not Chris Sawyer, after all. But the fact that this game I made entirely on my own with no intention of selling got as much praise as it did makes it in my opinion one of my greatest accomplishments.

The screenshot you see up above, however, isn't Bionicle Park Tycoon. Bionicle Park Tycoon looked a lot more crude and simple than the game up above, which already looks crude enough as it is. It's homemade: what can I say? No, the screenshot at the top of the post is of it's long-overdue sequel, which for now is so creatively named Bionicle Park Tycoon 2. Over the years, even when I've left the Bionicle forums after activity died down since Bionicle's cancellation in 2010, I received many messages asking if there was a followup to Bionicle Park Tycoon in the works. I never gave the idea too much thought before, as I was focusing on college and other creative projects. Plus, now that Bionicle was over, there wouldn't be an audience for it. Sure, people still fondly remember Bionicle from their youth, but most of those people aren't on Bionicle forums anymore, and with no future of the line visible, there'd be no reason for them to return to the forums and see my work. It appeared Bionicle Park Tycoon would be just a one-hit wonder for me, something fun for me to work on and fun for people to play, but also something with no future, much like Bionicle itself.

Then, just a few weeks ago, the future of both Bionicle and Bionicle Park Tycoon was saved by an announcement from LEGO that, after many years of dormancy, Bionicle would be returning, currently set for 2015. New fans are likely to come in, and old fans now have a reason to be interested again. More importantly for me, an audience for a Bionicle Park Tycoon sequel was restored. That was all the motivation I needed to get to work on a sequel. That screenshot up above is only a few weeks' worth of work, so it's very pre-pre-alpha. But work will continue throughout the coming months. I have plans for this game that greatly exceed the ones for the first installment. I can only hope that the feedback I get for it will be half as good as what I received for the original. With this project underway, my two favorite childhood interests are molded together once again. I can only hope the kids who might play this, the new fans of the new Bionicle starting in 2015, will have Bionicle Park Tycoon 2 as a fond part of their childhood too. That, more than anything, would be the greatest thing I could ever ask for.

Mythical Zoo Excerpt: Nemean Lion

Here is an excerpt from one of my writing projects, "Mythical Zoo." It's a fictional guidebook on how to keep creatures like the Minotaur, Cyclops, Sphinx, and all sorts of other mythological creatures in a zoo.

Nemean Lion

Size: 4 feet tall, 8-9 feet long

Diet: Any large meat, preferably man

Habitat: Deciduous forest, prairies

Attitude: Aggressive

Suitable Zookeeper: Centaur

         

Nemean lions are a complete and royal pain in the rear. In the original Greek myth, this larger-than-normal lion (albeit physically identical in pretty much every other way) was slain by Heracles in the city of Nemea, in the first of his twelve tasks. This was hard, even for the super-strong Heracles, because the skin was impenetrable to any sword or bow, so the only way he could kill it was strangling it with brute strength. He wore its fur as a coat, which he managed to skin off the lion by using its own claws after he killed it.

In the modern day world, mythologists irritatingly discovered that Nemean lions aren’t just immune to any swords or bows: they are also bulletproof, missile-proof, tank shell-proof, pretty much impervious to any modern day weapon you could think of. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would repopulate the Earth with the cockroaches after a full-scale, apocalyptic nuclear war. Their claws can also go through any metal, which unfortunately means that they can go through any fence as well.

Your best bet for containing these unstoppable felines is to keep them in a large, deep pit, and reinforce the walls with concrete, electricity, and possibly lava if you can manage to find any. While if it really wanted to, it could still probably escape from that, all animals, even mythical ones, hate electricity and fire, especially together. Hopefully, after sensing those obstacles in its way, it won’t even bother.

Now, seeing as Nemean lions, except for being slightly larger and more muscular, look pretty much identical to normal lions, you need to find ways to make the exhibit popular with your guests, who will probably pass up the boring-looking lions, instead going straight to the five-headed Hydra exhibit. There are several ways to keep the guests entertained, and several ways of letting them know this is no ordinary lion. For instance, you could have a show where it goes through an impossible obstacle course, and make it so that it intentionally doesn’t get through and gets shot, burned, and stabbed. Don’t worry, this won’t do anything to hurt the animal—it actually has a lot of fun showing off how indestructible it is. However, my personal favorite way is having the guests be able to shoot the animal themselves with special machine gun emplacements on the pit walls (make sure they can’t shoot each other with it, because guests can sometimes be homicidal maniacs). The Nemean lion won’t be bothered about this in the slightest: the bullets will just bounce off his fur, without him noticing.

Fortunately, despite their near-immunity to anything, Nemean lions are very easy to take care of once you have them confined. They’ll eat normal lion chow, and they’re really just super-tough lions in general. However, this doesn’t mean you can use normal zookeepers for them: they’re still incredibly dangerous, so having centaurs, which are used to those kinds of creatures, is still your best option.

The Top 4 LEAST Awesome Dinosaurs

For most of us seven billion people on the planet, adding a dash of the extinct scales-and-featheriness that are dinosaurs to anything, and I mean anything at all, will amplify the awesome to crazy levels. Why does King Kong reside on an island populated by the things, even though he's just a big gorilla and definitely not a dinosaur? Because it's awesome. Why did InGen create dinosaurs for "Jurassic Park" rather than mammoths or other Ice Age creatures that would no doubt be far easier to clone? Because it's awesome. Pride and Prejudice was a great story, but you know what would have made it even better? If Mr. Darcy had a pet Tyrannosaurus that he rode everywhere. Heck, even the Bible is better with dinosaurs: some people believe a few of them rode on Noah's Ark, and most artistic depictions of the Leviathan from Job have a hint of prehistoric beast to them.

So obviously, the question of which are the least awesome dinosaurs is a daunting one to answer. Every dinosaur has its awesome characteristics. A few of them, however, are kind of blah if you think about it, and adding them to famous stories or historical events wouldn't add much awesomeness. That's what this list will focus on. Naturally, these dinosaurs will be a bit more obscure: the famous ones like T. rex or Stegosaurus are famous for a reason, after all.

4. Camarasaurus

This dinosaur may have been a sauropod (long-necked dinosaur) and thus mighty big at sixty feet long, but it wasn't the biggest. It may have been bulky and built more heavily than other sauropods, but it wasn't the heaviest. And honestly, being big and heavy is all sauropods really have going for them. Camarasaurus was more like a slightly large linebacker in a long-necked football team rather than the quarterback. They're the fifth-place winner of an elementary school science fair. They're not enough in the back to be notable, nor enough at the front. They're just one of the guys in between. The average Joe of sauropods.

Adding to that, they were common as crap. Camarasaurus is by far the most numerous sauropod fossil found in North America, and easily the most numerous animal of its time and place in prehistory. They were literally the sheep of long-necked dinosaurs, and nothing's awesome about sheep. Would you get appreciative looks riding a Camarasaurus to work nowadays? Probably. But in the context of its time period, Camarasaurus would score a C.

3. Camptosaurus

Iguanodon was an awesome dinosaur; not because it looked awesome or acted awesome or had an awesome aura that awed all surrounding creatures with awesomeness like some other dinosaurs, but because it was the first dinosaur classified by science in history. For us mere humans it's awesome from a human historical standpoint, but even by itself Iguanodon was pretty awesome: while most other ornithopods (biped or semi-quadruped herbivores such as the duckbilled dinosaurs and others) were totally defenseless, Iguanodon could fight back thanks to a pair of spikes replacing its thumbs.

Camptosaurus, Iguanodon's Jurassic forefather, holds none of these distinctions. For one, it doesn't have thumb spikes, so like most other ornithopods its best defense is just to run away like a pansy. It was discovered many decades after Iguanodon, in a period of history known as "the Bone Wars" when dinosaur bones were thrown left and right at fossil-searching paleontologists faster than Apple throws out new versions of the iPhone, thus any excitement from its discovery was replaced with moans of "old news." What's worse, it was way smaller than Iguanodon; at only sixteen feet long, Camptosaurus was barely bigger than a car, rather than bigger than a semi-truck like Iguanodon. From a comparative standpoint, there's nothing awesome about Camptosaurus, and it's certainly no one's favorite dinosaur, at least that I know of.

2. Aucasaurus

For the most part, carnivorous dinosaurs were inherently awesome. They commanded a fierce and aggressive aura that let every other creature around know they were an animal to be feared. This kind of raw power and intimidation technique adds to their awesomeness, or creates it when it might not have been there before.

Aucasaurus, meanwhile, was a scrawny predator in Late Cretaceous South America, where it was overshadowed by carnivores like Giganotosaurus, which imploded the world with its awesomeness when humans uncovered it and found it actually bigger than the notorious T. rex. Aucasaurus, meanwhile, was about ten feet long, preyed most on lizards and smaller dinosaurs rather than the titanic sauropods other predators preyed on around it, and the only feature it beats T. rex at is shortness of arms. You read that right: Aucasaurus had arms that were proportionately smaller than the notoriously short-armed rex.

Not only was Aucasaurus overshadowed by the predators around it, it was also overshadowed by other members of its saurian family. Aucasaurus belongs to a group called "abelisaurids," a whole collection of small, short-armed carnivores that had precisely one awesome member: Carnotaurus, which despite being far smaller than other awesome predators totally makes up for it with a pair of bull-like horns that virtually no other dinosaur carnivore had. That's pretty awesome. Sorry, Aucasaurus; you're just not as special as your big brother.

1. Hypsilophodon

The hypsilophodontids were a group of amazingly non-awesome dinosaurs spread across the Jurassic and Cretaceous, and none of them exemplified their non-awesomeness more like their namesake, Hypsilophodon. These creatures rarely reached longer than ten feet in length, and except for their surprisingly diverse set of teeth for a dinosaur, there's nothing about them that's truly notable. They weren't even big enough to be real prey for the larger predatory dinosaurs they lived with, although they were preyed on by younger specimens learning to hunt. That's right: their main purpose in the big ecosystem web was target practice. 

Think about it real hard: when was the last time you saw a Hypsilophodon in a dinosaur movie? Or even better: when was the last time you saw one in a dinosaur documentary? They're literally so non-awesome that even programs designed to educate viewers about dinosaurs can't be bothered to show them. That's a pretty low blow for these guys.

And these are my personal top four LEAST awesome dinosaurs. Disagree with any of these choices, or have any choices of your own? Let me know in the comments.