Antisocial or Lazy?

//obligatory apology for never posting//

So this upcoming Friday offers a number of activities on the campus where I work/used to go to school that I can engage in that will bring me into contact with people I know or at least can identify after ten minutes of conversation while my brain tries to figure out who they are. These activities and the probable happenstances of said activity are, respectively:

1. Friday Night Magic. However, the format is Standard. I don't have a Standard deck. Actually, I don't really have any decks at the moment. If I had a Commander deck I could theoretically play with all the other non-tournament players, but I am really sans inspiration on the deck front. I might conceivably have a cannabalized Angel deck I could reassemble, but that sounds like work. And there's a chance there will be nobody to play with me/that will play with me. I will eventually feel like an automaton mimicking human behavior and I will ninja out early.

2. Geology Trivia Night. I could go, exchange cordial greetings with the current students and professors and realize how much I've forgotten/never remembered. Food and/or wollanstinite may be involved. Feldspars in all their potassium/plagioclase glory will put in an appearance. I will eventually feel like an alien miming human behavior and I will slither out and not be missed.

3. LAN Party. I only know two people offhand who will be here, one of which I spent an entire office in a summer with and--while sitting back-to-back--communicated via Facebook. I will show up with my sorry little laptop and buy giant cookies from aforementioned friend before giving up and vanishing in a cloud of incredible shyness and possibly shame.

4. Or I could stay home, play LoL, play RS and watch Charmed, play some more LoL, play RS and watch Charmed, play LoL because my fiancee has come home from Magic and wants his Xbox back to play Skyrim and I won't be able to watch any more Charmed, end the night playing Minecraft and drinking some concoction of booze from my dwindling supply of alcohol.

The choices, the choices.

DominateDominion Interview

So...I got an interview with the founder, otherwise known as TheFeedski, of the recently created DominateDominion.com site, a website dedicated to LoL's new game mode, Dominion.

Bacon & Betelgeuse: Why did you decide to start this site?

TheFeedski: I played a decent amount of Dominion during beta and got the hang of it pretty fast. When it was released, I felt that I was ahead of many of players I was playing with/against in public games. When I looked at the League of Legends Dominion forum it was full of people complaining or trolling, like usual, and I had a hard time finding a competitive team to play with. That's when I got the idea of making a strictly Dominion site. Thought it would be cool if I could make a place to host tournaments, find teams, write/read Dominion champion guides, etc.

B&B: Why go with paid hosting rather than free?

TheFeedski: As a broke college student, I originally made the site with free hosting. Then I started thinking, if this thing takes off, free hosting won't be able to handle it. So I figured I mine as well bite the bullet and pay for my own hosting. Plus, there aren't any ads. As of yet... Hope it stays that way, but if this starts to take a large chunk of change out of my pocket I may have to add a couple.

B&B: Tell us how you got into LoL.

TheFeedski: My room mate during Freshman year in college played it. He told me how the game works and I decided I would try it. From then on I loved it. And kept playing it.

B&B: Now, I've got to ask: Dominion or Summoner's Rift, and why?

TheFeedski: Depends on my mood. If I am feeling in the mood for some ranked, then Summoner's Rift. That mood doesn't come often though, so Dominion. I like the fast-paced feeling of Dominion. Getting your build rather quickly, being a sneaky sally and back dooring, I just enjoy the overall game play more.

B&B: What champions/roles do you prefer?

TheFeedski: I love me some Heimerdinger bottom lane. He's a beast. Or Ryze, Yorick, Gangplank, Xin, Tryndamere. I play a lot of people really, but prefer to be bottom. No homo.

B&B: What do you do when you're not on LoL?

TheFeedski: What do I do, or what should I be doing? I try to study and get ahead, but that's never fun. So usually I just smoke a bowl and relax. I'll get all my stuff done, but I'm a great procrastinator, so it won't be until the day before it's due. I also try working on this website. I use to make Youtube videos before I got in college and reached 10,500+ subscribers and got partnered with Youtube, but I stopped doing that. I should probably pick that up again.

B&B: Anything else you'd like to add?

TheFeedski: Thanks for being a member of the site and wanting to interview me. I'm in the process of finding someone to make a script for an unofficial Dominion ladder system. Hopefully that is coming soon.
 
B&B: Thanks for letting me interview you! Best of luck!

Today, I Met a Nobel Prize Winner & I Didn't Stab Any Computers Or Perform Any Other Acts of Violence

Title.

All right, I'll try to make a story of this.

This gainful employment manages to cut into my Times in all sorts of ways...my Runescape Time, my League of Legend Time, my Watching-Movies-on-Netflix Time, my Thinking-About-Exercising Time, my Studying-for-GRE Time, my Snuggling-With-LOML Time...

Back to the title story. Please note that since I'm tired that the sloppy Paint illustrations will be representing things that probably did not, in this dimension, happen.

So, after a long day of assembling maps on a computer that somehow escaped the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs and getting visited by a stabbing headache for the last half hour of work, I finally slithered up to the university cafeteria where the 2011 Nobel prize winner for Physics was speaking. I showed up 10 minutes early and the place was like the proverbial can of Sardines and the kids' game all rolled into one. I had to overcome my hesitation of talking to people to inquire as to whether a seat was available because I really did not dig the concept of standing.

Okay, so maybe this one did happen.

They eventually started shunting the mob to another room in another building on campus, but since I had a chair I stayed put, surrounded by strangers...The talk only started 10 minutes late, which was a bit earlier than I was expecting, seeing how these things tend to go (especially on my campus). After all the cheering and whatnot throughout the thankfully brief introductory speech Dr. Schmidt proceeded to take the entire audience from Earth, through the concept of Light, through the concept of Doppler Effect, to the curvature of space-time and why the universe appears to be accelerating. Oh, and he ditched meeting the Queen of England because he had already arranged to talk to us.

During the course of the talk, the following did not happen.

And after the talk I joined the time to say hi to the guy.

I asked a question I couldn't bring myself to ask during the Q & A as it would have meant I'd have to yell over two-thirds of a room of crowded people, and got a picture with the guy

Pretty good day, all things considered.

Still Alive...-ish

It's been nearly a month since I posted here. Yes, I'm still alive, but now I have been gainfully employed and it's amazing how much less free time I have now that I'm working 40 hours a week.

LoL Dominion is fantastic--maybe I'll try to do a piece on it in the future. I really appreciate the fast-paced action and the fact that last hitting isn't important.

Runescape has had several great quests lately--Branches of Darkmeyer and Ritual of the Mahjarrat.

My job has involved a lot of data downloading, and apparently I have to go work on a report that's due by the end of the month.

Take care all!

What's in a Name

If I had to choose my pseudonym now, it probably wouldn't involve Dragon, because after ten years of being on the internet I think it's definitely one of those cliched names. And Rebel's probably another one...I mean, who honest-to-God puts Rebel in their internet moniker if they're not making a point of saying, "Hey, look at me, I'm a rebel. Rawr." Putting them both together is just...um...pretentious?

But it's really highly personal to me.

The name, Rebel Dragon, didn't evolve for me until sometime in 2005. I was living in Pennsylvania at the time and started writing a story. This story was about someone a lot like me who kept phasing into this other world that involved technologically advanced elves, homicidal squirrels, and a time-traveling fairy. In the first chapter the main character gets chewed by a dragon but manages to kill the dragon from inside it's mouth with a pocketknife, and in the process is transformed into a weredragon. In the nature of all antihero stories, the character fights against turning evil and manages to have lots of adventures.

All this evolved after I had seen Lord of the Rings in 2002, but about a year before I learned how to play Magic and D&D and all the remaining trappings of standard fantasy. If I had, this world of mine may have turned out differently...for one, I was not aware of shapeshifting and intelligence being standard properties of most dragons.

I think at that time the dragon was something I both wanted to be and was also my inner monster that I was striving to be in control of. Much like any werepredator in pretty much any story ever that has any sense of moral decency struggles to not turn into a murder machine. Hence the Rebel.

I referred to the weredragon character as my alter ego.

In 2005 when I made my first Runescape account, I was trying to decide on a name and I tried for Rebel
Dragon. It was taken already and I wasn't able to rename my account that until they implemented the name changing system years later.

If I was to rewrite that story today, it would be different. For one, I wouldn't try to cram all the marvels of my created universe into it at one go.

At the end of Part 1 of the book, the main character dies.

In Part 2, the character is reborn.

But in the Intermission between the two parts, we meet the Dragonling.

Most of the Intermission and Part 2 hasn't been written. I don't know if it ever will be.

The main character has changed. I may have changed.

But Rebel Dragon does not change.

Why God Died

"And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent (Matthew 27:51" 

Most of you are probably familiar with this particular tenet of the Christian faith--God sent His Son Jesus to earth, where he was crucified and rose again, leading to the salvation of humankind.

Traditionally, veil reference in the above verse is seen as God allowing humans to come closer to to Him...but what if that's not the case? What if, instead, it symbolizes God coming closer to humans?

According to the Bible, up until this point, the one thing separating God from humans was that He hadn't died. It's one thing to be a great, omnipotent being with complete control over your creation, and it's another for the same being to become a copy of it's creation and live through the daily struggle of being human.

Death was the ultimate separation. Normally, it's been seen as a negative for us--death separated us from God. But what if it was more--God's absence of death is what kept Him from humans?

What if God had to die so He could truly join with His creation? Maybe He had to come to this world as a human, live and experience life as a human, and, ultimately, die like a human, so He could truly understand us?


What if Jesus' death and resurrection was to bring God closer to us?

RS: 99 Mining

 I haven't talked much about Runescape lately, although it's probably what I've been doing the most of.

This also gave me 2300 lvl overall.

 

Now on to smith and craft.