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Rubbing the Lucky Nut.

Random Thoughts

Before I got my job at Toys “R” Us, I visited my parents and my mother pulled out a bag of buckeye nuts.

There isn’t much special about buckeyes. Unless you count this. It seems that my grandfather wasn’t making it up.

See, my father’s father lived in Jacksonville, Florida. We used to visit a couple times a year, except when we were living in Pennsylvania, until he passed on, and outside the house on the right side stood the Buckeye tree. He’d collect the ones that fell and hand them to the grandkids when we came telling us of the luck they held within. We usually were only lucky in losing or misplacing them. I’ve probably had over a hundred of these in my possession over the years, but right now I have only three. Two of these I retained from my younger years of visiting my grandpa. They managed to stay with me through the years and all the moving, mostly trapped in the drawers of my various desks. But the luck of these have probably worn out.

My mother opened the bag and I picked out a buckeye with a good thumb on it. My grandfather used to say that you should just keep it in your pocket and when you need luck just reach in and rub your thumb into the indent in the nut. I took a good one and put it in my pocket. It was for luck on a job interview.

Every day I kept it in my pocket and when my hand would brush against it, I’d reach in and give the nut a couple of rubs. It was in my pocket when I went to the interview and it was in my pocket when they called to tell me I got the job.

Thanks Grandpa Pace. I hope you are looking down at me now, and I hope you are proud at what you see.

Recent Movies and My Opinions

Reviews

I’ve actually been to see a few movies lately, so here is what I thought in no particular order.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This was a good movie. Not being a fanatic, nor actually having read the book, I’d have to say it was slow though. There were a number of things that were in the movie because they were in the book, and had this been a less popular book many of these scenes would have been cut, but they were playing to the fans. No biggie, but it means the movie clocked in at 2 and a half hours long. A bit overboard for someone seeing it for the first time. Still, it was a solid story, good acting and effects, and great for kids.

Serendipity. Fantastic movie! The way that love should be. I laughed and smiled, I hoped and dreamed and I twisted in my seat when things didn’t look so good. A beautiful film worth every cent spent.

Monsters Inc. From the people that brought you Toy Story I and II, and A Bug’s Life. Pixar makes good family films and their animation is sweet. Again, worth the money.

That’s it for now, feel free to give me your opinions on the discussion forums, but I will delete messages with spoilers, so please avoid giving away the secrets of the movies.

`Tis the Season.

Random Thoughts

It occurred to me that there is something very wrong about the retail business at the Christmas season.

While working at Toys “R” Us, admittedly only for 3 actual days of work, I heard alot from the other employees, you know, the ones who work there are year long. Seems that this place, much like alot of retail places, only allows each store to have so many “full time” employees. The kinds of people who have to provide benefits for. During the Christmas season, they hire seasonal help to handle to extra load. These seasonal people are required to sign forms saying that regardless of the number of hours they work, they will not under any circumstances be considered full time employees. So I, and the 10 or so others hired for the holidays get scheduled for back breaking 40 hour weeks, while the people who actually care enough to work for the store all year round are left wondering why they can’t get more than 22 hours on the schedule. I mean, I bet they’d like some extra spending money too (safe bet, they actually told me they wanted more hours but were refused).

These stores don’t offer their normal part time workers more hours because by law if they give them 30 or more they have to give them benefits too, and yet they can work a “seasonal employee” into the ground and until what used to be his feet are just bloody stumps thumping away at the tile as they drag yet another overpriced Power Wheels toy to the front. Why is it they can’t just use the same magical piece of paper that allows them to side step the law for seasonal help for also allowing their dedicated employees a few extra hours a week?

I quit because my feet hurt. I was unprepared to do the job physically. Only minutes before I handed in my badge, another employee did the same, but because she was going to go do “seasonal work” for another store to get more hours.

Sometimes I just don’t understand.

One For the Record Books.

Random Thoughts

3 days. 4 if you count my day off. That’s how long I lasted at Toys “R” Us.

I’m 27 years old, and when I break down crying because I can barely move being nearly crippled by pain, I think its time to move on. And so I did.

5 years at desk jobs and I can’t be on my feet working for 8 hour stretches any more. Am I getting soft? Getting old?

I don’t think so, but one thing is for sure.. once my feet are back into functional working order again its really time to start doing that exercise I always promise myself I’m going to start doing.

And this time, I mean it.

An Aching in my Sole.

Random Thoughts

That’s not a misspelling. I meant “sole” not “soul”. Spiritually, emotionally, and all that other crap, I’m fine. Life is good.

However…

I have an aching in my sole. After 5 years of working jobs that were primarily focused in sitting on my ass behind a desk talking to people on the phone, I now have a job harkening back to my years spent toiling under the slave masters at Kroger (not really, I actually liked Kroger… at the time… when I was 10 YEARS YOUNGER!!!!!!), I work for Toys “R” Us as a stock / pick-up clerk. I am on my feet for 8 hours a day, give or take. I do get 2 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch. And true to form I find any excuse to sit on my ass (for example, today I rode over 25 bikes out to display on the floor.. yes, they are 16 and 20 inch bikes for little kids, and YES, I did say I rode them out). But Holy-Mary-mother-of-Jesus-H.-Fucking-Christ-on-a-stick do my feet hurt!

My blisters have blisters. The marrow in the middle of my bones hurts. I have pain from my toes to mid-shin, and then it just stops. All the other pain has faded, either because in 2 days of working my body has gotten used to the upper body lifting already, or perhaps my feet just hurt so much that my brain won’t allow me to feel the rest of it for fear it will kill me. And yes, I did just say 2 days. 2 DAYS!!

(insert massive amount of swearing here)

And somehow… but some miracle or sheer force of will, I still manage to smile at each and every single customer.

Of course, I get home and collapse crying like some pansy little sissy manling wussy. But that’s a private shame.

That`s the Sound of the Men…

Random Thoughts

Things have been a bit hectic lately. Job interviews and whatnot, so the updates have been slim, and will probably continue to be slim for a bit yet.

Tomorrow I head off to interview for a job that may suck. Some of you out there probably suffered through the period I was working on third shift and hating it because I wrote horrible and silly thing in my .plan file. This job may suck just as much, or it may not. It may be third shift, which would suck. Suck, suck, suck. Sorry, this paragraph just seemed to need more sucking to properly display the suckiness of the suckage that sucked. Suck.

Anyway, even if the job doesn’t .. you know .. it doesn’t officially start until December 10th. So about another month of not working, right?

Wrong.

“Jason to the kiosk. Jason to the kiosk.”

I am not working at Toys “R” Us as seasonal help. Seasonal means they pay me less, work me harder, and plan to fire me anyway the day after Christmas. So I don’t see any reason why I can’t take them for a ride around the block and then jump ship before I get fed to the dogs, do you?

Trade Skills: The Good and the Bad

Random Thoughts

So today I decided to try out the trade skills of Dark Age of Camelot. I’ve been familiar with the old UO style, and the EQ style, and never bothered AC (are there trade skills in AC? I never cared to stay long enough to find out). What follows is, as always, my opinion.

We’ll begin with how to do them, and I’ll stick with tailoring since its what I chose to do. I talk to the Tailoring Master and say I want to be a tailor. He says, “Great!”, and I get a skill point. I buy a tailoring kit and some supplies: wool thread, leather, cloth. Deciding ahead of time that skilling up on your own just costs money you never get back, I take the option of doing consignments.

For those who don’t know, you can make stuff in DAoC and sell it to a vender at low levels of skill for anywhere from 50% to 95% of the cost of making the item (barring failures), OR you can have the master of your skill task you to make something and deliver it for him in which case you average about 120% of the cost of making the item. Yes, that’s right EQ fans, you make a PROFIT!

So I start asking what he wants me to make, I make it, and I deliver it. I started with 13 silver pieces and today I ended with 12 silver pieces. I know what you are thinking, “Didn’t he say profit?” Yeah, I did. The last task I got asked to make was leather boned gauntlets which require bronze studs. I had to pay 3 silver for 20 bronze bars to make 20 bronze studs so that I could use 1 stud for the gauntlets (yep, you buy things in amounts of 20 from what I have seen so far). So in reality I had 15 silver before I bought the bronze bars, and I haven’t even turned in the gauntlets for my reward yet. Pretty neat, eh?

On top of that, the trade skills are a tree. Tailoring isn’t just tailoring. Tailoring is just the act of making the final product. There are sub-skills like clothworking, leatherworking, and metalworking, and I earn skill in those as well depending on the content of the item I am crafting.

There are two annoying nit picky bits with trade skills though. First, when doing consignments, you have to find the people. You start to cheer and shout out loud when you get a repeat customer because you already found them. Finding people is made easier though because you can ask any guard where to find them and they will literally point the way. Of course, nothing is fool proof and they will point directly to the person, so all I need now is the ability to walk through walls. Second, at least in EQ, you hit combine and you know immediately if you failed or succeeded. In DAoC you get a progress bar. Now you and I both know full well that the game knows before you even start to display the bar that the item was a success or not, making me wait 10 second just to tell me I have to try again is a pain in the ass, especially when you end up having to try 8 or 10 times before you succeed. But then again, not having to physically put items into my sewing kit is nice, so is not having everything automatically eaten on failures.

In the end, DAoC has a more well thought out Trade Skill system. That’s plain as day. However, all EQ would need to do in order to catch up again would be to put in Trade Skill Quests where you are given a no drop note with an order on it, make the item, then return the item and note for money. Oh, that and venders where you can store buy more materials for skilling up, hunting rare supplies is a bitch.

Let the mud slinging begin.

Random Thoughts

You may notice that there is a link missing from my page. SlowNewsDay.net no longer exists. In a soap opera like stage of drama and finger pointing they closed their doors. If you read over on CamelotVault or some of the various DAoC message boards around, you can see bits and pieces of the drama.

In all this, there was one valid point. Scott Jennings, a.k.a. Lum the Mad, wrote some software to manage the news and message boards for his site. He got hired by Mythic Entertainment, who made DAoC, and he turned over his website to other people. In the end, Scott being in close contact in an administrative sense to a site that was supposed to be looking at gaming for faults wasn’t a good idea, and everybody knew it. He needed to remove himself from the site, now SlowNewsDay.net.

After that, I can’t be certain of anything. But the result was the same, SlowNewsDay.net is gone, fingers are pointing, and everyone is a little less polished than they used to be.

And sometimes they do it wrong.

Random Thoughts

After such a glowing view of the new GM events in EverQuest, Verant goes and has a 7 hour patch. No wait, a 9 hour.. make that a 12 and a half hour patch.

But I supposed they were due. The last half dozen patches have actually finished BEFORE the deadline. I guess something broke today.

Hail fellow britons, how fare thee this day?

Random Thoughts

In DAoC news, for the umpteenth day in a row NO ONE TALKED TO EACH OTHER AS THEY SOLOED AND SKILLED UP!

That’s my one bitch about this game so far. I play on Pendragon (Test Server) mostly, but I do crawl out of my hole to play on a “live” server now and then, and in neither place do you find people talking much. In guilds and groups its different. But if you try to stop in town and say hello to someone, they usually turn, acknowledge that someone did say something to them, then run off to continue whatever they were doing, which in turn leads me to run off doing my thing.

Talk god dammit! TALK!!!