The pursuit of exploration

Growing up, I didn’t travel a whole lot.  Up until I was like maybe 11 years old, my entire world revolved around the states of Virginia and Maryland, bouncing around between family visits and, family visits.  Family vacations as I aged were to places like New York, Chicago, and to Niagara Falls, where we barely crossed into Canada for a spell.

Conventions, afforded me opportunities to visit other states, although I didn’t really explore any of them outside of the respective conventions I went to, but for what it was worth, I started visiting places like California, Georgia and the Carolinas.  And when I became my best impression of a functional adult and got super into baseball, the pursuit of baseball parks has given me the best excuse to visit a whole slew of places I never imagined seeing growing up, like Seattle, Portland, Miami, Boston, Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego.

However, aside from visits to cities in adjacent countries Canada and Mexico, I’ve never been outside of the United States.  In fact, I’ve never been out of the western hemisphere in my entire life.  For shame, when you consider the fact that I’ve never been back to the Motherland at any point, and it’s still my goal to ultimately take my mother to Korea one of these days.  I never went, or really had the opportunity for any dramatic international travel in my life; I didn’t go backpacking through Europe, nor did I ever have the aforementioned trip back to the Motherland.  And up until I was really an adult, I guess I didn’t have the financial means and/or the drive to pursue it.

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Gross

In short: New York Mets sweep Chicago Cubs, advance to World Series.

It’s a good thing that I’ll mostly be offline throughout the next week, and if all goes really well, will basically miss the World Series.

It’s not that I hate the Mets, it’s just the fact that they’re the Mets; in the same division with the Braves,  they’re supposed to suck, LOLMets, etc, etc… and seeing them storm their way through the playoffs and now into the World Series?   Sure, there’s some jealousy, resentment, but there’s also a good bit of awe, disbelief, and wonder at the fact that the scary thing is that they’re exhibiting a lot of patterns and trends that typically go hand-in-hand with previous World Champions; all the pitching coming together to form these chains of dominance, Yoenis Cespedes has been playing out of his mind, since arriving in New York, in pursuit of both a ring as well as a huge fatty contract at season’s end.

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Yes, we are going to talk about poop

In the very first Final Fantasy, Warmech was an enemy that could be randomly encountered on the long sky bridge preceding the fourth elemental fiend, Tiamat. Warmech was the strongest non-boss in the game, as it had a nuclear blast attack that attacked your entire party for a tremendous amount of damage, as well as health regeneration, lots of armor and strong physical damage output.

Subsequently, it rewarded you as if it were one of the elemental fiends if you defeat it, but the existence of Warmech was one-part easter egg, being a high-tech opponent in a world of fantasy, one-part completionist challenge, being such a difficult adversary, and one-part nasty surprise, because encountering one can only happen at a very inopportune time, right before another major boss fight.

It was deduced that the chances of encountering a Warmech on the sky bridge was approximately 3/64; which equates to roughly 5% of the time, but if you’re unlucky like me, you somehow manage to run into Warmech almost every time.

Anyway, there’s a sky bridge in my place of employment.

And there’s a Warmech that patrols it.

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My tolerance for cooler weather is gone

I knew it was going to inevitably happen, considering I grew up with four true seasons every year for 21 years.  And then moving to Georgia where the summers are brutal and the winters are supposedly mild, it was only a matter of time before the tolerance for cooler weather would begin to gradually chip and eat away at me, before I would inevitably look at a particular temperature and go “god damn it’s cold.”

Well, I’m there now, I think officially.  Granted, 37F degrees in October is slightly low on the spectrum of arriving fall weather, but it’s gotten to the point where I have yet to switch my home’s thermostats over to “heat,” and my home’s temperature is dropping into the low 60s, and my bedroom which is over the garage, creeps into the 50s, leading my to wake up cold and blurting expletives when stumbling out of bed in order to hit snooze.

The point remains, I’m easily cold now, vastly more than I used to be in the past.  Sure, I was more conditioned, not to mention my body’s composition was slightly tubbier back then, so say what you want about the insulating properties of blubber, but now, I’m furrowing my brow when it drops into the low 60s outside, and anything equivalent within my home is becoming “too fucking cold.”

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I guess I don’t think when watching television

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about how American Horror Story: Hotel is like the worst thing ever aired. All sorts of flippity-floo about how Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have gone too far in their push-the-envelope style of depictions of sex and gore, use of taboo concepts like homosexuality and transgendered people, how Lady Gaga is more or less portraying what people think Lady Gaga is, which is a weirdo who likes to do things for shock value, and how the franchise is undeniably dead with the fact that Jessica Lange (supposedly) has left.

Perhaps I don’t analyze things so much when I’m watching them, or more likely the fact that I’m just not really thinking too hard, but I haven’t had any problems with AHS:Hotel so far, and I’ve found them to be entertaining.  For baseline sake, I found Freak Show to be entertaining, in spite of the popular belief that it was the weakest of the four prior seasons.

In some regard, I think I’m a little desensitized when it comes to shock, gore and sex depicted on television, and I’m more apt to ponder on whether or not someone, be it show creators, or someone at FX is going to get in trouble for pushing the envelope as hard as they’ve been pushing it, but when I’m watching people getting their throats slit and/or sexually assaulted, I might cringe and go “Ohhhh” but it’s nothing that’s going to mentally scar me for eternity, as the rhetoric spouted by Parent Television Council sheep would have you believe it should.  If anything at all, just seeing “Murphy/Falchuk” combined with the fact that it’s on FX, by now, anyone should know that they’re going to see some pretty intense stuff.

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90 Day Fiance season 3 odds

Nope, no chance that she’s not in love with a guy thrice her age

So, with the saga of Danielle and Mohamed on the shelf for another indeterminate amount of time, it’s time to move on to the third season of TLC’s 90 Day Fiance. I’ll admit a large part of the amusement of watching the show is trying to play the game of identifying which couple(s) ultimately fails, leading to an unhappy ending for one of the Americans on the show, and injecting a whole lot of hypothetical narrative to which people from another country are putting up with this farce in pursuit of a green card.

Last season, I declared that it was a season designed to have sure-fire failures, but much like the first season, every single couple, including Danielle and Mohamed ended up tying the knot.

I’m not going to make that same mistake again, because as long as the cameras are rolling, and they’re part of this show, every single one of these couples is undoubtedly going to successfully get married, regardless of what occurs six, eight, or ten months after the cameras are gone.  Nobody wants to be the person who gets dumped on cable television, and even TLC producers aren’t as heartless as to let such occur if it can be helped.

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Time to talk about 90 Day Fiance – again

A picture is worth a thousand words

It’s that time of year again, when the greatest network in the history of television, TLC decides to trot out the biggest train wreck of a television show again for another season, 90 Day Fiance.  Long story short, pathetic American singles get engaged to people from other countries, and via the K-1 Visa, bring them to America, where they then have 90 days to either get married, or the mail order spouses have to go back to their respective countries.

Anyway, before I eventually start posting about season 3, I wanted to touch base with the recently aired where are they now special they released in regards to the couples of season 2.  Most notably, like most fans of the show, they wanted to know what happened between Danielle and Mohamed, easily the most polarizing couple in the show’s brief existence.

It should also be worth mentioning that in this follow-up special, two couples declined participation this time; combined with the follow-up from season 1, in both seasons, the dudes who married Filipino women have declined participation in the follow-ups, as both Louis/Aya and now Brett/Daya have dodged the prying eyes of inquiring viewers, leading to the probably conclusion that they were shams and that they didn’t work out.  Shocking.

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