Thoughts on Europe and cruising

Admittedly, I thought I’d be way worse off coming back from Europe after basically a two-week vacation.  Sure, the 22-hour trek that saw two layovers in New York and Detroit before getting back to Atlanta was pretty tiring, but I didn’t have that much difficulty in not using my recovery day, and instead returning to work immediately the next day.  Frankly, after two weeks unpaid, it seemed like the smart thing to do.

So Europe.  So cruise.  Long story short is that the vacation was pretty good, and I had a good time traversing various cities in Italy, and my first cruise ever was pretty enjoyable overall.  Maybe not as much relaxation as I’d hoped to have gotten, but I was able to sleep in for a few mornings, and those were quite pleasant.  Alternatively, there were a lot of mornings that were on the schedules of either shore excursions or travel deadlines, leading to some jam-packed agendas at times too.

Among the things learned about planning a destination vacation as such, is that in the future, shelling out a little bit of cash in order to have some travel insurance might not be such a bad idea.  Mythical gf and I got a pretty decent flight to Europe, but it was pockmarked with several layovers both to-and-from the states, and in the months approaching our trip, there were at least more than one deal that showed up with fewer layovers at a comparable price that made us come to the conclusion that perhaps there is some merit to timing.

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Okay, now I’m mad at Chick Fil-A

Utter bullshit: Chick Fil-A discontinues the breakfast spicy chicken biscuit; in favor of an egg-white chicken sandwich

I can overlook legacy founder discrimination and I can overlook the mayor of New York jumping on the boycott train two years late.  But getting rid of the spicy chicken biscuit?

Now, I have reason to have issue with Chick Fil-A.

In one fell swoop, CFA has effectively removed my favorite breakfast item, and replaced it with an item, that sounds okay on paper, but will be one that I cannot eat period, because I’m 90% sure that I have an allergy to eggs now.  Regular chicken biscuits are damn good in their own right, but if given options, I’m taking the spicy chicken biscuit four times out of five, nine times out of ten, and probably 90 times out of a hundred.

Seriously, I don’t really understand they’d 86 something that has been clearly a consistent strong performer on the menu, just because they want to introduce something else to the breakfast lineup.  It’s basically the equivalent of the Indiana Pacers trading Detlef Schrempf away because they wanted to use Rik Smits.

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League of Payforachievements

Since not all of my six readers are League of Legends players, much less gamers at all, I’ll try to kind of start with an analogy that those who have gamed at all within the better part of the last decade might understand.

Achievements, have become a pretty normal thing in today’s gaming landscape, with players getting little pop-up notifications in-game from their systems themselves, when they accomplish particular tasks in the games they are playing.  Ultimately, they’re utterly useless in the grand spectrum of most games, but their existence has created somewhat of a collecting hobby for those who game.

Some achievements are justly achieved by accomplishing monumental feats, like beating Mass Effect 2 on the hardest difficulty without dying once.  Others are as systematically simple as proceeding through the story, and getting an achievement for each notable storyline break point.  There are achievements of insanity, such as completing an entire Left 4 Dead 2 campaign only using a melee weapon.   There are achievements of futility, such as deliberately getting every single question wrong in a round of 1 vs. 100, and then there are achievements of everyone gets a trophy, such as simply starting a game.

The point is, achievements have become somewhat of a point of bragging among gamers, and one of the greatest accomplishments is getting a 100% of achievements earned in games, because usually every game has a good variety of achievements from layups to Hail Marys.  As in the case of XBOX Live, players’ stats have a running tally of how many games they get 100% success rate on, and for players like me, it’s something to be prideful of, to be able to prove just how little of a life I can sometimes have, when I obsess over trying to Boomer Bile over all four survivors in one hurl.

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So owned

I enjoyed this too much: woman tailgates motorist, motorist taps brakes to try and get tailgater to back off, tailgater instead slams their own brakes, loses control, and spins out into the median.

Bonus:

The Fox Valley Metro Police Department told the paper that she was cited.

Bitch didn’t only get what she deserved for being an aggressive tailgater, she also got her well-deserved citation.

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GDOT is the worst

I spent an inordinately large amount of time sitting in traffic over this weekend, because the Georgia Department of Transportation is shit, and at this very moment I am writing this, the worst organization in the history of mankind, over the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and ISIS.

For whatever reasons, GDOT decided to perform road construction to every single interstate northbound route in order to get to/pass through Atlanta.  Want to get to/pass through, Atlanta via I-85/I-75?  Three lanes closed.  Want to circumvent Atlanta on I-285?  Two lanes closed on the west side of 285, and construction and a lane shift on the east side of 285.  The result of trying to take any major route to or through Atlanta is sitting in tragic standstill traffic and the desire to pull your hair out of your head.

Seriously, who the fuck decides to do this much road construction in the middle of the weekend?  Sure, there is undoubtedly one worse time to do any sort of road construction, which is during the middle of any weekday work rush hour, but in the middle of the weekend afternoons has to be easily the second worst times to do traffic.  And to every single major northbound vein, at the same time?  That’s not just lunacy, it’s downright idiotic.

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The fallacy of casual League of Legends

Typically, whenever I play League of Legends, I play ARAM, because they’re quicker, not taken nearly as seriously as Summoner’s Rift matches, and as odd as it is to say, considering the occasional anxiety and unhappiness of randomly getting a champion you don’t like, there’s something inherently relaxing about ARAM, because there’s an accountability that is taken off the table, by everyone having their players randomly chosen.  I take a lot of flack about my enjoyment of ARAM from some of my friends, but I don’t really care, because I like ARAM, and I think it’s a mode where it kind of helps players actually dare to think outside of the box, instead of falling into “the metas” that people only on the highest level of play dictate, and everyone believes they can emulate.

However lately, I’ve been playing Summoner’s Rift again, because I’ve again been entertaining the thought of taking the plunge into ranked play, to see where I could end up on the gargantuan player pool of League.  Last season, I placed into Silver II, and I made little effort to try and climb out, because it was very late in the season, and secondly I just didn’t care that much.  Ultimately, I was hoping that I could squeak my way into Gold-tier, so that I could get the Victorious Morgana skin, whom only Gold or higher players received, but alas, it was just not in the stars for me to get there.

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