Just In Case You Were Wondering… 70 Is the Age to Be

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Speech class has become a place where I take the prompts I’m given, and attempt to create entertaining pieces of work out of them. And while the answers to the question, “If you could be any age for the rest of your life, what would it be?” given to my class ranged from 3 to 35, I chose… 70.
When I brought this up, people told me they thought 65 was better. However, 67 is basically retirement age here in the United States. So by the time I turned 70, I’d have worked all the years I was expected to, and then, well, we’d get to the points I make in this speech. Anyways, have this rather twisted, overly optimistic outlook on old man life.

        As children, we wish to be adults, because we want to be able to do
all the things our parents can and don’t like being told what to do.
As young to mid age adults, people want to be children again because
they’ve quickly learned how stressful life can be. As older adults,
people want to be at retirement age, because who likes work? If I had
to choose, the age I would be for the rest of my life would be 70, —
because of the respect I’d get, the discounts, and not having to work!
        As a 70 year old, you get the senior discount at most places. Man,
wouldn’t it be nice to go out to eat, and get to pay the least amount
out of everyone because you’re more experienced at life? There’s no
reason for it besides how old you are. And because you’ve already
worked hard for years of your life, you don’t have to compensate it
further.
        Secondly, I wouldn’t have to work. Why, you ask? Well, because I
already did for 50 years. I spent 50 years saving up all this money so
I could blow it as an old guy. Man, that would be nice, you know, to
get to do what you want, when you want, and not stress about going,
to, work.
        And finally, respect. You see, unlike the 20 somethings fresh out of
highschool or college who don’t have a job, I wouldn’t be frowned upon
and told to get my lazy butt out the door; no, I’d still be respected
because I’m old. Man, I could sit there all day and eat nachos if I
wanted to, and still have all those youngsters trembling at the side
of my huge leather recliner with their “Yes sir” and “What can I do
for you, Mister?” Bro. I’m telling you, that’d be nice. I know, I’d
have to go through decades of constant work prior to it, — that’s how
the old folks earn their respect. But it would be worth it, if I
stayed that age forever, — never worrying about inferiors looking
down on me.
        So as you can clearly see, 70 is the age to be, at least for me. It
may not be all I crack it up to be, but hey. If things go south, I can
just yell at the youngsters to fix me a fresh plate of nachos. That’s
it for my speech today, I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for listening.

Yeah. I’m sure life’s not like that when you’re 70, but who cares. I was bored and in the mood to joke.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

A Successful Tournament

Hey guys,
Steve here.

I went through with it this time. I told you guys I’d be back to this blogging thing and… here I am 5 days later. Five long days, might I add, which were filled with stressful travel, painful but fun Goal Ball, and now school, I guess.

My first ever out of state Goal Ball tournament was a thrilling experience to say the least. As you may recall, last week I was both excited and nervous about it; the excitement was justified, the nervousness not so much. Out of all four games my team and I played, we won four.

Of course, there were nerves involved, two of the games we won by only three points, and most nerve racking of them all, the last game in which we played for Gold, we won by only one point. The game that I neglected to mention, we won twelve to four.

Despite Goal Ball being a bit of a pain in the butt… and the chest and the arms and the legs and the stomach… you get the picture, I really enjoy playing it and hope to go to another one of those tournaments again soon. But please, for the sake of my sanity, can we just get there without the airports? I think those were more stressful than the tournament itself.

That aside, life has resumed as normal. We returned to Texas yesterday afternoon, welcomed by dreary skies and the pattering of a dismal rainfall, a perfect match for the feelings provoked by the prospect of another daunting set of consecutive school days. Lucky for me, my week will only last three days. On Thursday, I’m traveling to the Texas School for the Blind for a weekend long program that familiarizes the blind with city travel. That’s right, city travel, no airports this time. Anyways, I’ll be there from Thursday until Sunday. I’m pretty excited about this one, because with it being based on city travel, I’ll basically be exploring the city of Austin for a few days, and from what I can gather it’s quite large, and there are numerous things to do there.

In the mean time, while I’m living the good old normal life for a few short days, I’ll get some work done on my projects. Also, if Danny and I can get some technical issues sorted out, we might be able to record a podcast. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of those, but just as I have this blog I plan to go back to that at some point; if not this week, then perhaps when I’m not so busy.

That concludes tonight’s post. Depending on how much I get done code wise, I’ll give a progress update on my games when I blog next week. I probably won’t be posting until Sunday or Monday, because not much is likely to happen in the next three days.

Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

Return to Normalcy

Hey guys,
Steve here.

I really need to stop doing this. Over the last 50 days or however long it has been, this blog acquired 10 new followers. I’m guessing they followed me in hopes that they’d see future posts from me, which I have not done a good job of producing.

I remember a time when I’d blog every 4 to 10 days, because I didn’t try to stick to a certain topic. Recently, though, I’ve found myself unintentionally gearing towards one subject, game development. While I enjoy game development, quite fervently might I add, it was not my intention for this blog to become solely based on that. This does not
mean the end of my technical rants and detailed game idea postings; those will still occur, but it’s time
this blog return to the way it was before, when I didn’t attempt to bind myself to one particular
subject.

Because it’s been so long since my last post, I have a lot to say, but I’ll try to separate it into
multiple posts so I’m not talking about five different things in one. But as a general, perhaps five word
summary, the last month and 1/whatever was good… well… great.

My seventeenth birthday has already passed. Unfortunately, due to my attempt at binding myself
to one blogging subject, I didn’t post anything then; and when I don’t post something on such a grand
holiday, you know something’s not right. That said, it was one of the greatest birthdays I’ve had. I
didn’t have a party, but I will say this. The people I spent it with made it better for me than any party
idea I could’ve come up with myself, and to be honest I didn’t want one.

Aside from that, there hasn’t been much going on worth mentioning. This Friday, though, I am
traveling out of state for a goal ball tournament for the first time, something I’m both excited and
nervous about. I am not traveling with a specific team; I’m not sure whether or not I’ve been assigned
one. But here in Texas, our goal ball practices are small, so we don’t have a fully developed team of
men. I guess this one is going to be quite an adventure though.

In other news, I’ve been alternating in between my 3 projects. I actually did pull out Matt the Terrorist’s source code again, making some significant changes which I’ll discuss in a later post. I’ve also been working on Breakout, and at the moment I’m attempting to integrate a bonus level which requires the user to control multiple balls at once. I’ll let you all know how that turns out in the next post as well. But for now, I’m wrapping it up. I’ll be back after
the tournament.

Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.