New Year's Resolutions

[Flack]

So, does anybody even do this anymore? I mentioned to a few people that I was still working on my list of resolutions for this year and the two responses I got were, "resolutions are stupid," and, "I don't do that anymore because I end up breaking them all and it just makes me feel like a failure." In a distant third I got, "why do people wait until the first of the year to decide to change their lives when they could do it at any time?"

Maybe I am just that old school.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah, I'll do some.

#1. MURDER SOME TROUBLEMAKERS: In the week between a few days before Christmas and New Year's (not really a week, strictly, but it went by so fast I'll -- whatever IT WAS A WEEK) I had the following happen to me:

- Someone spray painted shit onto my house
- A homeless guy was hidden in the hedges between my house and screamed at me, at 9:30 at night, to "get off his lawn"
- My house was hit with two eggs

After no neighborhood drama for several years, there were three incidents in a week. So basically, someone's gonna fucking die. When I was asked why I was interested in getting a gun, my response was, "I want to shoot people." The guy laughed and then I laughed, and then I accidentally overlaughed and well... I'm still waiting for the paperwork to go through. I might have gotten flagged. I am lucky enough to live in a state with a good "Castle Doctrine," and although it doesn't strictly allow me to shoot people in the face if they so much as think about my house, I believe I can drag their blood-spurting, bullet-riddled corpses onto my property afterwards, and cover it all up with a knowing wink to the cops.

HITTAGE ODDS: 80%. I've got an itchy trigger finger, and I am going to get the teflon-coated trigger mod for my gun. You can make it discharge by just wishing hard.


#2. GO TO EUROPE: The only place I have ever been that wasn't in America has been Toronto, where I normally see the Blue Jays get the shit kicked out of them. I think I am something like 2-13 lifetime, watching them. Our currency has temporarily "recovered" for a little bit, though I expect it to be the me-watching-the-Blue-Jays of currency before too long. I'm going to have a hell of a lot of 2-13 currency, if you follow. So before the global collapse, I want to see the Loch Ness Monster.

HITTAGE ODDS: 99%. I booked the flight, and DIA had a crash a few weeks ago, meaning they are gonna be extra careful for the next few months.


#3. FINISH THE GODDAMN TEXT GAME I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON SINCE APRIL 2006: This is the big one! Cryptozookeeper, my work-in-progress, is gonna be the one they remember me for, if I get remembered at all. I've spent more time on this game than any other project in my life, as long as you don't count college (and the code in this thing is better than anything I did in school). I'd like to make proclaimations like, "Win some XYZZY awards" or whatever, but honestly, I just want people to get a kick out of it and make the rounds on all the indie gaming portal sites because people enjoy it.

HITTAGE ODDS: 90%. I'd say there is a one in ten chance I don't finish it this year, because - based on my other two resolutions - I may either be stranded in Europe or in prison. I assume wireless access is equal in both places, so if I do get in trouble, it's gonna be tough for me to check the game out of cvs.

[Worm]

1. Not to need stitches again

2. Don't vomit again

3. Crush a bitch

[Flack]

I've only needed stitches once, and that was after having been hit by a truck while walking down the side of the Interstate (hint: it sucked). While I never considered myself to be a particularly wimpy kid, my son has already had stitches, knocked himself out, and broken his arm, all within the last year. Either he's one adventurous little bugger or DHS is waiting in the wings to come swoop him up.

I don't know if "crushing a bitch" is a euphemism for something or if you sincerely hope not to flatten a woman with your girth; either way, I wish you luck.

Jonesy, you would have loved my old house. It was in El Reno, a town right next to an Indian reservation. There were tons and tons of Native Americans who would collect unemployment, so they would live on the Rez most of the time and then on the first and fifteenth they would come into town, cash their checks, blow it all at the liquor store, and then pass out wherever they ended up. I lived close enough to a convenient store that the sidewalk around my house was a fairly frequent sleeping lane. Behind our house we had a shed which was more or less being used full time as a residence by drunk Indians. When I put a lock on the front door they just tore the door off, so I gave up on that battle. More than once I found people sleeping in between my bushes and the house, on my sidewalk, and once on my front porch. They were like cockroaches ... with dream catchers.

[Maxell]

I made the resolution to be more honest. It's now 6 days into the new year and basically I think honesty can go blow goats. I am more alone now than I've ever been in my life thusfar and I'm gonna go back to lying. Seriously this is some whack shit, what the goddamn fuck was I thinking.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I would honestly like to murder the kids who graffitied my house.

[Flack]

This is long, boring, and was already posted on my blog, but here are my resolutions for 2009.

01. Lose Weight.

This one deserves an honorary lifetime achievement award, as I'm sure it'll end up on every list of New Year's Resolutions I make for the rest of my life. Last year I proved that lapband surgery in and of itself cannot force a person to lose weight. My goal this year is to follow the suggested Weightwise eating habits as much as possible. In addition I plan on walking somewhere between three times a week and five times a week (giving myself a little leeway), and (sigh) counting calories. My ultimate goal is to lose 100 pounds before my 20-year reunion. That's pretty simple math -- that's a pound a week over the next two years. That seems achievable, doesn't it?

02. Read More.

Another repeat offender, this one. The good news is, last year I did read more. The bad news is, more was a relative term, as in 2007 I read almost nothing. In 2009 I resolve to read at least one fiction book each month; that's twelve books this year -- certainly an achievable goal, and a sharp increase from last year. Ideally those twelve books will be fiction, or at least not dry technical manuals.

03. Remodel Upstairs.

My 600 square foot upstairs media/game room is overrun with clutter. It's a non-kid-friendly, junk filled mess. This year I have several projects in mind for the room. The first is, remove the shoddy shelves I put up a couple of years ago. A bunch of two-by-fours nailed to one another isn't fooling anybody. After that, the next project will be to relocate the flat panel television from the west wall to the south wall. I know you can't visualize it but, trust me, it makes more sense over there. The television will be wall mounted and I plan on surrounding it with wall shelves, maybe to house the aforementioned Star Wars collection (or some subset thereof). A secret plan that you cannot tell Susan about is I plan to install a door in the upstairs closet that opens into the attic, where I can store more stuff. Shhh.

04. Thin Out Gaming Consoles.

There's no reason to have three Nintendo 64 consoles hooked up and ready to play. Over the past several years I have fallen into the "quantity over quality" category when it comes to videogame collecting. Yes, I have a lot of old videogames and computers, but they don't all need to be out on display all the time, especially the ones that never will get (or never have been) played. I'm not ready to sell everything, but a lot of things are about to be disconnected and stored away for the time being. I have a Sega Saturn that I've owned for five years now and have only played for fifteen minutes total.

05. Record an Album's Worth of Music.

For the purpose of this one I'm going to define an album's worth of material as ten songs, so there's that. To achieve this goal, the ten songs must be complete and posted on robohara.com. I am not making any restrictions as to the type (or quality) of the music. Recording music is something I enjoy doing and I'm not going to let the fact that I can 't sing stop me from doing it.

06. Write (at least) One Book.

I have several books brewing, none of them associated with old computers or arcade games. Part two of this goal is to pursue a traditional publishing house. I have two self-published books under my belt now; I've done that. I am a good writer who could be great with a little guidance and editing. I also suspect I could do better in the sales department with an advertising department and distributor behind me.

07. Traincor -- Get Moving.

I still dream of making Traincor (a training company based around technology-based training) a reality. Last year one of my resolutions was to get the ball rolling by teaching at least one class in the name of Traincor. That did not happen. I'm not giving up on this one just yet. I'm giving myself one more year to do something -- anything -- to get this off the ground. The resolution for this one is the same as it was last year: prepare, advertise, and publicly offer at least one training class in the name of Traincor within 2009. If I haven't done anything with Traincor by the end of 2009, I resolve to let the domain name expire and move on.

08. Organize a Monthly "Movie" Night.

Technically, it doesn't even have to be movies. It could be videogames, board games, poker, whatever. The point isn't the activity, it's to hang out with my friends more often, something I let slide in 2008. I need to come up with a set date (like the last Friday or Saturday of every month, something like that) and just throw it out there and see who shows up. I realize not everyone can come every month, but in trying to juggle schedules last year we ended up not doing it at all. That's not going to happen this year. Wow, I think I just worked out the details while typing. The last Friday of every month is now officially "Movie Night." (EDIT: Invitations for the first official movie night just went out. This one has already started rolling!)

09. Load and Begin Using Linux/Ubuntu

While Ubuntu 8.04 was good, 8.10 was even better. Since I'm not a big PC gamer, there are very few things at this point that I cannot do in Linux that I can do in Windows. Between cloud computing, DRM, and licensed-software packages, I have a bad feeling about the direction Windows is heading. I think now may be the time to make the switch and learn my way around before it's too late, and I'm too old.

10. Attend, and Participate in, Blockparty.

Blockparty is a demoparty hosted by [url=http://ascii.textfiles.com"]Jason Scott[/url] at Cleveland's annual Notacon hacker convention each April. Demoparties consist of the creating and judging of computer-based demos. Not only do I plan to attend Blockparty this year, I plan to enter multiple categories. While I have no place entering some of the categories, Blockparty has several photography and music-related categories which, even if I cannot win, I can enter.

11. Go Digital.

I've been working on this one for a while now, and I expect to be done shortly. The two big focus areas of this one are: getting rid of all VHS tapes and getting rid of all cassette tapes. I am winning both of those battles and hope to have the house clean of both items shortly. That leaves music CDs, which are also slowly being ripped and copied up to the server. LPs are not really a problem at this point; I have a few, but they are more for artwork than listening now. I do have a few that need converting over but that is way down near the bottom of the list. Once the mp3s project is done I plan on rewarding myself by having an mp3-playing stereo installed in the truck.

12. Use RSS.

RSS has been around for years now and other than going, "well huh, that's neat," I've never actually used it. This is the year that changes. While typing this sentence I created an account for Google's RSS reader and punched in RSS feeds for my top 10 favorite blogs. This is going to end up saving my a ton of time checking websites for new posts and a ton of money on my car insurance (just kidding on that second one). I'd like to move from "wow, neat toy" to "hey this is saving me a lot of time" mode. My only reservation is that, knowing me, I'll soon be following 200 feeds and taking up the same amount of time reading that I was previously spending. Ah well, can't fix everything in a single year. By the way, I moved the RSS feed for robohara.com back to Feedburner (RSS Link for robohara.com). It should be working better now.

13. Relaunch the Podcast

I did six episodes of You Don't Know Flack last year -- a decent start, but well below my projected amount. I ran into some technical recording quality difficulties along the way last year that I have since have ironed out. This year's goal is lower than last year's goal but higher than last year's results; I plan on releasing one episode of You Don't Know Flack per month. That's only twelve episodes; surely I can manage that.

14. Clean out the Garage

Man I was so close this year, and Susan was actually able to park her car in the garage ... for about a week. Old habits reappeared, and soon the garage was again full of crappola and there was no way to get a car inside it. If I could get the garage cleaned out enough for that (one car to fit inside), I would be happy. This one can be pushed back a bit since it will take a while to complete, so I'm giving myself until the fall to complete this one. It's a goal, but on the back burner for now.

15. Drink ... Water

Part of the Lapband plan is to not get any calories from drinks, period. Because of the surgery I can no longer have carbonated drinks (which I no longer drink), but unfortunately I made the switch to lemonade, fruit punch, and fruity-tooty iced coffees. No more. For all of 2009, from today forward, I will only drink water or other 0-calorie drinks (ie: Crystal Light or iced-tea). No more coffees, no more lemonade, no more sugary fruit punch. I am giving myself one out on this one; I will give myself one night a month off, in case we have visitors in from out of town or, you know, I happen to have a movie night.

I also made five gaming-related resolutions.

16. Set aside two mini-gaming sessions a week.

These will be anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, twice a week (Tuesday and Wednesday night, perhaps?). One of these will be used to play a modern (PS3/360/Wii) game, the other will be used to play a retro game of my choosing (16 bit or older).

17. Update [url=http://www.review-o-matic.com"]Review-o-Matic[/url] at least once a week.

This one originally said "write at least two game reviews a month," but I figure one review a week isn't too much to ask when you add in movies, music, books, and everything else. Ostensibly, the games that get played in the previous resolution will most likely be reviewed.

18. Spend at least one hour a week out in the arcade.

I have an arcade that I rarely play games in. In 2009 I plan on spending at least one hour a week out in the arcade. This time can be spent either playing games, or working on them. Most likely, it'll be a combination of the two.

19. Set up a high-score tracking system out in the arcade.

A white board would work, but I'm thinking something fancier. I already tried my hand at writing one in Visual Basic and it didn't go well, so Jeff is trying it now (I may retry my hand again soon as well, just because I hate failure). I think one of the best things about arcade games is the competition that arises from trying to break high scores, most of which are lost when the machines are powered off.

20. Set up a game night.

This one is actually a cop-out. I had originally written a long diatribe about how I own all these arcade games and videogames and never play them with anyone, but after I wrote all that I wrote resolution number 8 ("Movie Night") and so I think this resolution will get rolled up into that one. For the first month we'll watch movies; next month, we'll play games. Two birds (er, resolutions) with one stone, so to speak.

[AArdvark]

but in trying to juggle schedules last year we ended up not doing it at all.

This is the downfall of any kind of social interaction where two or more people arrange to get together for the purpose of 'fun'. I cannot count how many times this has happened when I set something up.


THE
MAYBE NEXT MONTH
AARDVARK

[gsdgsd]

I haven't set these down anywhere, so why not.

1. get through surgery ok. Admittedly, I don't have a lot of control over this one.

2. learn Czech. I resolve to do this every year, so it's kind of comforting to have that on the list. It's an old friend.

3. get a new job. Preferably in Denver or Prague.

There you go. Three achievable resolutions.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

My other resolutions include writing something once a month for Caltrops' front page, and three times a week here. We'll see how that goes.

[Maxell]

My new and improved New years resolution is to drink more water. Thanks, Flack! Nothing could go wrong with that one, right?

[Flack]

but in trying to juggle schedules last year we ended up not doing it at all.

This is the downfall of any kind of social interaction where two or more people arrange to get together for the purpose of 'fun'. I cannot count how many times this has happened when I set something up.

Exactly -- that's why this year I decided to just schedule them and see who shows up. Of my three close friends, one has four kids, one is a busy artist, and one is a fireman who, after ten or so years, I'm still trying to figure his schedule out (every other day for three days followed by four days off except every other month and during full moons ... or something).

In trying to set up events for all four of us, we rescheduled so many times that I ended up seeing none of them. This year I'll just set the dates and whoever shows, show. If I only see one or two of them, then that's okay. And if nobody shows up ... well, I was probably going to be home anyway.

[Flack]

2. learn Czech. I resolve to do this every year, so it's kind of comforting to have that on the list. It's an old friend.

I actually live just outside of Oklahoma City in a town called Yukon, which was founded by Czechs. Every year we have a Czech Festival (Pics from this year's parade) that we always attend -- it's kind of like a party for 30,000 people. I don't really know that much about Czechs other than they make a mean kolache and throw one heck of a parade. If you learn Czech by next Fall you can swing by and try out your skills ... or at least have a kolache with me.

Mmmm. Kolaches.

[loafergirl]

I took this from the Book of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes about 10 years ago and I'm still trying to use it as a resolution...

"For every evil under the sun,
there's a solution, or there is none,
if there be one, try to find it,
and if there be none, nevermind it."

[Worm]

that's a pound a week over the next two years. That seems achievable, doesn't it?

http://health.discovery.com/tools/calcu ... basal.html
You'd have to go 1000 calories under that.

[Flack]

This was my list of resolutions from 2009. It's now 2019. Let's check back in with ten-years-younger Flack!

01. Lose Weight.

Over the past two months, I've lost 35 pounds. Say what you will, but carb cutting works. Things are fitting better and I have more energy. We're winning this one!

02. Read More.

This is such a low bar, as "more" usually means "more than none." This year I read a couple of classics and several nonfiction books. I think I read just over a dozen books this year, which is less than I would have liked, but better than younger me. Another win!

03. Remodel Upstairs.

I sold the house this was in reference to. I then bought another house, lived in it for seven years, and sold it. Right now I'm in the middle of a backyard construction project, and am making things happen. I'll call this one a win.

04. Thin Out Gaming Consoles.

I got rid of a bunch, and all the others are currently in storage. I actually thinned the collection out too much! While technically this one's a win, we'll be course correcting next year.

05. Record an Album's Worth of Music.

Didn't happen; lost interest. Won't happen and don't feel bad about it.

06. Write (at least) One Book.

I have, since this post, written at least one book. I wish I had written more. Writing more consistently is always a goal of mine. Technically a win, but more focus needs to be applied here. I will say that since this post I got a master's degree in professional writing, so that's something.

07. Traincor -- Get Moving.

Didn't happen, not interested in making it happen.

08. Organize a Monthly "Movie" Night.

So I did do this for a while. I was having four friends come over on a regular basis. I lost touch with one friend, one got married and had two kids, and one moved out of state. It was fun while it lasted, and I may try to relaunch this in the future, but it worked for a while and it was fun.

09. Load and Begin Using Linux/Ubuntu

I loaded and used Linux and Ubuntu. It never became my primary operating system, but I'm more comfortable with it than I was back then.

10. Attend, and Participate in, Blockparty.

So, this happened. I recorded a song and entered the audio demo competition and placed 7th out of 15 entries. I also spoke at Notacon, the con that hosted Blockparty. So, win/win!

11. Go Digital.

Last month, I boxed up all my DVDs and am donating them to a local arcade. I still own a few DVDs and VHS tapes for nostalgic purposes, but 90% of my physical media is gone. I will part with my CD collection in 2020.

12. Use RSS.

I guess RSS was new in 2009? I love RSS. I was a big fan of Google Reader (RIP) and still use INOReader to this day.

13. Relaunch the Podcast

I launched and relaunched podcasts several times since 2009. Once my shop is complete, I plan to have a dedicated podcasting space and return to the studio for more shows in 2020.

14. Clean out the Garage

Fail. Once the shop is done, I plan on downsizing more stuff and moving all my stuff out there, thus allowing my wife (for the first time in 25 years) my wife to park in our garage. 2020 is the year!

15. Drink ... Water

So this happened, or mostly happened. 99% of the time, I now drink water, Crystal Light, or unsweet tea. I still drink beers occasionally, but I completely cut out soda and (other than minor exceptions) haven't had one since 2009. (I still get complimentary 4oz cups of Root Beer at the casino for good luck, and drink Sprite when I am super sick, but I haven't purchased a can of soda from a vending machine or drank one with a regular meal in a decade now.)

Then, it appears, I made five gaming-related resolutions. Let's see how those went.

16. Set aside two mini-gaming sessions a week.

Fail. I haven't played a game in six months.

17. Update [url=http://www.review-o-matic.com"]Review-o-Matic[/url] at least once a week.

Sorta fail. I still write reviews on occasion, but they're almost always movie reviews, following by album reviews. Game reviews are at the very bottom.

18. Spend at least one hour a week out in the arcade.

I sold all my arcade games. But I spent one hour a week crying about it so there's that. In the new shop I plan to gave a couple of MAME machines so maybe there's hope.

19. Set up a high-score tracking system out in the arcade.

Never wrote it, but talked about it quite a bit.

20. Set up a game night.

Got rid of most of my games and most of my friends.

---

So there you go! Mostly, successes! Time to start that new list for 2020!