Unique!

So, I googled my name this morning, for kicks. It's amazing the stuff that comes up. For instance, I learned today that there is only one person with my name in all of Canada.

Skirmish Tips and Tricks

I'm no expert at skirmishes. I am in the process of learning all kinds of things about skirmishes, and with any learning process comes encounters with various problems. Following are some tactics I've developed to overcome various problems I've run into.

Problem: My soldier initiates fights before I've had a chance to do some crowd control.
Tip: Run backwards toward the fight. This puts your soldier the farthest away from the skirmish. Then do your CC while everyone is still positioned favorably. The non-CCed baddies will rush up to you, and your soldier can wallop them to her heart's content.

Problem: The NPCs keep doing ____ which I don't like.
Tip: Let 'em run out of power. Then all they can do is auto-attack, which, while still potentially a problem, is better than letting them have their full arsenal of actions you don't like.

Problem: I can't do the optional encounter without becoming overwhelmed!
Tip: get yourself into a position where you are in a fight with several baddies and no lieutenants, and then pull the optional encounter, and focus on that one. As long as those other baddies are still alive, I've found the next fight won't start. This is better than having both the encounter and a lieutenant in your face.

Problem: I can't see my fellows' soldiers' health bars. How can I heal them?
Tip: The coloured marking (looks like a 4-pointed star) under every soldier and NPC is a health indicator. Green means healthy, yellow means about half health, orange means desperately needs healing and invisible means your soldier/NPC bit the bullet so why are you still looking at the ground?
Tip: You can also target any of your fellows and their pets and soldiers (as well as your own!) by hitting certain hot keys, F1 through F6. Hitting the key multiple times cycles you through your fellow and his pet and/or soldier. F1 maps to you, and F2-F6 map to each of your fellows.

Problem: I need a couple more seconds to heal up/eat/prepare before the next fight!
Tip: Predict where the next fight is coming from, and run away from that spot. Your NPCs will be fine for a few seconds while you hide from combat and prepare.

Problem: I keep running out of power!
Okay, this hasn't happened to me but I keep reading how it is happening to others.
Tip: In non-solo skirmishes, do power-restoring FMs.
Tip: Bring a LM (What? Okay, so I'm biased. ;))
Tip: Try power-conserving stances/instruments/skills. Skirmishes have a big endurance factor to them.
Tip: Boost your will/fate/ICPR/OoCPR stats.
Tip: Allow your soldier and NPCs to do more of the dirty work. Possibly, place a hunter fire someplace where you are not likely to get caught in combat. Hang out there while the NPCs handle things for a few seconds. Be ready to rescue those NPCs when you do decide to join the fray.
Tip: Consumables are your friends! Bring the biggest, bestest blue potions you can get your hands on. Scrolls of battle/warding cut down on the amount of work you need to do. Food that restores power is handy, too, and of course, hope tokens never hurt.
Tip: Watch those lieutenants to see if they are doing something to your power.
Tip: Try a herbalist. Apparently they heal power as well as morale.

Soldiers vs Pets

I've been thinking about skirmishes and trying to figure out the nature of the beast, so that I can learn how to excel at them. I play a lore-master, primarily, which means that I am used to having a pet to do my bidding. I thought that surely my soldier would be the same kind of thing and that I had a leg up on how to deal with them. Well, I don't. Soldiers are a whole different thing, really. Here are some key differences:

Control
Your pet will obey a variety of commands, such as 'kill everything that can blink' or 'sit still no matter what'. You can't control your soldier. Your soldier is a free-'thinking' being who will do basically as she pleases. She is like your classic townsperson who has 'had it up to here' with the evils besieging her town. She's frothing at the mouth and raring to go and you don't have any ability to hold her back (other than not summoning her in the first place - a bad idea). She'll break your roots and mezzes and she won't care. She'll run up to the boss doing AoE if it suits her - you can only tell her to attack something else if you want her to stop that.

Positioning
As mentioned, you can tell your pet where to be. You can tell them to stay or follow. You can try to control your soldier's position, but you'll have to be clever about your own positioning to do this. I believe this depends on your soldier's role, but an example is the warrior, who insists on being in front of you. This translates to always being in front of you no matter which direction you are facing. She will run off ahead of you, so if you think there's something there to aggro, be prepared for her to begin the fight on her schedule (not yours).

**Handy trick: I've taken to backing toward fights, so that I am between my target and my soldier. That way, I can initiate the fight by mezzing my choice of targets (I don't have to face my target for that to work), and then the others rush toward me, and since my soldier is standing further from them than I am, and facing away from them, it buys me more time to drag them away from my mezzed target before she opens up her AoE attacks.

Relative Importance
Pets are important, but if you lose your pet, you will probably be okay. Soldiers are much more important in the land of skirmishes. You will constantly be outnumbered, and I am getting the impression that your soldier isn't just there to help you take the edge off of that. I believe the idea is that your soldier is supposed to be, in basic terms, your equal. If you're in a 3-man skirmish, then from what I've seen, it appears to be about the same environment as a full fellowship instance. A fellowship skirmish is more or less like a 12-man raid environment. I haven't tried a 12-man skirmish, but I bet it's like a 24-man raid. The key difference is that your soldiers don't communicate with you, and they don't have a whole lot of variety.

With all this in mind, I will be focusing my skirmish marks on getting my soldier up to my level, so she can be a formidable teammate rather than a throwaway helping hand.

LotRO: Seige of Mirkwood

I am very, very excited about this new expansion for Lord of the Rings Online. There are so many great things about it and so very much for me to do, especially over the next few weeks, that I consider it a moral victory to do things like sleep, go to work, and perform at concerts. Those people you read about who take time off work on update day - I get it now - I wish I'd done the same, but I know better *sigh*. Here are some of the attention-grabbing features of this update:

Skirmishes!
These puppies are the ultimate in customizable game-playing. You can scale the size, the difficulty, and the levels of the baddies you're fighting (rewards will vary according to your selection). You can start them wherever you want - no more travelling for 15 minutes to get to the battle site. You get your own soldier companion who definitely has a mind of his/her own. You can customize your soldier's race, gender and 'class', and you can control how they get stronger - skillwise, levelwise, and attribute-wise. You can pick from a variety of instances, and there are oodles of things to spend your reward skirmish marks on.

Mirkwood!
I have not paid much attention to this yet, considering the presence of skirmishes in combination with all these obligations (sleep, work, concerts) hogging my time. However, it's a new region, with new monsters, a new rep faction, new quests, new places to see and explore, and new raid content as well.

Crafting!
With the inclusion of 5 more levels to gain comes the need for shiny new gear, and shiny new things to stuff into your shiny new legendary items. This expansion features more than just new recipes - it comes with a few new kinds of recipes. Now you can craft a 4th type of relic for your LI (some tradeable, som BoA). You can also craft new armour that comes out in different ways (I will have to check this out sometime soon!).

Item Management
This update comes with an optional adventure pack, which comes with new shared inventory of up to 20 items (I think?) that you can share with all your alts. Even if you didn't purchase this adventure pack, you can still take advantage of the new mount system to gain a free bag space slot or two (or in my case, 6) by converting your mount token to a mount skill. Each horse token becomes its own skill! You'll probably need this space too, for your different types of skirmish marks. Aside from inventory, you will also have to re-spend your legendary points on each of your legendary items, because they all got a make-over as well. And, while you're fiddling with all this, you can also customize your toolbars so that your choice of buttons display.


Along with this expansion, the website utility known as my.lotro.com has also been revamped to accomodate skirmish info as well as a host of other tweaks. It's all very neat to see. My.lotro now keeps a skirmish log for you, with all kinds of stats and even some charts. One thing it came with was a big reminder of all the characters I've made over various servers. Their new lottery feature includes a list of all your characters that are eligible for the lotteries, and today's lottery looks like it is available to every character. Seeing this, I looked over at my character list, and I have an even 30 characters, including monster characters. This number is about to change to 31, as I am planning on taking advantage of my new character slots that came with the adventure pack I purchased.

I think I will be verrrrrry busy over the next little while!

Musings on 'Socialism'

Socialism is spoken as though it were a dirty word in the US, and this sentiment is spreading northward into Canadian territory as well. I'm not sure quite why that is, really. This is a continent that has a very large percentage of Christians (of various stripes). Christian institutions, on the whole, seem to advocate socialism, in a sense, in that they often organize charities and emphasize helping those in need. In the bible, you come across stuff like this all the time:

Proverbs 31:9 (New International Version)
Speak up and judge fairly;
defend the rights of the poor and needy.

So where's the political disconnect? I will confess to being largely ignorant on the topic, but it seems to come to light mostly with the public healthcare issue. The have-nots want it, and the haves don't want it. And before it gets seriously considered, before too long, someone spits out the dirty s-word and all thought on the topic ceases. The problem is that just like other public institutions such as road infrastructure and schools, policemen, firemen, television, and many other things, public healthcare helps everyone and it helps the population as a whole.

Yes, there's the issue of how to make healthcare work, what exactly the nuts n bolts of such a system would be, but people have a hard time thinking about it because the word 'socialism' pops up and people's brains shut down. I live in a country that has public healthcare and I'm glad we have it. Could it be better? Sure. How? That's a difficult question. Would I give it up completely? Not easily. Does this make me biased? I suppose it well could, but even so, we're also still a capitalist country. Just, we seem to choose tenets of the socialist philosophy that enrich our lives, and the tenets of capitalism that help us excel as well. I think the key is balance. I don't think 'socialism' should be a show-stopping word, and I don't think 'capitalism' should be, either.

Road Trip - Day 7 and 8

Well, it sure looks like I've procrastinated quite a lot on this road trip report...

Day 7 involved on of the weirdest 'enter a building' procedure I've ever encountered. We woke up in our ginormous hotel room, ate a buffet breakfast, and headed for downtown Detroit in search of information on a particular rent collection/payment program. The building we had to go to was a government building, and it must have been a pretty important one, because we had a hell of a time even getting inside, due to the building's security. Most public buildings involve entering the front door, but not so for this building. We tried it, and right away people from inside the bulding were running toward us yelling, "Not this way!" They shooed us out right quick. People outside the building helpfully told us we had to go around to the side to enter. So, we tried this, and again, people ran toward us yelling, "Not this door!" and "Not this side!" So, back outside again, and thoroughly perplexed, we looked for another entryway.

We did eventually find a way in, and, once inside, we had to wait in line to go through security. This is not really an issue for us since we don't carry weaponry or illegal stuff or the like. However, this time, we had with us every shred of electronic equipment we had brought on our road trip, since it's foolish in the extreme to leave that kind of thing in the car. As everyone there says, "This is Detroit!" So, the security guys who had to x-ray our bags had a really fun time taking out each and every item, including tangles of cords and wires, papers, and quite the assortment of other knick-knacks. Then they very sloppily put everything back in, so that papers were crumpled and things protruded in a badly balanced and uncomfortable arrangement.

Getting to where we needed to go once inside the building also took us a while, considering that after the strict and unadvertised entry procedure, they just sort of turned us loose. We did eventually find a listing someplace for the general block of floors we needed to head to, with the obvious first choice turning out to be under construction - no offices were open on that floor and we probably shouldn't have been there, but we didn't know that at first. We did find the office we looked for, did what we had to do, and then on our way out, the woman helping us realized I wasn't my boyfriend's kid sister but an adult in my own right, and then she spent another 5 or so minutes gushing about how young I look, which totally made up for the rest of my experience in that building.

After this escapade, we decided it was probably time to head out - out of the city and out of the United States. We headed for the border, which featured a lot of signs pointing us toward the 'Bridge to Canada'. The bridge, called the Ambassador Bridge, is pretty impressive, and so even if the signs hadn't been there, it would have been relatively easy to find. At the border, the border crossing agent almost didn't believe us that our total declaration after a week of travelling through 10 different states was $9.00 (fridge magnets for every state we went through, except I forgot to buy a Minnesota one). As well he shouldn't have, as it turned out we also had an $8.00 map that we'd forgotten about.

Once in Canada, we stopped for lunch at a McDonald's that had a recycling program (which was nice to see and something I totally wish we had in our city's fast food joints). Then we headed for Hamilton, which is where our flight the next day departed from. We found the airport, made arrangements for dropping off our rental car the next day, and then continued onward to... Niagara Falls! This was somewhat spur-of-the-moment, in that we'd just decided we should go there the night before, in our hotel room. The conversation went something like this:

Me (to myself): I wonder if that place is close to where we're going...
My bf: What place?
Me: That really famous waterfall... you know, really big, popular, Canada side is totally better...
Him: You mean Niagara Falls? o.O
Me: Yeah! We should see if it's near where we'll be!

...pause while I look it up...

Me: Yes, yes it is. It's practically right next to Hamilton. Looks like it's about an hour past it.
Him: We are going there.
Me: Woo-hoo!

So, we got to Niagara Falls in the late afternoon and, since we had to pay $20 just to park there, spent some time looking around and signing up for a tour through some tunnels behind the waterfall. It was quite a nifty experience, and very... damp. We were given rain-covers with our tickets and it's a good thing, too. Water was spraying everywhere, which made for quite a nice rainbow. The town there is very touristy - it reminded me of Vegas, with all the tourist attractions, lights, restaurants (with views, of course), and fancy hotels. And of course, there were people all over the place.



After that, we went back to Hamilton, searched for a restaurant that was open for us to eat at - it was about 9:00 pm, and due to the economy or something, half the businesses downtown, where we were, were closed down. Two Subway sandwiches and a nice walk later, we bedded down for an early wake-up the next day.

Day 8 consisted mostly of just flying home. We returned the rental car with over 5000km more on the odometer than when we picked it up initially. Waiting for us at home were two lonely cats and a LOT of veggies in the garden.

Road Trip - Day 6

Haha, I totally dropped the ball on this, didn't I?

Day 6, we woke up in Kalamazoo and continued on our merry way. We got to Detroit, which was our 'business' part of the trip. By now, it's been two months since I was there, so the memories are getting fuzzy. The city is very large, and the houses are very cute. They are mostly made of bricks, and they are packed together all cozy-like. Every lawn seems to be meticulously kept. We went there to see about potentially buying property there, so our day was spent looking at all the houses.

I don't want this to be too much of a socio-political commentary, but from what we observed, there is a very clear line across the city, and on one side, that's white people territory, and on the other, it's black people territory. Home is nothing like that, so it was weird to see. What I am happy to say we did not see was disrespect between people with different skin colours.

Anyhow, we saw a few business prospects while we were there, but after two months of mulling it over, we still haven't decided whether we're going to do anything there. It's difficult to know precisely what we can expect out of each potential venture, and so we haven't acted on any of it at this point. Plus, we're not even from that state/country, so even if we knew what to expect out of the transaction itself, we are still not sure how international laws/taxes apply.



The hotel we stayed in that night was absolutely enormous. It had 2 big beds, a couch and accompanying sitting chair, a coffee table, a tv, a massage chair, a fireplace, another coffee table and four more accompanying chairs, a desk and accompanying office chair, a wardrobe, a small kitchen with accompanying bar and stools, a jacuzzi tub in its own little room, and of course a bathroom. This room was also the cheapest room we stayed in on the trip, and the price included a buffet breakfast. We of course tried to make use of everything the room had to offer (except the fireplace, as it was July).

Road Trip Day 5

I awoke to Day 5 in a nice comfy bed at a friend's house. After a delicious breakfast of fresh cinnamon buns, we made our way over to another friend's house, along with the couple we'd stayed with, and the five of us began our journey to Chicago. We stopped along the way at a food court place that was built over top the highway, which is a neat idea. We had Taco Bell, which was fun because the boys usually tease me that they're going to Taco Bell at around midnight their time, and I quite frankly cannot do the same, nor obviously join in the fun. Oddly, the menu item I usually order here is not the same in Wisconsin. There's a bean paste in there instead of rice (bean paste is, I will admit, the more normal thing to expect in a burrito, but rice is more interesting and also the reason I choose this particular menu item in my own city).

We continued our way to Chicago, where we went to the Museum of Science and Industry, which was a lot more like a learning center than an actual museum, though the place was home to several artifacts, which were cool to see. There were some old cars there, including a model T. We took several pictures, but mostly they turned out too dark to see much of anything. We saw a giant model train set up, which was cute. We saw baby chicks hatching, which kind of broke my heart, really. Those poor little creatures were hatched with no mama chicken around. Those chicks came into the world utterly alone, save for the other scared, alone chicks hatching near enough the same time. Anyways... *hrmph* One of the displays was a cool submarine, which was captured by Americans during WWII. That was pretty neat to see. There was also a working coal mine, but due to line up sizes and the fact that the museum closed an hour early that day, we did not check it out.

When the museum closed, we parted ways with my friends and took off to find a hotel. Unlike most of our trip, we didn't se any hotels off the side of the highway while we were in Chicago, so we stayed on the main drag for a while before deciding to just continue onward, so we ended up just going around Lake Michigan and onward to... Kalamazoo! Kalamazoo is the friendliest place ever, I think. Everyone was genuinely friendly, not just service-friendly. We told the clerk at the hotel lobby that we were staying in Kalamazoo that night purely because of the name of the city, and he was so delighted, he gave us a discount. As we settled into our room, dusk fell upon us, and brought with it fireflies. This was our first time ever seeing fireflies, and they were very neat. It's hard to believe there's a creature whose butt lights right up, but we've seen them with our own eyes. That night we watched Harry Potter, which was the opening night, and we watched it for $5 each, no line-ups, and we strolled in about 6 minutes before showtime. That was interesting. We scrutinized the tickets after the show and found they'd given us student pricing (hehe).

Doing the Dirty Deeds

In LotRO, there are certain things you can do that earn you titles, traits or sometimes other things, such as xp tokens for your legendary items. These things you can do are called deeds, and as of last November, when the expansion for LotRO was released, for every 40 deeds you do, you can raise the maximum number of quests you have open by one. When this new quest maximum bonus was implemented, my character had 5 bonus quest slots, meaning she had already done over 200 deeds. I have a new mission, which is to double that. I adopted this goal when I opened up my 49th quest slot, so I decided 40 more deeds wouldn't be too bad, and it's fun to make goals. I also decided I should document which 40 deeds I do to open up that magic 50th quest slot, mostly for the purpose of sating my own curiosity later.

There are different kinds of deeds you can do. There are the dreaded slayer deeds, which I have plenty of to do, since I don't particularly like doing them. There are also exploration deeds, which I quite enjoy. Needless to say, there aren't many of those left for me to do. Another kind of deed rewards you for doing a certain number of quests in an area. There are also hidden deeds, several of which I have done. I may solicit my friends to help me a bit with this kind, as these hidden deeds tend to be unlocked by other people doing certain emotes at you (such as bowing, cowering, saluting, kissing, cheering, and mocking). Others are gained by eating a certain amount of certain foods, which I would like to work on also. The hobby system also rewards you for certain accomplishments (currently there is only fishing, so the deeds are things like, gain a certain fishing skill level, or catch all 9 kinds of trout - that sort of thing). There are also event deeds, for such things as participating in festivals. Finally, there are adventure-based deeds, which reward you for completing instances, often having with them associated exploration and slayer deeds. These are some of my favorite, since you can often get several, just for having an adventure.

Melawe's list of dirty deeds:

1. Kill dunlendings in the school of Tham Mirdain (Eregion)
2. Kill dunlendings in Eregion
3. Kill half-orcs in Eregion
4. Kill harvest-flies in the Shire
5. Kill trolls in Sarnur (Ered Luin)
6. Kill Angmarim in Forochel
7. Find the deep-fires in Goblin Town (Misty Mountains)
8. Kill orcs in the 16th Hall (Moria)
9. Drive evil from the 16th Hall (Moria)
10. Kill Globsnaga orcs in Moria
11. Kill merrivail in Lumul-nar (Hall of Mirrors - Moria)
12. Kill Ergoth (Hall of Mirrors - Moria)
13. Kill goblins in the Grand Stair (Moria)
14. Carnivore! (eat 3 each of lots of different meat dishes)
15. Kill kergrim in Evendim
16. Pork-chopper! (kill a boar in each of the original zones)
17. Kill giants in Evendim
18. Kill barrow-wardens in Haudh Iarchith (Bree-land)
19. Executioner of the Wicked (slay 6 bosses in Haudh Iarchith - Bree-land)
20. Kill the bosses in the Hall of Crafting (Moria)
21. Collect 5 crates in the Hall of Crafting (Moria)
22. Do 40 quests in Lothlorien
23. Find the Duvardain Quarters in Carn Dum (Angmar)
24. Kill trolls in Carn Dum (Angmar)
25. Kill Angmarim in Carn Dum (Angmar)
26. Explore Caras Galadhon (Lothlorien)
27. Kill orcs in Lothlorien
28. Wanderer of the Golden Wood (explore Lothlorien)
29. Kill worms in Moria
30. The Circle of Despair (explore the area around Barad Gularan in Angmar)
31. Hall of Crafting
32. Hall of Crafting
33. Shire Brewmaster (help the tavern keeps in the Shire)
34. Kill lizards in the Water-Wheels (Moria)
35. Collect flowers in the Water-Wheels (Moria)
36. Kill harvest-flies in Bree-land
37. Lorien Lookout (Lothlorien)
38. Flet-runner (Lothlorien)
39. Kill beasts in Lothlorien
40. Doer of Great Deeds (complete certain deeds in Lothlorien)

Well, that was an experience. I like how that last one worked out - it seems appropriate!

Road Trip Day 4

Day 4 of our road trip made its beginnings with us leaving Albert Lea and heading off toward Wisconsin. On our way, we saw lots of wind farms:



After a while, as we got closer to Wisconsin, and also once we were in Wisconsin, wind farms turned into dairy farms with windmills on them, and then dairy farms with no windmills:



We stopped in Wisconsin Dells to look for a place called Witches Gulch, but alas, we did not find it. We drove all over town looking for it. I've seen pictures of it, so I know it exists; it must have been hiding on me. We finally gave up and stopped for lunch at an IHOP, which we had been thinking about doing at some point during our trip. Wisconsin Dells is a very small town with a very small population, and a large amount of tourism. It's kind of what I imagine Banff, Alberta would be like if you took it out of the mountains and traded in the moose/elk for waterslides and the like. All the appropriate elements are there: quaint but touristy downtown, pedestrian crossings everywhere, people everywhere, out-of-towners working at the service places, and, where there isn't a bunch of buildings, nice roads with trees and nature.

After that, we continued to Milwaukee, where we met up with some friends of mine from Lord of the Rings Online. Now, that was really neat. I already knew these people, but I didn't know their faces, their families, their homes, their day-to-day lives. It was a treat to see them, a lot of them all together at once. My mother worried a lot when I told her I was going to be staying at a friend's house - she told me all kinds of horror stories of people meeting up with people they'd only met online. I told her if he was creepy, we didn't have to stay there. She told me if he was an axe-murderer, I wouldn't know until it was too late. However, as I suspected, there was no need to worry. There was about as much chance I'd mis-gauged my friends as there was I'd mis-gauged my coworkers, classmates, relatives or other friends whose houses I'd been to after only being their classmates. There's always a slight chance anyone you know could be a bonafide psycho, which is why you sort of test the waters before jumping in. Anyhow, it was nice to see my friends, healthy and happy, and meet their families, who were also wonderful. We had a barbeque feast, complete with such wonders as colby-jack cheese and lime chiffon (which I will have to learn how to make), neither of which I'd ever had before. All in all, this and the following day were my favorite part of the whole trip.

Road Trip Day 3

Day 3, we woke up in the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. This place is so incredible, mere words don't do it justice. Neither do these pictures, but they're pretty good nevertheless:





The top picture is a picture of the ladder stairs we climbed to get to the top of Notch Trail, which was a pretty neat, although short, hike. The view at the top is spectacular (the second pic). The third pic shows how vast an expanse these structures are, and it also shows the stripes of different colours, and how many layers there are.

After that, we went on our merry way, to Minnesota. The rest of South Dakota, along with most of Minnesota, was not nearly so captivating as the Badlands, and as such, I actually slept through large portions of both. We stayed in Albert Lea, MN, that night, in a hotel with a shower that had no tub - just a slight dip in the tile floor so the water wouldn't get everywhere. After cleaning up, we had dinner and saw a movie (The Hangover, which was pretty funny).

Road Trip Day 2

We woke up in a beautiful campsite in Montana on Day Two of our journey. I was not well rested, so I tried to sleep in the car. We spent most of this day in Montana, which has a lot of different scenery, so it was not as boring as one might expect sitting in the car all day to be. Here is one of the many interesting sights we saw in Montana:



We followed the I-90 as it made its way across Montana and into Wyoming. In a lot of spots along the highway, the road was paved red. We could see why, since the soil is also red in many spots. Here is a red highway (through a windshield with a bug on it - I did try to avoid taking pictures through the windshield but sometimes that's the only way to capture what you're looking at):



After Wyoming, we found ourselves in South Dakota, home of the iconic Mount Rushmore. We stopped in at Mt Rushmore to check it out. It was a pretty impressive sight. We of course had to pay to park, but as a bonus, we got to keep our parking pass for there for a year. Unfortunately, this is non-transferable, but at least if anyone else is crazy enough to rent the exact same car and take it to Mt Rushmore, they won't have to pay for the parking.



After this, it was getting dark, and we wanted to find our campsite in the Badlands, so we continued on our way. The drive in to the campsite was through Badlands National Park, and we saw quite a lot of wildlife on the roads and not much of anything off the road, since it was completely dark by the time we got there. In flat lands, it gets dark very quickly once the sun sets, whereas where I live, in the mountains, the sun sets but then we have twilight for several hours afterward, as the sun is still technically in the sky - just it gets blocked by the mountains sooner. Anyways, though we couldn't see the landscape, we still knew that the badlands are supposed to be somewhat desert-like, which is why the first of many frogs we saw took us by surprise. Driving along that road became like a game of reverse-frogger - we in the car were trying to dodge the frogs! We also saw a raccoon, an owl, a snake, and plenty of rabbits and mice. Every once in a while, some geographical wonder would pop briefly into view in our headlights, so I was very excited by this wildlife wonderland and its many nifty sights.

Road Trip Day 1

We started a little late because our car rental process took ages. We had an appointment to pick up the car at 10am, but when we got there, there was no person working in the booth, but there was another couple who also had an appointment for 10am to rent their car. It ended up being that the girl who was supposed to be there was instead out on the lot washing cars. Not filling them up with windshield washer fluid or anything like that, but at least they were clean. However, out of three factors that contributed to not making it as far this day as I had intended, this one wasn't too terrible.

Once we got going, say, an hour or so into our journey, it became clear (from looking at a map, finally) that we were in fact going the wrong way and had to re-route ourselves to be going the right way. This is the sort of thing you really have to watch out for, I'm afraid, when you rely on me to direct you anyplace. However, once we were on the right track, the adventure was quite nice. We went through orchards, vineyards and small vacation towns on big lakes. In one town, they have a canal running through town, sort of alongside the highway, and it is customary for locals and tourists alike to slam on their swimsuits, hop on a floaty toy and bob along down the river:



We went through the border without hassle, and continued along our way. We stopped at a pharmacy/grocery/everything store to pick up breakfast foods for the next couple days and then set out to drive until our eyelids wouldn't stay open any more. We went through some very beautiful terrain, including one area that had been ravaged some years ago by a forest fire. The trees at one time had all been burnt, and you could see each tree still had charred remains of bark clinging to them. However, they mostly looked like white posts with the undergrowth coming up around their bases:



We got to Spokane around dark, and then it was my turn to drive. After getting all turned around, my boyfriend had to take over again and get us out of that city, before it was my turn again. We cut across Idaho (took about an hour) and then went into Montana, where, disappointingly, I only made it a little over an hour before having to stop and set up camp, which turned out, at least, to be in a very beautiful campground. That turned out to be the only time I sat behind the wheel this entire trip.

Welcome Home!

I went on a road trip across the United States last week, and while I'm unwinding and preparing some posts about that, I thought I'd start with the last thing first: our garden bounty from when we returned home:

Delicious Treat

This may seem totally weird but once you try it, you won't think so. For kicks I thought I would try Rice Krispies on my vanilla ice cream with blueberries. It is so very good I can't believe I only just thought of it today...

Garden Update

I wish to preface this post with an explanation: there are no June '09 updates to this blog for several reasons, the big one being that my internet provider is dumb and through their own slowness at restoring their service (modem fried, all they had to do was come over and replace it), lost my business. Anyways...

My garden is growing quite nicely:



We take good care of this one, checking every day to make sure the peas are grasping their wire netting, shading the spinach, pouncing on every weed almost as soon as it pops up (this actually has its downfall as we do not actually know what all our crops are supposed to look like to start, and so we have managed to prematurely pick several plants that were supposed to be there...), and watering all the time (as watering laws allow, of course) - even going so far as to set up an irrigation system:



This picture is out of order from the others in this post, but you can see in this picture also that my boyfriend has set up a potato patch (also with irrigation) in the ditch outside our yard. Our strata doesn't mind this because it means he keeps that portion of the ditch under control, more or less.

On the other hand, we also have our strawberry patch, which we do not tend in any way:



This strawberry patch started in the very corner, in a neat little square. It has a mind of its own, however, and is apparently on a mission to take over the whole yard. The only way we take care of this is that there is drip irrigation there now, and we pick the berries whenever we see them (which is all the time!). We are letting them do their own thing because apparently they can take care of themselves, and if all else fails, at least we'll have delicious strawberries every summer.

Painting

Artpad.art.com is a neat website where you can make a painting, and it remembers every brush stroke you make (less the stuff you did right before you hit the 'undo' option). At any time during the painting process, you can have it replay what you've done so far. When you're happy with the end result, you can save your painting and it will give you a link so you can show other people what you've done, and there's a whole gallery full of people's paintings.

I drew the Shire:

http://artpad.art.com/?kkfkn623a9g

It's really neat replaying how other people drew their paintings. It's kind of like free art lessons!

One Year

Well, it's Melawe's birthday today - I created her one year ago. I decided to check her /played time, and the results are: 2 months 1 week 15 hours 26 minutes 27 seconds.

That makes up 18.8% of my last year.

I am resolving to get outside a lot more this summer. Between the hiking I plan to do and the garden I plan to maintain, it should be reasonably easy to make this goal. I did these things last year too, but this year will feature both a bigger garden and a bigger hike.

Garden Update

Well, the garden is done being built (although the irrigation still needs to be finished), and I've planted everything that can be planted so far (some things need warmer soil, others are going over top the irrigation, and I ran out of some seeds already). I've read a little about companion planting, which is where you plant something near something else, and one plant will benefit the other, either by repelling certain insects or changing the soil in a beneficial way. There is of course a flip-side to this, in that some plants are basically enemies - they pose a threat to each other. For instance, you're not supposed to plant potatoes and tomatoes too close to each other, and there are plenty of plants that can't go near beans because beans add a lot of nitrogen to the soil - too much for some plants to handle.

While I was figuring all this out and planting what I could plant, the boys have been building a shed:



Gosh I hope I don't kill this garden...

To Defend and Uphold

Over the past month or so, the leader of my kin in LotRO has produced a short movie about our kin, using game footage and a combination of music from the game and music by David Arkenstone. The video is called To Defend and Uphold and is available for download here. He put a lot of work into making this video, and I am super proud of him, because the end product is very well done. I am also proud to have worked alongside the group of wonderful people who participated in its making.

From the perspective of one the actresses in the film, I can say that it was pretty neat to be a part of such a process. Some shots in the film took scarcely more than a minute of screen time but took well over an hour to capture. There are many reasons for this. Sometimes we had to wait for the appropriate time of day in-game (because there is a day/night cycle in this game) in order to get the film sequence to look right, or to show a sense of time passing. Other times, some npc or other would wander into the middle of a scene, or add a line or two of his/her own. Another issue we had (that wasn't too difficult to work around) is that we couldn't always coordinate via voice because some players weren't equipped to do so, so it was a little tricky sometimes to cue actors in a timely fashion, so re-takes were sometimes necessary. Of course, there were also times where we had to choreograph several actions simultaneously, such as for the fight scenes. Sometimes also we had to redo things to fit all of us into the shot.

All in all, it was a pretty fun experience, working alongside my friends to help produce something high quality and entertaining to watch. For some scenes, we had passersby watching with amusement and/or curiosity, because a lot of what we were doing was role-playing rather than game-playing. There were several times when we'd be taking and re-taking shots, or standing around apparently idly (all in the same outfit), and once in a while, one of us would randomly move over, or reposition ourselves somehow, but behind the scenes, we were working out how to stand, who would say what when and how we'd be cuing people, and discussing various other ideas for how things ought to go. There were some very interesting role-play scenes going on (where some of our characters would be acting parts of non-Guardsmen), that we might do a few times over, in which case I think people could probably gather what we were doing. It was probably also interesting to watch as we'd be doing something in uniform and one guy without an outfit would be wandering around facing us, strafing side to side or some other peculiar action (that'd be our cameraman). Or we'd be acting out a scene over and over, each time with the cameraman standing in a different spot.

We had our fair share of outtakes too, which were hilarious for those involved. We may put on a serious front sometimes, but behind the scenes we are often fooling around and laughing. I had a lot of fun participating in this project, and I hope you enjoy the show!

Garden Project Day 10

Today I arrived home from work to see the boys busily working on that brick wall. They've gotten quite a lot done! (By the way, this really is Day 10 - I couldn't document day 9 because the boys had covered up their work due to the threat of rain, so I didn't get to see anything). They didn't notice me documenting their hard work in progress:



It's so exciting to see it all starting to come together. Look at the difference in soil quality, too - I can't really get over the stark contrast. Soon to come for this little garden: irrigation, arbours, barrels, trellises, dividers, pots, shelves, and quite possibly solar LED pathway lights. Oh, and plants. We can start planting in a couple more weeks. I'm looking forward to getting some crops in!

Also, a little side note: those drywall mud buckets are so handy. If you ever do a drywall project, keep the buckets. They make decent stepping stools, they are good concrete molds, they are good for mixing mortar in, and they are pretty decent storage containers for tools and supplies as well.

A quick note on counting

I must not be eating enough junk food, because my chocolate bar took me by surprise today. How do they get away with calling it a '3 Musketeers' when there are only two musketeers in there?

Interesting note: it says on the package, "35% less fat than the average leading chocolate brands." Well, yeah. Put Aramis back in there and let's see where we're at.

Garden Project Day 8

Sadly, I had to return to work today, so Day 8 featured only the boys working on this, but they got a lot done:




Now that the one side is complete, they have started filling it up with soil, so you can really see it coming together. Only a few more weeks until planting time!

Garden Project Day 7

Day 7 was a day of brick-laying. Progress:

Garden Project Day 6

I had to take pictures this morning of Day 6's progress, since the boys were working into the night on this one. Day 6 was all about preparing the area for the brick work, and some actual brick laying too. Before that, though, we had to prepare the beds for the bricks, by digging a small trench and then filling up the trench to the right height with sand. We also had to prepare the irrigation system enough so that we could lay bricks over top of it:



The boys laid out all those bricks in the dark in a crazy wind storm:



When we were pouring the concrete, we had extra concrete that we put to use by making stepping stones. We poured the leftover concrete into some old drywall mud pails we had, and on Day 6 they were set, so we removed them from the buckets:



Onward to Day 7...

Garden Project Day 5

Secksy.

Garden Project Day 4

Well, here's another day come and gone - Day 4. We got another load of dirt bright and early in the morning, and I had to move the whole pile out of the way - and there was already a pile of dirt in the most convenient spot to relocate it, so I really had my work cut out for me. Here's our progress for the day:



Here's a closer-up shot of all that dirt. My arms hurt every time I look at this picture. Oh well, at least I'm totally beefy now (hahahaha). My only reprieve from the dirt work today was the torture session... err, dentist appointment, I had (which I totally forgot about until they phoned me, wondering where I was). By the way, that's 6 cubic yards of dirt there - 3 from yesterday and 3 more from today. We may yet get more, too...



Here's a close-up of the windy path, with the forms all ready to go.



I'd write more, but my arms have had enough for one day. The pictures are each worth 1000 words though, right? So I hope you enjoyed my 3000+ word post!

Garden Project Day 3

Here's some dirt that should actually host a nice garden. You can see the difference between the new stuff (delivered by none other than the best) and the old stuff. The dump truck was just over an inch too wide to be able to back through the gap between two fence posts, so he had to dump the dirt right there, and I had to move that dirt out of the parking lot and out of the way, because we're getting another load tomorrow (okay, another part load, as the bobcat operator where we got the dirt from couldn't reach any higher, so that's really only a quarter of a load you see there):


Today was a much longer day than yesterday. Yesterday we really only worked on the yard for a couple hours, but today we worked for closer to ten hours. Behold our progress:



You can see I moved that whole pile of dirt over - we'll be using a wheelbarrow to spread it through the whole garden, after we install the path and the surrounding 'walls'. Today we also built half the forms for the concrete we are pouring to make the path.



Tomorrow: concrete and bricks. I've never done any of this stuff before, so it should be a very informative day.

Garden Project Day 2

Today was another day of using the rototiller and scooping out gravel, plus some pricing out of various materials. It wasn't that exciting, but we did solidify our plan a lot more and are ready to add some decent soil.



Check out the size of some of the rocks on top of the wheelbarrow. We have quite the high quality dirt, let me tell you. That is, of course, why we have such healthy looking grass - all the nutrients and stuff. Tomorrow we are getting a dump truck full of good soil, and we will dig out where the path through the garden will be.

Garden Project Underway

You read that right; the same girl who killed chrysanthemums (supposed to be hardy, come back every year) in 2 weeks (brown n crispy), is making a garden. Also, the girl who's been on all kinds of vacations without remembering her camera actually took a 'before' picture:




Ain't she purdy? We keep such a fetching lawn... well, not anymore we don't. Instead we're going to keep a nice vegetable garden. Here's the first afternoon's work:




I didn't work the rototiller, but I was on gravel detail. Here's the fruits of my labour:



Highlights of the day include uprooting a tree and bashing my hand into a rusty bolt while trying to remove another (you can see in the first picture there is a 'wall' structure in the corner - that was supposed to be our compost area). I actually broke a bolt too... I'm so tough... heh...

Onward to day 2...

Fun with Numbers

In LotRO (and other MMOs I suspect), there is a function where you can find out how much accumulated time you've spent logged in as a specific character (type the command /played into the chat bar). On a lark, I decided to do this on my main character, Melawe. My result: 2 months, 3 days, 18 hours, 56 minutes and 34 seconds.

By itself, that number seems like mere trivia, but I am trained in math, so to speak, so I had an innate need to make that number mean something relevant. Well, here's the relevance: I created that character a mere 10ish months ago, so quickly that number becomes: 20% of my existence since her creation has been poured into her. After a little more tinkering with this /played function, I discovered that my other characters I've created since Melawe have taken up an additional 7% of that time.

That means that if I sleep for approx. 30% of my time, then there's only 70% left of my life to fit all this play time into, which means that I am logged into LotRO for 39% of my waking life, and this isn't even counting any characters I may play that were created before I created my main character (and there are several of those - the reason I can't include them in my analysis here is that they would pollute the data, since I cannot discern how much of their playtime has occurred since Melawe's inception).

If we translate this into hours per day, then I play as Melawe for an average of 4.74 hours per day and another 1.7 hours playing as one of my other 5 characters I created after Melawe, for a grand total of 6.44 hours per day (nearly 7 hours per day).

That's a lot of time. Thinking back, every time I get passionate about something, large percentages of my time go into whatever my fixation is. When it was Diablo II, there was a similar amount of time devoted; when it was watching season after season of Buffy on DvD, there was actually probably a greater percentage of time devoted to it, when it was board games, I played every night and stayed up far later than I do for LotRO (I cannot force myself to get less than an average of 7 hrs sleep per night anymore, but I sure did in those days). All these things are much better than homework, which in my university days took up almost 50% of my time (cutting severely into my sleep time).

The good thing about fixating on one activity for a long period of time is that the cost of entertainment is dramatically reduced. Here are some examples of common entertainment activities:

Watching a movie in a theatre (per person): admission: $12, snacks: $8, gas: ? time: 2 hours.
Watching a rental movie, new release: cost, $5, time: 2 hours.
Cable TV: $40 per month, suppose 80 hours per month

Here are some of my activities and attached habits:
Settlers of Catan: Cost (assuming it wasn't a gift): $50. hours played: 1000+
LotRO: Total cost (assuming it wasn't a gift): $325. hours played: 3614 (this is a tally of most of my chars)
Buffy (assuming I paid for it instead of borrowing them): $350, for 144 hours

Summary:
Theatre: $10/hr (plus gas)
Rental movie: $2.50/hr
Buffy: $2.43/hr
Cable TV: $0.50/hr
Lotro: $0.09/hr
Settlers: $0.05/hr

Some of these activities have recurring fees, which keep their cost/hour up, whereas others have a one time fee, and these get cheaper and cheaper the more you engage in them. My current affliction has me entertained for 9 cents per hour, and that will go down and down and down as I continue to play.

A Blast from the Past

I recently reinstalled City of Heroes, just for nostalgia's sake. I missed being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and upon meeting new friends who had also previously played, I was curious about whether or not we could ever have crossed paths during that time. Considering my discovery that I have 12 heroes spread across 7 servers, it seems like it would be likely, but it looks like they played primarily on one of the few servers I didn't try.

It turns out that my highest level character was only on level 18 when I stopped playing City of Heroes a number of years ago. That's not really very high I imagine, yet she felt very powerful to me at the time. Upon taking her for a test drive this morning, I realized she really must be powerful, since I completed a mission all by myself (I don't remember how to find a group or what my character is supposed to do once in a group) first try, without really remembering what my skills do, how to steer (I kept trying to use LotRO commands, which don't translate over to CoH), or what all those little consumable things do (although I did figure out that right-clicking them gives me a description without actually using them).

Interestingly, the game tells me that I have not played my characters for 3388 days, which is roughly 9 years ago, which is impossible since the game only came out 5 years ago. I wonder how long it has really been, but I know I didn't play for very long because my computer at that time couldn't really handle the game, and physically melted inside trying to run it. Interestingly, I remember playing around Christmas time (I remember gigantic battles against a huge snowman, with upwards of 50 heroes combatting it), so external temperatures were not a factor in my computer's little meltdown. I wonder if CoH days count double, because I estimate I last played 4.5 years ago.



This is a picture of my lvl 18 hero, Burninatrix. She burns stuff. It's pretty sweet. I wonder if I wrote up a backstory for her, but I don't remember how I would find out for sure. I wonder if the fun I had with her is at all related to the fun I have with my main character in LotRO, who also burns stuff (my first real delight with my Loremaster was throwing Burning Embers, which has the nifty side effect of leaving a scorch mark on the ground around the target).

St Patrick's Day Festivities

Yesterday was St Patrick's Day. In honour of this festive occasion, and also due to opportune coincidence with a recording of an interview and song, the Bards of a Feather put on a show. A friend and I were interviewed for the podcast in the link above, and although I think we were both pretty nervous, some interesting stuff came out of it. It was very exciting to have 9 Bards turn up to perform for the recording, as it was the most we've had performing at any one time. With so many people to get coordinated, I think we did alright at smooth transitions between songs, although it gets increasingly challenging the more people there are. We tend to have wonderful audiences who partake in general revelry during and between our songs, and last night was certainly no exception! We started the party in the Shire, moving along to the Guardsmen of the Free Peoples' kin yard, then onward to a great secluded area near Trestlebridge, before winding up in Bree. It was kind of a small tour, but at the major town hubs (Michel Delving and Bree), we had some pretty cool audiences. We like to play the music for our own enjoyment, but it really enhances the experience to find that what you are doing is being enjoyed by others also.



UPDATE: The gentleman who interviewed us has turned our recording into a wonderful video:

Grammar? Srsly?

I try not to be nit-picky, so I often hold my tongue when I see people I like making the same kind of spelling mistakes over and over and over. Here are some minor corrections I wish would make it into collective consciousness:

Viola = a musical instrument or a flower.
Voilà! = Presto! (if you can't get the accent in, no worries, but at least get the letters in order)

Definitely is definitely spelled with the word 'definite' + 'ly', which is 'de' + 'finite' + 'ly'

A watchman is one man on watch.
Watchmen are several men on watch.

Socializing and the Internet

Lots of people say that your online friends aren't as important as your real life friends, but I wonder sometimes about that. For me, my real life friends are typically more important, by virtue of I have known them longer and so we share a greater history together. This doesn't mean my friends have a seniority order of importance, but it is generally the case. Many of my real life friends are people I've known since high school - I reached adulthood with these people. I've been to their weddings, and I'm watching their families grow together. It's not about the order of meeting people - it's about the bonds we make. It just happens that the longer people know each other, the more opportunities they get to create those bonds.

That said, I spend an awful lot of time with some people online, to the point where, if we knew each other in real life, it would be the equivalent of practically living together. I may never, say, sit on the same couch as them, but I still spend a large portion of my waking day with them, close to every day. There's a point to be made that not being able to share real life experiences with them doesn't make them less important, as friends go.

There are friends I've met in real life and now keep contact with them solely via the internet. There are friends I've met online only, as well. I consider each of these people to be my friends and barely register the difference between 'online' and 'offline' friends. It would be nice to see each of these people face to face, either again or for the first time, but realistically, in many cases, this just can't happen. I am grateful that I have the internet to help me keep in contact with them at all. Should I prioritize them less because of these limitations? Some people argue yes, but I am just not convinced.

Another poem

This one is one I wrote a while back, and there is actually a melody for it as well, which I obviously can't share on a blog. This one's a sonnet, so if I wanted, I could take the same tune and apply it to any sonnet, since they share a rhythmic template. I like this one better than the last one I posted because it has rhythm, rhyme, and structure, and yet still conveys a message.

The Sweetest Thing

The winter frost makes patterns on my soul
For three long moons I put my heart away
What’s left is but a hungry gaping hole
There’s nothing I can offer, do or say
And so I hibernate and wait for spring
I take myself and store me all away
I wait for all the warmth that March will bring
The winter took the sweetest thing away

Feel not for me the same angst filled sorrow
I feel, now sure of what’s to come for me
This is an opportunity to grow
I won’t call out for help a silent plea
I find my strength inside myself today
To live life while the sweetest thing’s away.

One Person

Quiet, serene, in a little corner of the world
Lies a pool of water so calm and clear
A mirror, displaying the splendors of the sky
A window to a paradise below

One wave, one simple little ripple
The calm can endure and overcome
Another and the mirror breaks
And the world below goes into hiding

O! The despair! Splendor destroyed, dashed!
The garbled ruination of golden promise
Patches of skylight, shreds of dreams
Reminders of what was had and lost

But lo, all it takes is one sure hand
A guide to lift chins, set sights high again
Or to take one below, beneath the waves
To see clearly that the treasure holds strong

One person to obscure
One person to reveal
Take the guiding hand
And leave the waves behind

Calais, Zetes and Chione

Last night, in LotRO, my Lore-master character earned her pet eagle. I am allowed to name these pets pretty much whatever I want, but naming pets can be difficult. I like short, easy to pronounce names, and my one attempt at naming a pet with Sindarin nomenclature (befitting Middle-Earth) fell flat, and I ended up renaming that pet. In LotRO, there are also special amulets that change the appearance of your pet, in effect giving you another pet (cosmetically). Each appearance of a pet can be named individually, and it turns out that I had access to two amulets that change my eagle's appearance, so I had to think of 3 names for my new pet(s). Traditionally, my pets that share a species also share the first letter of their names (because I'm dorky that way), but for my eagle, I wanted to do something a little different. I ended up naming them after figures from classical Greek mythology. My eagles' names are Calais, Zetes and Chione.

Calais and Zetes were twin brothers who travelled with Jason and the Argonauts. They rescued Phineas from the harpies and were rewarded with wings. When these brothers met an untimely death, they were transformed into birds. I thought these would be cool names to give my eagles. Then I found out I could make myself another amulet, so I had to think of a third eagle name. After some digging around, I found out Calais and Zetes had two sisters: Cleopatra and Chione. Cleopatra is a name that has been done to death, so I read up on Chione, and it turns out she has a bird-related story also. Chione was beautiful - so beautiful, in fact, that two gods came and, er, canoodled with her in the same night. She ended up giving birth to twins as a result. Anyways, she preferred her beauty to that of the goddess Artemis, and was summarily put to death, at which point she was transformed into a hawk, which, while not an eagle, is still a pretty cool bird.

These stories - especially Chione's story - really make me wonder about the ancient Greeks. On one hand, their civilization was a time of huge breakthroughs in rational thought, but on the other hand, people were making up stories like this and other people were believing them. I sometimes wonder if there were some secret society that had some kind of contest going with prizes for the most ludicrous story that people actually believed.

Democracy

This is how things should work.

(from xkcd.com)

Optimization

This is, in my mind, a pretty simple concept, but I think it is one people don't think about. When people make decisions, I have concluded that they always make whatever decision is perceived to be the best course of action at the moment the decision is made. It doesn't matter whether the decision is, ultimately, a good decision or a bad one, but to the person who made the decision, all the factors were weighed in some fashion and a conclusion was reached.

Here is an example: suppose there's a 16-yr old boy who is approached by his friends to go smoke behind the grocery store with them. Depending on a multitude of factors (social acceptance, health, parental control, ethics, money, etc), coupled with an importance he internally places on each of those factors, he may or may not decide to join them. If he has heard a lot of horror stories about cigarette smoke, or he knows someone who suffers their ill effects, he may place high importance in deciding 'no', but on the other hand, perhaps he is desperate for social acceptance - he might then place high importance on 'yes' too. Whether he's consciously thinking of any of this is irrelevant - I argue that the process still happens whether he's cognizant of it or not. Ultimately a decision will be reached, and it will depend on all the factors at that given moment. He may later change his mind, or have regrets about whichever decision he makes, but at the exact instant he arrives at a decision, it is optimal according to his brain, as an accumulation of all his prior experiences, thoughts and feelings.

I like to keep this in mind when people come to conclusions that I think are baffling. I know that there is always more information that goes into any decision than I am, strictly speaking, privy to. I think that if more people understood this concept, then tolerance would increase world-wide. It all ties in with empathy - seeing things from another's perspective. It's just that in this regard, you can't always do that.

If someone does something that you perceive to be sub-optimal, then it may be time to analyze the situation. For example, let's go back to that 16-yr old boy. If I were, say, his mother, and I found out he elected to smoke with his friends, then I would try to discuss this with him why he made that decision. I might not successfully get the truth out of him (either because he doesn't know it himself, or because he decides he'd rather not say, or he's feeling guilty about it, or whatever else), but I would be against his decision and try to tip his mind's scale the other way. I might try to add more weight to the 'no' side of that prior decision, or lessen the weight on the 'yes' side, that he may one day change his mind and quit smoking.

People try to persuade other people all the time this way, either by adding weight to one side, or by taking weight away from the other side. I think in this way, people are pretty decent at working together to optimize in a social sense. Of course, people also try to 'look out for number one', so it's good to have your wits about you when someone is trying to persuade you to make decisions a certain way. Society is also shaped by balancing scales like this - every rule, convention, and custom is a result of a conglomeration of a meeting of these internal scales. It is important that we, as a society, revisit our old decisions when they start to chafe, to see whether there is anything we can add or subtract from the scales of decisions past. This is how slavery was outlawed, this is how women claimed their right to vote, this is how revolutions occur. This is how we grow as people and as a society.