After a winter of chasing girls and trying to live like a post-university bachelor in spite of nearing 30, I’ve come into the spring feeling like it’s time to stop being a lazy bro of excess and instead become a healthy, active man of self-mastery.
Of course, I’m a gamer, and there’s only one way to accomplish this goal once and for all, I feel: I have to make it into a game. I’ve been playing this “game” for about a month now, and I’m excited enough about it now to geek out and share what I’m doing in a rare SEO-unrelated, purely personal, and optimistic post on this here blog thing I never use.
The Concept
I figured, given my long history of playing MMOs, that I would devise a strategy to equate MMO paradigms into a weight loss plan. To accomplish this goal, I decided to adopt a number of game “components” before layering on my own. The end result is something of a character sheet and combat system for my real-life MMO avatar (otherwise known as my body).
The Game Engines
The heart of any MMO is its character development system, and as a long-time RPG afficando, stats and levels are my bread-and-butter. Thus, I started my quest to build the ultimate MMO by searching out a stat system. That’s how I found MyFitnessPal.
Stats (MyFitnessPal)
Initially looking for any way to get healthier without having to work out, I started my new life by researching ways to eat better. For too long have I over indulged in various types of delicious poison. For whatever reason, though, I found cravings were starting to taper off as the guilt outweighed the pleasure when eating poorly.
As I started to do some research, I learned about the basics of caloric intake and how it affects one’s weight. Shame on me for not having understood or cared enough about this as a teenager. I was missing the real game of life all along: stats and numbers and percentages abound in my real-life character sheet. This would be the stat system I needed.
Remember when I used to regularly blog on here? Those were good days, right? I miss them, too. Thankfully, you’ll be happy to know that there was a good reason for my absence as of late. Over the last few months, I’ve been looking for different ways to extend my writing efforts, and beyond taking on some freelance work, a friend of mine and I managed to finish off something we’d talked about for a while: my first “book”.
Available now on the iBookstore for your viewing pleasure on the iPad is His Toronto, the first of what I hope will be many digital works. Inspired by James Joyce’s Dubliners, this short story collection repurposes some of my old “fiction” works with the aid of the beautiful photography of my partner-in-art, Anna Rukosuyeva. We juxtaposed the short stories and photography in a way that makes this collection something of an adult, visual storybook.
We’re super proud of what we’ve done, even if it’s only a small sampling of what we want to do, so I urge you to check it out. And do let me know what you think!
A dance. A trance. A DJ’s praise. A girl. A guy. A club floor haze. A drink. A sip. A party phase. A look. A laugh. A fleeting gaze. A smile. A glance. A glance, returned. A turn, too late, and, in turn, a fiery blaze.
A heart, now doomed to be aflutter: a rhythm that need not a rhyming rudder.
A move. A slip. Our dancing ways. My hand. Her hip. A daring phrase. A space removed and smirk returned. To follow suit, a touching graze. A look, a smile, a stare engaged. A whisper, smirk; a fire enraged.
A look, like there could be no other: she, the one he’d trade not now nor never for another.
A push. A pull. A lovestruck daze. Such is the song of lovestruck days.
The following is a short story taken from one of my upcoming collections called Her Toronto. It will be available on the iBooks Store, alongside its partner piece His Toronto, soon.
“There’s one thing I know for certain about relationships,” she said with a huff as she tapped her cigarette into the blackened ceramic tray in front of them. The wind lapped at her hair as it swept down Queen street and across the outdoor patio at Rivoli’s where they sat, wine in hand.
“There are two types of lovers in this world: fridges and furnaces. And the key to a good relationship is this,” Maureen paused to let a smug grin form on her face. “You have to match a fridge to a furnace.”
Francesca looked at her inquisitively. Though she’d long grown used to tuning her friend out when she got into her fits of ranting, the theory proved enough to mildly pique her interest.
“Explain,” Francesca said a second before her wine glass touched her lower lip. The swell of house-red berries tickled her nose as she tried to mask her captivity to the conversation with feigned presence.
Suddenly invigorated by her friend’s interest, Maureen continued proudly: “Well, my dear, it’s really quite simple.”
Francesca sighed to herself. Her friend’s know-it-all demeanor was infuriatingly Watson-esque in its clumsy dance of hypothesis and supposition.
“You see, take me for example. I am a fridge. I am always cold. Not cold-hearted, mind—”
Francesca scoffed.
“Ahem, but physically cold. My hands get cold, my arms get cold, my body gets cold… even my toesies get coldsies!”
Francesca’s stifled scoffed turned into an outright gag, but before she could retort with a torrent of her own sociopolitical deconstruction, her friend continued.
“Now, James, my boyfriend? He’s a furnace. He’s the complete opposite of me. He’s always a thousand degrees too hot, goes outside without a jacket in the dead of winter, refuses to sleep with blankets on him. He’s a furnace, through-and-through.”
Francesca interjected. “So you’re saying that you guys work so well solely because of the fact that he gets hot and you’re a frigid ice queen?”
Maureen continued, as always unfazed or more likely unaware of her friend’s interjection.
“He’s a furnace. I’m a fridge. And because of that diametrically-opposed chemistry, our relationship works in all other facets. I’m telling you. Analyze every great relationship in history, and you’ll likely find that all of the greatest can be boiled down to fridge meets furnace and falls in…”
“Lava lamp?” Francesca said, tongue firmly in cheek and with a sigh of boredom following the final syllable.
Unable to ignore her friend’s flippant remarks this time, Maureen returned volley with a sigh of her own. Together, the two sipped their wine in silence.
A moment passed before Francesca spoke. “That’s a pretty good theory,” she said reluctantly as she felt the cold wind blow by again and longed for her own furnace.
Have you noticed the quiet rise of gambling games on the likes of Facebook and the App Store? If you haven’t, start paying attention, as it seems an online gambling renaissance is nigh thanks to the rise of social gaming. Poker and Bingo were one thing, but the rise of Slingo and Slots games hints at a future industry boom worth billions.
Though for years seen as a blue ocean for traditional gaming (in the gambling sense) companies, online gambling has not picked up steam at a pace that even remotely parallels the growth of internet usage. Slow uptake has largely resulted from the vast amount of red tape that surrounds the industry; thorny legal issues abound for those trying to get into the online gambling industry, particularly in US.
However, rumours about the advent of broadly-legal online gambling have grown louder in response to Facebook’s forthcoming IPO. As Business Insider posits, Facebook stands to become a massively more valuable company should it play host to the bountiful ocean of online gambling. And its close compatriot in Zynga has been very open about how it intends to pave a profitable path into the industry.
Thanks to the evolution of the social web, Zynga is poised to vastly and quickly surpass the space’s current leaders like InterCasino, Poker Stars, et al. who have fought tooth and nail to grow their respective marketshare in the face of legal friction. Alas, the future of these older companies does not look so bright, as storied gamblers and fresh meat alike flock to Zynga’s titles on the new and perceivably less “shady” gambling venue of Facebook.
Remember when I used to regularly blog on here? Those were good days, right? I miss them, too. Thankfully, you’ll be happy to know that there was a good reason for my absence as of late. Over the last few months, I’ve been looking for different ways to extend my writing efforts, and beyond taking on some freelance work, a friend of mine and I managed to finish off something we’d talked about for a while: my first “book”.
Francesca looked at her inquisitively. Though she’d long grown used to tuning her friend out when she got into her fits of ranting, the theory proved enough to mildly pique her interest. 