Chris Algoo

Time for growth, and new things, and all that good stuff. It’s amazing what effect changing one number can have on us, spurring us into change.

And New Year’s Resolutions. Don’t make a New Year’s Resolution, as there is a vindictive spirit that dwells in New Jersey whose sole reason to live is thwarting New Year’s Resolutions. If I may humbly make a suggestion, why not just make a Resolution?

Happy New Year! This year, be more awesome than you were last year.

Whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Chanukah or Cwanzaa, you know the real reason for this holiday – the birth of Santa. Christmas is simultaneously a time of giving and wishing – giving things that you hope people will like, and wishing that somebody won’t get you a toaster. Toast sucks.

For Christmas, I’d like to give Sonic Team a time machine so they can go back to when Sonic was fun, and I’d like Sebastian Bach to join Ayreon. That guy’s cool, aside from the drinking problem.

What do you wish for, and what would you like to give?

Tuesday works much better. In the intervening time between today and tomorrow (roughly 24 hours), you can answer this quiz. The article tomorrow will deal with each of the following in depth. So, please pick one or several…

Why do you game? (Game is a verb. It means “to play games”. Shakespeare isn’t the only one who can make stuff up.)

Challenge – I game to challenge myself. I enjoy achieving mastery over the game system or other players.

Social – I game to interact with / meet other people.

Experience – I enjoy games that take me on rides and create strong feelings.

Narrative – I game to watch a story unfold.

Roleplay – I game to play an internally-consistent, interesting character.

Growth – I enjoy watching my position (character, faction, country) grow in games.

Change – I enjoy creating change in the gameworld, or feeling as though I have.

Other – Please write what the Other is.

Tomorrow I’ll give an in-depth look into each of these styles. For the record, I see myself as a Narrative/Experience gamer with occasional bits of Roleplay (Fallout 3 really brought that out of me). If you’ve got some interesting “Others”, that would be awesome, as I’ll have more material for the post tomorrow.

I found a salsa event on the Internet – free lessons, free dancing and five dollar margaritas. I wanted to bring some friends of mine, but they couldn’t make it, which I later learned is a common thing with dance events. The club/lounge/whatever was on Bowery, near where my friends and I celebrated my friend’s Halloween birthday, so I wasn’t entirely lost.

I entered the dark club and was immediately greeted by a charmingly effusive event planner. I assume she sets up the meetings on that site, talks to the bar and coordinates the whole thing. I wanted to be an event planner for a while, it’s a nicely social bit of work (if stressful). I can only imagine that the bar allowed her to use the space for free if she could promise that a certain amount of drinks would be sold, and I’m pretty sure any threshold would be met. Drinks were in full force that night, from bright blue margaritas to dusky pink cosmopolitans. The crowd was surprisingly mixed in age, gender, race and whatever demographic spectra you can think of.

The night began with a free lesson, which is when I realized that tonight might be a problem. See, there are two kinds of Salsa, one and two. I had some training in two, but the dancing that day would be one. I was actually in a worse place than someone without lessons, since I had all of these habits and muscle memory things that would work against me. Eventually, I just danced the kind of salsa I knew. I met some pretty cool people at that club, one of which said that she was planning to bring several of her friends, who ended up not going. Oh well.

Nothing much to report here aside from this:

Apple Pie is Delicious.

But you already knew that.

Also, Thanksgiving is awesome because of the thinking it can encourage (break the word into its two component words and switch them). What’s awesome about your life?