It's been a year since I've posted so here's another post. Yokai Watch came out and it's pretty good! Filipa's birthday is tomorrow, and that's pretty cool. As of December 13th this year we will have been dating for 4 entire years. Woohoo!

Changes

A lot has happened in the past few months.

Firstly, I quit my job at Target. My girlfriend is (pseudo)-done with school and I'm done living in Amherst, MA. It's a nice enough place, but there's a lot of downsides to it too. The reason I moved out there in the first place was to be with my girlfriend, so now that she's done with school I really don't have any real reason to stick around. I was just getting used to my job, which was nice. 2 years really gives you a good foothold in a retail job and I finally understood the system and I knew exactly what I could get away with.

Now, I live at home in Providence, Rhode Island. It's nice here, but access to my Filipa is pretty limited. I can see her whenever I can see her. Basically whenever my parents can drive me over there or drive over there to pick her up. Our relationship is really different then it was in Amherst. Every summer in Amherst I would wait through those grueling months to be with her, and then when she was there everything was great. We would hang out literally every day and there was never really any reason for us to separate, except for when I had to go to work. Now it's the restriction of whether or not her dad says we can see eachother, and his feelings on different days is arbitrary and flip floppy at best.

I got a job at Whole Foods Market. I work in the produce department now, and I spend all day stacking fruit or being bored. When I first started they were more lenient on how high we could stack fruit, but recently they had a visit from the regional directors who criticized most of the department. The focus went from "lazily fill the shelves as much as possible to avoid refilling it" to "quality is the most important thing. Fill the shelves just enough so that there's product on them, and make sure the quality is the best there can be." I respect the concept, but in practice this leads to 1000 short projects with repeats, instead of 1-5 projects an hour. This makes for a lot of lost time in productivity and a lot of back and forth from the salesfloor to the backroom.

I like my new job, but I don't really know anything about produce, and I never want to work on work stuff when I'm not at work, so I never look up what I should be culling when I get home. I just guess based on the color and feel of each product if it's good or not. When people ask me if a product is ripe or not, generally I just make something up. I know that's a pretty bad way to be in a sales business where the focus is heavily on selling products, but usually I don't care. I just want them to stop asking me questions so I can go back to my boring job and get out of there as quickly as possible.

My mom was diagnosed with cancer. Still not sure how I feel about this. I know I should feel bad, but nothing has really changed all that much for me. Sometimes she needs to go to the doctors. Sometimes I need to help out at the daycare. I'm fine with helping out and doing whatever, but other then that nothing has changed. She maintains this positive attitude and this nothing is wrong vibe that makes it seem so not real. I really just want to go roller skating with her, but she's too tired now. I hope she gets better soon so we can go and do that stuff again. I asked her the other day and she told me I should ask Filipa if she wants to go. Roller skating was kind of this special time for me when I was in high school that me and my mom would share. It was our together time and it was really the only alone time I got to spend with my mom where I could talk to her, and if I didn't feel like talking I could skate away from her. It was easy, it was meditative, and it was fun. I miss it a lot.

I'm going to get my drivers license soon. I hope. I've been driving around with my sister a little. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on what a car feels like. I hope I get it. I don't want to have to wait any longer. I feel like when I set real goals for myself I achieve them. I'm pretty confident that I'll pass the driving test. The most important thing about it is that when I get a license, I can get a car. When I get a car, I can see Filipa.

Filipa is the love of my life. She's 20 years old. She has the most beautiful smile. She has the nicest hugs, and the nicest body to wrap my arms around. She gives me nice kisses. She makes me feel all loopy in my head. She is fun, exciting, and smart. She's creative and cool and an amazing sister to her younger sister. I miss our life in Amherst.

Day One

I decided that I needed a project, so for a couple of days at least I'm going to try to draw myself everyday. I don't have that much experience in art, I've taken a few classes, but I really haven't done anything significant with art in the past few years. I can't remember the last time I picked up a pencil and decided that I was going to draw.

I've been wanting to draw for a while, or at least figure out something to do, but I really have had a hard time deciding what to do. I've also wanted to start blogging, but I really don't read that many blogs so I don't know what'd be interesting to read about. So to combine the two things, I'm going to try to start writing a blog or something resembling one. More like a diary really, maybe. But it's on the internet, so maybe people will see it. I know Filipa definitely will.

My Day:

I woke up a few times at the night, 2AM, 3AM, 5AM. Each time I woke up in my addled state of mind, I had decided that I'd be better off just staying awake to go to work for 6AM. At 5, I really was getting up, but at 2 and 3, I didn't need to be up. For some reason I've been feeling stressed about waking up lately, always feeling like I'm in a hurry.

I definitely didn't sleep enough, because I woke up feeling like crap. I had been up semi-late talking to my girlfriend and playing stupid games on my phone before deciding that I really should be sleeping.

I had a dream, but I don't quite remember what it was. I remember waking up, realizing I had a dream, then trying to recall it, but forgetting almost instantly.

I contemplated taking a shower, but decided not to, and instead went to work.

Work went by quickly, I had to reset an aisle of shoes, a shoe endcap, and two bra outposts. I thought the bras would take a long time, so I decided to do the shoes first. They went by quickly, I finished both the shoe POGS by 9, and finished the rest before 10. At huddle we had to push 2 palettes of frozen goods which didn't take that long.

The rest of my day was spent pushing product back to the floor and putting up signs. We ended up finishing at 2:25, which almost never happens and so we got to go home.

Unfortunately it was raining, so I had to bike home in the rain. It wasn't great. When I got home I took a shower, then did my best not to fall asleep so I'd be able to sleep tonight.

I've been having a lot of internet connectivity problems lately, and I think it's either the router I bought or the amount of routers in the area blocking out my signal.

And then I drew, and this is what I drew.

It's an attempt at a self portrait. I don't think it's great, everything is a little off, but I figured it was good enough for a forty minute project. If I can't think of anything else to do tomorrow, I'll probably draw another one or two. This one was done from my webcam, not a picture, but I didn't move much while I was drawing it. 

I think I could do better if I wanted to spend more time on it, but really I just want to go to sleep.

Let Go

Ballet Hammer

Headphoned Dood

Space Age Premise

It is the cusp of the space age revolution. Faster than light speed travel has been discovered, making traveling and discovering distant planets incredibly simple. Space travel has become more and more common, and the universe has come to something of a 'wild west' state, where no form of government is prominent enough to enforce the entire galaxy. Planets are being discovered and inhabited every single day, and the expansion of humanity is finally coming to full bloom with humans racing off to find planets in search of metaphorical 'gold', natural resources with which to further technology. The price of natural resources has drastically dropped, and the variety of technology being created is incredibly diverse. One technology, however, has become universally used, and that is nano-technology.

While many engineers and scientists are still working on big things, like spaceships and terraforming, nanotechnology has become prominent in all societies. Despite the technological diversity of the many worlds humans inhabit, nanotechnology will forever be regarded as the 'king of kings' of technology. Arthur Smog was the first person to invent a nano-tech space-suit. Initially called the 'Smogsuit', it was the standard spacesuit and after seeing the success of the suit in marketing, many other companies started to mass produce cheap knockoffs, however, Arthur Smog's company is still around and producing the top of the line suits in terms of nanotechnology available.

A few years after the 'Smogsuit' was created, an elite programmer known only by his alias Falcon_Leader started releasing programs to the universal web that could change the behavior of the nano-bots and make them alter some of the functions of the Smogsuits. It could force the nanobots to instead of changing the air the user breathed to oxygen, it added chemical compounds that would make the wearers of the suit high, or minor tricks to make the suit seem heavier, make the suits produce too many nanobots and have you leave a sparkling trail wherever you went. Falcon_Leader was called a terrorist by many governments, but regarded as something of a trickster more commonly, and even praised as a god by others. Arthur Smog continued to upgrade his suit, adding lots of hack prevention functionalities to it, and even programming his nanobots to not accept any new programming, but Falcon_Leader had started a trend of hacking into nanobot technology which would live on long after he disappeared from the universal web forever. Waves of hackers started turning their attention to the nanobots, and soon Arthur Smog and other scientists had decided it wasn't worth it to fight them anymore, and that they should just start programming the machines to accept new programming as long as it didn't delete any of the essential programs needed for a wearer to survive on almost uninhabitable planets.

The Smogsuit soon became a monopoly company, releasing tons and tons of new programming chips called 'Modules' to the public. These Modules were licensed coding that you could buy to upgrade your Smogsuit to function better in certain ways. Each Smogsuit came with a certain amount of programming built into it, such as energy collection from converting the air to something breathable to the wearer, and self maintenance and replication of nanobots, but it also came with slots for inserting new Modules. At first, due to the limits of input a nanobot could take, only one Module could be accepted. These modules were simple at first, such as changing the color of your suit, assisted jumping (so you could jump higher), but militant groups took an interest in this and quickly created modules that would make the suits create more nanobots than it needed and use the excess as armor, or even programing the nanobots to change into weapons, such as guns, that would disintegrate as soon as you stopped holding onto them. When Arthur Smog died about 50 years later, his company lived on, hiring 'cream-of-the-crop' graduate engineers to continue designing new suits and pushing these nanobots to the limits. Soon only one module slot became two, and two slots became three, and the ability to take more and more complex modules became better, and the ability for nanobots to collect energy and create objects became more efficient.

Now it is the age of the Nanosuits and Modules. If you don't have the best, than it's hard to make it anywhere in this world. Shady black market deals to get a glimpse of the newest unreleased model of the Nanosuits are a necessity, and getting your hands on an unreleased one is even more important. Space piracy has hit its all time high, only rising, as there is not really any form of galactic government still, just many small allegiances between certain planets, and many companies are hiring mercenaries to protect their cargo as they ferry it from one planet to another, paying with custom made modules or other useful technologies to use or trade with others to get even more amazing modules or Nanosuits.