Karma and Luck

THIS WAS A DRAFT THAT I THOUGHT I MAY AS WELL POST

So I've been having a muse about Luck recently, good and bad, but mostly good. I am not sure if you call it luck, or karma, or whatever but try to follow me here.

I am a good person, well, I like to think I am a good person and I would tell you, if you asked, that I am a good person. Ofcourse I could be lieing so who really knows? But just imagine for a second that I am telling the truth, I am a relatively good person.

As a good person I would expect Karma or Luck to reflect this, if they exist. Lets see.

I crash my Car - Bad Luck. However 2 scrapyards near my house each have 2 cars of the same make and we are able to fix my car back to working order for £20 - Good Luck.

I barely tried in my exams, I pass and go to College then to University - Good Luck.

This brings me to a more serious one. My grandad, fit as a fiddle, a kind considerate man with no hate in his heart, has a stroke, something that could only really be caught if a Doctor was looking for it. He is now paralysed and can't really do a lot. Obviously this is very bad and heart breaking in some respects. Bad Luck? Not necessarily. He didn't DIE. If you take the stroke out of the equation of Luck and say it was predestined to happen, then your left with the dichotomy in which the result he recieved was the best, that of life.

This brings me to the fact that I am 18 almost 19 and I am yet to experiance a close family death. My cousin died, in her sleep, when she was 16. Very sad, very unexpected, but she went peacefully and didn't suffer. For my other family I still have both parents, four grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I would say I am very lucky.

I figure this is how faith is started.

Hardboiled

Sat down in front of the keyboard, the thought of typing another blog entry makes its way across my mind. It's been some time since I wrote my Film Noir monologue but I thought I should advertise it on here too. People have told me it's good, I am not too sure, all I know is it was the result of watching Brick with a couple of friends and sitting at a laptop a few hours later. You have to read it in a Hardboiled style though, or else it loses its obvious charm. The kind of stereotypical voice from old private eye films.

Give it a read and leave me some feedback, and check out the Shaun and Andy Project while your at it.

Lecturer

I have found something to hate. Something to despise with a firey passion.
That something.... Is one of my lecturers.

Oh. My. God. I hate this person.

I am not going to disclose his name, as he seems the type of person to search for his own name in google as a past time, but just know that I don't like this guy. Simply put, I really hate his lecturing style. Now heres why:

The Subject
Maybe I just realyl dislike the subject and find it really boring but I doubt this is the only thing. Today I had my first lecture which involved combining Psychology with this subject. Psychology I find to be incredibly interseting and enjoyable to study, the way he taught it though could convince me to undergo seppuku on even the happiest of Morns. We were taught stuff that I had already learnt, which obviously not everyone learnt as not everyone did Psychology. Fair Beans, I thought. Now in these circumstances I get bored easily, as I already know whats being said, but the way he taught it made my blood boil out of sheer boredom.

Off-Tangent much?
The lectures go on for 2 hours. Firstly, as someone who studies psychology, I know this is too long for people to pay attention. This isn't his choice though so no hardship on that. However, his lectures could be over in thirty minutes if he didn't spend so much time going off topic and talking about god know's what else. I don't mind this if its interesting, it's not that I have a hard time keeping track of the different conversation topics, it's just that when he does go off topic it is about the most boring, most unfunny, most... stupid of things. It's not surprising I spent most of last year playing Tetris on my phone.

Attendance-freak
I dislike the ammount of control this guy likes to have over his lectures. He has a bleeper to read your card to determine whether your in the lecture or not. With other lectures, where they have paper registers, you could obviously ask someone to tick your name for you, but with this bleeper your card has to be present. He also makes sure you go to these 'tutorial' sessions which are, not only badly timed (meaning I should come into Uni when I have no other reason to be there) but they add to the ammount of boredom I must endure. If you don't attend these your marks go down... Great.

Smarm
This guy emitts it in clouds. Smarm. He tries far too hard to be nice to the point where it looks, sounds, and feels fake. These people automatically annoy me. Not nice people. People who are unnaturally nice and... greasy about it too. Its hard to convey in words but I hope you know what I mean.

Humour
Everyone has a different sense of humour, not everyones is to everyone elses taste. I like a lot of humour, from black humour to silly humour. This guys sense of humour is just... I don't know but it's annoying. The only people who laugh with it are those being polite or trying to kiss up to him.

Omni-presence
This guy is everywhere, in every lecture. So far in this course I have had FOUR modules, THREE of which were taught by this guy. ONE wasn't even part of the same subject really, it was part of Sociology. Why is he everywhere? Maybe ONE lecture of his would be alright. But when I imagine me taking this subject for the next THREE years and he is, by this rate, going to be teaching 3/4 of the lectures. I am going to die.

Enjoyability
I just cannot find these lectures enjoyable. I hate going to them. I really, really, really, hate them. But I want the mark on my Degree, saying I took this subject, but... I don't know if I can endure them.

There, I found something to hate for a change.

Evolving with Gaming

Girls can't play Video Games... Oh... Wait... Now hold on.

I have been at University now for over a semester and have got quite a close knit group of friends. Within said group are your Guys and your Girls. You may think you can guess where this is going, The Girls are going to be the Non-Gamers right? Well, your almost there.

Halo 3's multiplayer is probably the item that brought Woody, Luke, Common, and Me together as a friendship group. It sounds sad to admit it, but the highly social aspect of fighting one and other on the Xbox 360 has built solid foudations. We played it for eons and now we like to think were quite good. When a random Girl takes the controller instead of us you will find she stands there facing a wall for a good ten minutes and only manages to turn on the spot. But it isn't only girls. A lot of Guys pick up the game only to do sort of the same thing.

She hasn't got a clue what she is doing.

These Girls are always willing to give Halo 3 a try, eager to infact. So it's not the 'type of game' putting them off. Regular arguements are that girls tend to favour The Sims, and other such slower paced games, but here we have girls wanting to try Halo 3. With that in mind maybe Girls just lack some sort of necessary Gene? Maybe Men have evolved to be able to game? No?

This is a case of Nurture over Nature. From early birth I grew up with an Amiga, Megadrive, and Atari. I learnt to be good at games that involve timing your jumps across colourful platforms and getting to the end of certain levels within a time limit. Anything that was a shooter was either sidescrolling or topdown/birdseye view. I grew up back when gaming was young. Back when characters didn't look like actual people but tiny blocks put on top of each other.

Then I moved on to an N64. Suddenly characters were in 3d and you could run where ever you wanted, jump whether you wanted. Games like Mario which traditionally had ran across the screen were now triplejumping and backflipping over trees and rivers in a fully 3d enviroment. I then had a PS2 where GTA made it's transition from birdseyeview to 3d. What a wonderful transition it was too.

Now I am here with my XBox 360, PS3, and Wii and I find no game really that hard to play (NB: Play in this case means to move the character about and USE the game, the game may still be Hard). Give me a different controller, such as the Wii-mote, a dance mat, or Guitar Hero, and I am still alright. I can adapt to it easy. I believe this to be down to how I have grown using these things as important components in my everyday life. Taking up more of my free time then education or writing. Now this gives me a gaming template, or schema, in my head constantly. Every new game you get you head to the analogue stick to move, you never think it will be the buttons on the right, each game like Halo 3 I can move the character seemlessly, not having to stop to turn around. It gets to the point when you put it in use in real life, learning to drive for instance, I was treating the car as a giant controller! For someone who hasn't grown up in this enviroment it must be a lot harder to adapt to play games. It's not that Girls don't want to play games, it's that they will just have to overcome a higher learning curve, it's exactly the same if a Guy, who has never played games, comes up and tries the same thing. I just think that perhaps parents treated their children in stereotypical manors, giving games to Guys, for them to play and grow with, and not to Girls.

This kid got an N64 for christmas, his sister is blatantly jealous.

When your faced with a present day game you have alot of buttons on your plate. Take the 360 controller; A left analogue stick, a right analogue stick, a DPAD, 4 Buttons (X Y A B), two 'shoulder buttons', two 'triggers'. Thats a lot to do with your hand if you haven't picked up a controller before. It is hard to find something you use in real life which would bridge the gap. It is a completely new concept for some people. Vicky can not yet fully handle moving, shooting, and aiming at the same time, yet she 'captured the flag' and got it all the way back to base, scoring us a point. It shows that you just need to have a bit of practice, and a tolerant teacher, and you should be able to pick up games with such simple concepts as Halo 3 easily.

Me, not Vicky, on the home stretch.

It's been shown in Studies that Guys and Girls have different spatial awareness. Guys being better at it then Girls. Spatial awareness is knowing where things are without touching them, knowing your position without being able to see yourself, in general, finding your way out of a maze. This is probably why Guys are such better drivers! (Don't kill me) Studies even show that this gap between Guys and Girls narrows when the participants are gamers. Games do people good! We need to encourage Gaming!

Typical female driver

This should be a homework project. If you have a friend, be them Girl or Guy, who has never really played games, then get them up to speed! Get them good at atleast one game.

Let me know how you get on.