I have returned during my brief winter break! It's a new year, and I write this post while sipping a Banana Cream Olipop on a frozen January night. Good stuff. Been loving life recently tho fr... I don't ever wanna die! :D

I saw this video by some girl on YouTube where she described the concept of a "Forever World" in Minecraft. Basically it's a world that you make frequent backups of and make an effort to play on forever.

hold on, lemme get a link to it... please hold...

okay, here u go, I even put it in a fancy embed box!

And that's one of my issues with Minecraft, I always start worlds and end up losing them, either by installing too many mods and corrupting them, data loss, not backing them up, and not having a plan to stick to.

And burnout is fine, right? Like, it's totally okay to get tired of the game and stop playing for a few months or whatever, but that's cool thing about the forever world concept, is that once you get the itch to play again, you can always come back to a really cool, personalized world and see all kinds of years of memories, like a digital journal yknow. Provided you are taking good care of the save file and protecting it with every fiber of your being, of course. I'm backing it up on OneDrive as well as my local SSD, incase Microsoft explodes or something. You just gotta stick with it and not lose the world. Simple concept, I know, but i've really been enjoying it.

In other news, i've been getting into retro games a bunch. I love like, PS2 era, Original Xbox era games. They are imbued with the zeitgeist of the early 2000's. It's something you can't recreate now. I bought one of those fat PS2s and some games. I hate emulators because you have to spend 3 hours configuring them to get the crap working, theres always something going wrong, it's just always a hassel, and feels more charming when you use original hardware. I'm an original hardware andy.

I've been playing the original Half-Life and some other whacky games, like Scooby-Doo: Night of 100 Frights, Enter The Matrix, And i've heard so much hype about this game called Okami, so I bought that too. Haven't played it yet.

AND I CANNOT BELIEVE THE PRICES of some of these PS1/PS2 games! It's absolute HIGHWAY ROBBERY. Like, who in their RIGHT MIND gonna pay $200+ for an old crummy copy of Silent Hill?!?! Okay, I mean, I get it, supply and demand, the games are out of print, whatever. But that's ridiculous.

Apparently, I have expensive taste, because everytime I think;

"oh, that would be cool to have! :D",

I go look it up and it just so happens to be extremely rare.

I wanted the Half-Life: Raising the Bar book. Nope! Ultra rare, out of print, $600 please.
Wanna play Silent Hill on original hardware? Well you better be ready to spend 200 FRICKIN dollars! A physical copy of LSD: Dream Emulator? You're dreamin' pal. That'll run ya' about 2000.

Valve is reprinting a second edition of the Raising the Bar book sometime this year for the 20th year anniversary of Half-Life 2, however, and you bet your sweet bippy i'm gonna scoop that up.

One of my weird ideas is to dedicate one entire room of my house to being the retro gaming room. Like, everything in the room has to be period correct. Nothing in the room can be made after say.... 2008?

Everthing from the 90's beatboard walls to the warm glow of the CRT television! The whole room would be made to look like it's stuck in the early 2000's. And I would have like a 90's lookin' wood entertainment center full of old games and various consoles, Dreamcast, Xbox, PS2, whatever else... and an old CRT, like a Sony Trinitron. Those things are so cool.

I would love to just get high as fuck and play Scooby-Doo for hours in there. And bring some friends over. Can't bring your iPhone in there though! That wouldn't be period correct... :3

I struggle to find things to write about on here, and what I do write can sometimes feel like it's not me, or i'm being performative, and I think that's because I dont exactly know who i'm writing for. I guess it's my future self. So that's who i'm writing this blog post to, and all my future ones from now on, because It's a lot easier to write these with that audience in mind, and this one feels more like it was actually written by me. Cheers to you, you magnificent bastard.

Life is crazy, man. And I wouldn't have mine any other way.

- Aaron :)

It's that time of the year again! A new semester has started at college. And just so you know where I stand on this, college is absolutely a scam. A worthless degree that leaves you with a lifetime of debt SUCKS!!! >:( Not to mention you can literally learn anything online for free, and universities indoctrinate you with all sorts of SILLY BILLY hocus pocus mumbo jumbo.

So then, you may ask, why on earth am I still going? Well, there is one exception, (at least for now, in this brief window of time before degrees become completely worthless), and that is that STEM degrees can actually provide a return on investment as well as useful knowledge and skills.

And although everything taught in a STEM degree can also be learned online, it's the degree (and possibly networking), not the knowledge that you're after. Couple that with the fact that I've always wanted to go, have nothing else better to do at the moment, and that it's completely paid for, and it's more a question of why not?

I'm going for a masters in Mechanical Engineering. A degree so broad that you can go pretty much anywhere with it. I love the physical sciences and nature of our universe. That shit is fascinating to me.

I was torn between this and Computer Science, until I realized that what I really wanted to learn from CS was programming, not all of the abstract data math and stuff. And the ME courseload has tons of programming in it, so its the best of both worlds.

I think working at a National Lab would be sick, like some real Gordon Freeman Black Mesa type shit.

I am Aaron (aka Asrob, aka Air) and this is my blog. This serves as a place for me to speak my mind.

I've always wanted to keep a jorunal, because writing can be so good for you're soul, processing thoughts, self-reflection, y'know, all that stuff. And what better place to store this writing than on than on the internet! Where it will be forever backed up!