The Jake Neumann

I recently started to play Spirit of the Century with some friends of mine, and it is the most fun that I have had playing a role playing game in a long time. It might just be the fact that  it’s a new game to play, but it might just be that I’ve been in a bit of a gaming slump lately. The only game that I’ve been playing with any consistency is a weekly D&D 3.5 game. I’m not a fan of the D20 system, but that’s a topic for another post. I find FATE and more specifically Spirit of the Century to be a great system, but here are a few highlights that I have:

On-the-fly character creation In Spirit of the Century, anybody can jump into a session having done no work beforehand. You just need to pick the things that you are best at and go from there. As you play through the game, you fill in the holes on your character sheet. I have found that this is so much more fun than some other systems that I have tried where you have to do a lot of number crunching and thinking about precise placement of skill points before you can begin to play.

Fast and Loose I’ve seen a lot of different games in my day, and a lot of them encourage you to immerse yourself in your character. Most of the games that I have seen, implement this poorly. The rules are simple in Sotc, your role 4 six-sided dice, with each side marked with a plus, minus, or nothing, add the result to the skill and that is how well you did at your task. In this game, you can focus so little on what you can do mechanically and more on what your character would do in that situation.

Freedom, Freedom, Freedom The FATE system has something called aspects built into the system. Each character has ten aspects that they make up. Aspects round out the characters thematically and they guide the game master as to what the characters want to see. Aspects are used to make the characters fun to play. The skills are helpful in knowing what the characters can do, but not who they are. Aspects inform all of the other players who that character is and what they do.

Spirit of the Century provides a much different experience than most other role playing games on the market. At the least, I would give the game a shot, because it will provide a good change up from the standard Dungeons and Dragons game that most people have expected of role playing games.

I’m looking to try some different things, because I need to do something different in my life. To do this, I want to get back into photography. I’ve tried my hand at some amateur photography in the past, and I took some pretty above average pictures, if I do say so myself.

I have an idea for a series of photos which show people showing emotions. When you look at most pictures on the Internet, you see one of two things, usually, happy and sad. But there is a gamut of other emotions that people feel. I want you to help me express these emotions. It is amazing the things that you can see when you look at people when they think nobody is watching. You can see them as nobody has seen them before, because when people don’t think anybody is watching, they are themselves. We all put up walls and put on different masks when we go out. Anybody that says they don’t is a liar. Some of our masks are not as prominent as other peoples, but we all wear them, because there are things that we want to cover up. I want to capture you for who you really are.

All that I will need from you is permission to photograph you going about your day, and in return, I will give you digital copies of all the pictures that I take.

Winter has officially reared it’s ugly head in Illinois once again. While we haven’t had snow that has stuck, it’s still colder than I like. It’s around this time every year that I think to myself, this time next year, I’m going to be on the beach sipping martinis. That never seems to happen, though. Since I am here in this almost frozen tundra with no end in sight, I’m going to make the best of what I have.

I know that it’s a little cold outside right now, but this is a great time to go out and take some cool photos. There isn’t anybody else out right now, and if we plan things right, there will be some pretty snow on the ground for some great pictures. If you’ve been thinking about getting some pictures done, let’s hang out for a few hours and see what we can produce.

If the winter is a little too cold for you, I’ll still be around in the spring to take some pictures for you when everything is blooming and coming alive once again.

About two weeks ago, I had an epiphany. I am not living my life the way that it was intended to be lived. I am just skating through life, accomplishing very little. I feel as if I am a creative, talented person, but I am using neither one of those to even a small fraction of their potential.

I am going to start doing things to use my creativity and talents, this is probably going to involve other people. My reasoning for this is twofold: the first being that I want to expand my talents beyond what I am doing right now, and the second being that I am trying to figure out what I really want to do with my life. Due to this being a selfish endeavor, in trying to make my life better, I am not going to charge a set rate for anything I do until further notice. The only thing that I ask in return is that you pay me what you think that I am worth (hopefully, this won’t be a negative number. I can’t afford that).

I can’t do this alone, and I realize that. Over the years, I have realized that the Internet has a much larger network of people than I ever could. At this point, I just ask that you tell everybody about me, start a viral marketing campaign if you have to. If you know anybody that wants or needs web development work done, a website designed, some pictures taken, or anything that you think I might have an inkling how to do, send them my way.

Before I start this, here’s a little disclaimer. I love wordpress and all of the options that it has, but I don’t think that it is a one size fits all solution. When an Internet ignorant person comes to me for a suggestion on how to set up their website, they expect to get some knowledge and wisdom out of me, not the same stuff I give to everybody else. I feel like people are often given wordpress, because that’s what everybody else uses, not because that is what they need. WordPress is great, it has a lot of plugins available, and it is customizable to no end. It also has a lot of things that a small website might not need, such as the ability to blog.

I recently found a CMS called Concrete5 it is a free open source CMS. While templating isn’t as intuitive as wordpress, what the end user sees is simply stunning. It has a feature that I have wanted to see in WordPress for a while now, inline editing. This alone wouldn’t make me change my mind, but everything  on the concrete5 dashboard seems much more intuitive to me.

I know that lot of people have invested a lot of time and money into developing for wordpress, and there is a lot of money available in supporting wordpress. But I also know that designers should be more worried about the end user, than making a quick buck. If you could make your customer happier without using wordpress, why wouldn’t you?

It’s funny how, after a long time of not being inspired, a lack of inspiration seems normal. It has been a long time since I had been inspired, but I felt it again this weekend, and it was amazing. Due to this sudden spike of inspiration, there are some big things coming.

You can take that to the bank.

I finally finished my NaNoWriMo word count plugin, you can find it here. I for one think it’s does a pretty good job at what it does. I wrote this plugin, because I noticed that there was a lack of plugins in the word count department that fit my needs. I am planning on doing NaNoWriMo this year, but I wanted to use wordpress as my editor. I found that there was nothing to track my word count on my way to 50,000 words. So, I unveil to you the NANOWRIMO WORD COUNT PLUGIN!!! With this plugin, you can view the titles of all of the posts in a category, see their individual word counts and the total word counts of all of the posts.

You can see this plugin in action on my Table of Contents page.

I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons Online a lot lately. It’s a free game(with the option to use real money) made by turbine, the same people that made Lord of the Rings Online. If you haven’t check it out yet, you definitely should. It has replaced my gaming time, because, as I mentioned in the previous post, I cannot game consistently. For those of you that don’t know, I am a huge nerd, and I like to play tabletop role playing games. I haven’t been able to do that very much for the past year, due to life circumstances and all of my adult friends having other adult schedules. For the past few months, I have been able to attend a friend’s D&D 3.5 game every few weeks, but showing up that inconsistently isn’t very satisfying for anybody involved. Long story short, I have had this game shaped hole in my heart  for over a year, so once I found DDO, I was hooked.

DDO is a great service, because it allows me to play a game, while not my favorite style but a game nonetheless, on my schedule without the need to collaborate with multiple other peoples schedules. If you are a gamer that is bored with your current games or you are a gamer, like me, that can’t fill that void very easily, I would suggest trying out DDO.

I currently play on the Thelanis server as Portario (cleric) and Aistydeu (fighter)

For those of you that don’t know what swing shift is, it is a job that you do not work the same shift everyday that you go into work. For clarity’s sake, swing shift is seven days on midnights (10:30 PM to 6:30 AM), two days off, seven days of afternoons (2:30 PM to 10:30 PM), one day off, and seven days of days (6:30 AM to 2:30PM), and four days off. This type of shift work is frustrating to say the least. I used to hate my standard office 9-5 job, because I am very much a night owl. After working a screwed up shift like this one, though, I would love to go back to something like that again. If you know anybody looking for a web developer, feel free to drop my name in a conversation with them.

Something that has an interesting effect on my body, is the four days off trying to adjust myself to midnights. As I write this blog post right now, I am adjusting, by staying up late the days before I have to go into work. Over the last nine months that i have worked this job, I have had time to think about my feelings about swing shift in general.

First things first, I thing that I would love little more than to work a straight shift, especially midnights, but that is not possible at my current job. When you are in a relationship, like marriage, with somebody, swing shift can strain the relationship to say the least. I couldn’t imagine working swing shift if I had kids to worry about. Over time, my wife and I have adapted to those weeks where we do not get to see each other very much, but it still proves interesting when we literally see each other for twenty minutes a day for a week at a time. I worked a desk job for a while where I worked from 8:30AM to 4:30PM, Monday through Friday, that I wasn’t a huge fan of, because I am a night owl. Looking at what I’m doing now, though, the job wasn’t that bad. The hours were always consistent with the occasional option for overtime. If I could go back to that, be able to pay the bills and still have some money left over to pay off my debt, I would probably take it in a heart beat.

Swing shift isn’t all bad, though. On those nights that I am preparing myself for midnights, staying up late all by myself, I am sometimes inspired with those crazy thoughts that you get when you have a lack of sleep. Right now, I am watching Gangs of New York, which has gotten me thinking about a setting for a steampunk setting set in the not too distant future, but that’s for another time and place. When I do go to bed tonight… this morning… whatever you want to call it, I will probably get an idea that seems great at the time, but in reality is just plain dumb. I don’t know if this happens to everybody, but my mind is always thinking about something so things can start to get a little loopy.

When swing shift does start to mess with my head, I start to remember how much swing shift messes with my mind and body. With the job that I have, I cannot have anything resembling a normal social life, because I am either working or sleeping when my friends are doing something nine times out of ten. That isn’t to say that i don’t want to do anything else. I would love to be able to have a consistent game meetup, but that isn’t possible with swing shift. I do get a total of seven days off in a twenty-eight day period, but on those days, my wife has these not so crazy ideas of spending time with me.

Studies have been done to show that when swing shift is required, such as in a glass factory, the shifts should be progressive, e.g. days, afternoons, midnights. Since my job is a union job and they want their long weekend to be as long as possible, I get to work the reverse of that. Personally, if I worked midnights, days, and then afternoons, I would probably be ecstatic, but that won’t happen with the way that the union I’m in is set up.

I’ve been learning a lot about programming, specifically with WordPress in mind. I know the basics of wordpress plugins, but I don’t know where to go from here. I’m currently working on a plugin to use WordPress for NaNoWriMo. I’m looking for other ideas for plugins, though. Is there any functionality that you would like to see that you haven’t been able to get yet? Or is there something that you found that almost does what you want, but not quite?

I’m just learning, but I’m open to new ideas.