Starting to think about tying up loose ends

It looks very much like I'm going to be moving to Korea. Nothing else came through for me, and they definitely are offering me the position. I was told that the contract would be Fedex'd to me in the next few days (or sent by carrier pigeon...who knows), and then I can actually start working on getting the Korean E2 visa paperwork completed.

I'm going in for surgery next week for the shoulder manipulation. We've been kind of waiting a long time for this, but hopefully this will give me a lot more mobility with the arms and make it so it doesn't hurt so much on a constant basis.

Finally received my thesis back to go over one last time. It looks like once I have these fixes completed, it should be ready to send out to the three professors, and then we'll go into defense mode. I was getting really concerned about this because if it didn't happen soon, I realized I was probably going to be leaving for Korea in a little more than a month, so the defense might never come because I just won't be in the country anymore.

Been doing a lot of playing of Tabula Rasa lately. I have to admit that the game is pretty solid, and it's so much more interesting than World of Warcraft. Sure, it has a lot of flaws to it, but it's completely different than everything else that is out there, so it definitely serves to pass the time in a fun way. Plus, the one thing it has that almost NONE of the other games have is a great, solid backstory that weaves itself through the game. Most other games tend to have a backstory that is just that: A story in the background. This story is very much at the front of the game, and as you play the game you find yourself involved in the story line, which is pretty rare. There were some signs of that in Lord of the Rings Online, but most people knew the general story, yet it was pretty well done in how they incorporated the regular folk into an epic story that is really about a few dozen people. Tabula Rasa becomes one of those stories where the individual is more important than a few key players in the story line and that is both welcome and rare.

A negative, however, is a really, REALLY cheesy publicity campaign that is being used by the people who run Tabula Rasa to link Richard Garriott (the guy who designed the game) and his upcoming space tourist flight he is going to be taking. They've decided to integrate the real world space flight Garriott is taking and turned it into one of the cheesiest publicity campaigns of all time. I think the actual campaign claims that RG is going to space to "save humanity" from the evil bane (the creatures attacking in Tabula Rasa), and that somehow they're going to bring a data disk of the DNA of people playing the game. Yeah, really cheesy. I'm kind of embarrassed to be affiliated with the public relations part of a game I'm enjoying so much. The way I figure it: Go to space and have fun because you're a freaking multi-millionaire who lives in a castle in Austin, Texas. Don't pretend you're saving humanity in a computer game you've created, because even though you have a lot of geek cred, there's a point where geek cred stops being an asset and becomes a serious loser liability.

Stumble It!