Meanwhile on the other side of the planet

Lately my thoughts have been trying to grasp the massiveness of humanity on the earth. Right now I’m sitting in a house typing at a computer listening to some music, (mumford and sons the cave not that it matters) and thinking and I am alone. I live in city of 100,000 people I am related to one person in this city who isn’t here right now he is presumably about 3 blocks away the nearest kinship relation I have beyond that is several hundred miles away. In that distance how many more lives are there what are all those people doing right now

Expand that out further to just the US the third most populated country on the planet over 3 hundred million people meaning we are only one fifth the size of India and a sixth the size of china

What does that mean well if you are standing in a line at a store in the US and there are 5 people in front of you the same line in china would have 30 people in front of you and in India it would 25

Just coming to terms with the numbers is one thing but what are we, all of us humans, doing at any given time.

How many people are doing exactly what I’m doing, a lot because typing is the primary means of how most language is passed on from person to person these days. Listening to music is common, you can hardly go any place in an urban environment and find silence and given humanities current desire to live stacked on one another the population density in urban environments is staggering you would think it would be impossible to be alone.

But I am and so are millions of other people.

Millions of other people are with other people. Some they know some they do not know some are happy, angry happy, in love, arguing and the multitude of things we do with one another

Someone is being born right now
Someone just died
Someone had sex perhaps for the first or last time
Someone just ate something
Someone hasn’t eaten and will probably die of starvation before the end of the day
Someone can’t decide what to wear
Someone has only one set of clothing and they wear it every day
Someone just got hugged
Someone just got slugged
And the list could go on an on and on

In every single minute over 6 billion people have done something all at the same time

Imagine if we could get all 6 billion people to do the same one thing all at the same time

Say that would be to jump up in the air and land … would it be enough to cause any seismic activity?

There is a person in the Amazon who is as far as scientist can tell the last of his tribe. A man who lives alone in the jungle and has for most of his life at some time he had a mother and father and perhaps other tribesmen but for what ever reason he is the last of his people. He is protected, the government forbids anyone to trespass in his territory and he has killed at least 3 people who have attempted to invade his territory.

I know about this person and anyone else who has read about him knows about him but largely most of the world has no idea that this man exists in the Amazon. Are there other men or women like this man that we don’t know about.

What does this man think is beyond the area that he knows and can he even fathom a skyscraper or even an airplane or space travel, submarines and all the other things that we take as common place in our world.

In our world what do we really know is going on in the lives of the 6 billion plus lives that fill the earth

The commonality of all of is that we all do the same things every day, eat, sleep, love, laugh, work and all the things we do there is so much that is the same every single day.
We celebrate the same occasions and mourn the same losses

Laugh when a friend falls and then quickly make sure they are ok but then laugh some more, not to make fun but to share that in life that we all fall down physically or emotionally but life goes on

Cry at the same losses the death of family and friends and other things which cause us sadness.

We all experience rage and ire at the wrongdoings which are primarily the same things there is very little difference in the core things we find to be wrong across all ethnic, cultural, national ,moral and political lines we are really very similar


Right not somewhere someone has kissed someone else and they are in love and it will last a life time but I will never meet them or the children they will someday have together our lives will never cross and most likely they will never meet a single person I know but we can all relate to that couple and the future they will have even without knowing them if you read this you thought about them and I’m sure your thoughts were happy ones and hopeful for people you’ll never meet. They are as real as anyone you know, why do we spend so much time thinking about how different we are in our lives when so much of it is the same

It isn’t even just our time we spend most of our effort and work on things which focus on our differences but how different are we really from one another.


Well, that’s all for now, other stuff tomorrow most likely

Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday

Thank you for reading, please subscribe, you know if you are reading this on blogspot or on diaryland. If you are reading on face book well you are already subscribed. Aren’t you happy.

Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood.

Ciao,






PS 3 Gamer Tag: invisible don

PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015

My solaris version of things

Recently, I find myself waxing nostalgic about things. Not that there isn’t anything of importance going on in my life in the present. The things in my present life are not really all that terribly exciting predominately due to an extreme lack of finances to fund endeavors which might be blog worthy

Unless you would like to trudge through the things I do for my job which I am sure there are more than a few that would like to know but I am not able to talk about that in a public forum.

I also walk my dog and scoop the cat box on a daily basis, which does sometimes produce some pretty deep thoughts but not so much in the exciting blow by blow recounts of the process

So I’ve been waxing nostalgic, especially about a photograph that some one recently posted of when I was living in Germany while I was in the Air Force.

The photograph is like so many then and today of friends out for a night of drinking and relaxing. The people in this photograph were two girls and another person in the Air Force Security Police. We were off duty

This was evidenced by the boot of beer in my friends hand and our civilian attire.

The girl I was with lived in a town pretty far from the base but not so far you couldn’t get there by car within about a 30 minute drive. Problem one I did not have a car at this point in my time in Germany.

The second problem encountered in this was my work schedule 6 days on 3 days off. The first three days of work were from 3p to 11p then the second 3 days working 11p to 7a. Not a Monday to Friday 9a-5p job. You would have a Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday off then be working all weekend yeah you get off work by 11 p but then by the time you change out of cop gear and get off to the hangouts it would be after 12 and that usually didn’t set well.

The girl and I got along very well but we were both young and I didn’t really understand the best way to talk to women then and added more stress to the situation because of my stress over not having a car and messed up work schedule.

She didn’t really understand the whole you just don’t tell the Air Force you aren’t showing up for work. In fact the military as a whole sort of frowns on that a good little bit.

I don’t regret anything I’ve done in my life but I do often wonder what if I had done things differently at time or wonder how things may have been different if things had played out differently.

Say she and I had been able to work thing out and dated longer and had a very serious relationship. I would have re enlisted remained in Germany. Probably learned to speak German beyond asking for directions, ordering food and a few profanities, as I was part of the deployment team I would have most likely spent some time in Gulf War one, which would have impacted that relationship.

I liked living in Germany so I know I would have remained there as long as the Air Force would have allowed.

I wonder what might have been all from one photograph.

I wonder too what if I could re connect to that person again, sadly the person who posted the photograph does not know how to contact the girl today.

I wonder how has here life been all these years what has she done in her life. She is one of the women I’ve dated that I wish things had turned out differently.

Like in Solaris do we remember things as they were or how we would like them to have been? I think I remember them how they were because I know I wasn’t the best at saying what was on my mind or how I felt.

I remember we broke up and got back together a few times. One of the times we got back together, I saw her out with a German guy she was dating and I wasn’t happy about it. However I got less happy when he hit her, which in turn I grabbed him and hit him and kept hitting him. Which inspired his friends to come to try to jump me and them my Air Force friends jumped in and there was a melee in the bar which was in the hall and the restroom, how it ended up in there I’m not sure but there were about 8 to 10 guys fighting in a very confined space.

The fight ended and the owners asked what had happened, a bystander said that the one guy had hit the girl and that I had started hitting him and then everyone else jumped in.

The owners decided to toss out the other guys and we were allowed to stay. She and I started dating again. Yeah knight in shiny armor stuff but it didn’t last long a few months and then we were back to where things were that broke us up before which were me not talking or sharing how I really felt about this girl.

Perhaps in an alternate time line there is a version of this relationship that worked

Perhaps there is a version that allows our threads to cross again in the tapestry that is living

In other news

Have about half of the new unlocks completed in the new DLC, trying to get the rest but one done today. One of them is going to take some work but some I mean a lot of work. However I’ve not been one to mess around much with the sniper rifles in this game yet and it will force the issue. Should be fun.

In other, other news,

August and everything after is one of the best albums ever recorded.


Well, that’s all for now, other stuff tomorrow most likely

Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday

Thank you for reading, please subscribe, you know if you are reading this on blogspot or on diaryland. If you are reading on face book well you are already subscribed. Aren’t you happy.

Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood.

Ciao,






PS 3 Gamer Tag: invisible don

PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015

New Battlefield 3 DLC Close Quarters

Some thoughts on the new Close Quarters DLC for Battlefield 3. The 4 new maps are small enough to allow for a lot of gun play with other players but not so small that you get pinned into an area and are then trapped in a particular corner and your team is then at the mercy or the lack of mercy by the opposing team.
The new maps are Donya Fortress- Operation 925 - Scrapmetal - Ziba Tower
All offer something unique in the environments that force an adjustment in game play for each map.
DICE delivered on their billed claim that Close Quarters is death from every angle there are very few places in the maps that you are safe and not open to an attack from multiple angles and or from higher or lower levels on the maps.
The modes of play are Team Death Match, Conquest Domination and Gun Master
Team Death Match on theses new maps is as fast paced as any other map in the BF3 rotation and if you are on the map you are in a gun fight quickly (most of the time)
Conquest Domination – moves quicker than any other conquest mode and players capturing flag points are generally fully exposed or at least partially exposed. So no longer do you arrive on point and have to wonder why the counter is not burning down because there is some player is hidden in some box, balcony or elsewhere requiring the man hunt or a greater number players to begin taking a point. Simply win the gun fight to take a point
However watch out for C4 though a new assignment requires a few C4 kills and grenades are needed to avoid being vaporized while capping you are going to die if you don’t spot the C4, and there are places to hide off burn to ambush those on burn so there is risk from every angle
Gun Master – Love and hate this game mode. Everyone is even with weapons at the start but not as the game advances. I don’t know that I will be playing this game mode much for a few reasons. While the maps are smaller you can go for what seems an eternity without seeing an enemy and there you are stuck with the M443 while you can see players moving up the Gun Master ladder further and further making getting those first 6 kills to get out of the 3 pistols harder and harder.
That said I love the idea of bettering my aim and gun play with a lot of different weapons. Come in late to a Gun Master round and you are pretty much toast pray you find that unsuspecting person here or there and hope you get a head shot because if you don’t you are a blood splatter on the walls.
The Gun Master Game mode has one other flaw in it that while you are still on a team a win only goes to the Gun Master winner and not anyone on that team. This is not a team game mode and should not count in the win / loss ratio statistics and should be changed to unranked as to win/loss statistics.
Sure I’m going to lose games and I do not mind losing but if you are going to only allow one winner and not a team win then make all the players targets and not just half of them. Because really they are not on your team they are on their own team in this mode.
Another thing I do not like about this game mode, either I’m not seeing an enemy for minutes and minutes or I’m getting shots into a player and then some “team mate” pops in gets off that last shot for the kill and gets the kill and my screen shows Kill assist 99… Ok… really? I swear to BOB in one match I had 40 kill assists and was stuck in the pistols for 70 percent of the match because of all the lost kills to “team mates”. Add up the assists if you get a total of 300 or 400 percent of assist points on a gun level, one or two more kills than necessary to advance let those players advance to the next weapon. However I think the easier thing to do would be to take out the Win/Loss statistic in this game mode. Then there is no adding up to kill assist points and there is no negative loss or gain in the Win/loss ratio to players who want to test their gun skills against other players.
Sure this may be called a “stat whoring” complaint. I don’t have stellar KDR or even a SPM rate, I do however have a positive W/L ratio and I work at keeping it that way by playing the objective and working with my team mates whether they are in my clan or just randoms.
My quit percentage is really low, at 2 to 3 percent depending on how many matches I get kicked out of, my internet craps out on me or I spawn into a game and the team is already being spawn camped and is down by several hundred tickets. I’m sorry this isn’t the real military and I’m not going down with an already sinking ship just to keep that quit percentage from going up a tiny bit. So I think removing Gun Master from the W/L statistics is a fair complaint because W/L is a team based statistic rating and Gun Master is not a team based game mode.
I think some of the assignments are a bit steep but not completely out of range but will take some work while others are so easy that you barely need to think about them to unlock a weapon. The AUG is an example of that I was in a high ticket rush match on Operation Metro and had it unlocked by the third set of MCOMs.
All in all I like all the new maps and new game modes, even if you won’t see me in too many Gun Master matches


Well, that’s all for now, other stuff tomorrow most likely

Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday

Thank you for reading, please subscribe, you know if you are reading this on blogspot or on diaryland. If you are reading on face book well you are already subscribed. Aren’t you happy.

Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood.

Ciao,






PS 3 Gamer Tag: invisible don

PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015

Project PTFO Team Yesh Bandits

Project PTFO Team Yesh Bandits

If you’ve been following the blog you know I was recently involved in a Battlefield 3 tournament which was a new idea in online gaming to bring the community together. However if gaming is not your thing you may not know about this tournament.

PTFO is Play the F’ing Objective and is an attitude of playing the game as it was meant to be played. Win or lose you play to capture/defend, arm/destroy points on the maps and to work with the other players on your squad/team and to have a fun time in the process.

The tournament paired players who also direct and produce video content on game playi and are posted on youtube /Twitch TV / Machinima with fans of their videos and also the game Battlefield 3.

The tournament was free, as in their was no fee for the players but you have to own the game and put on by the staff of Battlefieldo.com

The number of hours the people of Battlefieldo.com have committed to this project have been more than most people really probably understand. This tournament is on all three platforms of the game PS3, Xbox 360 and PC and involved hundreds of people from all over the world. So planning this was not as easy as sitting in a room and hashing out the details it took a ton of work.

The tournament announced aired in movie trailer format and I was all oh man this so exciting and decide that I would enter but did not really have much hope of wining.

I can not tell you how excited I was when I opened my email on Battlefield.com declaring that I had been selected to play as a contestant on Team Yesh Bandits.

Team Yesh Bandits are the directors Robert the Bruce with Yesh Gaming and mariocarrion with Bandito Gaming. These guys both produce video content on youtube and TwitchTV

I was familiar with Robert’s Battlefield 3 videos but was not with Mario’s videos. They are both of very similar mindsets on game play, that being fair play and playing the game to win while having fun and learning.

Meeting both of the via the online game play and online in game chat has been a good experience and I have enjoyed gaming with both of them.

As the winner of the selection draw I got to practice with these guys for the last week and the other winner Kennykyle2010.

We worked on tactics for the tournament game on attacking and defending two different maps in the Battlefield 3 game in the game mode Squad Rush. 4 players v. 4 players. This game mode allows attacking teams 20 player deaths in total to arm and destroy a target, if successful in the first arm and destroy it opens a second target to arm and destroy also with a total of 20 player deaths. If you arm and destroy both targets your team wins on attack. If the defending team kills the attacking team 20 times without the attackers saving downed players the defending team wins.

Each team attacked and defended two maps for a total of 4 possible points, points were only earned on attacking turns.

It is a very thinking game mode that requires planning on both sides of the game and requires that teams have the adaptability to adjust on the fly to what the other team is doing at any given time in the game and a very small mistake can lead to point lost or losing the game entirely.

We practiced for the week and I noticed a lot of improvement in my approach to the game and gun play. I will be the first to admit that I still have a lot of work to improve.

The main point of the tournament was for fun and to bring the community together for the event and for the directors to produce content from their POV of the game play and experiences meeting other players.

Our match was this past Saturday June 2, 2012 against Team LOL which was a European team, Captained by CHu99y from the UK and Dark Symmetry from the Netherlands and their two lottery players.

Unfortunately on the date of the game Kennykyle2010 had a family emergency and was not able to play. So Yesh Bandits was given another lottery player Maripopoza who agreed to come on board and play with no practice with the team and only a very quick 20 minute crash course on our teams planned tactics.

With that handicap Team Yesh Bandits still performed well and brought a lot of pressure to Team LOL and shut them out of two of their possible points.

Team Yesh Bandits did not score any of the 4 points possible but we performed well and were able to breach the defenses of Team LOL several times but just did not produce points.

With any tournament of this kind where the players are in remote areas from the others playing and all players signing onto a location computer server there will be lag or a delay in the data stream to the players and back to the server. The server we were playing on was a European Server so Team LOL was closer to the server than Team Yesh Bandits.

I’m in Virginia, Robert is in Kentucky and Mario is in New York and I’m not sure where Maripopoza is located. Our other team mate is in Seattle so he was further away than anyone else but did not pjlay. I know the two lottery players for Team LOL were in Europe but not their exact locations, so Team LOL’s distance from the gaming server was much closer than Team Yesh Bandits.

The data stream goes out quickly but there is always delay in getting the stream to those furthest from the servers. The slight data stream disadvantage to our side and paired with our team playing with a player who had no practice tilted the odds in favor of Team LOL.

I’m not saying this to take anything away from Team LOL. They are a very solid team who PTFO in a very serious way. They communicate well and play a very tactical game and were good and tough competitors and I congratulate them with all due sincerity for their win.

All of us on Team Yesh Bandits are happy with our performance and had a very good time and are all extremely happy to have been a part of Project PTFO.

I want to thank Robert with Yesh Gaming and Mario with Bandito Gaming for helping me and being very good teachers and always offering feedback in a positive and objective focused way. I’ve noticed a big, big improvement in my own game play and I am winning gun fights with players in my own clan that had usually out gunned me. I have a very new out look on how to play the game and hope we are able game more in the future.

I also want to thank everyone at Battlefieldo for all the hard work and effort you have put into making Project PTFO a great event and I am so glad to have been a part of this event. I hope you are able to plan more events like this one and hope I am lucky enough to be able to participate again.

Well, that’s all for now, other stuff tomorrow most likely

Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday

Thank you for reading, please subscribe, you know if you are reading this on blogspot or on diaryland. If you are reading on face book well you are already subscribed. Aren’t you happy.

Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood.

Ciao,






PS 3 Gamer Tag: invisible don

PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015

The happy ending business

The happy ending business, no not that sort of happy ending but the fah-la-la-la happy ending business, the, and they lived happily ever after sort of thing … this is not my business.

It is a pretty safe bet that people wish my business was the sort of thing that made it all better, but it isn’t that sort of thing … or at least not on the surface of things.

Yesterday another worker compared the work we do to assembly line work and I see his point. All the cases we get have specific things that have to be done and it becomes very much an assembly line mentality. We even say the same things over and over again in documents, meetings, every contact in one case is handled the same as in any other.

The droning machine that we are building isn’t a device, but humanity.

It is easy to fall into the idea that the world is a bad place and nothing ever gets better if all you see is bad.

The whole of the world lies, cheats, steals, takes the easy way, they don’t do what that need to do and on an on.

It never gets better and it never ends.

But it does sometimes get better and it does sometimes end but we just don’t see that part of it.

I’m sure that there are studies that burn out of factory works on assembly lines is higher and the front end of assembly than at the back end.

At the front end it is all the same it never slows down it is just do this and do that but what you do doesn’t make the whole but as you move along in the line it gets better and better … the person who does that last task gets to enjoy the satisfaction of making a product every single time it gets done.

Ask that worker, what did you do today I built 5000 widgets or what ever

Ask that first worker the same thing, nothing important, same shit different day, or something along those lines.

But that person did as much as the last person just at a different stage.

We don’t see the good things happen all that often it’s bad all the time 24/7/365 bad news, on top of worse news, covered in garbage.

But things do change Real life Super Hero Guy works with a kid who was part of the bad news a few years ago… that worker who ever it was who dealt with the same kid a few years ago only knows that kid from then, bad things happening for no reason but this kid is doing better there are still bumps but it’s better

Things change and the widgets we build with the same tools don’t turn into the same end product we just don’t see those people again.

We do see the recalls hey this wasn’t done right the last time it needs to be done over which ads to the bleak picture that people are just bad.

One of those assembly companies has ads now building themselves as good guys but how they are doing it is connected the makers of the products they build that get put into other things …for the builders it’s all well did that but they didn’t see the work they did do any real thing just gets shipped away and you make more. These workers get to see the product and product users in the ads

And at first I thought well that’s dumb why wouldn’t you see what you did or understand how it fit into the end product, but largely you don’t always see how your effort is connected to the next step.

I wrote a thing on interconnectedness back some time ago about how some ditch diggers 40 or 50 are as much responsible for my morning coffee as the bean growers and pickers without them the water in my house wouldn’t be there for me to put in the machine that makes the coffee and the those workers and the cup maker and hundreds of people all for a single moment of ah… now that is good coffee.

I’m sure that wasn’t the circuit board workers thought when he put that together for the coffer maker, you know invisible don is really going to enjoy coffee from this machine of 2 to 3 years before the product breaks and he has to buy the next coffee maker I make for him or the ditch diggers thought, or the potter, glazer, electrical and all the other workers.

My point is while it may not be such a nice picture from you point of view, even the Mona Lisa is just a blob of black or brown up close but take a few steps out and you see that each of the brush strokes builds on another and another and stepping back further the picture because clearer and look at it long enough what may initially seem like a melancholy lady is perhaps smiling a little bit, or you can be envious of her because she can see what Leonardo was doing and it is her secret which you can never know.

Taking the steps back or taking the time to see the bigger idea that is the work and there is a happy ending there some where but it might not be in your life time. Just like light that leaves the sun now won’t get here for another eight minutes and light that we see in the stars was sent when the dinosaurs were on the earth

We may not know what mark we make on the world but we all do in some way change the echo of humanity in some way.



Well, that’s all for now, other stuff tomorrow most likely

Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday

Thank you for reading, please subscribe, you know if you are reading this on blogspot or on diaryland. If you are reading on face book well you are already subscribed. Aren’t you happy.

Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood.

Ciao,






PS 3 Gamer Tag: invisible don

PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015