Overcoming the 'woo'

Recently, I caught myself looking into organics, herbal, crystals and kombucha. I had to step back and realize I am getting myself into the 'woo'. My scientific mind doesn't want to compute but, my body started to crave natural whole foods, living a zen life, meditation.

Yeah, I feel better but, there's no way I should fall myself to the 'woo'. What's a woo? It's basically a short term for pseudoscience and also applies to other terms such as homeopathy, energy vibrations, crystal healing, organics, etc. To get myself back on track, I blocked myself from reading up on it. It's a little harder with having an education in Archaeology because a lot of the 'woo' stuff gets superimposed into archaeological debates. It's time for me to learn which ideas are solid, needs to be investigated or pass it off as woo. I will no longer debate people about ancient history because it is my forte. If people believe aliens built the pyramids, I'll just smile and nod then say "you're talking to an archaeologist". It's like telling a doctor about how homeopathy is better than today's medicines. It just doesn't make sense in my head.

I will however set up a meditation spot in my house as I am currently struggling with personal stress and am tired of being irritable. I recently discovered the main cause and that is set for another time.

Blogging Blunders

I've committed an eternal sin which is not blogging. I've lost interest mostly due to the real world tacking on more responsibilities on me. I've got a full time job, vacations to plan, exercising, focusing on weight loss and still no clue what I want to do career wise. I have yet to find my calling and still I am desperate to figure out what I should do in my life.

I can't complain much because my life so far is decent, but the existential crisis is strong. I'm barely 30 years old and am sick and tired of having so many ideas and no time to start them off. I don't want to stay stuck with regrets so I will say "fuck it, I'll finish what I started." I honestly don't think blogging/tweeting/snapchatting/vloggin, etc is for me even though it's a great way for me to vent and rant. As of this moment, I will put this blog to a pause and figure out how I can make my life better. Until then, stay classy.

WvW Purgatory: The server stuck in the middle

On October 18, 2013, Guild Wars 2 will begin its first season 1 Sever competition. There will be three leagues: European Servers, North American Gold Servers, and North American Silver & Bronze Servers. What does that mean for you? Check out this chart that I just put together, this is based on the current stats. 

 I decided that it made more sense to split North America into three leagues, much like Europe. In the case of North America, the top six worlds will be the gold league and will battle each other in a clash of titans over a seven week period. The silver and bronze leagues will be made up of nine worlds each and will function exactly the same as the European leagues.

For reference, the red servers below are the Gold leagues. These top six servers are far beyond in score and population so it is natural for Anet to create a separate league. Blue colored servers are the Silver leagues and green colored servers are the Bronze leagues.

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Now compare that chart to the European server charts, see how huge the North American gap is? Good luck reaching the 2 million mark.

| Create infographics

So who are these top six North American servers? They are Sanctum of Rall, Jade Quarry, Blackgate, Tarnished Coast, Fort Aspenwood and Sea of Sorrows. Sanctum of Rall, Jade Quarry and Blackgate are STACKED servers. They have the highest player population and the queue times can take hours. All three servers have good coverage across NA (North America) prime time, EU (European) prime time and SEA (South East Asia) prime time. They were once called Tier 1 servers. 

Tier 2 is a whole other mess consisting of Tarnished Coast, Fort Aspenwood and Sea of Sorrows. I am a player of the Tarnished Coast. TC has a reputation for having a good community and it is the unofficial Role Playing server. I do not RP, I spend my time kicking butt on the World versus World battlefield. Look at my pitiful collection of badges, each badge represent how many players I have killed in battle.

Yes, enjoy my pitiful collection of sweet tears from my enemies. If you have a server in which players are organized and skilled enough, you can have a map like this one below. It looks so beautiful when your server has control of all camps, towers and keeps. Now, with a top server like TC, we suffer from the case of the zergs. It is how the top three servers deal with fighting against a horde of 100 players on the map.

Below is an example of a zerg overtaking a tower. If you are smart, you better run away if you don't have the numbers to fight them. If you are brave, godspeed, your body becomes a sacrificial offering for the zerg to collect their loot from your corpse.

See how scary this is? It is a sea of red players ready to kick your ass. I once joked that if you start lagging out of nowhere, chances are that there is going to be a zerg rush coming to run you down. I stopped joking after that because it is a real threat. Although, while us toasters suffer from being stuck in the middle, we still try to have fun.

We are forever stuck as a 1.5 server. We don't want to be tier 1 because Sanctum of Rall, Jade Quarry and Blackgate often steamrolls us with their higher numbers. We are a NA prime server, we lack coverage in EU, especially SEA prime time. Once it hits 10 pm PDT, our numbers fall leaving most of our defenses unmanned. Some people have said that Tarnished Coast is not tier 2 because we have the higher numbers than Fort Aspenwood and Sea of Sorrows. I have no comments about Fort Aspenwood, but Sea of Sorrows can be terrifying when SEA prime time comes around (see sea of red).

At the end of the day, we all have fun and yes there were times where we take ourselves seriously. We are not here to win. Tarnished Coast is the server that can teach you how we dealt with the top three servers. So many servers have risen and fell but Tarnished Coast has risen from the 7th spot up to the 4th spot. We are staying strong, we like where we are because we can focus on our strength through skill and not numbers. The last time I ran a zerg was for the infamous Karka event. Don't get me started, this image below sums it up.

Yeah, no more angry Karka...crab island...it was horrible, but I did survive it.

Challenge Accepted

We are faced in a world where the media describes the current generation as unmotivated, lazy and self centered. Before the great recession of 2008, we were told that our futures were bright. We could be what we dream to be and are guaranteed jobs anywhere because having an education is worth it. Now we are all faced with a problem. We all have the degrees, but the jobs that we studied for are not there...what happened?

It's a complex issue that would take experts, scholars, stats and researchers to compile all the data I need to make an analysis of why and how this happened. I am not going to do that. I have plenty of sources to look into and form my own opinion from it. The simplest answer is that there is not enough good jobs for college grads. What I mean by good jobs, I meant about jobs that are related to the students study. We are seeing changes in the way the higher educational system is run. Let's look at the medical professions. If a student wants to learn to become a doctor, normally he/she needs to major in Pre-medical studies. Get high grades, internships/student projects and place high on the exams. Now, getting into med school is not an easy task. Suppose 100 pre-med students apply for medical school in which there are only 20 spots open for the first year. What happens to the 80 applicants that didn't get in? Did they waste 4 to 5 years of their life and thousands of dollars in debt and not get into the career they chose to be? What happens to the 20 applicants that did get into Medical school and half of them drop out due to school costs, life, etc? These are the questions that need to be answered.

The reason I am writing this is because I am a concerned voice of the generation. I've been to college, I had several jobs and have been out of the job due to the economic downturn. Every job I've applied to, 9 out of 10 have found someone else or decline my application. It is quite frustrating to see. I had thoughts of going back to school to study another field, move back with my family and try there, etc. I had so many plans and ideas that don't work out, but one thing is consistent. I want to succeed and travel the world. I'm at a point where it's becoming a challenge. This should've been done when I had so many chances and I didn't take. This time I am stepping up, I am going to push further to complete my goal. I always find a way to make things work and can't have anything or anyone pull me down. I am a millennial and I consider it a challenge accepted.

Next up I will talk about Twitter becoming the new Myspace and why I hate flash. :)

Fortune Cookies: Therapy in a Box

I feel like I have to express my thoughts on something almost unnatural that I must share with the world. For the longest time, whenever I receive fortune cookies, the messages in them somehow relates to my life. To be honest, I don’t know if I should call it a blessing, a curse, or I may just be over-thinking. Regardless, the randomness of the fortunes I receive are almost too accurate for my liking. For example, I work in a job that requires me to maintain a professional but friendly appearance whenever I approach customers. A lot of them were friendly, understood that delivery of goods and services isn’t going to be fast enough because I have to deal with a lot of customers. Sometimes, some customers are not patient and are very particular on how service should be run. If left unattended for too long, I would end up getting yelled at or at worse, not making enough sales. 

Two days ago, I ordered my usual Kung Pao Chicken and Vegetable Fried rice and was greeted by three fortune cookies. Each one is a gem waiting to be held:

•  Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

I was told often and time again that I have potential to be much more successful but I have to apply myself. The problem is how do I do that? How can others see that I am intelligent, business savvy, and creative? I have way too many talents to pick one to succeed on, so my dream on being successful one day feels like a difficult task to do.

•   Avoid taking unnecessary gambles.

This one is vague enough to apply to everyone who gets that message. I didn’t think much of it, but soon I realized that I have been following that message before I got it. I learned how to be patient, learned to pick one’s own battles and be graceful when things don’t work out. After all, if you put everything at risk, you lose everything. I nearly did that and learned it the hard way. I am glad I still follow that rule.

•   It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

This message bothered me for a bit…what is it supposed to mean? What does a little piece of paper with random words of wisdom be so intuitive? Maybe it is my luck, but I am still wondering what the phrase is supposed to tell me. Should I be confident 100% of the time or be confident when I know I am in the right? I’m pretty much over-thinking things that may mean nothing…

Either way, this is just a snippet of my private life and don’t assume it is all I do. My life is much more interesting than that and it would be 1000 pages if I make a detailed story of my life.  There are some things I like to keep private, and there are other things I want to rant about. I’ll keep this short because I am having trouble seeing with my contacts getting blurry. Signing out.

Goodnight Heights

My time is getting closer to move to the West Coast and I feel that a part of me will always be from New York City. No matter how much has changed, I still look back and remember the times I had growing up there. I am delegating this post a la Goodnight Moon. So here it is:

Goodnight Heights
Goodnight hood
Goodnight crackheads and prostitutes at the corner
And the dealers, too
Goodnight PS 189
Goodnight IS 143
Goodnight HS Media and Communications
And Columbia U.
Goodnight Bodegas
Goodnight Boutiques
Goodnight 181 shopping spree
And Macy's too
Goodnight Crime
And goodnight catcalls
Goodnight killings
And wannabe gangsters
Goodnight poverty
That I don't want to live through again
Goodnight drama
Goodnight Summer noise
Goodnight angry New Yorkers
Goodnight Traffic Jams
Goodnight Times Square
And your clubs too
Goodnight Subway
Goodnight Bums
Goodnight Central Parks
And goodnight dog crap, not going to miss you
Goodnight roaches
Goodnight horse coaches
Goodnight Grafitti
Goodnight Hipsters
And those Crusters
Goodnight Village
Goodnight good food,
I will miss New York
Just not the ghetto.

IQ and EQ Fail

The past few weeks I took on the challenge to create an equation that can measure the social relationship between two people in accordance to IQ and EQ. I failed. This is meant to be a joke and the math equation is made up for comedy purposes. This is what I have done so far.

We all know about IQ (Intelligence Quotient) used to measure Intelligence, but what does it mean for everyone else? It is believed that people with high IQs tend to have low EQ (Emotional Quotient), whereas people with high EQ tend to have average or below IQ. To make it simpler people with high IQs tend to rationalize their emotions that can be viewed as anti social, apathetic or even uncaring to a person who is naturally outgoing. Of course there are so many variables to this. Not everyone with high IQ is an uncaring soul and not everyone with average IQ are outgoing popular folks. Here is the equation I created that doesn't make freaking sense but fun to do.

Lets go over the first image on the left. Let's say that both IQ and EQ are measured equally and take a person of a 117 IQ and 100 EQ. We then add 117 + 100 to create an IEQ of 217. By dividing IEQ with IQ and EQ then subtracting the values:

IQ / IEQ - EQ / IEQ = X
117/217 - 100/217 = .078

Now that we got .078 for X, we then can plot to where .078 stand on the scale. Base 1 is positive, Base 0 is average and Base -1 is negative correlation. So therefore, .078 is between Base 0 and Base 1 meaning that the person has both attributes of a person with good intelligence and a good personality. But what if we need to figure out how compatible people are within a social circle? Let's make a breakdown.

Think of intelligence as a bell curve, about 2.1% of people are MENSA smart, ~2.1%  legally dumb, ~13.6% below average, ~13.6% above average and ~ 68.3% average intelligence. The same can be done for measuring emotions with 2.1% sociopath, 2.1 very empathetic, 13.6% extrovert, 13.6% introvert, and 68.3% average (variation of both). These are much harder to measure because personal experiences can make a person more or less sociable to his/her environment. Now that we got that down, here is how my equation failed.

Let's say we begin to calculate Sue and Mark's social compatibility between each other. Sue has 115 IQ and 110 EQ while Mark has 117 IQ and 101 EQ. Let's calculate!

Sue: 115/225 - 110/225 = .022

Mark: 117/218 - 101/218 = .074

So Sue has an IEQ of .022 and Mark has an IEQ of .074, wait a minute. That means Mark is more sociable than Sue, what gives? Sue has 9 points more than Mark and their intelligence is almost equal, what happened? By just using the calculation of IEQ, you just can't say oh Mark is more sociable than Sue. This is the second step of the equation, we have to see the proportion of that in relation to their IEQ. For this we need to find the relation between two or more people.

IQ + EQ OF 2+ PEOPLE

p1 +p2 = P(of p1 and p2) - 100% = q

if result = q then,

p1 - q = x1, p2 - q = x2

With this I tried to find the values of X within a proportion, let's calculate Sue and Marks IEQs.

 .022 + .074 = .096 - 100% or 1 = .096 - 1 = .904

q = .904 then,

Sue: .022 - .904 = .684

Mark: .074 - .904 = .83

Now it looks like it makes sense, both Sue and Mark are closer to the base of 1. The proportions itself however are still too high, so I made the next step.

X1 - X2 = | SQRT X |

.684 - .83 = -0.146 = |SQRT -.146| = .382 

Now it looks better. With a base of 1 Sue and Mark has social compatibility of .382. This is seen as positive because 1 > .38 > 0 and thus they are seen as compatible within their social circle. This can only be done through people who are friends and not strangers. If this is done with strangers it would produce results of hilarity only found between Peter Griffin and Marge Simpson. It's just not going to work well, which is why I think it fails in that sense. Let's say Sue and Mark has that compatibility that is seen as above average but they are not dating nor live together. How so? The variables are endless: different interests, grew up together, dated before, live in different places, issues with work schedule, hygiene, eating habits, attraction, married to other people, etc. These are endless. This is the bs I came up with and I in no other way claim this to be fact.

This is a challenge I took and the equation I cam up with. So what does the IEQ have to do with it? Simple, in society, we see that the default person must be both smart enough and emotional enough to succeed in life. This isn't always the case. You can be the smartest person on the planet but when it comes to dealing with people, you can be people shy or only care for others who share your intelligence or interests. I am guilty of that but I do not claim as smart, I know enough and am interested in learning new things. I guess there will be a part 2 if I get a request to take up another challenge.