Oblivion (cont.)

Here are some pictures of the armor (without shields), not all are represented though. The weapons aren't shown very well, and there arent many pictures of them, but they include: daggers, shortswords, long swords, claymores, axes, maces, battle axes (two handed), and bows. Each armor type (steel, ebony, daedric, elvish, etc.) has its corresponding weapons, so there are steel swords and axes, ebony axes and maces, etc. down the list.

Daedric Armor


Glass Armor

The game is composed of the main quest (the storyline laid out at the beginning of the game with the Emperor and such), The Fighters Guild quest line (kind of like a mercenary group, they take contracts to kill monsters and criminals etc.), The Mages Guild quest (they send you on quests in the pursuit of magical knowledge), The Arena Faction quest (a gladiator arena in which you work your way up through the ranks by killing a ton of opponents), The Thieves Guild quest (a Robin Hood-esque band of thieves led by "The Gray Fox"), and The Dark Brotherhood quest line (a secret society of murderers and killers led by a vampire, its actually pretty creepy, and the contracts make you feel kinda icky, so I only did two or three). Each quest line is composed of a ton of mini quests that focus on the particular faction (for instance, the Mages Guild has to do with magic, lots of learning new spells and fighting evil mages and necromancers, The Fighters Guild has contracts that require you to wear armor to survive and fight other meat heads such as yourself, The Thieves Guild requires you to sneak in the shadows and steal things unseen, etc.) There are also a lot of other side quests that don't have anything to do with the secondary quests. Since the game is so open and non-linear, you can play hundreds of quests without ever advancing one step in the main story line. The map is huge, over 16 square miles by scale, with hundreds of locations that need to be found, like caves, mines, ruined fortresses and cities, glades, and towers.

Every location has items placed in it, either on tables (dishes and utensils, food, potions), in chests (most have gold, weapons, armor, etc. and you have to pick the locks on a lot of them, an infuriating process), in cupboards, and other stuff depending on the surroundings. You can amass a good amount of items, so much that it weighs you down until you cant move until you drop some (your ability to hold more items goes up as you "level up" and increase in strength) or sell them. Almost everything has a use at some point. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of individual items throughout the map.

The enemies in the game are usually specific to the quest, and they vary quite a bit. There are trolls (pictured above, they look kinda like monkeys), ogres, goblins, ghosts, wraiths, zombies, necromancers (mages who practice necromancy, or the raising of the dead), skeletons, evil mages, vampires, nether liches (kinda like mummies, only with some armor and magical staffs), huge rats, bears, and wolves. Humans make up a big number of your enemies, whether they are bandits, Arena opponents, thieves, knights of an opposing faction, etc. They level up with you, so the game stays challenging. As you gain more advanced armor and weapons, they start appearing with better pieces also, which is good, since searching dead enemies is the best way to get armor and stuff. The main bad guys are the Daedra, demon looking guys who live in a hell type world called The Planes of Oblivion. They are trying to conquer the world by coming in through Oblivion Gates and sacking cities and towns. I'm sure there are more bad guys I missed.

To be continued.

The first promotion in my young life.

So as you know, I work at Rent A Center doing deliveries and collections and stuff. Ive been there for a little over 9 months now, and since that time we had our Collections Manager get promoted to be over his own store. Well now, that leaves a little hole in our employee positions. One that I was more than happy to fill. I'm now the Collections Manager (also the Assistant Manager) at the Midvale Rent A Center. I got a raise (Sweet!) that will help me pay down my debts, and a lot more responsibilities. Hopefully it works out as good as can be hoped, and who knows how far I'll go.

No sugar makes for less fat.

So, completely against my nature, I have made and kept a resolution. I started in May, on my birthday, not January, but still. Since May 14, 2009 I have almost completely cut sugar as an additive from my diet. That means no candy, no sugary soda, no cake, no brownies, no cookies, no frosting, no maple syrup, nothing with more than naturally occurring sugars (such as the natural sugar in milk etc.) and calorie free sugar substitutes such as aspartame and splenda. Luckily, you can find ice cream, maple syrup, diet sodas, pudding, and some candy made with splenda, not sugar. "Well," you say pompously, "Sugar isn't the only thing, you have to take into account the fat content and total calories along with a lot of blah blah blah." That is true, yes, but considering the calories per gram of sugar, a diet free from added sugar is a diet with a radically reduced amount of calories. Its has worked. Very well. Its all in the mind.

If you choose to pass over the above named sugary sweets, by default you take in less calories. Yes, the sugar part of unhealthy foods is a small part, but it is a good standard by which you can control your diet without counting calories. I think everyone can do things like this, an honest look at your habits and eating routine can lead to a personal natural way to be healthier. If you eat a lot of a certain type of fatty, sugary, or salty food, you probably need to cut back. Its human nature to overdo it. If you focus on one aspect of it (not ignoring the other ingredients, simply not obsessing over them), such as the sugar, and cut back on it, you can change your body's need for it. Then you can move on to the other sinfully tasty aspects, like the grease floating on your pizza or the cup of salad dressing on your cheese and croutons.

I think its important to view weightloss (or simply being healthier) as a personal, natural thing that you can accomplish with your own brain and control of greedy little hands (I gorge on sweets and other bad food, so the greedy references etc. really refer to me, not you).

To date, with no cardio or other types of exercise outside of work, I have lost 11 and a half pounds. Count the days. From May 14th to July 6th, that's 55 days. I think that's pretty good.

Some stuff I been doin at work.

So I have been discovered. I have been shang hai-ed into designing sales flyers and posters for my work, Rent-A-Center. Using photoshop and picture elements, I have created a new design philosophy for my region (about 5 states worth of Rent-A- Center locations) from the ground up. Its been pretty time consuming, and my compensation comes in the form of gift cards that equal up to a few dollars less per hour than my normal wage when you take into account the number of hours it takes for each flyer. But, what better way to gain the attention of your superiors than being the dude who generates a third again as many sales per store from his flyers? Not too many. Yes, that is Magic Johnson. Yes, RAC owns his soul too.

Club Vegas

Some AHNTHAC Videos

The End of A Horrible Night to Have a Curse

Since April of 2006 I have been the vocalist in a band that started out as Tragedy of Tomorrow. Before we even had any songs written, we changed to Dying Rest Theory due to the huge amounts of bands with the same name.

We played our first show ever on April 9th 2006 at the Comedy Circuit in Little Mexico Midvale to a crowd of about 40 people. We were so naive and horrible. Ha ha, looking at one of the videos, i cant believe we even made it through the first month. Our stage presence was non existent, we had no idea how to move up there, and even worse, we all had no idea how to write interesting music. The night was so very fun and nerve wracking. We became good friends with a band called Last of the Bloodline (their first show also) that at the time we thought were so much better than us. Which they were for the first several months of our respective local careers.

We booked soooo many shows after that, I have lost count. We played nearly every venue available to us:

Addicted Cafe Halloween (dressed as chicks)

Redlight Books (Our first show there, the second show has no pics, but there were at least 100 kids packed into the basement.) Holy cow, it was soooo hot and stuffy.

Half Circle in Wyoming (played with Poolside at the Flamingo from Ohio and Die to Yourself from Oklahoma)

Our first promo pictures

We played As Dying Rest Theory, briefly adding a member, Jeff Hain, to replace Ryan Heidt while he worked in Philadelphia for the summer. Jeff annoyed us so much, it was the biggest relief when Ryan came back (plus Ryan and I became friends after that, previously we had been pretty aggressive arguers). Shortly after that, we started writing more aggressive music based largely on metal and hardcore influences. We released a self titled demo in early 2007.

That's Ryan on the cover

Shortly after, we changed our name to A Horrible Night to Have a Curse based off the text that pops up on the screen when you die in the old Nintendo game Castlevania. We changed our name because we had been changing so much in style and skill. We had just started to write some truly ferocious songs named Just to Make it Worse, and Skeleton Frame, and had more in the works.

We played some awesome shows and the new style was very well received. Our networking and booking skills increased and we got booked on a ton of shows with some amazing bands such as: Winds of Plague, Vanna, Whitechapel, Throwdown, War of Ages, Soilwork, Destroy the Runner, Dead to Fall, Impending Doom, The Chariot, Poison the Well, Three, With Dead Hands Rising, etc. These are all bands that, in my musical world, are the equivalent of playing a show with John Mayer or Josh Groban.

Our amazing drummer Marshall got married and left the band to pursue a job in Wyoming and we found a seemingly perfect replacement in a guy named Brian Dugger. That didn't work out, due to personal problems and stylistic differences, and after everything getting to a boiling point, an inability to tour broke the camel's back and I left the band for several months. Brian eventually quit and Marshall and I rejoined. That first practice back together after not having the original members in the same room for almost 6 months was one of the best feelings ever.

The End of A Horrible Night to Have a Curse (cont)

Along the way, we all spent an ungodly amount of money on equipment, merchandise, and travel expenses. We bought a band van, pretty awesome. Nothing validates you as much as rolling up to a show in a 15 seater van.

These are some of the shirt designs we had made. They were pretty sweet. We sold them for 10 bucks each, we probably made over 3000 dollars in 2.5 years, but we never saw the profits since we used them to record, buy more merch, and pay for gas etc.

This is our band van, it seated 15, awesome trips in this.

Sleeping in the bench seats was like sleeping in small stinky coffins.

We started recording our new material several times, always stopping for one reason or another. In the end we never finished, I'm still way mad at a few people over it. Never finishing is one of my biggest regrets. I pushed and pushed, before we even knew the band would end soon, but no one else was invested enough to be anything but annoyed at my insistence. The descision was made to end the band, and a last show was planned at The Avalon Theater with iwrestledabearonce, The Human Abstract, and Oh Sleeper (all awesome bands and huge influences on me). We played the show, it was kinda disappointing, the crowd wasn't very responsive, and we didn't play very well.

After the show, our brother band Fear Me Dear pressured us into playing another last show with them. We had one last practice the day before the show on June 26th. It's a good thing we played it, it was really fun, the venue was pretty full, and there were a lot of kids in the pit. We played really well, officially announced our breakup, and sold about 20 shirts.

Andrew, Zach, and Ryan are all planning on starting another band to tour with next summer, and I'm not quite sure what to do with myself.

RIP A Horrible Night to Have a Curse