As I was typing this up and most likely while you are reading it, I was and still am chuckling. I can’t help but be amused. I know you’d like to know what’s so funny. Well, it’s nothing, really. I mean, it’s no big deal. It shouldn’t even upset you. Everybody loses the Game at some point, right? Your time had to come.

What Game? I bet you didn’t even know you were playing a game, did you? There are a ton of people right now playing the Game, and quite frankly, most of them are doing better than you. Now, I know it’s not really fair of me to tell you that you lost the Game when you don’t know the rules, so I guess I should lay them out for you. Don’t worry; there are only three of them.

1. You are always, always playing the Game. No exceptions. Everyone in the world is playing the Game in some capacity, really.

2. When even the very thought of the Game comes into your head, you lose it.

3. When you lose the game, you HAVE to announce it. Read More »

I guess I’ve always been a really impatient person. I can invest time and effort into things, don’t get me wrong, but I always need to see some kind of yield, and I usually need to see it fast. I do it when I’m writing papers (I don’t double space until I’m on the third page so that I feel better about how far I’ve come), I do it when I’m cleaning (I only clean one portion of my room at a time), and I’m pretty sure there are other things that I can’t even think of. So I guess it goes without saying that the fact that I am not losing any weight is really, really bothering me.

Surprisingly, I stumbled across an answer to my frustrated question from a surprising source. Alright, it may not be all that surprising, but I always distanced myself from Redbook; it just bothers me on principle. But they have a surprisingly poignant article that gave me a bit of insight as to why I haven’t lost at least HALF a pound. Here are half a dozen reasons you might not be, either. Read More »

“What the F$%k is an AVATAR?“, I thought to myself just a little over a year ago. My nine-year-old nephew told me that he’d bet $5 that his avatar online was cooler than mine. Considering mine would have been a lost girl drawing a….total blank….he was probably right.

Having felt embarrassingly ignorant to this concept once myself, I’m gonna score some karma points by giving you the rundown of what exactly all these nine-year-olds are talking about.

Avatar, in Hindu philosophy, actually means a bodily manifestation. The concept isn’t so glamorous when applied to the internet and computing, though. While an avatar is still a bodily manifestation of some sort when on the internet, it’s more like a cartoon character that you pick to represent yourself rather than a higher being.

The whole craze actually started in 1985 with a computer game called Ultima. The “avatar” was the visual on-screen persona of the player. Nowadays, everyone from elementary school kids to grandparents looking to find friends online have become familiar with this concept. Read More »