Location Taken: Caseville, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011
I was flipping through my photos and noticed that this one could be rather misleading.
So, have any clue what it is?
I know what it is, so I have trouble seeing it as anything else, but I could still manage to mentally flip between two images.
The real question is, how close is that peak?
Location Taken: Buffalo Bill State Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012
Asia has the Great Wall of China.
Africa has the Pyramids.
Europe has castles from Medieval days.
South America has Machu Picchu and the Nazca lines.
Australia has Ayers Rock.
North America has rocks that look like castles! And let’s toss in Mesa Verde for good measure.
And, um… Ummm…
Antarctica has penguins?
Location Taken: Chestertown, NY
Time Taken: July 2012
I’m rich!
Rich, I say!
I should buy a bridge! Or an island! Or a volcano!
Or, you know, none of the above. I’m not that rich. And for that matter, I’m only rich in Guild Wars 2. And you can’t buy bridges, islands, or volcanoes there.
On the other hand, I did manage to earn a whopping 100 gold in just three days!
For comparison purposes, a single gold kinda feels somewhere between 10 and 20 American dollars in terms of how you spend it. You notice the loss, and have to think about it, (well, at least you do if you’re on a tight budget in the real world. Adjust number for personal wealth level.), but you’re still willing to spend it on somewhat frivolous things. Spending 10 gold is a major expense for most players, especially just starting out. Earning my first gold was a major accomplishment!
On that scale, 100 gold is between 1,000 and 2,000 dollars. The most expensive things sold by virtual merchants cost that much, and they’re a special book that gives you the Commander tag which makes you show up on the mini-map and become a leader in the eyes of many people (or at least someone they follow around and listen to the orders they give), and a component needed to create the most elaborate and expensive items, the legendaries. These things are so tough to make that one of the components is gotten from exploring every single corner of the rather large map, and that’s nowhere near the toughest one to get!
There’s also a trading post where you can sell and buy things with other players. Those legendaries are sellable (or at least put up for sale), and the most expensive one, Eternity, is currently being sold for 3,450 gold. Eternity is over a thousand gold more expensive than the next one down the list, but that’s because making it requires combining two other legendaries!
So with the scale I’m using, Eternity feels like it costs between 34,500 dollars and 69,000 dollars. I’m not sure if anyone actually buys these things when they’re listed…
Still, I’m now one tenth of the way to being able to afford that. Slightly more, actually, since I’ve got 354 gold. Yes, that means I’ve earned a third of my current wealth in the past week (not counting the rather expansive collection of expensive items I’ve accumulated). So, how did I do it?
By selling things worth six silver at most, of course! Quick currency note: 100 copper to a silver, 100 silver to a gold. That meant I had to have sold several thousand items during those three days, which is just what I did. Yay multiplication!
This game has a gathering system. You can wander around the maps finding spots to get materials. Some are worthless, others quite valuable. And you can sell these materials on that trading post. It can get quite boring just wandering from node to node over and over, but that’s just what I did. The primary ones I was gathering are in the highest-level areas, and are so valuable that you can only gather them once a day, rather than the once per hour of the lower-level nodes. These are materials needed to make the best gear in the game, so there’s quite the demand out there. I would wander around gathering every single piece of Orichalcum and Ancient Wood I could get my hands on, put them on sale on the trading post, and they’d be sold within minutes, if not seconds.
I earned just under five gold each run. Normally this would only net you about 15 gold in three days, which is actually a respectable income. Except. The nodes are only exhausted for the day by the character you gathered with. If you have multiple characters, you can gather multiple times a day. They have to be at the level cap and geared well enough to survive the run (which is quite difficult in some places). This requires a large amount of time and work and money to get these characters ready.
I’ve been playing this game regularly for a year. I have seven characters at max level.
So, thanks to the power of math, 7 characters x 3 days x ~5 gold equals about 100 gold in just three days. Most people can’t manage this particular route to wealth. Either they don’t have enough top-level characters, or their mind goes numb at the second or third run-through of the exact same gathering path, and they quit early. They take other paths to earn money, usually involving running dungeons with other people or buying speculation items and sitting on them for a while before selling at a profit or selling everything they get their hands on or what not.
In other words, this tactic works for me because it plays to my strong points. It requires patience, willingness to do repetitive tasks, love of traveling across the map, and an appreciation for the power of math. And it doesn’t hit my weak point of having to deal with other people to sell things (the trading post is an automatic interface, nothing more). I can take things at my own pace.
I’m still trying to figure out how to apply the insights about myself that I’m learning from this game to the real world. Although, based on that list of strong and weak points, maybe I should really focus on my photography and set up some way to sell my photos that requires minimal interaction with people…
Now if only real life had a one-click, always-available interface that handled both making my product known to people and all the technical aspects of market research and the actual selling aspect without any extra steps required on my part…
If that was the case, I could make hundreds of gold – I mean, dollars, in the real world too…
Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012
I accidentally left a pot on the stove with the plastic handle just a wee bit too close to the flames. Didn’t help that I was distracted by my mom showing me something on her computer. But I heard an odd “POP!” from the direction of the stove and thought “Wait, boiling water doesn’t go POP! Let me check that out…”
Did you know that melting plastic can glow that lovely ember red if it’s hot enough?
I removed it from the flames to let it cool. Luckily I was making couscous, which requires you to let it sit off of the heat after you boil the water and add the grains. So I didn’t have to restart my dinner even. The plastic didn’t deform in any way that will hinder the use of the pot, so the only negative part of this was the faint whiff of burning plastic that I noticed when I went to check out the popping noise.
Well, faint to me, at least. I stopped noticing it very quickly. My Mom was opening extra windows and doors and hoping that would help reduce the vile scent all through my meal.
You see, I’m anosmic.
I know, “what’s that?” Anosmia is the inability to detect scents. In other words, I’m nose blind. Tells you how important the sense of smell is if you have to describe it using a disorder in a different sense, and for that matter, have to describe it at all…
I go through life with very little to no sensory input coming from my nose. It’s really not that bad, all told. Sure, I can’t stop and smell the roses, but I also can’t stop and smell the garbage either. And my sense of taste is really strong to compensate. And food tastes exactly the same when I’ve got a stuffy nose!
Well, I guess I’m more, what, legally nose blind than completely lacking the sense. There are a few compounds my nose can detect. Usually they have to be in really high concentrations for me to notice at all, if I ever do. It’s an interesting list, though.
Apples. I can smell apples. It’s the only fruit I can smell, and I love the scent of baking apples.
Cinnamon. But only very faintly and only in high concentrations. Which is usually what you find it in, at least. Another reason for loving baking apples, since cinnamon is tossed in the mix.
Sulfur compounds. Yellowstone National Park was extra-interesting because I could actually smell the geyser fields, like the one in the photo.
Burning stuff. Especially campfires. So I don’t have to worry about not noticing if my house caught fire. I can also detect burning coal, and apparently burning plastic.
Hot water. Yes, it actually has a scent. It’s just a subtle one, but one I can notice. My increased sense of taste also means water has an interesting taste profile that actually changes a lot from place to place.
Scents I’m allergic to. I think these use paths a bit different than what few sensory cells I have. But I notice right off if I’m near someone smoking a cigarette, or wearing perfume, or cleaning things with chemical products. I do a sniff test for all cleaning products I am considering buying. If I get an instant headache from just one gentle sniff, I put it back on the shelf.
And… And… I’m sure there’s more…
Well, technically, there are. I can detect most scents if they’re really really strong. For instance, standing next to a turkey that’s fresh out of the oven and faintly detecting the scent of cooking meat.
As far as I can tell, I’ve been this way since birth. Usually people have one scent or another that brings back an old memory, but my old memories are tagged with sight cues or taste cues. It took me until the end of college to realize I was different than everyone around me in this respect, too, which I suspect would not be the case if I’d started out being able to smell things. The fact that I can detect some scents probably hid it a bit, since I have a concept of what smell acts like. In general, it doesn’t really affect my life.
Except in two ways.
First, I have to keep in mind a sense I don’t have. Imagine if most people could detect, say, auras around people and you couldn’t. But they kept telling you that your aura was unpleasant and could you please adjust it? How would you react to that?
For me, well, I have to keep in mind that showering is for more than just making me less itchy and also reduces body odor. Let’s just say I suspect not knowing about my anosmia was part of why I was in the “outcast” category in high school. I own a deodorant, but only remember to use it on rare occasions (usually if I’m dressing up for a special event.) For a little bit I tried using lavender perfume (the only one I’m not allergic to), but I don’t even know what that smelled like. I mostly have to wander around hoping my fumblings have made it so others aren’t distressed by something I can’t detect.
The second way is that my taste buds work differently than other people. For most humans, the sensation of taste is actually upwards of 90% smell. That’s why a blocked nose makes food taste boring. But for me, the actual taste buds compensated for the missing sense, and I have a very developed appreciation of food. It just doesn’t quite match other people.
For instance, hamburgers taste like cardboard to me. While I enjoy beef, it’s because of compounds in the blood and the like. I prefer my steaks as raw as I can get them, because the raw meat is what has the flavor to me. Grinding gets rid of most of the blood, removing most of what I like, and the flavors grilling imparts are almost all scent based. It’s similar with alcohol. To me it tastes like bitter water with a few hints of rotten fruit, whether it’s a fine wine or a common beer. Not that I’ve had beer. The taste of the alcohol itself is far stronger than the other flavor compounds, except for in the scent category.
On the other hand, vegetables taste awesome! I love the sweet crunch of a carrot or the rich nutty taste of roasted brussels sprouts. Just about all of the things that make people hate vegetables are on the scent side of taste. It’s really easy for me to eat a balanced diet. Though oddly enough, I don’t care for most fruits. Those tend to just taste like sugar to me, and I don’t like having that much sugar in my diet.
Put all together, the interaction of scent and taste is probably both why I love cooking and why I hate cooking for other people. I make the food to match my own particular mix of taste buds (and my love of spicy foods), but it only rarely matches the mix other people use. Certain cuisines are rather close, usually vegetable- or raw-food-loving ones like Mexican or Japanese, while others are just kinda boring to me, like Italian. Or American. As much as America has a cuisine, that is. And trying to compensate for a missing sense in something as personal as cooking just doesn’t work that well.
Which is why I’m going to head off and make a lovely veggie-rich chicken noodle soup with extra cranberries in it, and you’re not going to get any of it! Bwahahahaha!
Location Taken: Multnomah Falls, Oregon
Time Taken: June 2008
There have been plenty of times where I’ve been just randomly clicking through my photo thumbnails looking for one to post, only to find a hidden treasure. I’ll select a photo with a merely average thumbnail only to find that all the flaws fall away when the detail is revealed.
This photo is the opposite of that.
It looks really great as a thumbnail, an elegant mist against a dark background with some green stuff in front. But well, open it up and the pine tree just jumps out and punches you in the face. Not literally, though. Pine trees are horrible at punching.
It’s not a bad photo, mind you. I still quite like it. But it’s missing that certain undefinable something that separates the good photos from the great photos.
I think it’s a little too obvious that the pine tree is just part of a larger whole, most of which is off-screen. That makes the photo feel a bit awkwardly cropped, or perhaps zoomed in too much. It’s a subtle effect, but persistent.
Not to mention that the slight awkwardness just makes you pay even more attention to the tree, which makes it more awkward, which draws more attention, and so on. That beautiful cascade is nearly forgotten in all the hullabaloo.
