Certified Organic Locally Grown Caturday

Today I'm heading to the grocery store on the first day of genuine attempt to stop eating fast food to save money and (hopefully) lose weight.

ugh get out of the cart, mittens

I mean, I've been to a grocery store before, but I've been shopping like a confused teenager for awhile. In less than a month I'll be closer to 30 years old than 20, so McDonalds should probably stop being considered a reasonable place to eat more than once a day. While being healthy and saving money can get pretty tricky, nothing else is quite as simultaneously expensive and horrible for you as fast food on a regular basis.

for real though don't give your cat cheeseburgers

So, in our weekly celebration of Caturday, I'll be hosting a segment of cats with food. Bon appétit!

Idle Gaming - When You're Too Lazy to Actually Game

unrealistic number of cookies

Ah, idle games. The very phrase elicits feelings of... staring vacantly at numbers. Endlessly clicking on things to earn resources to build and buy more things to get more resources to build or buy other things that give you more or maybe different resources to use to buy and build... other things and, sometimes, you... don't really know why you're playing.

Currently, the most famous of these games is probably cookie clicker. It's probably also the best example of one of the addictive power of these games. If you've ever been sucked in by an idle game, then you already know what I mean. The thing about most games like these is there really isn't... a point.

The goal feels like it's to accumulate more resources and build all the things to completion, but some games have no end. Some games add incentives to restart your game, putting you spiraling into an infinite loop of cookies or cabbages or what have you. Some of them do end, but to be honest, the end is always disappointing.

Idle games have been around for quite a long time - I remember playing one when I was still in middle school, in the early 2000s, before the term "idle game" was even coined. Now, there are a ton of them, sometimes their addictive powers being used for evil, exploiting the 'idle' aspect of them to riddle the games with microtransactions...

...while some people genuinely make great idle games for entertainment.

Why Gamers Hate Being Sick

Being sick sucks, but it has its benefits. You get to call out of work or not go to school, stay home and - if you're really lucky - get taken care of by someone really awesome. The thing is, depending on what kind of sick you are, sometimes you can't do the one thing you'd really like to do.

When you're any kind of sick that affects your eyes, head, inner ear, etc., playing video games is painful. Sitting up to be at your computer makes you dizzy, looking at the bright screens makes your head throb. Then you try to play handhelds and realize it still sucks just as much, especially with that screen up in your face. You can try to play for a bit, but your instincts will start to kick in and yell at you for being an idiot.

instincts: go to bed dummy

So, thanks to a sudden, painful, and thankfully pretty shortlived sickness, I slept for about 2/3rds of the entirety of yesterday, missed my first raid this week, ate half a bag of sliced sandwich bread, and didn't wake up until noon today. It's also why you're getting this cop-out post, because I still feel kind of crappy.

Now, I'm gonna lie back down.

Graphics and You

Giving a game a bad review or saying that a game is bad because of its graphics is an easy way to get laughed at by a lot of gamers.

the enlightened opinions of random internet users

Graphics matter - but not the way some people tend to think. It's not important how stellar the graphics are, it's not important if the graphics look "real", but rather the way the graphics fit into the atmosphere and the environment matters.

Minecraft has made hundreds of million of dollars with very low quality graphics, and no one has stopped playing the classics due to the higher quality graphics available in more recent games. Don't get me wrong, you can judge graphics all you'd like, and stellar graphics really do enhance a game's experience, but here's the thing:

Gameplay and graphics are mutually exclusive.

Caturday! - Business Cat

Today for Caturday, I will share with you one of my favorite webcomics, Happy Jar. Happy Jar is currently not updating, but if you've never read it before, there are already plenty of comics to read.

Happy Jar once upon a time made a comic about "Business Cat," which is rather well known, but I feel like not everyone who's seen business cat has actually read Happy Jar's comics. Business Cat is a man with a cat's head - and probably brain - who is somehow the CEO of a business.

Today we'll take a look at some business oriented cats in celebration of Business Cat.

Tips and Tricks of Successful DPS Pt. 1 - Uptime

goals

It always feels weird to me to talk about how I perform well. Maybe I feel like I'll jinx myself, or maybe it's my low self esteem or just a desire to present myself with some level of humility. Well, I'm throwing all that out of the window because I'll be writing a few posts with some detailed tips on how to DPS like you know what you're doing.

I primarily play ranged, though I have had experience as melee DPS. If you're already a superstar, or a hunter, you probably won't need any of this advice, but in the wake of my recent guild merger, I feel like I've been asked "How did you pull off that much damage?" more often than usual lately.

I've written a guide before, it was actually my first, on how to learn how to learn how to play. If you aren't already doing well, you should start there. This is less 'how to play' and more advanced tactics on upping your game. 

If you don't already know your class' rotation, you might not get as much out of these as you could. I really can't go through and tell you on a class to class basis which abilities you should be using to accomplish these goals. You have to already know that. I've been a balance druid for six years - if, like most people, you are literally any of the other twenty two damage dealing specs, I won't have much detailed advice about your class to give you.

First, the most important secret to successful DPS: