Matt's Blog
March 19th, 2025
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January 30th, 2025
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December 29th, 2024
November 25th, 2024
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October 20th, 2024
March 19, 2025
What's this, another update? Crazy. Today's post is all about Matt passing wealth checks. 95% of the dollars that flow into my bank account aren't spent on fun things that I enjoy. They stay there, and they accumulate. I can't afford to get things I like becuase every few months, I will experience what I like to call a wealth check. Something will happen that costs a lot of money to resolve. The apartment getting cooked, that lady rear ending my car, Lexi's birthday, you name it. You, dear reader, probably experience these types of events too. Right now, I have a recurring wealth check in the form of CPA exam application fees. I knew these were coming, I applied for REG on Friday, I knew that was going to set me back a pretty penny. I was due for a wealth check, I had prepared for one. What I hadn't prepared for was a second, harder wealth check happening less than a week later. I dropped my phone, my very nice, completely usable, rooted, customized Google Pixel 5a. This is not the first time, shoot I didn't even think this one was as bad as that time I basically threw the thing down some stairs. Unfortunately, it landed funny or something because the screen was totally bjorked. It was unresponsive and only flickered white light in a pattern similar to the loading screen of the original 2004 Star Wars: Battlefront. Now initially, I'm thinking: 'Oh man, that really sucks, I'll have to get a new phone here in May.' Within maybe forty-five minutes, I realized that if Outlook signed me out and wanted me to sign back in, as it is won't to do, I would have no way of signing back in. Unfortunately, I'm not yet close enough to graduation to disregard messages in my Outlook inbox. I do some poking around, I determine that I'm going to go to the Verizon store in town and get myself a Motorola g Power for about $300. I go to the Verizon store, they don't have Motorola products. Crap. I think to myself: 'Well I suppose I'll have to get another Pixel.' I try to buy a Pixel 7. The incredibly nice salesman who was about to go home before I walked in, his name is also Matt, shoutout Matt the traveling Verizon salesman, tells me they only have Pixel 9 models in stock. It isn't all bad, if I trade in my 5a, I get $400 off, turning an $800 phone into a $400 phone. I think to myself: 'Hey, that's not bad, that ends up being right about what I paid for the 5a three years ago.' Lo and behold, he checks in the back for a minute, then checks his computer, and informs me that they don't actually have any base Pixel 9s, only 9 Pros. He didn't realize this because he is a travelling salesman who works at several other Verizon stores in northeast Missouri. I tell him that's alright, he doesn't stock the stores, I guess I'll have to get a Pixel 9 Pro. The 9 Pro is a couple hundred dollars more than the Pixel 9. My $400 phone just became a $600 phone. I think to myself: 'Oh man, this is getting expensive, but work is going to want me to have a smartphone so I can use authenticator apps.' I have to get a smartphone eventually, and I don't have much money coming in between now and August, start date confirmed in August btw, so it doesn't really make a difference when I buy the phone. I sign the thing and after sales taxes and upgrade fees, my $600 phone becomes a $717 phone. In the span of about a week, I blew over $1,000 between CPA exam fees and me fixing my mistakes. Joy. The real kicker is that after I get home, I see a reply from Dad to an email I sent informing everybody of my situation and what my plan was. He said to go ahead and buy the thing on credit and put it on his bill. He sent that after 7pm. I was at the Verizon store at 7pm. Verizon closes at 7pm. If I had waited until I saw his message, I would not have been able to go to the Verizon store that day. I am out $717 that I'm not getting back. The REAL kicker is that Verizon locks their bootloaders, so I can't root and customize this Pixel like I did my last one. They removed the 3.5mm headphone jack as well, so there is no point putting any music on it or anything like that because I don't have wireless headphones. I'm stuck with this thing for as long as it lasts and I will never escape smartphones like I was hoping. I also lost all of my contacts, there are six currently on my Pixel 9 and one of them is an authenticator number for Duo security. Lex and I had to postpone the wedding due to lack of funds, and now it looks like we are going to have to settle for a crappier apartment than either of us were hoping for. The silver lining in all of this is that I finally have no reason to use my smartphone outside of sending and receiving calls and texts, or as an authenticator. This is as free as I can be for the next few years. The weather has also been nice. Boy you sure write a lot when you are ticked off.
Go do something productive,
--Matt
March 10th, 2025
Surprise update. I'm on Spring Break. Classes are going well. Less than two months until I'm done with college forever. Additionally, I took the AUD portion of the CPA exam this morning. I'm feeling way more optimistic about this one than the last one. I'm still not definitively declaring that I've passed, I should find that out April 9th. That said, maybe it's the weather, but I'm feeling alright. In other news, I've gotten pretty good at Rock Band. I can do most songs on Hard and I can to up to 2 star difficulty on Expert. Not too bad. I don't remember if I said that I made a to-do list, but back in January, I made a to-do list. It had a list of books to read, games to play, and shows to watch with deadlines by month. I'm on track with the books (ahead of schedule even) and I'm ahead of schedule with the TV shows. I've pretty much scrapped the games thing. I got through January, but midway though February, I got a hankerin' to play through the Resident Evil series. I have the first 5 games, either through GOG or Steam. I think I'm almost done with RE1, I'm at the part where I killed the snake and got the code from Barry, so I think the rest of it is just pushing to the lab and fighting the Tyrant. Just got to pick up the Python first. I don't know if I will do a Chris run or just move on to RE2. I've heard that the Jill and Chris routes in RE1 are more similar than the alternate routes in future games. I'll think about it, I suppose it will have to do with how much the nonsense in that game has worn me down. Also on the game list are the Zelda games and Death Stranding, along with some PlayStation 2 classics. It would have been so much easier to just play though these as they were coming out. Stupid unidirectional time. Oh, speaking of time, Daylight Saving Time happened yesterday, sun rises at 7:30 now instead of 6:30. while I do like getting up at sunrise, I would prefer the time frame to be consistent thoughout the year. If people wanted to get up earlier or later, they would just set their alarms accordingly. Ah well. I've also been considering writing a screenplay for fun. I don't have the details figured out yet, but I thought it would be a good time. I've puked, I've rallied, I have a new plan. FAR has a 60% failure rate, I'm feeling better, I'm rarin' to go. I updated the Favorites page to reflect Farscape pulling ahead of Stargate SG-1 in my personal rankings after finishing both series. I had a really long thing about what I thought about both shows after finishing them, but I used my hosting site's HTML editor and it logged me out after using it for too long, egg on my face. The new plan is to sort of accelerate my testing schedule, I'm taking the other three and then starting FAR again from scratch at the beginning of June with the aim of taking it again before the end of July, I really hope I'll be able to pull through on the rest of these, I don't want to retake any more than I already have to. Ethics exam in August, CFE exam in September, move up to Kansas City with Lexi, get hitched, make money. Easy plan. I can do it. Also I'm trying to get on that mathematically optimized sleep schedule of sleeping from 9:30 pm to 4:30 am, but that would be easier if Lex and I didn't have 3 hour phone calls every night. I like the phone calls, so I'm only casually pursuing the sleep schedule project now, I will pursue it more seriously after graduation and we're living together again. Oh, I'm certainly looking forward to that. I have failed, that will be all. I'm 23 now. I had my birthday a few days ago, it was alright. I was pressured in to going out and eating at this expensive hot pot place, where you are given a pot of boiling soup broth and you boil a lot of meat and vegetables in it. It was alright, but I had a nasty time on the toilet the next day. Presents were kind of a disappointment, but they have been for the last few years now, so that's nothing new, that's not what birthdays are about anyway. Christmas also happened, and that was pretty cool, I got a whole lot of books, a pair of good binoculars, and some two way radios. Pretty good haul on that front. I've read one of my books front to back, but that one wasn't actually a Christmas present, it was one I picked up a couple of weeks ago, it was a historical account of the Ottoman Empire from their inception circa 1280 to their dissolution in the 1920s and replacement with Turkey. Fascinating stuff. I've got more books about the Egyptians, the Messopotamians, and the Babylonians, but next up on the reading list is an academic book from the 1950s from Norbert Weiner. It should be a nice, quick read. I feel awful. I just took the FAR section of the CPA exam. Allegedly people who use the review course I did do significantly better on the exam than on the review tests. At this point, I may have to bank on me doing really well without feeling like I did very well. I have a feeling I'll have to end up taking FAR again. I'll find out the damage January 29th, so expect an update then. I have nothing else for today, no sign-off or anything. Enjoy life. Goodness, yesterday was certainly interesting. Yesterday, the 5th was the US presidential election, Kamala Harris v Donald Trump. In an absolutely ridiculous turn of events that neither I nor my buddy saw coming, The Don swept. It was brutal, Harris didn't even crack 200 in the Electoral College. Some are coping, some are gloating, some are in shambles, me, I'm actually doing alright. I wrote this election off as a wash months ago. I was not a fan of either candidate's policies, Harris was just going to stick with the status quo and keep sending billions out in foreign aid while paying lip service to fixing the issues we have here. The Don was also going to send money out in foreign aid, and at the same time was going to put a bunch of tariffs in place. I never did believe that the Democrats were going to protect abortion at the federal level. Outside of winning the presidency, the Republicans also took the House and the Senate. Essentially, the only thing stopping Republicans from passing laws at this point is the Constitution and other Republicans. I guess that's what the Democrats should have expected when their whole platform was "We'll fix the country" when they had already been in power for four years. I honestly thought Harris was going to win, but I can completely understand why The Don won. The Democrats pretty much neglected entire voting demographics and the left has been using white males as a scapegoat for years at this point, so it shouldn't really be a shock that the majority of white, working class males voted for the guy who hasn't outright said he hated them. That's not to say The Don is perfect, I have plenty of issues with the kind of person he is. I do think it is a little funny that he totally swept both female presidential candidates, but I'm not looking forward to the price of consumer goods going up for the next few years. He does have good relations with the Saudis, so maybe he can negotiate with OPEC and get gas down to under $2 again, we'll see. I figured it out. I got some internal links set up on this page and on the Favorites page, and I threw some images up on the Favorites page. Pretty swanky. Lexi was in town this week. She went back to Thornbrooke on Friday, and she was going to go to a play in Arkansas today. She had planned to go down to New Orleans afterwards to stand outside the Taylor Swift concert with her sister, but her car broke down, so that's out. Instead, her and her half-sister are taking the sister's car down to Arkansas for the play, and then the rest of the weekend is going to be spent trying to fix her car. I'm pretty sure her brake fluid needs to be flushed and refilled, but we'll see what the shop says. I took a longer break than I was planning to, but I think I've finally got the website pages filled out enough to where I'm good to stop worrying about the content and start working on the formatting. Honestly, going in and filling out the pages after such a long break was something I was sort of dreading, but it was actually pretty fun once I sat down and got in to it. I really like talking about my favorite things, so filling out that Favorites page was a blast. My original plan was to have something like a list of my top five items for each of the five categories, but I figured that a list wouldn't really give me a whole lot of room to talk about why I like the things I like. In the end, I decided to just pick my number one item in each category and write a little piece about why I like it. I think it turned out pretty great. That page is not 100% done, I'm going to try to put the covers of the things I'm talking about in there, so if you visit that page in the future and it has some pretty pictures, I was successful.
That's all from me today,
--Matt
January 30th, 2025
I've decided that a dedicated signoff is silly, so I'm putting whatever here in this section now,
--MattJanuary 29th, 2025
December 29th, 2024
I have this plan in 2025. Essentially, I have a list of books I would like to read, a list of games I would like to play, and a list of shows I would like to watch. I created a spreadsheet that has a month by month breakdown of which book I'm reading, which game I'm playing, and which show I'm watching. The books and show are going to be the easy part. If I watch just one episode per day, then I will be done, truly done, with Stargate SG-1 in 35 days. After that, it's on to Babylon 5, which with the pilot film should be done in 111 days. Should be easy breezy, heck, I may get started with Norbert today. The hard part is going to be the games, for whatever reason, I picked a lot of games that have long completion times. I currently have them organized more or less by console generation, but I may change that up so that I'm playing shorter games now and longer games later, in fact, I think that's what I'm going to do right now. Also Lexi and I got engaged.
Be good to each other, don't do anything I wouldn't do
--MattNovember 25th, 2024
--MattNovember 6th, 2024
In other news, Missouri got a new governor, Mike Parsons hit his term limit and his Lieutenant Governor ended up winning the election. I honestly didn't know too much about him, so I read up on him and he seems alright. Raised by a single mom, he's a family man, he sold cars until he got into politics, he fixed our roads. On the surface, he seems like a good dude. Abortion passed, it is now legal again in Missouri, which I think Lexi was hoping Harris was going to do. I personally believe local politics is more important than national politics, and here I am getting proven right and that woman still doesn't believe me. On Monday night, I watched the film The American President from 1995 staring Michael Douglass, Martin Sheen, Michael J Fox, and a lady whose name eludes me. Not bad, this is the first rom-com in a long while that I remember enjoying. Watch it in 4 years before the 2028 elections, it's pretty rad. I think that will be all from me for now. Like I said, I'm not panicking or anything, I honesly don't think things will change on a fundamental level, stuff is just going to get a little more expensive. Maybe the Democrats will actually run someone charismatic with a good platform next time. Only time will tell.
Be good to each other, don't do anything I wouldn't do
--MattOctober 26th, 2024
So now that the content is genuinely set up how I want it to be set up, what's next for the site? Well, the plan is to learn some CSS and make it pretty now. I really just need to format everything. Right now there are no bounded text boxes, so the text goes from one edge of the active window to the other edge of the active window. This is not necessarily bad, the main reason that most websites just have their content in the center is so that they can display ads on the sidebars, but I'm so used to having nothing on the sides that I think I'm just going to format it like that anyway. I'll see about putting some tiling images on the sides so it isn't blank. I also have pending changes, mostly with the images, so I need to clear my cache out in order to see if the change took effect like I wanted it to.
In other news, I finished up Metal Gear Solid V the other day. I did not reach 100% completion, but I did all of the story missions and a little less than half of the Side-Ops. I once did 100% of them when I was playing the game for the first time, but I really didn't like doing all of the "Eliminate the Armored Column" and "Eliminate the Tank Unit" Side-Ops, so I'm not even bothering doing 100% of them this time. I did the fun ones, I found all of the Wandering Mother Base Soldiers, I rescued Kojima, I did all of the Important Side-Ops, I'm pretty sure I did all of the Unlucky Dog ones. Pretty much the only ones I have left are the Prisoner Extraction, Heavy Infantry, Highly Skilled Soldier, and Armored Unit and Tank Column ones. All of the repetitive ones, in other words. I'm not doing all of that again. I did have a good time, but I'm not sure I'll ever do another playthrough starting from 0% completion. If I pick the game up again, I'll just keep going from my 60% save file, no big deal. I have a few options as to what to play next. I am in the middle of several playthroughs, ICO, Mass Effect 2, Morrowind, and Final Fantasy X. I'm thinking I'll finish ICO first, as that is the shortest, then probably ME2, then FFX. I could also finally grind out the final few Alternative Missions I have left in Metal Gear Solid 2 for the Virtually Impossible achievement. This is the closest I've ever been, and I think I've gotten the hard ones out of the way already, so it's just the rest of MGS1 Snake's Alt Missions, I already got over his Virtual Missions, which I think were the biggest hurdle. Who knows? Not me.
Be good to each other, don't do anything I wouldn't do
--MattOctober 20th, 2024
So recently, I've been replaying Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain from scratch because it was the game's ninth anniversary not super long ago and the game starts after a nine year time skip, so it seemed appropriate. It was my introduction to the series, but I was a dumb high schooler who didn't pay attention to subtext. Frankly, this playthrough has only solidified it being my #3 in the series. It gets a lot of flak for supposedly having no story and a lot of filler missions. I would sort of agree on it having a good chunk of filler missions, but those filler missions serve the overall story of Venom Snake building up the Diamond Dogs in order to combat XOF and Cipher. I fully disagree with people who say it has no story. The main difference between The Phantom Pain and the rest of the series is that PP presents a lot of the story in subtext and optional cassette tapes instead of being super overt and using the Codec to relay important information. Honestly, it's up to the player how they consume the story. If they just want a super fun open world stealth sandbox experience, they've got it. If they want a story about mystery, revenge, misinformation, and the Diamond Dogs' descent into paranoia, they've got that too on top of the open world stealth sandbox. You don't even have to play stealthily if you don't want to, the game gives you plenty of options to play loud and lethal. The game even has something to say about how the Cold War never really ended, it just changed from a weapons based Cold War to an information and technology based Cold War. The superpowers of the world have been fighting the same wars they always have, they just started using proxies in Korea, and they have never stopped. We're seeing this today with some of the shooting wars going on in the world. The Russia-Ukraine war has some basis for someone to argue that it isn't a proxy war. The Russians invaded a soverign state and the United States is backing the soverign because their freedoms were in danger. It makes sense, I get it. It's still a proxy war, this is the best chance the US has had at economically crippling Russia in a long while, so we are dumping a lot of resources in there to making sure that happens. I wouldn't be surprised if the United States' goal in this war is not necessarily for Ukraine to win, but to keep the war going long enough for Russia to exhaust their troops and resources until they have nothing left and they lose superpower status and become a pariah in the eyes of the world. The conflict in Israel right now is also a proxy war, but that one is WAY more contentious, so I'm not going to get so deep into that one. Long story short, I think Israel have proven their point, have given so much worse than they got, and they can probably stop now. They won't stop due to political reasons, but they could stop. My tax dollars at work.
Well anyway, I just wanted to post an update on how things are going on the site and talk about what games I've been playing recently. I don't plan to post on a strict schedule or anything, it's mostly going to be whenever I feel like it. I'm also going to see about linking the posts up top so someone who wants to read old posts can just click to the one they want. If you see something like that up top, I was successful.
Be good to each other, don't do anything I wouldn't do
--Matt