The people who play pencil-and-paper role-playing games are often stereotyped as being social misfits with bad hygiene with no life outside of the game. I have met and played with enough of them to know that this stereotype is often right on the money. However, I believe I have found a way to weed out the groups that have the good ones; the ones that I will call ‘friend’ for the rest of my life.

I have learned to look for a good omen: a baby.

Yeah, I know that’s strange, but the presence of an infant always bodes well.

Back in 2000 I met Nick, Eileen and their baby son Ethan. Nick ran one overarching campaign that lasted a few years, with a few breaks to allow some of the other players to run their own games. This group introduced me to many that I would call life-long friends, like Joe, Mike, Bryant and Matty. As most of them were soldiers, the Army took them away from me, one by one. Only a handful were left after a few years, and the games stopped.

I visited my local game shop sometime in 2006 to pick up a D&D 3.5 book. While at the register, I asked about open games running at the store. Matthew (the employee that was ringing me up) invited me to his personal game. After getting over the surprise of being to this game even though he didn’t know me at all, I accepted. At my first session with them, I met Guillaume, Brenda and their soon-to-be-born daughter Aliénor. Shortly after joining, Matthew announced that he could no longer run the game. Guillaume and I traded DMing duties between Shadowrun and D&D 3.5, respectively. I quickly befriended Terra, Stacey and Walt. Once again, the Army stepped in and brought an end to that game, as Nadia and I had to leave Maryland.

Shortly after arriving in Colorado in 2008, Ken contacted me through Meetup.com to join a D&D 4e group. I remember being reluctant about it, because using an Internet site to find other gamers seemed sketchy. Despite those reservations, Nadia and I made our way down to Florence. There I met Donovan, April and their infant daughter Ravyn. Once again, I struck gaming gold and began to see this pattern emerging. Sadly, this group did not last very long at all. A few short months into our campaign, life happened and our new friends had to leave. At least the Army had nothing to do with this breakup.

Now in 2009, with Nadia gone and no job, I need to occupy my mind and time. D&D has always done a good job of that, so I turned to Meetup.com. It worked so well last time, so maybe lightning will strike twice.

Yesterday I went to my first session with my new group. Guess who I met? Casey, Samantha and their newborn daughter Aspen.

I’ve got a good feeling about this group.

I found this post, which helped me deal with this issue. In short, you have to run a very simple SQL query against your WordPress wp_posts table:

UPDATE wp_posts p SET comment_status = ‘closed’,
ping_status = ‘closed’ WHERE comment_status = ‘open’

With that done, I’m going to leave comments open on my latest posts, and manually close them after a week or so. My next task is to find a way to do this automatically . If you have any suggestions on how to accomplish this, I’d appreciate it.

To you spammers: My most frequent commentators are my friends and family. I know the email addresses that they use. I look at every single comment that hits this blog. Please stop trying to pose as them - you are wasting your time.

Edit: I was getting ready to implement the solutions provided by Doug and Joe. Then I saw one of the comments made by someone posting as Tito:

I would recommend the Comment Timeout Plug in. Or the core solution.

I can’t believe I overlooked WordPress’ built-in function. I enabled it, and it seems to be working.

It is bad enough that I have had well over 130,000 spam comments hit my blog, but this is a new low. I will be closing all comments across the site in an attempt to get them to focus their attention elsewhere. This is only temporary; I love hearing from all of you, but since the frequency of new posts is so low I don’t think this will hurt the blog too much.

When I open them up again, I’ll let you know.

I’ve decided to leave comments open on my latest posts, and close all of the older ones.

Nadia left for Afghanistan at the beginning of the month. While I’m thankful that I’ve been able to talk to her on a regular basis via email and over the phone, I still miss her very much. This place is too quiet without her. There are so many things, big and little, that I miss.

(If you are interested in sending anything her way, please let me know and I’ll give you her contact info).

Three days after she left I got laid off. I didn’t see it coming (I’m not sure anyone does). I’ve been on the job hunt since. Colorado Springs isn’t very friendly to PHP web developers, so the pickings are pretty slim. I’ve considered moving to the Denver/Boulder area (about 90 miles from the Springs) in hopes of landing a job there.

Unfortunately, the combination of these two events is causing me to throw a series of pity parties for myself. This jobless thing would be easier to deal with if Nadia were here. Having a job would help with being so lonely. The few friends I’ve made here have either moved away, deployed, or were at the old job. For lack of a better term: this situation sucks.

Luckily, all of June wasn’t bad.

My neighbors have been pretty awesome. They fed me the first few days after Nadia left (I think they think that I don’t know how to cook). I’ve also met with the Family Readiness Group (Army spouses) a couple of times. This little bit of face-to-face human contact is helpful.

I play on Xbox LIVE more than I used to. There I game with some of Nadia’s family and some friends. Doing something that I enjoy is certainly stress-relieving.

I built my first computer the day she left. A home theater PC, to be exact. I planned it this way thinking that keeping myself busy that day would absorb the blow of her departure (that plan didn’t work). However, in the month since I built it, it has kept me busy with the troubleshooting and new functionality and all. At least it keeps me occupied.

Of course, I’m looking for a job. I put together willdiaz.com as a single-page site to host my resume and offer ways for potential employers to contact me. I’ve redone my resume twice, gone on one interview, I have another one scheduled for next week and have spoken to many recruiters and potential clients for my fledgling freelance career.

I would like to take a moment and say something to all recruiters and hiring managers out there: if someone is not a good fit for your organization’s needs, please have the courtesy to tell that once-potential employee. It is incredibly unprofessional to suddenly cut off communication with them. Sadly, this has happened to me a few times, and it is crushing to my morale (and to anyone else’s, I’m sure).

I wrote my first amateur video game review! That was a neat experience, playing a game solely to critique it. The lucky game was Terminator Salvation, and you can read it over at buttonmashing.com.

Following Danny’s death, there was a gigantic legal mess surrounding his car, which I cosigned with him on a few years ago. It was an eight-month ordeal to sort out, but it is now done! Thanks to my dad for spending many long hours at the DMV on a few occasions to make this happen.

I think that’s about it.

In short, my month started off really rough, and I’m trying to fight all of those naturally-occurring negative feelings.

So one of my RSS feeds stated that the Viper plant was up for sale - and very few was interested in buying it. At $10 million, purchasing the plant seems like a steal to me, but I’m in no position to buy it nor am I fully aware of what is expected of the company that does decide to buy it. Will they still build Vipers (my ultimate dream car by the way…) or would they desecrate the plant by building anything other than a Viper? I was especially scared for the plant when I read that a food company CEO was interested in purchasing it for considerably less…horrible, horrible thoughts came to mind.

The Viper is a car that you either love or hate…I happen to love this car to death. I had posters of this car on my wall (yes, when other chics had the latest Teen Beat heartthrob on theirs…) I save car magazines with photos of Vipers on the cover. Before I die, I hope to sit in one of these beautiful vehicular beasts so I can listen to its sweet V-10 rumble through my soul - IT’S THAT SERIOUS! Car mag reviewers will talk about its high maintenance costs, it’s lack of road manners, the fact that’s it not a good daily driver…it doesn’t matter because this car was never not meant for the masses - only serious car enthusiasts needed to apply! Those that wanted appliances like Camrys and Accords knew where to go (I have an alternate place for them, but anyway…). To think that this car may no longer be produced is sickening.

Hopefully a car enthusiast will purchase this plant and do right by this car. This is the hope of a car enthusiast - one who does not see any of her vehicles as appliances.

The below video shows the creation of this “cake.”

The first layer is made up of four doughnuts covered in Betty Crocker whipped vanilla frosting. Two more layers are stacked on top, each one covered in frosting. The final product is pretty difficult to eat, even with a tall glass of milk, due to the rich nature of the chocolate and the thick, sweet frosting. I could only eat one, and Nadia could barely get through one.

At the end of the video, I get choked up singing “Happy Birthday,” so Nadia finished the song for me. Her original deployment date had her leaving yesterday; being here by myself would have made today much harder to get through. I’m happy her deployment was pushed back one week for that reason, and also because I get to keep her around for just a bit longer.

I love and miss you Danny. Where ever you are, I hope you enjoyed your birthday.

The drifts in this video are bananas!!!

NOTE: Anti-domestic car supporters, Toyota/Honda sheep and BMW driving douchebags need not continue to read or leave comments at the end…they will be deleted…

Not really sure how to feel about this. I have an emotional tie to them because they helped spawn me into the enthusiast that I am today. When they pulled the plug on Oldsmobile, it didn’t bug me as much because I thought that they had too much overlap with Buick anyway. I glossed over the fact that Pontiac and Chevy were doing the same. I really wished that GM would have gotten their heads out of their asses sooner and make Pontiac the sporty division they were supposed to be. 

In addition, my driving history has crossed paths with them several times.

• I learned how to drive in an ‘89 Grand Am
• I saw Lethal Weapon 4 and fell in love with the Grand Am (the redesigned GA debuted in that movie - the scene where they are going through the office building is my favorite!). When I was looking for a car back in ‘99 during AIT, I knew I wanted a Grand Am. Now, 10 years later, Michiru is still in my driveway and remains my Road Warrior.
• I saw the Vibe GT at the 2001 New York International Auto Show and stalked it for 2 years . My dealer called me the day it arrived for a test drive and immediately fell in love. After we got into the accident with Umi (R.I.P.), we knew exactly what we were going to buy next. Hotaru was our first manual transmission vehicle and she mixes sport and utility perfectly.
• I didn’t fully expect to fall in love with the G8 only because of how poorly the GTO was received (liked that car a lot, too). We followed it since the 2007 New York International Auto Show and I finally test drove it last year while I was at OBC in Texas and when we got here, we test drove another one.  As you can see from my post, we had to get that car.

No one saw how the recession would ultimately affect businesses across the world, but you could see that something wasn’t right at GM well before that. A lot of what had happened to them today was out of their control because someone had messed up the formula over 15 years ago. They got lazy and complacent and allowed ‘badge engineering’ to take over. They wised up a little too late in the game. I’m not claiming to know exactly what happened, but as a consumer you can look at certain GM vehicles and know that there wasn’t too much thought put into making it look different from its “cousin”.  There are many more factors to consider, but I just don’t have the time to get into them right now.

My other beef with not differentiating the brands is that Chevy was the darling older sibling that got everything and Pontiac got the scraps. Pontiac’s most recent wins were the Solstice and G8. I don’t have anything against Chevy (my first car was an ‘89 Beretta), I just don’t think Pontiac got a fair chance to prove themselves.

Maybe this is what they need to get back on track. I just feel horrible for all the people who will be affected by this mess.

Bottom line is I’m not sure how to feel about GM anymore. Unlike most uninformed knuckleheads who see a domestic brand and immediately count it as trash, my beef with them is a little more personal…emotional if you will. When it come time to buy a new car again in the future, the chances of it being a GM will be considerably less for me.

Her parents are Kevin and Athena Robbins:

She should be home in her new SpongeBob Squarepants inspired nursery on Monday.

• He who lays the blame , from his rectum it came
• If it smell like someone shat, then you blame the cat (this is Nadia’s)
• If you swear you see fog, then you blame the dog
• If you think he did it, maybe he shitted

Yeah, I know we’ve got some real high-brow humor here. Add your own if you’ve got one.