The Birthday Thread

Happy Birthday!

It's also Papua New Guinean Repentance Day.

HAPPY PAPUA NEW GUINEAN REPENTANCE DAY! :D

Happy Birthday!  

It's also National Toilet Paper day.

I'm pretty sure that's a coincidence though.

Unless you were the poopiest baby ever.

You're the birthday. You're the birthday. You're the birthday Boy or Girl

Happy Birthday!

I'm not saying happy birthday unless you brought cake for everyone.

The cake is a lie!

Then no happy birthday.

Spoilers:  You're getting older.  :P

The cake isn't actually a lie - you're just not allowed to have any of it ;).

Is Okay, have own cake.  Will share.  Just come on over and get your slice.

I'm on my way, but it might take me a while.

I'll have the chicken.

WE WUV OO MCBEHWEW!

It is now my birthday, so I now lay claim to this thread.

Did you bring cake?

Happy Birthday, arenson10! It seems like you have been 9 forever.

We need to make this the birthday thread, and see how far we can go with someone's birthday on each day.

We have 10,008 users who are definitely unique, human, and active forum participants. It should be a piece of cake!

Where's my cake?

And I can't be helpful in a birthday sense until November.

See, you are an American.

Nah. She recognised that she didn't really deserve it in her next post. A True American demands cake as their right, guaranteed by the shplifty-furf amendment.

Your birthday is the same as my grandfathers!

You're not my grandfather are you?

It is still here, you said you were coming to get it.  It might start molding soon.

That was most likely an earlier model, Arenson 3 or 4 probably.

I did not. Are you sure you're American? In America, it is traditional for others to give you cake on your birthday, not to bring it yourself.

BTW, I have decided that I am going to answer every question addressed to me in this thread on my birthday.

Thank you. Turning ten was a strange experience. It felt like it marked a movement into a whole new age of my life - one of greater freedom, but also greater responsibility. Though still a child, I was much more often expected to be responsible and to figure out things for myself. 

Having eventually gained full freedom and responsibility, I also eventually came to the realization that doing so does not necessarily require putting behind all of the whimsy of youth, but I am still working my way back to it.

If I am your grandfather, it is through rather unlikey circumstances.

Having no children and no likely prospects for children, I have had to face the question of who will take care of me in my old age. This has spurred me to make stronger connections with my niecephews than I might have otherwise. Also, having no children has left me free of the time and financial requirements of raising them, which has allowed me at a relatively young age to face the question: So what? My life is fairly secure -- job, home, spouse. So what? Is this all there is? Is there some greater purpose? Should I be striving for more? For less?

I no longer expect answers to these questions, but console myself with cutting a reasonable path in general, but giving in to ridiculous whims on occassion.

So, are you my grandad or not then? I need to know before I Fedex this cake out to you. It took me ages to put 96 candles on it, I hope that they don't go out by the time it gets there.

Nice one!

Though arenson9 does not refer to my model number, there have been (indeed there currently are) many models of me. I believe this is true for all people and in both senses: Over time we remake ourselves and at any one point, we are not really a singular being. Within us are many different minds that have varrying levels of control over our bodies, our feelings, and each other.

As mentioned, I am very likely not your grandad. I can, if you like, pretend to be. Sounds awkward, but I'm game.

Gee, I love ya pops. Can you tell me about what it was like when everything was black and white?

Ha, ha, ha, ya silly nit! Of course we've always had color, but I'm happy to tell you what times were like back in my day. This was before the Internet, so you may find this hard to believe, but it was possible to be bored, if you weren't creative. I spent a lot of time playing by myself, making up scenarios with my toy soldiers and stuffed animals, or drawing make-believe maps and imagining armies clashing. Sometimes I'd imagine I was playing football in an important match. I still believe there's a few toy soldiers in a patch of the garden at the house where I lived as a very young boy. I would eventually get lonely enough to brave my shyness to try to play with other kids in the neighborhood. It didn't always work out so well. I got mad at another boy and put one of my favorite toys, a spear, I think, through the spokes of his bicycle to keep him from riding. Sadly, he peddaled away anyway, breaking the toy in the process. Pretty humiliating. The worst though, when I was really little, when a bunch of us were waiting for the school bus on the first day of school and I started playing with a bunch of girls, dancing around. A few of the boys started laughing at me, calling me a sissy. I was mortified. I let that moment scar me for decades, sadly. Let that be today's lesson: You're an adult now, find those things hiding in your past that your younger self didn't know how to handle well and help that past version of your self. It's not to late to remake what happened.

so, you're suggesting that I dance with girls and refrain from sticking spears into any of my friends? Sounds straight forward enough to me!

Happy day on which you took your first breath of air!

Here's a question for you, what would be your perfect Birthday day? How would it start, long lie in with breakfast in bed or up early to make the most of it? Where would you go, who would you see, what would you do? What would you have for dinner? (As we're ona  gaming forum) would gaming feature anywhere in it, or is that more of an 'everyday' activity?

My perfect birthday day involves being able to follow my whims and energies. It certainly involves not setting an alarm, but whether I get up early or sleep would depend on how I feel. Today it involved waking up just when my alarm would have gone off anyway, but then lounging for a few hours, reading.

In past years I've really enjoyed looking to see what happens to be going on in the city and going to check it out. A few years ago I discovered the Feast of the Lanterns, a small, neighborhood festival in one of Indianapolis' older neighborhoods. Today, given how much has been going on in the past couple of months, I've been happy to not go and seek more, to have an opportunity to tie up the odd loose end, like going through my YouTube subscriptions and unsubscribing from a bunch of things so that I'm more likely to actually see the videos I care most about.

But let's postulate some Perfect Day in which my inner self is completely at rest, my energy is high, and I'm filled with joie de vivre. On such a day I would rise with the dawn, seek adventures, and then want to sup with close friends and recount my adventures to them. Alas, no gaming would be involved, for such is as cotton candy to me -- fun while it lasts, but not satisfying in and of itself.

Addendum: I did, as it turns out, play a computer game -- one of these games where you build armies to take cities to build armies, etc. I like the idea of these more than the practice in many cases as the tedium of managing the armies weighs down my fun. I did what I often do for these, once I was comfortably ahead, I turned all the cities to building bombers and just laid waste to the enemy cities the easy way.

I can tell you this, though. There will be cake. And ice cream. And chocolate. Or at least some of that.

Addendum: Not just some of it, but all of it, and it was good, particularly the ice cream. I went to this hipster ice cream place that I'd not been to before that makes the ice cream when you order it by using liquid nitrogen. I had dark chocolate, malt, and cinnamon flavor with Andes' mints mixed in. Delicious. then I went to another place and had some passable chocolate cake that was overpriced and for which I didn't really have much room in my stomach, so it was hard to properly enjoy, but it was my birthday I was not to be deterred.

Which character in SotMs is The Deputy's nemesis, or at least closest to that status?

The Good Samaritan

If you could make one forumite a mod, who would it be and why? (Can't pick a current mod or admin.)

It would be inappropriate for me to comment on any particular individual.

Thinking about this does, however, remind me of how the community has evolved over time. Greater Than Games has grown and this community has grown. Each have also changed. I see that continuing for quite some time and it is good and exciting. I was not actually asked if I wanted to be a mod. One day I simply was and then we all worked together to figure out what that meant. Like any small startup, the few people involved from the beginning wore every hat and jumped into everything that needing doing, trusting themselves to make it work some way or somehow. Which is not to say that they weren't skilled or even experienced, but that there was no time for long analysis of the exact perfect/best way to do things. As they gain further experience and grow larger, it will be natural, I think, for more formal rules and processes to be put in place. The way Jodie runs the warehouse, for instance, with her years of experience working in large warehouses, is probably quite different than how the guys did it before. It will be interesting to see what happens with the company as they continue to grow. Will they one day have a testing department? marketing department? HR department? Adam is already doing Art Direction and Christopher is already working with other designers. How much further will the changes go?

I don't have any stats to look at for how much use of the forums there has been over time. Sure, the number of registered users keeps going up, but people disappear, too. Are we doing more posts and threads/day now then last month or last year? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, but I don't know by how many. The group of regular posters seems to have not changed all that much in a while. Why is that? My guess is that part of it is that it's less naturally appealing to become super dedicated to forums when there is already a high volume of posts and lots of insider knowledge. If my sense that the core group of people who post isn't changing much is correct, is that good or bad? I'm not sure. It's good that people are still interested, but have we become too cliquey rather than inclusive? It may simply be an effect of the fact that the people most likely to get super excited by the game are also more likely to have heard about the game quickly and thus for the most part were also early joiners of the forum.

Anway, the day is quickly drawing to a close. Thanks for the questions, folks. I appreciate the opportunity to be reflective.

Ha. You had Andy's mints in your ice cream. Subzero is a good place. Nick and I go there from time to time, as it's pretty close to where he lives.

Whose birthday is next?

Not mine!

Not mine either.

Are we breaking the chain so early?

Okay, if no one else is calling it I'll call it.

January 31.

November 13th.