Sunday, August 26, 2012

Drum Corps

It is decided! I shall try out for DCI! But what corps?  Ah so many fantastic corps to choose from! But there is only one that I would ever care to be a part of.... Carolina Crown! But unfortunately audition materials for the 2013 season are not yet available... so I must wait. I will be auditioning on mellophone and will hopefully make it in! If I do then I have the chance to do 5 years of corps which is magnificent.   This is a short post but there really is not much more to say on the matter except that I cannot wait for the audition materials to become available so I can jump on practicing! Wish me luck!



                                                                                                                 -Matt

Friday, August 10, 2012

SWTOR Review

So I am a fairly enthusiastic Star Wars fan, so when I heard about a Star Wars MMO was coming out I was extremely excited! (One that was going to be different from the previous one that shall remain unnamed) I spent quite a few months researching the factions, races, classes and advanced classes that seemed so amazing. The graphics are beautiful and that is an understatement. I shouldn't be surprised that it is such a beautiful game seeing as it is made by BioWare. They did a very good job at making the appeal very evenly spread out as far as the classes. I won't do a discription of the classes because you can just go on their site. But in my opinion there was no class that I just would not play. I obviously had my preferences which happens to be a Trooper Vanguard dps. But as I got into the game, I started to find several faults. First, it is not a particularly social game. You don't really hang out on planets or the stations. Questing was very solitary and there was no real incentive to do missions with your friends. They have just released an LFG (looking for group) system which should alleviate some of that tension.   Crafting in the game was one of its stronger starting areas. There was a wide variety of skills to choose from which is always a plus. The companion system was very cool, but some companions were useless and you generally ended up using only one the entire time. The best part of the game to me was the voiced chat interactions for every NPC encounter. The NPC and your character would talk and you could see emotion in both faces and it was just a very well developed system. The legacy system is also a very cool feature that provides numerous privileges which i will also not go into due to its extensiveness. Though the game has all of these very good utilities available to each player, it lacks the main assets of an MMORPG, social interaction and the combat sequences. Combat was just slow and in PVP it took too long to kill people and the scaling system is not very popular. Ever player's character would scale to the highest player in that warzone. So it was possible for a level 13 to kill a level 40, which was not a good feeling. I give this game a tentative rating of 3 out of 5 due to some very key issues. Though I believe that if they fix many of the key points that I mentioned this game could easily move up a point or two. Thanks for tuning in


                                                                                                    -Matt

Epiphany!

Aha! I have discovered the purpose of this blog! It is clear to me now! All the questions about what I shall share with the people of this world! But now there is no second chances and no going back... Here is where I shall begin my sharing of music! But why would you put music on your blog TMcSpanks? Well I'll tell you why! It is music that you can get nowhere else, for it is composed by someone who has yet to be discovered! His name is.....is.....IS.....isss...... ME! I am in a class called music technology this year and I shall use it as a chance to further my musical understanding and also as a learning experience in composing. I will upload what projects I can from the class and you al shall be the judge of its quality. It is still unknown when my first shall be released but I shall keep you all updated! Wish me luck!

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Elder Scrolls Online

Many of you fellow gamers out there have probably all ready heard tell of an Elder Scrolls mmo. It was announced on May 3, 2012 and is supposed to come out about a year from that date. It has been in the making for several years now and you can find a decent amount of info on it, but you will need to find a wiki and not the real site because they have not released a lot of detail about the game officially. What many of you may thinking is, "Oh my goodness! Bethesda is making an mmo this is amazing!" Wrong! They are only supervising the story line of the game and making sure they get lore and geographic details correct. The game is being developed by a small team known as Zenimax Online Studios. I have not personally heard of them myself but many of you may have. The game is split into three factions that will all be fighting for the seat of the Imperial Empire. The factions are The Ebonheart Pact which consists of Dunmer, Argonians, and Nords. The next is the Aldmeri Dominion which consists of the Altmer, Bosmer, and Khajiit. The final faction is the strangest to me (I have not played the games that came before the 3rd elder scrolls game so correct me if I missed some lore) is the Daggerfall Covenant which is made up of Bretons, Orcs, and Redguard. But where are the Imperials you may ask? Well the game revolves around the Imperials losing power due to so many wars and have made a pact with daedra to resurrect their fallen soldiers so that they can continue to keep control of their lands. Whether it will be all of these factions versus each other or if their will be a sort of neutrality among the factions as they all fight the Imperials is unknown to me, but if any of you know leave a comment so that everyone reading this can be enlightened. Leave a comment about anything on the game! You can even call me a noob if you want to! I mean ill just delete it and go on my merry way, but just go ahead and get your jollies out.

                                                                                -Matt

Saturday, June 2, 2012

May Economy Report

May has by far been the worst month for the world economy since possibly September of this past year. I myself own stock and follow several potential investments, but with the way things are going I am not sure whether or not they would be wise investments. Getting stock while it is down can be beneficial but I fear that things may just go from bad to worse for the world economy. I personally think that some of the safest investments are pharmaceutics, biological technologies, and other technologies. These tend to be things that will always have some profit and can still maintain stability while other sections  of the economy continue to drop dramatically. For instance, the Dow has dropped close to 500 points in May alone. NASDAQ 300 points. But, Apple only dropped 20 points in May collectively and Pfizer a little over a point. Hopefully June (which is my birth month!) will prove to be more lucrative than May.


                                                                              -Matt

Introductions

Just started this blog and it will probably take me a while to get the hang of it. I will mostly be blogging about what is going on in the world theater and economy. I hope to obtain a business degree and possibly start a small restaurant. After this post I will begin formulating my first real topic of discussion. I do not know that I will producing videos as a security precaution but I will consider audio posts as to enhance the feel of the discussions. I welcome an open debate on any of my opinions. 


                                                                                                     -Matt