Frisboi Cedrico

This is responding to the 'What objects tell the story of your life?'  I feel like I'm a little short on reflection, so it would be nice to know where readers would want more reflection.

The first time my frisbee got thrown up on top of Uni Gym, I was devastated. I was a subbie at the time, and one of the seniors had thrown a little too high and it got caught by the wind. The frisbee blew down off the roof about a week later, but not before I had gotten two new, identical frisbees from my dad and the senior that lost the original.

This frisbee has been through a great deal of abuse. It’s an Aerobie Superdisc. It’s been stepped on, slammed into sides of buildings, kicked, etc. It lived in my backpack for a couple of years. And most recently, it was on top of Uni Gym for around ten months.

The story with me and frisbees goes back to elementary school, where nobody wanted to include me in the PE sports, and they had a good reason. I was trash. But at some point, my dad and I started throwing around a frisbee for fun. At first, all I was trying to do was touch the flying disc. Later, around the start of middle school, I had gotten good enough to catch reliably, and throw pretty well too. Not that my classmates knew; I was still excluded for the most part. It was around this time that I got the frisbee mentioned above.

All of this exclusion changed when I started going to Uni. Nobody knew me or my story, so I could start fresh. When we got to the Ultimate Frisbee unit in PE, I got to see how I could do if I was included in the game. It took a while to figure out the specifics of playing in a group, since I hadn’t had the opportunity to do that at all. But I was also throwing around my frisbee with Will after school, and it didn’t take us long before we were lobbing it back and forth to each other across the entire Uni yard. For the first three years at Uni, I was building a reputation among some people as ‘that one guy who always has the frisbee.’

However, this reputation was among a very small number of people, so during Cross Country season, there was one day when I didn’t go to the morning run, but a bunch of the other guys did, and they played Ultimate Frisbee over by the Atkins tennis center. They also played again that afternoon, and I was with them that time. The best moment of that day happened just as we were about to head back. We were tied 2-2, and the next point would be the end and we would head back to Kenney. One of my teammates missed the catch in the endzone, and the opposing team was just starting to cheer that they hadn’t lost when I ran in behind and caught the frisbee about three inches from the ground. It was after this that the boy's cross country team started calling me Frisboi Cedrico.

My frisbee got thrown up on top of Uni Gym again at the end of Sophomore year, and just recently was recovered. It’s severely damaged.  It's held together by the rubber ring. There was a plastic disc that used to be clear, but now is some opaque frosted color, and cracked.  I've had the thing for around six years now, and I don't think it will fly again, but I'll keep it to remind myself of everything I've done with that frisbee.

Me and My Dad, Gamers Both

Sorry for the wall-of-text-y essay.  It works better for the sort of writing I'm used to doing (freshman history papers anyone?).   Anyways, this was responding to the prompt "what have you accomplished with your family."  
There's a bit more detail I'd like to put into this, so please point out places where I'm rambling or could cut some details and still keep the substance.  Any other comments that would help me improve the piece would be appreciated too. 

My dad and I play a lot of computer games together. The main one that we’ve played over the past year and a half is Warframe. As a family, we have created a space for ourselves in a tiny corner of the Warframe community. We have a clan entirely populated by people we know in person, with almost everything researched, and enough resources accumulated that whenever a new item is added to the tech labs, we can start researching it usually within hours or even minutes of the update. I often play missions with my dad, especially the harder ones. Both of us is individually capable of completing all but the hardest missions, but it’s still nice to run the easier stuff with my dad occasionally. I’ve formed a very significant bond with my dad over Warframe and other games. We can spend hours discussing various strategies until we’re both so tired that we can’t think of anything else, then get up in the morning and pick up where we left off once we’re thinking straight again. Talking to my friends, none of them seem to have quite as strong a bond with their dads as I do with mine.

There is unfortunately some imbalance in-game between me and my dad, which has caused some conflict in the past. My dad has way more time available to him to play, so he can gather resources faster than I can, simply because he has more time. On a couple of occasions, this has led to me burning out, filled with disappointment and doubting my usefulness to a group, since I don’t have as much variety of equipment I can contribute. These were ultimately pettiness on my part. I was placing too much stock in being exactly on my dad’s level and not enough in what I was already bringing to a squad.

Between the amount of time my dad has to play, research new concepts and playstyles, test them, and accumulate resources, he has become a pretty good player despite being older than the average gamer. What he doesn’t have in reflexes, he makes up in solid strategy. I don’t have as much time in my day to play, so I’ve focused my playing on getting better at just playing the game, building game-sense and reactions, rather than the logistics. This difference in focus results in me usually playing as the group’s main damage dealer and my dad playing some sort of supporting role. It’s a comfortable balance that lets me do the things I enjoy in the game (shooting pesky AI enemies in the face) while letting my dad enjoy everything he’s worked so hard to get.

I’ve watched my dad play games for almost a decade and have seen how he plays things. Having played the same games for almost as long, often with the guidance of my dad, I’ve built a love for gaming that sometimes is detrimental to getting other things done. More recently, I’ve seen examples of near-professional level play from my cousin and Will. Between these, I’ve learned how to control the tactical terrain of the game, though not as well as my dad, and also shoot quickly and precisely, though again, not as fast or accurately as the pseudo-pros. I’ve come to accept that it’s unlikely that I will ever be as good as my dad at logistics, as well as accepting that if I wanted to play as well as Will or my cousin, it would take more dedication than I can afford or enjoy.

For that year and a half I’ve been playing Warframe with my dad, I was doing everything with him. More recently, I’ve been venturing out on my own, but when I need a group for something that I can’t or don’t want to handle on my own, my dad is the first person I ask to join me.

The Fall of Browser Games

Online gaming sites can provide temporary enjoyment. Kongregate, NotDoppler, Armor Games, that sort of thing. I used to play these a lot. I would wake up in the morning on weekends and go through those endless lists of games, trying out the ones that looked interesting. Occasionally, I would find one and play it for the entire day. I’ve had some good times playing these stupid little flash games.

But around the middle of freshman year, I started to enter the world of ‘real’ computer games, the ones that you install on your computer, rather than temporarily connecting to through a browser. The first of these I was introduced to long before freshman year, Kerbal Space Program. It was, and still is, a fun game, but it takes a lot of time for a productive session, one that leaves me feeling like it was time well spent. The beginning of a turning point came when Noah Johnson introduced me to Planetside 2. Here was a game that I could play any time I wanted to, for any length of time I wanted to, and was developed by a branch of a huge company by people who were paid to work on the game, instead of just being one person’s hobby.

It wasn’t until over a year later, when I had been playing these ‘real’ computer games for some time that I started to realize that the browser games were just trash. There were a few good ones, but in general, they just weren’t good enough to match anything from the computer gaming industry. I started to realize that whenever I played browser games, I just felt disappointed, since now my expectations for a game are much higher. Browser games are massive time-sinks, and don’t bring as much satisfaction as a ‘real’ game does in the same amount of time. It was around this time, about a year ago, that I started deciding that it was time to let go of this relic from my childhood. If I wanted to put off working, I had more fun ways to do that. I haven’t bothered with these browser games since.

So I’ve been wasting my time more productively, playing games that I can really enjoy for hours on end and still feel like I haven’t completely wasted my time. At the end of the day, sometimes I think to myself, “What did I do with my day?” It’s these moments that I hate. I usually go on to agonize about what I could have done differently, what things I could have done that would have given me joy. But it’s a rare experience with these ‘real’ games. Yes, there are times when I just don’t play well, or don’t get anything done towards long-term goals, sometimes the session just isn’t fun. On these days, sometimes I regret playing that game that day. It happens. But the frequency of these bad days is way lower with these games than with a day used up playing the browser games. I’m still not to the point where I completely prioritize school work over relaxation, but at least I’m having fun instead of just ending the day disappointed.


So, I'm at 532 words for this, so I think I should expand it some.  Where do you think I could do that?  Anything unclear, poorly worded, or any weird jumps in focus?

New Class

This marks the switch from a blog about 20th century novels to nonfiction writing.