Does playing video games really make you happy?

Hello everyone, today we will be exploring a little bit of thoughts to help bring discussion about if video games really help people feel happy or if they are just a cause for frustration. There are many games (like the Pokemon series) that you can see a child play and their face begins to glow. However, unfortunately there are many games that will cause a person to throw the controller on the ground and start screaming in a furious rage.

For anyone that has ever played on xbox live and played the popular games Call of Duty or Halo, you have experienced the moment where even a young boy will be throwing swears in your direction. Another populate set of games that has recently left a lot of anger in it's path is the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) video games.

Games like Dota 2 and League of Legeneds have been growing in popularity over the years but unfortunately they have also drawn the attention of the rage community. A new player will quickly be greeted with swears for simply being a new player. Even with this greeting, somehow the games and their communities continue to grow.

So why does it happen? Why do games like this inspire such rude comments from others? Everyone was bad at a game at one point right? So why is it so easy to forget that when you see someone who is struggling? I think the answers all align with the simple truth that once someone feels like they are "better" than others, they simply feel like they deserve to win. Everyone who gets in the way of what they "deserve" is a jerk and will be met with much hatred regardless of if it's the enemy team or if it's a bad team member.

So how do we stop this? With e-sports taking off the way it has and continuing to grow, is there really any hope for games to just be about having fun again? The signs are there if you look at Nintendo continuing to make games for casual players. But to the extreme gamers, is there a way we can change e-sports to take out the aggression and make people have fun, winning or losing? That is unclear as that is a battle that has been going on in sports since the beginning. Competition almost always brings out the worst in people's personalities but it can also bring out the best in their abilities.

Without competitiveness there is no desire to get better, and with no desire to get better you can't possibly improve and go above your current rank in life. We simply need to find a way to make competitive events fun for the people in them so that we can remove the anger. If we can do that, it should help people grow much faster and become even more amazing.

What do all of you think about this? Do you think there is a way to make everyone happy/having fun and still maintain the competitive nature of some video games or do you think people are simply doomed to rage every time they pick up the controller?

How can we change the world?

I have found that many people don't really like their life and don't really like the world that we live in today. In that regard, I wonder how we can help. Have you ever wondered what drove someone to do some of the horrible things that we see in the news these days? In modern times we have massive shootings, random violence, and all forms of cruelty.

Oddly enough, in a world so full of hate and aggression, we also have an abundance of sadness as well, people are hurting every day.I would like all of that to stop but it is a group effort and we are all going to have to pitch in to stop it. I've thought about it for a long time and I don't think some things are avoidable but I do believe some things can be stopped before it happens.

So how do we change the world? The answer is simple, be kind, gentle, caring, compassionate, and understanding. Now you might be reading this and thinking "well I already do all of those things". If you are saying those things my question to you is, are you doing those things to strangers or just people you know? There is no limit to the kindness that we can share towards others, even complete strangers.

Imagine some of those people who felt lost, alone, and forgotten. Imagine what they went through and how they felt before making a most regretful choice. Do you have a picture of that in your mind? Now imagine being that person, and then you show up in their line of vision. How would you react to them? Would they be just another person, would you greet them with a smile? Or would you simply walk on past and not even notice they were there?

How would the way you acted in that small moment of time change the fate of the person who feels like they have hit rock bottom? Can you imagine the amazing feeling of having someone come up to you and treat you like you matter when you feel that down? You could save a life, you could change the outcome of a tragic event. Just be kind to everyone and when you see someone who looks like they need a hand, do your best to smile and show them someone cares.

Keep smiling and show the love you have for others every day that you can.

Why do I suck

Why do I suck.

This is a question that has often haunted the best of us. It has haunted me for a long time and still bugs me even to this day.

I'm sure that even the best of people just have that "I suck" mentality sometimes. It's not really anyone's fault, it's just a pause in positive thinking. Something went wrong, things just aren't the way you want them to be. Eventually... You blame yourself.

While it's definitely okay to accept blame, also understand that beating yourself up will not help you at all. Accept what has happened, learn from your mistakes, and move on to bigger and better things.

Remeber: next time you start thinking negatively, just reverse it and say "I'm awesome. I can beat this, just watch me". If you outwardly express victory, you will automatically start thinking of ways to make it happen. Never let your negativity dominate you. You are the master of your emotions, it is not the master of you.

Type of person you wish you were.

What is the kind of person we wish we could become? Is there anyone we idolize because we wish to be like them? If there is someone like that how well do we know that person? Are they really someone we should dream to be like?

When you think about what you want to become, the type of person you want to be, do you ever reflect on your past dreams or goals? I do, all the time as a matter of fact. I hope you do as well. While we can't change our past it is important for us to see how much has changed from one time in our life to another.

The story of my life

11 years ago when I first started getting into programming I never thought I would become a profession programmer, it simply wasn't my intention. I had a love for technology back then just like I do now but I never thought about exploiting my ability as a programmer to live a life filled with the technology I love so much.

My dream now is to become a professional bowler by using the money I make as a programmer to go around the country and enter bowling tournaments. I'm a very lucky individual in the sense that I was able to find a way to have all my dreams become possible. Most people have to give up their dreams to make something they want become reality.

Reflecting back on all of this though I wish I was able to find a way to market my abilities sooner so it wouldn't of taken so long for me to have a chance at becoming a professional bowler.

How much do you have to give up to allow yourself the ability to have a dream though? Sometimes the sacrifice is too great for people to be willing to go through with it all.

Depending on the dream you might have to give up friendships, family time, possibly even a social life in general. You could also have to move around a lot which isolates you from your familiar scene of home. But for those of us that are willing to do anything to make our goals come true those sacrafices are worth making.

But for those who can't give up those things to make their dreams come true they have to give up something else just as precious, the dream itself. They have to change the kind of person they want to become, compromise themselves, to keep something important to them.

Giving up on everything you worked for is never easy though. Changing your life plans just because you realized you had to make more sacrifices then you would like seems too difficult for a normal person to do without even further pain.

I feel that if you do something like that you will always be faced with the question "what if" in the back of your mind and it is possible you will never be able too look at the things you enjoyed most without thinking about what you gave up to keep them.

Being filled with regrets is no way to live in my opinion and if I lose friendships or family over chasing my goals and dreams then those people were never my friends or family to begin with. I will follow the path I feel is right to the very end and I truly believe that is how people should handle things if they want to live without regret.

HTML Basics: Inserting CSS

When dealing with HTML you are going to naturally encounter CSS if you want to make your website look remotely decent. CSS itself is easy enough to learn and will be explained throughout this tutorial but the first real step to using CSS is knowing how to combine it with your code.

But first what is CSS? CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It is, as the name implies, a way to write styles into your HTML to give it a certain look and feel. In the past, websites were designed with nothing but tables and frames, now it's rare to even find a site with a table on it.

So, now that we understand what CSS is how do we use it? It's very simple really, CSS has three ways of combining it with your code, all three have different purposes and uses. These are external, internal, and inline.

The first one we are going to discuss is external. An external style sheet is most commonly used for CSS that is going to be reused on other pages. This is most easily demonstrated by looking at my background. It is the same on every page and is displayed with CSS. It is stored in an external style sheet.

You can create a style sheet in any text editor such as notepad. For Windows users I personally recommend using notepad++ as it will color all of your code which will make it much easier to spot mistakes. I use Linux GEdit which is the default text editor for Linux users.

A basic external style sheet would look something like this:

style.css

body {
    color: #000000;
    width: 960px;
    margin: auto;
} 

This would make the font color black and the width of everything in the body tag 960 pixels. "margin: auto;" makes the content on the page automatically align to the center based on the browser size. For better understanding of this all you have to do is look at my blog right now and notice that all the "content" is in the center and only 960 pixels wide.

Having the CSS file alone doesn't really do you any good though if your HTML files aren't using it. The way to make your HTML see it is very simple though. You simply do this:

htmlFileName.html

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
</head>

Make sure your embed code is within the head tag of your page. You can name your css file anything you want as long as it has the .css extension, it's just most common to name it "style.css". You MUST embed the style sheet into every html file you wish to be affected by it.

Now that we have covered external CSS let's talk about internal. Internal style sheets are good for  when you want a specific page to look unique compared to the rest. Using our previous code as an example here is some internal css:

htmlFileName.html

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"> <!--You only need this if you want the external style sheet in the page as well. -->
<style>
body {
    color: #333333;
}
</style>
</head>

This could be used if you want a specific page to have a different font color while still maintaining everything else that was used. The reason this works is because internal style sheets has priority over the external style sheet.Whatever the internal style sheet has set is what will be used for that page and the external style sheet just fills in the gaps.

Now for the inline CSS. This is most useful whenever you only have one tag that you want to be affected by the CSS but it is still recommended that you use external or internal for future reusability if things ever change and you do want to use it more then once.

An example of inline code:

<p style="color: #FFFFFF;"> This font is white </p>

This would make everything inside of the paragraph tag white regardless of internal or external style sheet settings. Just like how internal css has priority over external, inline has priority over everything. Using these three ways of implementing css at once will result in a very nice design and feel for your website.

HTML Basics: How tags work.

Hello everyone, in this tutorial where we will cover how tags actually work in HTML, this is a very basic tutorial assuming you know nothing of HTML or programming.If you are an more advanced programmer please check out later tutorials. With that said let us begin.

So what is HTML? HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language used to design static websites using an assortment of tags.

So, what is a tag in HTML? Well to put it simply a tag is something that is surrounded by <> an example of this is the universal <html> tag that surrounds all HTML pages.

To put it simply, you have an opening HTML tag and a closing HTML tag, Everything in-between these tags are affected. So what is a closing tag? A closing tag is the exact same as an opening tag except for a / behind the < symbol. For example;

If you have a <p> tag (this is called a paragraph tag) then you would do something some this.

<p>This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. </p> This is not part of the paragraph

And it would appear on a page like this:

This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph.

 This is not part of the paragraph

See how the text outside the paragraph tag isn't part of the paragraph? Simple isn't it?

So now that we have a basic understand of how tags work let's look at a basic HTML page layout.

<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Okay so I know what you're thinking "Woah James, head tag? title tag? body? what are these?" Don't worry I'm going to explain them all one by one.

Okay so the first thing we see is our <html> tag, this is the tag that as you can see here, surrounds all my other HTML tags.

Now for the <head> tag. This tag surrounds all your special code like javascript and css but we will worry about that a bit later. It also encases out <title> tag.

Our <title> tag is the text for what appears in the top of our browser and in our tabs. For instance my title tag is <title>Philosophers Home</title> and that is what you read when you look at my tab or the top of the page. It is also what appears as the main link in Google search results.

And now for the <body> tag, this is where you put everything that you want to visually show on the website itself. For example, the paragraph tag <p> we used earlier would be inside of the body tag like so.

<body>
<p>This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph. This is a simple paragraph.</p>
</body>

With that hopefully you have the very basic understand of HTML tags and how they work, in later tutorials we will reach out to making the most out of HTML tags to do some cool stuff and combine it with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to add that visual appearance that you want.

 If you have any questions or have things you would like tutorials on feel free to leave a comment and I will definitely work to answer any questions and fulfil any request.

Five reasons to not get a roommate

This is one of those times where a lot of college students or people simply moving out of their parents house consider looking for a room mate, but is that really wise? Here are a few reasons to consider otherwise.

This might be your fate.

• A good friend does not make a good roommate.

 Just because you can get along with your friend for a few hours on the weekend doesn't mean you will be able to handle being around them and living with them. When you live with someone you have to put up with their life styles and habits that would otherwise not really concern you.

• Your roommate might not pay the rent.

In times where money is hard to come by it's a very sad fact that some people will simply not be able to pay for the rent and once you lose your room mate you risk losing your apartment as well.

• Household appliances being shared.

This is a rather simple concept, depending on who you are you might need to share a stove, dish washer, microwave, or girls might want to share hair dryers, curling irons or something of that nature. The one question you have to ask yourself is if you can even handle them moving stuff around or being irresponsible with stuff you also need to use.

• Sharing a fridge.

This can't be a really big deal right? Wrong, There is nothing more frustrating then storing something in the fridge and coming back with it hidden behind hundreds of drinks as well as other things you would otherwise never store in a refrigerator.

• Different sleeping hours.

I know what you're thinking, "there is no way his final argument is when they go to sleep". Yeah, it is. Here is why. This is just one of those times where you have to look at the person and ask yourself "is he/she loud when they are awake?" if the answer is yes and they also stay up really late when you need to get up really early this could cause extreme problems.

Obviously everything here is strongly based on each individual but this list is meant to be a simple concept of common issues when trying to live in an apartment with someone.