Jane McGonigal says in her book Reality is Broken that games are about overcoming unnecessary obstacles. I totally agree with that statement. There is nothing more fun in a game than having little obstacles to overcome, whether it is the main point of the game or having to figure out away to get around one wall, the obstacles make the game. She mentions the game tetris, and I couldn’t agree more. All you have to do is make complete lines, but the obstacle of having odd shaped peices make it the most fun. You know you can’t win but you continue to play, and play, and play.  Even if you clear the whole board, you aren’t done more pieces keep falling and the pace that they fall with continues to speed up, which increases the difficulty but also makes the game more fun. These little obstacles give the game life and meaning. I also think of the game Skyrim. I have never played it but I hear its kind of the same deal. Its a game you can’t beat because they just keep throwing more and more obstacles and challenges at you which keep the game interesting and different. The fact of knowing that you can never beat the game is also exciting because you know that even if you beat the one you are on, the game will just throw another one at you which will only keep you playing and wanting more. The little obstacles in games that make the smallest differences are what makes a game fun and different.

I have been playing video games for about 10 years now. I received my PS2 when I was in 4th grade for a Christmas present along with the Madden game for that year. I have been playing sports games ever since then.  The first person shooters and role playing games have never really appealed to me the way that the sports games did. I grew up in an athletic family, not so much that we were athletic, but we loved to watch athletics on the tv or in person. So that’s why the athletic games are more popular with me. That is my gaming experience in a nutshell, but my view on video games is much different. Video games, in my opinion, is what is the root of some of the growing problems in the United States, not saying the are the whole problem but I do believe they account for some of it. First of all, you can start with the obesity problem in younger generations, but we have all heard about that so I am going to not delve into it to much. One that sticks out to me is the problem the younger generation has with controlling their attitudes. I think that video games affect that because you have ten year olds playing rated M games and swearing/cussing the whole time they are playing, and the parents don’t have a problem with it. Then when they get outside of the video game, the attitude carries over where they are acting like they are still in the video game/playing it, causing their behaviors to be out of sync with the way they should be. That is why I believe that video games are right for the right age group.

I completely agree with what this writer is saying. If we would all make Christmas all about the birth of Our Lord and Savior then the companies would only make things that advertised that. Since we now go for the wintery things instead of the CHRISTmas things, the companies will go to what makes them the most money with winter. As for the part about the Christmas season starting before Thanksgiving now instead of the normal day after Thanksgiving is a totally different debate. Everyone these days wants to get their shopping done earlier and earlier, so stores are taking advantage of that and getting their Christmas stuff out as early as people will start coming in and buying that. I don’t think that has anything to do with Christians, that just has to do with consumers. I do agree though with this writers first paragraph as well, why do we have to call our Christmas trees, holiday trees? No other religions call their religious traditions, holiday traditions. I think we need to see where our priorities lie, if we keep trying to make everything politically correct then we will have nothing that is unique to the Christian religion. We keep trying to make Christianity a politically correct religion but we make no other religion take part. If we keep doing this, Christianity will be non-existent. I have no problem if we want to try and make things politically correct, but we need to do it across all areas of thought, not just certain groups. This is why, I feel were going down a slippery slope, allowing minority groups, not just race but areas of thoughts and religions too, take control over the way the majority acts. Pretty soon, those minorities will be able to get whatever they want because we continue to bend our backs for them, which is something we are doing all to often.

I think it was wrong taking the obese child away from his mother, but I also believe that the mother should get extra help for her son weighing 200 pounds. If I had a kid that weighed that much, I would do something to try and find out what exactly was wrong with him and was causing him to gain as much weight as he had. That way if it was a case of neglect, the child could be taken away, and if not, then the child could stay and get the help he needs. They say that the weight problem was a result of their home environment. Personally, for a kid be over 200 lbs as an eight year old kid is pretty bad. How can y0u honestly say you are raising a kid right when you have a kid weigh that much and it not be an eating disorder. If they would go out and find out exactly what was wrong with the kid, then they could get special help for the kid, allowing him to lose weight and stay at home. I don’t know how long the person would have to stay, or if they would need some form of an intervention where the child leaves for a while to get out of the temptations, but something needs to get done for the kid to start losing weight. But and no time do I believe the child should be taken away for being overweight, especially with how many young Americans are overweight now. Do we need to go door to door and take any obese kid away from the parents for neglect? That’s what this story is advertising.

As  a republican, nothing makes me more mad then the current democratic president leaving the office to pitch a completely different campaign than his previous one when he never followed through on them. Yeah, he did bring in universal health care, or Obamacare, as I like to refer to it. That is about the only thing that has happened that he said he would do with his “CHANGE” promise. I think he should rerun this year with the same promises he said he would run with last election and see how many votes he would get this time. My bet would be he would struggle to win a single state besides California because he was running on his own agenda and not listening to Americans voice their opinion in opposition to what he was trying to push through. It also makes me crazy thinking about how he is out campaigning right now when America is in the state it is. He was elected to lead the country, not to get a second term. If we wanted him for a second term, we would elect him again based on what he has done, not by what he “promises again.” I don’t want anymore of those unfilled promises. We need to fix America, and were not accomplishing that with a president who runs around the country from a campaign and leaves a person more unqualified than himself in charge. This is what scares me about America, we try to fix it without the proper people who should be in charge, in charge.

I am going to start out this post by saying that I do not like Tim Tebow, I do not really have a reason why but I have just never liked him. I do not think that it has anything to do with the fact that he is an in your face christian, because I have no problem with that, as I am a man of the Christian faith as well. I think the reason I don’t like him is that when he was at Florida, the offense was changed to revolve around him. I know he was successful and all that, but I have never like players that have an offense revolving around them. I don’t like Payton Manning for the same reason, but that isn’t the point of my post. My point is, people are just making to big of a deal about Tebow being such a devout Christian. Look around the league and you will find a large majority of them are Christians, but no one makes a big deal about that. One player comes in and shows that he’s a christian and all of America finds it outrageous that he is would do that. His parents are missionaries and he was born in another country while they were there spreading the word of God, so how can you get mad at him, he grew up in it. If the only reason why you don’t like Tebow is because he shows his faith, you should turn around and look at yourself and why you are talking about him in the first place.

This article discussed how college football coaches receive huge amounts of money for the job they do, while college students have to squeeze every drop out of their dollars to get by in college. I find it crazy that coaches at a college university can make 3+ million dollars a year, when college tuition continues to rise. If the college didn’t have to pay their coaches that much every year, then the tuition wouldn’t have to rise as much as it has been. When the average state college price is right around $8,200. With that as a tuition, it takes 365 students to pay his salary. With that in mind, there are coaches for a multitude of sports, not all the sports demand that amount of money, but then you take all the colleges other costs and you see the problem, not enough money for the school to continue without raising tuition. And then these same colleges give full rides to its athletes, and gives them money for food on road trips, and then they give them their shoes and jerseys for free. All of this money is going into its athletics and not into the academics that the school offers. Some of the smartest students at a university are paying the full price of tuition. Yeah, the schools get most of their money from athletics but it should being going into what they schools are actually there for, teaching the students. That is the problem with colleges today, they focus on what makes them money and rewards those areas, not what the school is actually for. Thats the problem with america today….money, money, money.

This year in intro to religion I learned way more than I thought I ever would. It didn’t feel like to me we covered a wide range of topics but we went into depth with all of the things we covered. It felt to me like we were just building and building upon what we learned that first few weeks and learning to apply it to other things. I am happy with the things we covered thought because the things that we did cover were things I wanted to know more about. I have always been interested in non-christian religions and this year that was the main thing we covered, which kept me interested in everything we covered. If I had to change one thing about the class thought I would cover Christianity more during the semester instead of just touching upon it like we did. It is the main religion that many of us practice and I feel like we as a general population don’t know a lot about our own religion, which is pretty sad. I think that before we start to focus on other religions, we should fist understand our own.

Is Elvis becoming like a “god” and making his own new religion? I think yes. If you look back at the ancient time with Jesus, people didn’t come to really start following him until after he died and rose again and ascended into heaven. Could the same be happening with Elvis? I think it could start going in that direction. If you look at the death week celebration, more and more people come every year. He is only getting more popular and he is still today making millions of dollars of his music that was released thirty years ago. If you think about it, he is more popular today than he was when he was alive. The same is true with Jesus. No one really started to pay that much attention to him until after he died. Now look at today, Christianity is the largest religion in the world. And it is only gaining more followers. Sounds familiar right. None of us have any way of knowing if Elvis will become a “god” in the coming years, and maybe he is just becoming a very popular public icon, but you can’t deny that he is becoming more popular everyday and the trend of the popularity is eerily familiar to the way Christianity started.

Today my grandparents asked me about my religion class and what I was learning in it.  I told them just an overview of the world religions. They asked me which ones and I started naming them, and I realized just how many religions we have learned about and how many other ones that there in the world. We have barely even scratched the surface on the religions of the world, there are so many that none of us have ever heard of that people belong to. If we really wanted to, we could learn about off shoots of each religions, but that would also take forever because if you look at the Christian church alone, there are denominations everywhere for it. I am Lutheran, but I’m from a town that has a Christian Reformed, Reformed, Catholic, Netherlands Reformed, United Reformed, and a Non-Denominational church. That alone is a wide range of offshoots and that is just in Christian church. This semester I have learned so much about the world religions that I never even imagined that I would ever know in my life. It is so interesting that people follow these crazy pilgrimages and do really weird things to bring them closer to their God. Some of the things that Christians do are like that though to, other religions would look at us and laugh. But that’s just the way that the world works today, and there is nothing that we can do about it.