We've all heard and seen the cliché's at this point; the chunky, agoraphobic 20 something's with skin as pale and transparently thin as tracing paper who maintain a carefully choreographed dance of not mixing up the bottles of beverage/soup with the ones with urine. people who purposefully stay up till the wee hours of the morning, fraggin Dutch gamers and discussing the finer points of micro transactions on a $ system vs. the M$. Then they tuck on in for a nice 10 hour nap, and begin their sad live anew as afternoon breaks.

And for those of us who know reality, that is not insomnia. You do not choose it, it choose YOU Pikachu! There is no blissful 9 hour intervention. Your groggy ass just has to ship off to work on what few moments of daylight dozing you can eek out, leaving you with an extra 8 hours that can be filled only with booze and or infomercials. That and mild hallucination.

Until now, in the shiny era of the computer and inter and-ra webs, insomniacs can do more than watch late night music videos, Cops re-runs, and just how horrible "ordinary" kitchen gadgets make our daily lives. Now you can be productive. And how! How? You can make lists like this one!

#10
Blog: From Blammo.

Yeah, yeah, everyone blogs these days. But who really takes the time out of their day to day lives to really go full on Faulkner crazy stream o consciousness blogging at 2 am these days, besides me? Well, when your day has an extra 8 hour block devoted to teasing Tantalus, you can too! Just fire up yer word processor or blogger software and turn off your inner censor.

You will learn things about yourself or your world that you had never really picked up on, like how odd it is that two Army recruiters pulled over to the side of the road to ask me about the Army, simply because I seemed to carry around a duffle bag full of laundry with no trouble. desperate!

Anywho, but personal vanity aside, the blog o sphere (god am I glad CNN stopped using that phrase and related segment!!) would cease if no on actually read anything anyone wrote. Ahem So with the other 7 hours you have left tonight, go through your friends list, and read what's going on in their lives. You can find out amazing things, like how my nephew is going to be mysteriously born a month and a half earlier than expected. Track down a coworker 's blog, or your immediate supervisor. No one really considers the fact that John the Mouth Breather in cubicle D might read your inner thoughts and water cooler gossip. Be a busy body and make people nervous.
Don't forget that celebrities have blogs as well. Stalk away oh sleepless readers.

#9
Wikipedia, the best smelling -pedia in the web!

If I only am able to accomplish one thing, besides limiting your purchase of products that sell for the low low price of three easy payments of $29.95, it is to convince you to better your self with your sporadic free time. Since we are at this juncture to unstable for community college, why not read up on a few things then?

en.wikipedia.org. Just saying it out loud makes my eyelids twitch a little slower. If you need to kill the time before the Early Bird Special, AND want to be the Go To know-it-all of the office , then the wiki is the place for you. Pick a topic, any topic. search for it. now here's the trick. While reading down the page, you'll happen upon little words in a pretty blue color, cerulean blue, perhaps. These obviously are links. Each word is a link to an article on THAT topic! Now if you are using Firefox or any browser that allows for tabbed browsing you are in for a treat. Open that link in a new tab. And the next in another. I suggest mapping the middle mouse button to open new tabs. But leave them alone for now. Finish your encyclopedia article first, like a good boy. There now. Now close the tab, or bookmark it. Now move on to the next, opening up new entries as you go. Soon you'll have gone through reams of entries on everything from capybara to tappas.

But dangit to hell, they got something wrong, didn't they? Well, you can show them, you can show them ALL! Simply register, gather up your peer reviewed sources, and edit away. Just remember that being an anonymous wiki vandalizing douche is a bad as cheating at online games.

Well folks that brings me to the end of today's installment of Things To do When You Could be Sleeping But Can't and Have a Computer. Tune in for part 8 through some smaller number! Expect a full break down on anally retaining your itunes Collection!

I had a most frightening epihpany this morning. When I woke up, two fingers on my left hand were sublocated (just kind of out of socket), and my right was this numb lump of pain. This is not an entirely uncommon event for me at this point in my life, but today really sucked.

I'm 23. I now know for a fact, that barring some luck with medical skillset, in the not too distant future I will be physically unable to game. Or do other things that are near and dear to me...with my right hand. Using a mouse for long periods of time on anything other than the internet or a nice slow point-N-click leaves a searing pain in my palm. The 360 controller leaves my fingers so litteraly out of whack I have to manhandle them back into a hand shape. I won't even get started on the Guitar hero.

This sucks, this sucks big time. And it just seems to be getting worse.

So do us all a favor this holiday season guys. Take that $50+ your were thinking about dropping on some crappola quilty pleasure release *cough* madden *cough*, and consider donating it to something helpful like

Arthritus research campaign, the american diabeties association , or the national MS society

Its a good thing. These diseases affect us as gamers and as people. Much more than pretty much anythign from EA short of a cease and desist letter can. Course the fact that I have not a single watcher will GREATLY limit the effect of this, but it was theraputic to write. aside from the hurt.

I've spent some of my downtime waiting for my Xbox's coffin to come and go (for what its worth I'm on my 3rd 360 since February) toodling around the forum, answering Create your own Achievements" threads, as well as looking at actual achievements. The threads help with creative juiciness and executive functions, and have led me to believe that well, some developers just aren't trying as hard as they could be.

So in an attempt to help Developers, or at least the interns who are not paid to come up with Achievements trip their way through some of the typical lame Achievements minefields, I present a

List of Achievements that need to Die! (Imagine this echoing a little bit)

1. You Completed the First Level! - 50 points!

Woo-hoo, lets celebrate mediocrity! Seriously, who would buy or even drop $9 for a game and NOT BEAT THE FIRST LEVEL!? There is no need for these, or really for any level except the last one. In a typical game, cutting these would free up at least 9 new achievements slots, even 2 or 3 times that for games that award you for multiple difficulties.

2. You just did something that was MANDATORY to continue the game! - 75 points!

I'm looking at you King Kong.

3. You scored every single rank in every single type of online multiplayer game. - 10 points each X 30

The whole POINT of a competitive online multiplayer system is that people who want to play it, will play it, to.... win? If you want to unlock an achievement for getting the highest ranks that's cool, but there's no need for the other 28 ranks. If anything you guys should be limiting the need to people to play online only for achievements. You should not have to team up with a partner for the specific purpose of letting each other earn achievements.

4. You defeated this boss, and the next, and the next, and well all of them. yay. - 40 points each

Kind of covered this already, but needs to be specifically covered. You want to reward someone for defeating a boss, then reward them for doing it creatively, like no damage received, or by using a pistol, something.

5. Yay, you were in a room with 1000+ people at the same time! See that means people like us! - 25 points 10 Points for simply popping online for the first time!

Yeah, like this ever happens. Maybe on the first Tuesday of release, that many peeps will be on, but aside from MMO's there's really no way to reliably let people earn this. Then some games give them for using online features that should be used anyway.

Now these type achievements are dead. They can no longer be used.

Now a big part of me is irritated by my complete and total lack of Xbox Live Connectivity, and hence the inability to even try at 500 of every game I play. I would just like to have a shot at at some more meaningful Achievements.

So it feels like I actually Achieved something.