::A Geek in Korea::

December is time for those retrospective "Year in review" meme-y sorts of posts. People make claims of absolute certainty to quantify the quality of things that have happened or were released in the past year, whether it be the best television series, game, or movie. Trivial things get forgotten, and things get declared the best or worst of the year. What if you could apply these sort of trivial procedures to the events in your everyday life? The winners and losers of the first annual Torgo Awards are as follows:

Nominees for Best Purchase of the Year:
1. Nintendo DS Lite with Homebrew cart
This this is an absolute blast. Not only do I have a stylish and cool portable video game machine, but it also does homebrew applications like reading comics, playing games, and lots of other neat stuff. While I was crazy about playing the Nintendo DS before, the ability to walk outside and actually see the screen is quite a revolution. If I actually had breaks at work I’d play this more. Right now, while it lives in my coat pockets and is seen on my person quite a bit, I only use it when I’m not busy, which is on the decline these days.

2. Yoshi
What more can I say about Yoshi? He’s an awesome dog, spends tons of time with me when I am home, has transformed my relationship with animals and my wife, has gotten me to exercise more often. Even if we had no intention of keeping him in the beginning, I’m so glad I have him now.

3. First Apartment as a married couple
We had to put down a monstrous down payment on our apartment once my last job threatened to toss us out on the street after their illegal employment fiasco. We had less than two weeks to find a place, move in, have it furnished, get everything done, then go to the United States for vacation. We had help getting some of the stuff done, like the ride to the furniture warehouse with our family, or the real estate agent being a distant cousin of my wife, but everything worked out very well in the end.

4. Airplane ticket to the United States
Seeing my friends and family is always one of the best things to do in the year. Last year my family came to me for our wedding, and this year my wife and I flew to the United States to see them. It was a long hellish flight, but once we got back, we had a wonderful time meeting everyone. My wife was amazingly good at remembering the family structure and we got lots of pictures to help sort out who was who for my Korean-in-laws. Plus, I got to hang out with my friends, catch up on some old times, see my perpetually traveling younger brother, and generally relax for a while.

Nominees for Worst Purchase of the Year:
1.  A Million Little Pieces, a Novel, by Some Jerkface
Remember this book? The one written by the guy that was lying about his whole rehab experience? That book that even if you read it as complete fiction was so outlandish by the end that you could hardly believe ANYONE would believe a guy trying to sell it as non-fiction, even if he WAS on Oprah? That book? Yeah. I bought it. The amount of self-delusional egotism dripping off the pages has stained my bookshelf where it sits. I can’t even look it the direction of the book without gasping and shouting "GAH! STUPID BOOK!"

2. Rhythm Tengoku, a Game Boy Advance Game, by the makers of WarioWare
WarioWare is awesome. A music game based on the same mini-games as the main game principal should be awesome too, right? No. It really, really wasn’t. While the game had style to spare, the game was not fun. I can deal with Japanese quirkiness. Hell, that’s something I enjoy most about my hobby, but this game was not something I could get into at all. Every game was a two minute "push a single button many times at a precise time" sort of mini game that simply was too boring to care about. Even the whimsical scenarios and decent music couldn’t cover up the fact that the game was repetitive. The reason why Warioware works and Rhythm Tengoku fails is that you play Warioware mini games for blasts of five seconds, where you are stuck playing music for minutes at a time doing the same thing over and over. I bought it used, thankfully, and played it a handful of times before selling it back at a slight loss. No thank you.

3. Some Bad Pork, from Wal-Mart
Grahhhhh! ZOMBIE TORGO eat BAD MEAT! MAKE Torgo LOSE control of ALL BODILY functions and causes EXTREME pain for ONE DAY. CHEAP meat BAD. BRAINS good!

4. My Donation to Nexus War for new character slots
If I had known that a text based Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game would have gotten me up at eight o’clock in the morning so that I could level up a character by clicking a button labeled "attack" when I had stumbled upon it, I should have simply saved my time. Instead, I went from playing a little, to actually donating to play more. I got obsessed with statistics, abilities, and even got friends hooked on the game. I deeply regret this decision. I wasted so much time playing this game. Even though it cost me a total of 10 dollars, the hours I wasted alone must have totaled entire DAYS of my life this year. What was I thinking? Thank goodness I’m clean and I don’t have any desire to go back to playing such a time destroying game anymore.

And the winners are!

In a surprise, "Best Purchase of the Year" goes to Yoshi, on the technicality that the plane tickets to the United States were actually purchased by my parents as a wedding present. This means they weren’t technically eligible as our best purchase. In the category "Worst Purchase of the Year", Nexus War wins hands down, as the rest of the items in the category combined couldn’t equal the amount of time wasted playing a boring MMORPG. Wow, more characters meant even more hours of time wasted every day! What a bad move!