This summer I bought an Xbox One and so far the only game I’ve been playing on it is Forza 5. It’s that good. Well, I’m a Forza fanatic. I’ve played them all and this one honors the franchise. Plus, I now know someone on the team so it’s fun to chat with him once in a while.
That being said, there are a few things that I’d like to see changed in Forza 6:
- The cars get tuned for you when you buy them for a race. There’s almost zero story line already in Forza and automating this part of the game makes it feel like you’re just getting put into the seat of various cars and running around a track. Sure, you CAN still tune, but it’s already done for you so you really have to go out of your way to want to change something. If you’re just running the career, there’s almost no reason to tune your car.
- The career is LONG. Really long. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the various combinations of cars and tracks. You’re just checking them off one by one. There’s not much feeling of progression or choice.
- The online stats are really limited. Forza collects so much data. Make it all available online! In addition to the slew of basic numbers, help me analyze my racing line and show me the areas of the track where I lose time to people slightly faster than me. There are lots of opportunities here.
It’s a great game, and if you love racing simulators, this is the pinnacle. (PS4 owners are free to disagree. I haven’t played Gran Turismo in many years.) But it offers very little beyond that pure racing simulator experience. If you’re not a little OCD about completing lists, you might find yourself giving up on the game before you’ve completed the whole career. But I suppose you could have a great time just playing the multiplayer section either racing with other people or competing in timed events. I enjoy that area but haven’t ventured there much yet.
For this latest 
Yuck. I said the Seahawks wouldn’t make it to the Super Bowl. Now I’m just hoping they can make the playoffs. They got pushed around in the first half but had a better second half. That non-review call at the end of the game seems insane to me, but it still would have been a stretch to win from that point and they never should have been there in the first place. The fake punt was an incredibly gutsy call, and the misdirection on the punt return earlier in the game was one of the coolest special teams plays that I’ve seen in a long time. Too bad they were performed against the Seahawks and not BY the Seahawks.
We grew up in the middle of the woods and pretty much no one ever saw our house except us and our guests. We put up a few lights to enjoy ourselves, but as far as a public display goes, there was no point. Ever since I moved into more populated areas, I’ve wanted to get into Christmas lights, but I’ve been hemming and hawing over exactly what I want to do. This past weekend, I finally took the plunge.
A while back I wrote a post wondering why there were no good sites with woodworking plans that were nicely categorized and reviewed. Most of my requirements in that post have been met at 
The Seahawks faltered again this week. In five games, they have yet to regain their dominance from last season. Forget about the Super Bowl repeat. Let’s make it through the first round of the playoffs. Here are some of the big changes I see from last season:
Learning Hobbies
Once you get the hang of it, trap shooting is a hugely mental activity. Sure there are lots of physical aspects to keep in mind and to analyze when you get on a bad streak, but when you’re in the zone, the hardest part is focusing on one shot at a time. It’s easy at the start of the round, but once I start getting close to a perfect round, it’s incredible how my body reacts. My hands get clammy, my mind is racing with what kind of victory dance I’m going to do, and my arms literally start shaking. With experience, I’ve gotten better at controlling it, but the last time we were out and I hit 24 straight, my last shot was almost comically bad. This feels a lot like my (very) old days of high school baseball. Standing alone on the pitchers mound in high pressure situations is another mind game. I’ve thrown tens of thousands of pitches, but I had to overcome the mental pressure to throw one more.
Over the past 5-10 years, I’ve become a big proponent of “done is better than perfect.” There are so many cases where you simply being done is a lot more beneficial than taking it from 95% correct to 100% correct. Woodworking isn’t usually one of those cases. Small errors along the way pile up into bigger and bigger problems until I just wish I could go back to the beginning and start over. A well-done project is a wonderful reward and a constant reminder that sometimes it pays to spend extra time and get closer to perfection.
You can’t fly RC planes without experiencing crashes. Lots of them. If you’re lucky, your crash results in a quick repair, but sometimes you end up with bits of plane scattered across the field. If you can’t pick up the pieces (literally and emotionally) and still want to keep going, this isn’t the hobby for you. It takes a different mindset to watch tens of hours of work explode in a couple seconds. But if you stop there, you probably WILL get fed up because you’ll keep repeating the mistakes. Each crash has something to teach me. Loose connection? Incorrectly configured transmitter? Lapse of focus? Misjudged the conditions? It’s fine to fail once, but repeating the same mistake over and over again is not only painful and costly, it means you’re not taking the opportunity to learn from your mistakes.
As people get into skiing (including me), they seem to progress from someone who knows they are a newbie, to someone who thinks they are awesome because they can ski circles around everyone they see, to someone who finally realizes that there is more to life than the groomed runs and there are a LOT of people who are infinitely better than you. Going to that last phase is humbling but it’s awesome. You realize that you can never master it all so you pick one area and try to improve until you decide to move on to another area. Once you’re in that phase, the challenge is continuing to push yourself. It’s so easy for me to stick with what I know and enjoy instead of doing something that makes me a little nervous or is just a little beyond my abilities. There’s a popular saying, “If you’re not falling, you’re not learning.”
I think you could take any one of these and easily see how the lessons from the hobby are easily extrapolated into general life. These lessons are an added benefit to the physical enjoyment of the hobby and hopefully help us improve ourselves beyond the skillset that we’ve learned.