Belghast the Eagle Scout

Waiting on Server Maintenance

Last night a pretty crazy thing happened.  It was announced that Everquest Next Landmark would no longer be under NDA, meaning we can say whatever we want about it.  With this happening on Saturday night, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to devote a Steampowered Sunday to this brand new game.  Problem is up until now I have been a good little NDA abiding monkey and did not take even a single screenshot.  So that leaves me without a lot of fodder to talk about for SPS.  Another problem is, shortly after going off NDA they took the servers down to apply a fix for some issue that were going on.

The valiant Landmark team has quite literally spent all night working on the problem, and while it sounds like they are getting close they have yet to get things where we can log in.  Which means for the time being my episode of Steam Powered Sunday is delayed.  However the show must go on, and since it is uncertain if they will get things back up in time for me to write a Sunday post I am going to move forward with making my Factoid February post.  It is not my intention to keep making two posts a day but it seems like that is going to be the case here at least.

Belghast the Eagle Scout

I grew up in a small town of roughly 2500, and with that upbringing came so many little tropes of small town life.  The one that did because I wanted to, not because someone expected me to do… was Scouting.  In essence it gave my dad and I an excuse to sneak off and do outdoorsy things.  Granted these days by the very technology laced lifestyle I live, you could never tell that I was ever a good little boy scout.  I even went so far as to be a camp councilor at the local scout camp for a season.  The pinnacle of all of it was me getting my Eagle Scout during my sophomore year of high school.

Even more interesting than that, my Eagle award was a bit of a major occasion.  I was the very first Eagle scout from my small-town troop in thirty years.  They made a huge deal of it and it was attended by several politicians looking for a photo opportunity.  As cool as getting that was, it was tinged with regret.  Our troop had eight scouts all on the verge of getting their Eagle, and I was the only one who actually went through with it.  Getting your Eagle is essentially a lesson in dealing with frustrations.  You have to create an Eagle project proposal, and submit it for approval.  It then gets kicked back for this technicality or that one, causing you to revise it over and over until finally several tries down the road they finally give you the green light.

More than anything it is that this perseverance that is what I think the project is trying to teach you.  In the working world I cannot count the number of times one of my projects has suffered random rejections that are completely out of my control.  The determination that in part I gained through the frustrations of trying to get Eagle have helped me to just keep pushing forward.  So while it saddens me that I am the only one of my friends that actually completed the process, I am proud of myself for doing it nonetheless.  So that’s today’s factoid…  I am an Eagle Scout, and while I don’t always agree with the political stance that the Boy Scouts of America take on various issues.  I am still proud of the lessons I learned along the way.