Moving Targets

It seems that the Louisville leg of the tournament circuit has been moved up from Sunday to Saturday, a move that makes sense since Sunday is actually July Fourth. Unfortunately, this new date creates serious logistical barriers that may prevent my attendance. They will certainly prevent the attendance of Pat and Bryan, the two guys who were going to accompany me down and make a road trip out of it (Pat was also going to be in the tourney). Work schedules make this new date impossible, though, and I must say I’m not entirely thrilled at the prospect of making yet another long drive by myself, especially since Louisville isn’t that far from Atlanta and there will undoubtedly be much better players than I in attendance. As it is, the only way I’d be able to go at all is if I cut out of work very early on Friday (like, say, one o’clock), something that might be possible since they made me work thirteen hours yesterday. I thought I left shit like that on the other side of the Pacific.

In other news, it’s looking more and more likely that I’ll be attending the Penny Arcade Expo at the end of August. Not only will it be the first real “geek con” type event that I’ll have attended (E3 continues to elude me) but they’re actually going to have panels with big players in the gaming industry talking about how best to break in and get a job there. This would be invaluable information for someone like me, and I’m not the only one who thinks so as Pat has also expressed interest in attending. The icing on the cake: they’re holding an SC2 tournament as well. Will wonders never cease?

Stating The Obvious

I absolutely refuse to link to the latest article highlighting the trials and tribulations of our beloved lawmakers as they try valiantly to defeat the villainous ranks of designers whose sole purpose in life is to defile, destroy, manipulate and otherwise pervert America’s morally pure youth. After all, we’ve been down this road before and nothing ever comes of it – there’s no point in arguing with someone who refuses to play by the rules.

On the other hand, I have no trouble telling you that I bought an Xbox, which is probably one of the dumber things I’ve done lately; of course, experience has has demonstrated time and again that I am utterly bereft of intelligent cognition where such things are involved. I mean, it’s not like I didn?t already have more games than I can finish this summer for PS2 and the Cube – no, I needed to get Crimson Skies and Halo (for MP only!) to add further spice to the Monday Night Fights. The depth of my problem becomes all the more clear when you consider that I’m looking forward to returning to school at the end of August because I will have more time to play videogames. Not to learn things or graduate, mind you, but to have more free time than my job allows and a steady broadband connection over which I can own bitches in Dead Or Alive Ultimate and Call of Duty (or perhaps to torch bunnies with Firaga in FFXI).

Of course, it’s not like I ever studied before, but I’m not sure I previously had such an obvious correlation between college and slacking. Eh.

Dear Squaresoft

Recently I have spent a lot of time playing one of your games: Final Fantasy X-2. It is a fun game, and I’ve enjoyed it despite the fact that if I were lactose intolerant the cheese would have sent me into a coma long ago. I like the subtly different mechanics; I like the return to the world map and being able to roam about. I like all of these things.

What I hate with a deep, abiding passion is the stupid shit you make me to do see your “perfect” ending. It’s not enough for you that I spend fifty-plus hours trekking through the same damn locations I already explored in FFX whilst trying to find a wife for some loser, is it? No, I’ve also got to talk to a monkey. Probably more than one monkey, actually, in an entire room full of them. The rest of them don’t say anything or steal my gil, but there’s a few elite monkeys that really, really need to be investigated so that I can tally an additional 0.2% onto my completion total and get your damn perfect ending.

This may be new to you, but there are other companies that make games whose names don’t start with Final Fantasy and end with some absurdly high number. I would very much like to play their games too…I do not want to beat yours with a 99% completion and then have to go through it again to get the last few percent I missed just so I can see the way the game was always intended to end anyway. Yes, it was very nice of you to allow people like me to keep all the levels and items we gained on our second go, but that means you knew this shit was going to happen and you did it anyway! If I were British I would say bullocks to you, but since I’m an American I’ll just call it bullshit like it is.

In closing, Square, I wish disease and pestilence upon everyone in your organization. Except for Uematsu-sensei…he can come live with me.

Shut Up Caboose

So far I’m totally disgusted with my summer reading progress this year. Normally, I make it a personal goal to average at least a book a month in general and certainly during the summer, but so far I seem to be falling well short. Consider: it is not the middle of July and I have only read Cryptonomicon and The Future of Freedom. For those of you who do not count math as one of your better subjects, that’s about half a book a month. To be fair, I suppose, Cryptonomicon is really like two books in one, but if I start allowing myself to argue semantics it sorta defeats the purpose.

Anyway, there are still three books on my list in addition to The Salmon of Doubt (which I’m about halfway through), all of which are in social- and life-science genres. If you have the inclination and opportunity, I would recommend you pick up The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene or The Age of Spiritual Machines. All three still remain on my list and once I’ve finished them (whenever that happens) it’s always fun to have someone to discuss them with.

In case the whole reading thing just doesn’t seem like it’s something you would do, episode 38 of Red vs. Blue is finally up. It’s the last one of season two, so those of you who were waiting for such an event (Tim,Pontus) no longer have any excuse not to get them. Besides, you know, finishing your lab projects and finals.

Six Times Nine Equals Forty-Two

Have you ever been really excited to start something that, by the end, you hoped you’d never actually finish? Aside from the obvious sexual connection that people like Zen have already made, that is. For me it’s The Salmon of Doubt, a book I started a few weeks ago with something close to giddy excitement that has slowly slid into a sort of morose contemplation. It’s not that the book is in anyway bad or disappointing; it is, in fact, the best look into the psyche of Douglas Adams that I’ve ever seen. Instead, it’s the knowledge that upon completion of this book I’ll have read everything that has ever been written by that man.

Not that this is necessarily a new precedent for me. I have read virtually everything ever written by William Gibson and feel no remorse in doing so. The key difference, of course, is that while William is alive and still quite capable of adding to his body of work Douglas is, of course, not. Having read all of Gibson’s books is a kind of accomplishment, something that I can say with pride and know that whenever it is he decides to release his next book I’ll get any arcane references to previous works he might make.

Just as finishing Adams’ works is different that do the same for Gibson’s it’s also different than finishing, say, the complete works of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare was undoubtedly a great writer, he has been dead for nearly four hundred years and, perhaps more importantly, he lived a full life (although not really by today’s standards; he was fifty-two when he died). That is, Bill wrote probably most of what he had in him to write and did so in such a very distant time that imagining what it would be like was he still alive seems like a pointless exercise.

This is not so with Adams. He was still heavily involved in creative efforts, and with the Internet and biotechnology poised to turn so much of what we take for granted on its head it pains me to imagine all the wonderful things he might have come up with. In a world that, more and more with each passing day, seems anything but funny it would have been nice to have a guy who could do more than just make mindless pop-culture references that pass for humor. I’ll probably finish his last book this weekend, and in doing so will close the final chapter on one of the most amazing and talented writers this smallish blue-green planet orbiting a small unremarkable yellow sun on the western edge of the less fashionable arm of the Milky Way may ever know. It may be several years too late, but so long, Doug, and thanks.

The Monster Cometh

It’s almost that time again! That’s right folks, the one time a year when I and my gamer-geek posse venture outdoors for nearly twenty-four hours of physical activity. Yes, the 2004 Michigan Monster Game is here, and you all know what that means: welts.

Don’t worry; it’ll make more sense in a minute.

For those of you not familiar, the Monster Game is a two-day event that happens annually on the last weekend of July. More specifically, we will be playing paintball for those two days. If there is anyone out there who doesn’t know what paintball is (and that’s a possibility seeing as how this site now has an international audience and paintball is illegal in many countries) keep reading because I’m going to give you a synopsis.

Paintball is actually a pretty simple game. You have some basic equipment: your paintball “gun” (which is now referred to as a “marker” to remove the negative connotation the other word carries), a mask, and of course some paintballs. There are many kinds of paintball markers but all of them are powered by compressed gas, either CO2 or Nitrogen. They fire paintballs (duh) which are spheres about 1.5cm in diameter that feel like plastic (but are actually some sort of biodegradable sugar-based material) and are filled with (surprise!) water-soluble paint. The markers launch the paintballs at somewhere between two and three hundred feet per second depending on the rules of the field at which you’re playing. The mask is, well, a mask. The basic idea of the game is to shoot people on the other team with your paintballs while avoiding the same fate yourself. Once you’re hit, you’re out for some amount of time that depends on the type of game being played. Types of games include capture the flag, elimination, or (in this case) a big-game format of several four-hour rounds spread over two days where you score points for every minute your team holds particular objectives.

The game is absolutely addictive. In fact, the only reason we don’t play it regularly is because of the absurdly high cost of doing so. A case of paintballs has two thousands rounds and costs anywhere from forty to seventy dollars – in a big game like this one it won’t be surprising if I shoot through two of them. Add to that the registration fee (sixty dollars), gas to get there both days, food and liquids (it’s usually hot so we go through a lot of water and Gatorade) and equipment maintenance and you start to understand the monetary strain involved.

I’ll probably post a little more on this later in the week as well as some photos of the group going and the equipment we use if people are interested.

For Your Perusal

You may remember when, almost two months ago, I mentioned that I planned to participate in a writing contest. Well, the deadline is nearly here (July 26th, actually) and I finally decided to write something. The contest calls for a pair of two hundred word reviews, a task that’s actually much harder than it sounds. I was, at first, quite annoyed by the restriction, but I’ve come to realize that it plays two important roles for the contest judges. First (and probably foremost) it keeps them from having to read through hundreds of three-page crapfests written by 1337 hax0rs with no concept of grammar or spelling. Second, it simulates the sort of environment magazine writers have to deal with. On the net we’re able to write however we want, unrestricted by the realities of cost and deadline, but in the print world these things are major constraints. If someone can manage to write a decent review that conveys the important parts in only two hundred words the judges can probably assume they’ve got someone with actual talent on their hands.

Whether or not mine get included in this lofty category I leave for you to decide. Comments, criticisms and critiques are encouraged; you can put them in the comments section of this post, in the forum thread I’ve created or by e-mail if you prefer.

Abject Stupidity

I am constantly amazed by the abject stupidity of our elected officials. As a general rule I try not to spend much time pontificating about politics and such but there’s absolutely no way I can avoid commenting on this article from Yahoo! News. So that you don’t have to read was is essentially a rehash of the same crap we’ve been hearing for years I’ll just give you the quote that pissed me off:

But a parade of conservative Republican speakers lamented the unbridled power of federal judges to thwart majority will, although no federal court has yet ruled on the 1996 law.

I would hope that I don’t have to tell my American readers what the problem is, but for those of you unfamiliar with our legal system I’ll spell it out: Judges are not supposed to give their judgments based on the opinion of the American public! This is something everyone learned in their US Government for Utter Retards class in high school?there is a reason why high-level courts like the Supreme Court are appointed instead of being elected. The courts are intended to be The Constitution’s last line of defense against angry mobs that seek to strip away the rights of a minority! If all of America decides that left-handed people need to be executed, the courts are supposed to stop them! This is the basic of our entire system of checks and balances! Of course they don’t have to listen to public opinion?that’s the friggin point!

How the hell has this country survived for this long?

The Love Of The Game

As awesome as the Monster Game always is, there’s no getting by the fact that you pay for it with your entire body. Yesterday my legs felt like they were encased in clay and my left knee absolutely refused to bear my weight any longer (I hyper-extended it on Saturday) – were it not for the saving grace of IB Profen I would probably not have been a terribly useful slab of human.

Of course, in addition to such standard athletic-related injuries paintball has its own special brand of pain known as welts. See, getting hit with a paintball isn’t usually enough to leave any noticeable marks unless it hits bare skin, although my legs seem determined to prove me wrong on this. My first three or four hits were all neck shots, the neck being one of the few places that pretty much every paintball player leaves exposed…sufficient to say two of them drew a little blood and left me something to remember the weekend by.

All of this begs the question: do only masochists play paintball? Although Keith is a well-documented fan of pain, the rest of my group has no particular love for it or desire to experience it. For that matter, why is it that humans play sports at all? After all, pretty much any sport that you play hard leaves you exhausted and sore the next day; even Pavlov’s dogs did a better job of linking cause and effect.

Either way, the question is purely academic because I will, undoubtedly, compete in the Tippman Challenge this coming September and will, inevitably, end up in a similar post-game situation. Stupid? Possibly. Fun? Oh hell yes.

Kinda Creepy, Actually

Has anyone else been following this? It’s obviously some sort of marketing blitz, and whoever came up with it has my full, unabashed respect. What am I talking about? Without spoiling any of the fun investigation you can do, I’ll just give you what you need to get started:

In the Halo 2 trailer that has been showing in some movie theaters there’s a URL referenced at the very end – it morphs into this one: www.ilovebees.com. When you go there it’ll bee immediately obvious what I’m talking about…have fun trying to figure it out! I’ll keep you posted if I come up with anything cool.

I Don’t Normally Do This…

…but sometimes you get a snippet of conversation that’s too funny to pass by. Thus, at work today:

Norm: Ah, there you are.
Jenny(in a Chinese accent): Why are you looking for me?
Norm: Well, Jon says you’re trying to kill him and asked me to report on your location.
Jenny: Oh, yeah, I am.
Norm: Any particular reason?
Jenny: No, not really. Do you need a reason?
Norm: To kill someone?
Jenny: Yeah.
Norm: Eh, I guess not if you’re a psychopath, maybe.
Jenny: I’m not a psychopath, I just like stabbing. What’s wrong with that?

It’s funnier if you say it in your mind with the accent.