"A Harrowing Experience" - An Excerpt From My Life

Unfortunately, maintenance has been low this past week and a half, and I take this time to apologize. With the spring semester wrapping up and the Ultimate Frisbee season ending, the time of no time was imminent and marked by a prodigious amount of work. Projects and finals that are not quite finals abound and drain my willpower like so many disheartening parasites. Instead of a hard hitting editorial piece this week, take a certain voyeuristic pleasure in the sordid and occasionally pleasurable details of my life.
Highlights of the week: a quite pleasurable foray into Downtown L.A. to take visit some interesting places in one of my favorite shirts poignantly cut short by a dying camera battery, turning in a badly polished proposal for my retarded brainchild "Myrmidon," and Econ tests, on two different occasions, kicking my tender buttocks. Ooh, plus I finally got to catch Assy McGee last night.

Shooting news coming soon GTA4, Gears of War 2 vs. Army of Two, (Because we all know TPS is the bastard child of FPS) and a follow-up on Realism in Video Games. Perhaps more poetry.... who knows?

Ode to Halo 3: HD Dreams

Hey all, this is a poem I wrote for my Creative Writing class.  Someone had the nerve to tell me I had started a new genre of "geek" poetry.  Not geek... gamer!!!!

HD Dreams

Take a step past that glowing Halo,

And enter the lobby, which is also the home

To the owned, the pwned and the stoned

Sometimes even the renowned

If only for one game and the next

Is up to you and you gotta be too legit to quit

Until you’ve interjected your own acerbic wit

To call that other guy a fag,

Insult his mother,

And call out

HEADSHOT!

And Deadshots, hotshots, and cheapshots

And any other kind of shot,

Like shotty-snipes on your favorite map

But everyone gripes cause they hate that type

And you got them all dead to rights

Locked into your sights

Except he ducks into that room and you die

And for sure he’s a leet hacker

(or slacker)

 

But hippieslayer won’t stop singing Journey

Chorus punctuated by explosive percussion

Or is it percussive explosions going a rat-a-tat-tat,

Harsh virtual metal pinging and scraping and penetrating

But not the good kind cause that would require a

Partner in person

And you see the dead come back to life to die again

Creeping and sneaking in a perfect posed

Crouch so different from the slouch on the couch

Who doesn’t feel the pain he inflicts on his pixilated pawn,

But instead yells inane, profane, and insane curses

At his monitor and at the assholes he sometimes calls friends

Remembered fondly in a tidy list on a glowing and slightly menacing menu

Dead Federalist

Itchnut

Ovvnage44

The Littlest Donkey

And they follow me into dreams

Spinning and pirouetting,

Lazily lingering in the air

Between streaks of vibrant viciousness

As orbs of potential pyrotechnics

And leashed luminescence

Burst like stormclouds in vivid Technicolor

 

(my dreams are not yet in HD)

Map Pack Follow-up: The Day After

So after a weekend of binge playing the new map pack for CoD4, I am still over 300 headshots away from my golden Kalashnikov.  Double exp didn't help with my resolve to resist another round of prestige, but I wanted to put my best foot forward on these new maps.  So after eagerly checking Xbox Live every five minutes on Friday morning, I finally downloaded the maps around 6:30 a.m.  Needless to say, I was stunned.  Broadcast is a delightful mash-up of a heated close quarters fracas within the station and a healthy dose of sniping and precision BOOM HEADSHOT-ing between the buildings in the parking lot.

  Tips for Broadcast: Use Extreme Conditioning when starting out in the parking lot to get onto the roof before the Op-For and pick them off as they come out the rear stairwell.  Watch out for flankers coming from the main lobby though.  The second tip is to sneak around in the conference room close to the stairwell and the roof entrance.  You have a good vantage point of the station floor in the back and a good hiding place crouching by the conference table.  Just pick people off as they cross from the stairwell to the roof.

Creek, I have mixed feelings about.  First of all, I'm not really a sniper so I've been frequently perforated by a hail of sniper bullets whenever I peek my head out.  However, the map is a lot of fun even if you don't want to snipe.  The map is nicely balanced with an open area to snipe any unwary combatants through the middle, and buildings on each side for some up-close confrontation.  As a in-close kinda guy, I really liked standing right next to snipers and taking a few extra seconds for that headshot.  You know that Kill-cam is going to piss them off, and after getting taken down like a buck in deer season for five minutes, the revenge is soooooo delicious.  

Tips for Creek: If you're not a sniper like me, an effective alternative is to equip an assault rifle with an ACOG.  You get the best of both worlds with a scope for hunting down all those pesky snipers and a good close-quarters firearm for those "Oh-SHIT" encounters.  In the cave, be wary of campers and claymores, and don't be afraid to throw a little smoke.

Chinatown is a nostalgic walk down memory lane.  CoD2 fans will take the first minute and a half going, "WTF?  This isn't Carenetan!" but after getting over the contrastingly shadowed corners and the vivid neon, they'll soon sink back into the groove that is Carentan.  Some noticeable and exploitable differences are the trashcans next to the walls by the lions' gate which allow for opportunities to flank, the third story in the central building looking out over the lions' gate.  This also allows for a overhead view of the small courtyard between the buildings (not the big courtyard with the cars).

Tips for Chinatown: Get to the building across from the mounted .50 cal with a good long-range assault rifle and pick off people as they look out that window.  I swear they're like moths to a flame.  Other than that.... Its Carentan, dude!

All in all, the CoD4 map pack is definitely worth the 800 Microsoft points on Live.  Four brand spanking new maps, two of prodigious proportions, one filled with bittersweet memories, and one to freaking pwn your best-friend in. 

Sable Caine out and watching you down iron sights.