They grow up so fast!

Right, I survived Christmas and got introduced to another weird family tradition: Meet at Claire's aunt's place and watch movies with the sound turned off whilst people engage in smalltalk or stare at biscuits longingly. Whilst being too polite to be the one to crack them open, so they just stay in the box all night.
Seriously, people on this island are so extremely polite, I must come across like a complete and utter barbarian. "Oh no, I don't want the last slice of pizza/can of coke/cookie, you go ahead and have it." "Nonono, it's fine, I'm full and I really don't want it." Goes back and forth for an hour while the yummy treat, which both parties crave, just sits and collects dust.
It's an adorable, yet utterly exploitable quirk. "Wolf, you want any more beef, gammon or turkey?" Been asked about 500 times and my answer was yes. Always. To all three of them. Quite possibly the happiest moment in all my life.

Well, it was definitely the Christmas with the coolest present of all times. Gentle reminder:

I haven't been this thrilled since I got my C64 for Xmas 21 years ago.

On a completely unrelated note, here's a picture of steak. Because I love steak.

Don't miss next week's pictures of bacon!

I'd love to tell you some cool stuff about our new lizard that you don't already know, anyway. He's not gonna fly around killing people, he looks nothing like Benedict Cumberbatch and he doesn't have a cool accent like Sean Connery. But he's the coolest fucking pet I ever had. Sorry cats!

In other news, Claire is getting good at Black Ops 2. No, I actually mean good! Most of the night we've been in first and second place, respectively. She still has the awareness of a dead Russian dog, the aiming ability of Stevie Wonder and doesn't even try to score a longshot using her sights, but her scores are consistently getting better, she's quicker to react and her overall K/D is slowly but surely creeping out of the dreaded 0. zone.

She's getting her scorestreaks, she had a few ruthless kills now and while there are some moments of facepalm, where she blatantly ignores enemies in plain sight or misses them by about a half mile, a result of 18/10 is nothing to complain about. Bear (haha!) in mind this is her first ever online multiplayer FPS on the PC. Thinking back to when I got started on one of the early CS betas, I probably did a lot worse. Oh yeah, you can also see my 29/3 on the scoreboard at the end of the video. Not as good as my highest K/D (27!) yet, but still nice. But enough bragging...

While I usually enjoy the game a lot, there are certain inconsistencies, which make me want to uninstall the whole damn thing for good. Frankly, I probably would have done if it wasn't for Claire'n'friends playing it. During an ideal match, it will take a maximum of 2-3 hits to down an enemy. Pretty much all the time. Except for longshots, obviously, but they're not a big deal. And the next round, I may run into a guy, get the hit notification noise and the little marker four or five times and the fucker won't die, yet he seemingly takes me down with just one hit. And on the killcam it looks like I'm not attacking at all, blindly rushing towards him, hitting thin air or doing all kinds of shit that I don't remember doing.

Right. I know I'm 31 now and it's time to worry about things like dementia. Maybe I'm getting senile. I forget things. But when I shoot a guy several times, the game tells me I hit, then the killcam tells me I was just standing there scratching my balls while some prick one-shots me with his pistol, I can't help but feel that something might be a tad off. I don't know if I've been taking the wrong pills lately or maybe it's that dreaded lag compensation everyone is talking about or god knows what, but it's starting to piss me off.

I don't usually get these problems during the day. But come midnight, enemy players are a lot harder to kill, I seem to die a lot faster and my killcam shows me doing dumb shit I don't remember doing. Maybe that's when the Americans come out, the Europeans go to bed and I'm starting to lag a bit. Or I'm so convinced that stuff goes weird around midnight, I just start playing like crap. I dunno. Weird shit.
To be fair, I'm spoiled by my own stupid scores. When a score of 15/10 used to be great a week or two after release, those ten deaths now make me rage and freak out like I was getting no kills at all. And you know you're getting old when you cannot even please yourself anymore. Hm... I might wanna get some sleep and rephrase that last bit.

-Cat