She's gifted that way. I know, I know. This totally looks like an "I hit that!" kinda thing, but that's not it. If it wasn't for the exotic pet shop, and I'm really not knocking it, she'd probably work with huge, scary animals at a zoo or something. She has completely tamed and housebroken a freakin' huge monitor lizard. We refer to him as "the dog". Because he's a cute little house pet now. What's the next step from there, tap-dancing with crocodiles? She was born for this stuff. She's Reptile-Jesus.
One perk of being a stone-cold pro is that you can detach yourself from the pets a bit. For, you know, when the nasty stuff happens. And it does all the time. Imagine you raise an animal from hatch day to the point where somebody points at it in its tank and wants to buy it. And you have to let go. And there's always the chance the pet will come back when its new owner realizes that reptiles aren't just fun, but also mean work and responsibility. And sadly, people have the tendency to only make that realization when their unwanted companion is already more dead than alive from lack of care. Happens way too often. Raise and hand-feed a baby animal, watch it go to a customer, watch it come back ill and malnourished, do whatever you can to help and then it still dies. I couldn't deal with that. Claire does it all the time.
You see, I'm the kinda guy who doesn't even squish a spider. The way I see it, that spider has to be somewhere and you can't exactly tell the eight-legged freak you don't want to share your house with it. I don't just go and kill them because I don't want them here. I don't kill the mail man or the asshole who keeps posting those damn Domino's vouchers while I'm trying to eat healthy. Every life is precious. Which makes me a huge hypocrite, because I've probably eaten a thousand chickens in my lifetime, among various other animals.
I can't detach myself the way Claire does. Which is bad, because I can't deal with death. Both my grandparents died within four weeks of each other and while I'm being incredibly selfish here, I'm actually glad I'm far away from it all. My dad descibed exactly the kind of situation I wanted to avoid. Visiting their empty house, nobody opening the door, no coffee, no cake, nobody doing the dishes, doing the crossword puzzles, doing grandparents stuff. Knowing, feeling that something is missing, that things have changed and will never be the same again. When I think of my grandparents, they're still there, reading the paper, arranging their pills for the day, playing cards. I didn't have to see the empty house, didn't have to move their stuff, couldn't afford a flight to go to the funeral. I didn't even know how to respond when my dad told me about these things. He's been there. He's lost both his parents. How do you respond to that? What do you say?
Heck, even my ex wife has emailed me about the whole thing. We're not exactly friends, but this situation isn't normal, I guess. Normal doesn't even apply here. Different ruleset. I couldn't write back to her, either. I don't know what to say. Thanks? Thanks for caring? Seems phony and pointless. The whole thing is messed up.
To make things a little more dramatic, our foster beardie Bakara has stopped eating. Has stopped pretty much everything, in fact, and is slowly withering away. We thought maybe we weren't careful enough when Chompie died all of a sudden and Bakara may have caught the same thing. But it's been dragging on for weeks now and it's probably just her age. Her previous owner got her as an adult and didn't know how old she was. She looked different from all our other beardies, bigger, scales were a little dull, she didn't know how to hunt and she tried to eat salad from her bowl from 3 feet across the tank. She was a bit... senile, I guess?
A few weeks ago she just stopped eating and started to sleep all day. Which isn't very alarming in itself, seeing as she always does that over the cold months. But this time around she lost a ton of weight. We bathed her in critical care formula, hand-fed her, gave her vitamins, disinfected the whole tank and though she kept getting thinner and thinner, she eventually seemed to perk up and ate by herself again. For a while. Now she just sleeps. I've spent all day trying to get her to drink, to get her to eat some salad. I put her on my chest, kept her warm, kept her close to me all day as though I could somehow make her better through wishful thinking. But nothing seems to help. I'm watching her die and there's nothing I can do. Claire can handle it. She has to, it's her job. But I can't deal with it when Godzilla Jr. packs her bags to visit Maggie Thatcher in the netherworld.
It stinks. When the bathroom spider dies, well, too bad. Such is life. But Bakara is our pet. She didn't invade, she didn't ask to be here. We brought her here and we're responsible for her. And now she's dying. It may happen within the next few hours, it may happen tomorrow, but it's happening and we're just waiting for the inevitable. I'm 99% sure it's her age, I know we've done everything we could, but I can't stop feeling that I've failed her, that we fucked up somehow and that there might have been something we could have done and we just missed it. I don't even dare check on her anymore. I don't want to find her... you know. There, that's me going all cheesy over our pet lizard. You have no idea how sad and heartbroken I am over the whole thing. My grandparents? Holy fuck, I'm glad I've missed the most dramatic parts. I can't even get over Bakara - what my brother has seen in hospital must have been a million times worse.
It's sad when people die, who don't deserve it. Why them? Why not the guys who made Need for Speed: Rivals? I have seen reviews on this game and I have to be very careful what I say, because one of my friends and respected colleagues has written one of them. And I couldn't disagree more with all of the positive stuff I get to read about this pile of garbage, which can hardly be considered a racing game. The average review-rating on Metacritic is 74 right now, with a user score of only 2.9 - and once again I'm starting to question my fellow reviewers out there. Either I'm completely stupid or those guys are doing something wrong. It's CoD: Ghosts all over again.
What should a good racing game be about? Hint: It's in the title. Speed! I want to drive amazing cars at ridiculous speeds. And Rivals already fails right there - the game is capped at 30 frames per second. In 2013, where powerful hardware is packed into every box of cereal. If CoD Ghosts and NFS Rivals represent this "next generation" of games, then their parents must have been brother and sister. Speaking of missing basics: Mouse support, support for steering wheels, anti-aliasing, a replay feature, the option to disable "catch up" rubberband AI, manual transmission - GONE. Each and every one of them. And we're talking about stuff you had in most other NFS titles.
So what do we get instead? Cutscenes and unskippable tutorials. The game tells me, "Wreck a cop!" So I do. And I get a cutscene. A news report about a cop, who got into an accident with a racer and had to go to hospital. WHAT THE FUCK? NFS has always been about ridiculous, over the top fun. They didn't have you send people to hospital - they didn't ask you to put them into hospital, but this is part of the fucking game now! I just want to fucking race! I didn't ask for some bullshit background story about the consequences of my actions.
And those fucking tutorials. It's Need for Speed, not a goddam space station. But the game doesn't just explain everything as I drive. It plays videos, showing me what happens when I accelerate or use the brakes. Because apparently I'm a drooling idiot, who has never played a video game before and I'm also too stupid to grasp the concept of a car. Because, you know, the other 19 NFS games were all about horses. I can't skip them. And when it's finally over, the game plays them again. You can be a cop or a racer, they get identical tutorials and you have to watch them both.
But what ultimately kills it for me is the soundtrack. I remember racing to kickass licensed tracks such as this one:
Rivals? Crappy electronic techno beeps and hip hop. If I'm whipping a Ferrari up and down the landscape at 200mph, the last thing I wanna listen to is some gangsta shit, that makes me want to slow down and driveby-shoot people.
In other news, Claire and I have begun comparing dicks. Metaphorically, of course. We tried it the other way once and I won, because mine exists and hers doesn't. But in this case I'm referring to STO. We're building, tweaking and tuning ships on Star Trek Online. You're probably tired to death of the same old stories about how complex the game is and how many different configurations and play styles there are, so let me skip to the point where I win all of our duels and she is getting beyond frustrated.
You see, I'm a bit of an asshole on STO. I can take an outdated, underpowered ship and then destroy people with it:
This is the awesome-looking Galaxy X Dreadnought Cruiser, featured in the TNG episode All good things. It's my favourite ship in terms of looks and design and it's also dreadfully bad compared to most other ships. Allow me to quote the wiki:
"[T]he Dreadnought Cruiser falls behind other C-Store Starfleet cruisers in terms of turn rate and offensive capability, but is still a viable ship for tanking. The introduction of the Avenger Battle Cruiser and its Fleet Equivalent have also rendered the Dreadnought Cruiser semi-obsolete. [...] it is unfortunately let down by a number of weaknesses [...] poor maneuverability, coupled with the 3 minute cool down time of the Phaser Spinal Lance, makes it an ineffective source of DPS. The lack of high rank Tactical bridge officer slots further exacerbates the Dreadnought Cruiser's shortcomings."
Long story short, nobody uses this thing anymore, except maybe for RP-purposes or nostalgia. If you can't be bothered to watch my stupid video, it shows me using this ship to get the most kills and second highest dps in pvp, score 1st place in a competitive 10 player fleet action and get top kills and dps in a 5on5 arena match. Suffice to say, the missus ain't too pleased.
Don't get me wrong. I love her for being competitive. I love how she obsesses over her ships and setups, how she stays up until 6am to try out some new build and how she never gives up and keeps coming back for more, even after I blow her to pieces in a duel or she only scores 2nd place behind me in fleet actions. But damn, she's getting scary! She started breaking things. Like a pair of sunglasses. Snapped it right in half. For an obsessive hoarder and pack-rat like me, this is extra painful. I've still got my 1st grade elementary school scissors right here on my desk. Mint condition, some superglue scars aside. Long story. Childhood trauma. I hoard things, because I associate happy memories with them. The sunglasses remind me of days out with Claire, back in Germany, in the summer, when she cooked like a lobster, because she wasn't used to the heat. I don't think she even wore them that day, but they still remind me of the whole thing. Now they're in the trash.
I totally get it, we all need to vent. I threw a cup once, when my computer kept freezing because of the faulty PSU and I couldn't figure out what it was. :D
I've just never seen her like that. She loses in Smash Brothers, meh, no big deal. Call of Duty, whatever. Star Trek Online? NO FUCKING WAY! Not acceptable! VERBOTEN! I think this is mostly because she's the Trek nerd in this relationship. She has the novels, she knows all the shows, all the lore and background details and I just casually watch TOS and TNG here and there. DS9 bored me, I hated Voyager and I never bothered with Enterprise. It kinda makes me a bully. I grab the dumbest, crappiest ship, put some huge ass cannons on there, which shouldn't even be viable in pvp to begin with and victory ensues.
I understand how she feels. We've all been there. It's like practicing your moves on Mortal Kombat or Tekken all day long, beating the game on all difficulty levels and then you get your ass handed by your little sister, who never played any games before. She's just mashing the A-button, kicks your ass and refuses a rematch, because "this is stupid". You can practice and master all the tricks, learn all the moves, know everything there is to know, only to lose to the unexpected and the stupid. You don't prepare for weird shit that no sane person would try in the first place. Hilarious. Maybe I should post a manly guide on how to fly a dreadnought. Brrr, I hate how they spell that with an o!
-Cat
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