Fun With Dead Pets

My first ever reptile was a bearded dragon. They're a little less twitchy and fragile than geckos and still relatively idiot-proof. And they don't live very long, especially when you have a tendency to pick up old, rescued or neglected animals. So let's just say we have a bit of a... rotation. In with the old, out with the dead. It probably sounds a bit more fucked up than it really is. Imagine walking past some scrawny, unwanted little lizard week after week and absolutely nobody wants it. And you have a nice warm vivarium with enough space in it at home. You get the idea. And then you get used to one another, everyone is happy and then they die. Awesome. Yeah, we're not gonna get any more beardies, but maybe we'll use the tank for something that lives a little longer. Baby beardies, maybe? I kid.

I don't believe in beardie heaven, but it seems a bit disrespectful to just flush a dead pet down the crapper or throw it in the garbage, so we tend to bury them. There are two dead reptiles resting in the garden, somewhere underneath our living room window. Or so there were, until the bones came up during a recent weed removing session. Now they're partially in the garbage, anyway. Sigh. Sorry, lizard. Or sorry, snake. Whichever one of you has been dug up by accident. They probably don't mind, what with them being dead and all, but it's still a weird thought to meet again like that. Then again, I used to live with a lady for a while, who kept her great grandfather's skull on a shelf. I'm not making this up. There was a human skull on her bookshelf.

My work around Elder Scrolls Online is coming to an end and I'm fucking exhausted. It was fun, I'm getting some good money out of it (I'm *finally* getting that i7-4790k or whatever next week!), but the surprise level-up marathon is burning me out right now. I handed in a bunch of stuff, everyone was happy, my job was done and then I was asked whether I could level up a sorcerer within a week or two. I'm such a whore.

Sorcerers are fun. For 41 levels now I've been soloing world bosses, anchors and public dungeons with such ease, I honestly cannot say whether they made the game a lot easier since the game's release a year ago or whether my build is just broken and overpowered in some way. Just nine levels to go and a whole bunch of pages to write about how to play, what skills to pick, what items to use, yada, yada, yada. That's great and I'm looking forward to even more money, but the constant grinding of levels on top of my online news coverage every single day, including weekends, is starting to wear me out a bit. Oh well, nearly done now. Oshi-

I am finally getting that article on Warframe! It's only one of the single-most fucking important F2P-Games across multiple platforms and for some inexplicable reason most magazines are extremely reluctant to feature it. I was finally asked to write a little something about it and I'd do it right the fuck now, but I had to postpone it until I'm done with Elder Scrolls. Then Warframe. Claire and Haggy are joining me on there, so it's definitely gonna be a fun job. Still no time to rest, though. Ugh!

I dunno, maybe I'll finally get to chill out on Everquest 2 for a bit by the end of June. Finally get that last expansion, get to the new level cap, get some more goodies for my characters... you know, before Daybreak fucks it up altogether and shuts down the servers for good.
Still gotta find the time for more GTA, as well!

-Cat

The A(sshole)-Team

If you're like me, then you love it when a plan comes together. We've been playing the first three heists on GTA Online and it's been some of the most entertaining and also most complex stuff I've ever done in any multiplayer game. Most regular missions on GTA are pretty staightforward - go somewhere, grab a car/package/bike and/or kill a bunch of ballers/yakuza/rednecks. Stuff rarely takes more than five minutes to complete unless your team starts ten or so miles away from the action for some inexplicable reason. And then there are heists.

The Disciples of Kitten like to dress for the occasion.

In theory, it's possible to just start a heist with any group of random strangers, who may only communicate in text using some foreign language - if that. And that shit isn't very likely to succeed, which is why the PC community is already begging for easier heists. So adorable. Always screaming for better balancing, buff this, nerf that... thanks, Blizzard. Thanks for turning a generation of gamers into a bunch of whiny, entitled cunts.

Like sex, heists are a lot more enjoyable in a group of people you know and love, especially when you can tell what everyone is into, what each member of your crew is good at, that sort of thing. Because unlike regular missions, heists require each and every member of your team to do a specific job - and they had better know wtf they're doing. And it goes beyond the usual MMO-style holy trinity level of compexity, too! Nobody heals or tanks on GTA. Well, you can buy a tank, but that's a different story, entirely.

"I'll man the cannon, Felix gets in the plane, Claire grabs the bike, Peter... who the fuck invited Peter?"

One heist requires a player to steal a getaway plane, while another player protects said plane against fighter jets using a helicopter that comes equipped with with gatling guns and guided missiles. The plane is required to help the other half of your crew escape from prison. It's a massive clusterfuck, where you depend on each and every member of your crew - if you fuck up and one of your team mates dies with no team lives left, it's game over. You don't just get to complete that shit with dead people on the team - you start over!
It was amazing to see how our team grew from a bunch of incompetent, retarded morons into a bunch of slightly less incompetent, retarded morons as we progressed from one heist to another.

We completed our third heist on the first try last night. Granted, I nearly fucked it up when I used up our only team life by introducing my face to the spinning blades of our getaway helicopter. But stealing a fighter jet and enjoying some sweet team-dogfighting whilst listening to a certain bit of the Top Gun soundtrack was easily some of the coolest shit I've ever done online.

Meh, if you've seen one explosion, you've seen 'em all.

You can tell how intense heists and many of the setup missions to a heist are by the atmosphere in voice chat. Most of the time we're so busy trolling each other, dicking around and doing stupid shit that at least one person is always dying of laughter. I'm not even making this up - every once in a while you'll catch one of our guys (or the lady) laughing so hard, they'll forget to breathe and then it becomes hard to tell whether they're laughing, crying, having a seizure or a little bit of everything. It's amazing how such a bunch of dickheads can instantly switch into pro-mode during a stealth mission, where several targets have to be taken out simultaneously from stealth. You take this guy, I take that guy, on three, you get the idea. I've never been so tense playing an online game before.

In between missions I like to drive around in a car with Haggy, who made his character look like Kid Rock. He likes to slow down his car to a crawl, so we can just stay in the car a little longer and enjoy some sweet reggae music. I always forget where he's from, but I suspect he's Jamaican or something. Asians, amirite?

We get shit done.

I hope they'll be adding more heists to GTA Online - and soon! We race, we play golf and tennis, dick around in free mode and kill each other with hammers, but nothing comes close to the adrenaline rush of a really tough heist, especially when you're doing it for the very first time and you have no idea what to expect.

I think aiming for the crotch deals more damage.

I'm still suffering from some rather severe FPS issues, especially in busy areas, where stuff can start freezing and stuttering like crazy, while everyone else in our little crew plays without any problems whatsoever. There are threads all over the internet where people with hardware much beefier than mine have the same issues. I still can't figure out how to fix this. Felix runs the game on decent settings and at up to 60 FPS on his humble little GTX 660. I'm jealous.

I like our crew emblem. ♥

The really annoying thing is how I can change my visual settings to anything from bare minimum to ultra and absolutely nothing seems to change about the performance. It just stutters like hell, even when I'm barely using 2 out of my 4 gigs of VRAM. Sigh. I probably would have given up on it by now if it wasn't so damn fun.

-Cat