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.
No, of course I'm not naming him Dino! But, aside from their less than majestic posture and waddling around, there is something undeniably dinosaur-like about monitors. I find that deeply fascinating. And judging by the way he's staring right back at me at the moment, I'd say he's rather inquisitive, himself. Though he's probably just hoping for more food.
As always, the main reason I haven't come up with a name for our new pet is that I'm still trying to convince myself that there's an actual point to it. Our cats know their names and when you call them, they might actually come running. Or at least look up at you in that typical "fuck off" kind of feline fashion and go right back to sleep. Reptiles, on the other hand...
The family suggested Adolf for a name, though I might have provoked that by saying I could really kill some juice when offered something to drink.
Since I consider our reptiles to be more than just fancy display furniture, which occasionally eats and poops, the long-term goal with our new friend is a successful taming process - the achievement of which is currently presenting me with two options. On the one hand, there's the 'all or nothing' method. Just corner that fucker and grab him, whether he likes it or not. Repeat every day until he no longer shits himself. Literally. A rather unpleasant experience for both pet and owner. Arguably the most rapid method to get him used to being picked up. Or to eternally loathing you - whichever happens first.
The alternative method is simple hanging around. I just parked my ass right in front of the tank, read a book, put my hand inside, right next to the lizard. He stared at me the whole time, stared at the hand, licked it, didn't freak out. Which is all pretty nice, but he'll run, hide, tail-whip and lose his shit the second I touch him. Looking is okay, him licking it is okay, but no touchie. The basic idea is that by repeating this for several hours each day, he'll get so used to the hand that he stops fearing it entirely, even if it touches him. No shitting, less struggling, less stress for everyone. But also waaaay more time-consuming. Lots of patience required. And very tempting to slow down progress more than necessary. "Okay, had the hand right next to him, he didn't freak out, that's good enough for today." Nope, gotta keep at it. Physical contact.
When he doesn't have to put up with me pestering him, he's a perfectly normal, healthy monitor. He hunts down bugs like a pro, digs around, climbs, bathes and basks just the way he should. Which is great and much preferrable to hiding, refusing to eat and being a pussy.
Oh, speaking of pussies - Jiji has taken an interest in our new reptile, as well. She spends most of her time in front or on top of the new tank. The two of them stare at each other a lot, but he usually gets bored after a while and resumes his daily routine. The cat is batting at the glass and freaking out a little, but he doesn't seem to care. At all. No defensive posture, no hissing, no hiding. Which is great, since they all have to get used to each other.
In fact, the cat might be helpful to the overall taming process. If the lizard can get used to her, he can get used to me. If nothing else, she'll provide a bit of entertainment. Monitors are known to get bored from lack of action and she's gonna serve as a bit of a stimulus. The real fun begins once he's ready to be picked up and held outside of the tank, allowing the cat to have a better look at what's still a relatively puny lizard. She'd better behave, because he's eventually gonna outgrow her. A lot. Heh!
I'm excited. This is a fun new experience for me. First times are always a bit scary. Picking up a beardie for the first time. Picking up our garter snake. Picking up the python. Touching my first bug for feeding. Putting yucky, wiggly maggots in a little food bowl. All these things have been a little creepy before they became perfectly normal. There will be a whole lot of new 'firsts' with this monitor, even scarier ones, some potentially painful ones. If all goes well, we're gonna end up with a giant, friendly reptile, who will become a scaly version of what's the family dog to other people. Sweet!
One faithful afternoon at McDonald's, roughly two and a half years ago, we made a spontaneous decision: Let's get a bearded dragon! I liked them a lot whenever I came to the shop, they're relatively idiot-friendly and eventually, our new pet more or less chose me by climbing out of its tank and straight onto me. And it has been staying there ever since. Our beardie came with me, no matter where I went. Supermarket, family visits, on the bus, my lizard would join me.
And since we already had a lizard, I could hardly say no when my significant other decided to bring home a snake. There. Bearded dragon. Garter snake. Tiny, noobish reptiles. Let's just stick with these for now.
As if! It didn't take long until one of the shop's customers had to get rid of another dragon. You see, with every sold reptile there's always a certain chance that the pet's proud new owner suddenly "doesn't have the time anymore" or [insert stupid ass excuse here]. You know, when the initial two weeks of excitement go by, when they wanna "upgrade" to something cooler, you get the idea. And to be fair, sometimes people are just fucking broke. I can relate. And it isn't always bad. It is kinda nice when you can sell the same animal twice, I guess. But you gotta feel sorry for these unwanted critters.
And that's what we did. Feel sorry. For an unwanted beardie. Fat, lazy, a bit ugly and incredibly stupid, even for a bearded dragon. They barely qualify to work at Wal-Mart and this particular one was just about good enough to greet people by the door. But even a dumb lizard deserves a nice, warm home and we went with the biggest beardie tank we could get, so fitting in a cagemate with our original beardie seemed reasonable.
Three reptiles now. Didn't last long, though, because our elderly garter snake had reached the end of her modest lifespan. Very sad. Even sadder when I decided to bury her under our living room window to keep her close to us and a few days later, the fat chick from upstairs decided to plant flowers in the exact same spot. Flowers, which kept her busy for exactly two weeks, until she decided she could no longer be arsed to tend to them. So yeah, now we have some posh flowers and a whole lot of random weeds growing out there, where the snake was buried. I didn't dare look, but our poor old snake probably had her final resting place in our wheelie bin. I told the neighbour to try and avoid digging up our dead pet, but it was probably a bit late by then. I don't wanna think about it.
It's strange. I honestly don't give a fuck about what happens to my body when I'm dead, since... you know. I'll be too dead to care. Have me stuffed in a cool pose and put me on the fireplace. Sell my organs on ebay. I seriously don't care. But the idea that the fat cow upstairs has probably thrown our dead snake in the trash is rather depressing. I feel tempted to do the same thing with the neighbours' annoying dog. I might have to help the mutt a bit with the whole reaching its 'deceased' state and all, but... hey, always happy to help!
I'll miss you.
So, down to two reptiles again. For a while, anyway. But there was that empty snake tank now and... you know. The most expensive thing when you get a new reptile is rarely ever the reptile, itself. It's the setup. And we had one of those now, just sitting there, not housing anything. But it didn't seem right to get another garter snake and just 'replace' the old one. So we got this one, instead:
A Royal Python. She's one huuuuuge fucker by now, not the tiny baby snake you see on that video.
Yeah. Back to three reptiles. Totally enough, what with the two cats and all. Fingers crossed the landlord won't mind when he finds out.
Well, fuck.
Came to the shop one day and there was that teeny, tiny bosc monitor. There was also a guy with a mature monitor, dog-tame and everything. Biggest fucking lizard I had ever seen outside a zoo. I held him for a while. Heavy! Massive! Totally chilled out! The kinda pet you'd expect to see when visiting the Flintstones. His owner spent countless hours with his reptile each day, picked him up, stroked him, tamed him to a point where he could actually put his finger in the lizard's mouth and touch his teeth. I wouldn't even do that with most cats. Bastard made my beardies look completely shit in comparison!
Now now. I like our pets a lot and nothing will ever change that. But look at it this way. I go out shopping with a beardie, sit on the bus with a beardie, people get curious, ask questions, pet it, then some guy walks by with a fucking dinosaur.
And it had been a good year thus far, we had our finances under control and starting a payment plan towards a brand new monitor seemed like a cool idea. Which, of course, didn't work out. It never does. My life's alright until I decide I want something. And within just a few weeks we went from financially independence to, "Sorry, no meat this week" to, "Fuck, I don't think we can afford the rent!"
Awful. I didn't even wanna come to the shop anymore. I'd hafta give up on the payment plan, some random prick would buy my lizard, and the whole transformation from, "Good sir, please accept this humble payment, for I choose to purchase this herptile" to, "lolimahobo" was nothing short of embarassing.
Since I'm expecting my average follower to sport at least moderate intelligence, I'll fast-forward to Christmas from here. I'll assume you've all seen this coming, anyway. So yeah, the craziest thing happened. The whole family chipped in this year. I got the whole thing. Tank, heat, light, the works. And the very same lizard I had hoped to buy. Not a replacement one, not some random stranger, but the exact one I had started handling at the shop, hoping I'd be taking it home, someday. He'll ultimately outgrow his vivarium and I'm gonna have to find a kickass new, BIG one ASAP, but in the meanwhile, the second hand one will do nicely.
Also got a book about monitors as a manual of sorts. It's amusing to read "probably" and "seems to" in every paragraph, which just shows how little is known about pet reptiles so far.
Four reptiles. And I really need to stop here. I have no fucking clue how to explain this to the landlord during the next routine checkup. Frankly, I don't believe I should have to, since they're not dangerous or venomous or aggressive, they don't make any noises, the tanks are always nice and clean and these pets don't cause any smell, damage or whatever, but you can't blame a guy for thinking you're a little weird when you live with a snake, two bearded dragons, a bosc monitor and two cats. Then again, I've seen the neighbours. And the people who live around here. We're probably the most pleasant folks in the whole damn street.
On a slightly related note, let me sum up how this year's Xmas episode of this nation's most popular soap opera ruined the lives of almost every single character:
- Guy attempts to talk his ex out of marrying her new lover, so she'll come back to him instead
- Same guy gets surprise visit from his replacement girlfriend, who spontaneously moves back in with him
- Potential bride decides to cancel wedding to get back with ex, who now refuses her because his new GF showed up
- Potential bride decides to marry new lover, who cancels the wedding, because he finds out he's still only 2nd choice
- Potential groom fucks his younger brother's wife in frustration
- Whiny guy arranges wedding with his violent, abusive girlfriend, so he can get custody for their kid and abandon the slap-happy wife to-be. Fucks neighbour. A lot.
There's also some scary side-plots about gay dude, who breaks the hearts of two other gay dudes, when he realizes his sudden appreciation of the pussy. Owner of said pussy breaks the heart of her current lover to be with gay (?) dude. Rejected former lover then fucks 60 year old in frustration.
Not gonna comment on any of that. Just enjoying the fun of sharing what great quality Xmas tv people are enjoying over here.
A friend sent me a rather handsome amount of money via paypal today. People do that every now and then, asking me to buy them stuff on Steam, which is not available in Germany. So I asked him what he wanted me to buy and he said pizza. With double cheese.
Certainly one of the cooler Xmas presents I have received so far. Wanna know why he did it? He told me he had a great job, a roof over his head, a great life and nothing to wish for and he wants his friends to be happy for Xmas, as well. How cool is that?
When I was a kid, my parents used to be rather rich. At some point we had four (!) cars, one of which was for the cleaning ladies. Yes, plural. And my family was never satisfied. With anything. My stepmother is the kind of person who used to drive around in a golden (!) Mercedes with fake labels on them, suggesting the engine was even bigger than the one her car actually sported. Make-believe. Show off, impress the neighbours, that kinda thing. Look at how rich we are!
Well, you know how it goes. Big crisis, recession, everyone buying stuff they couldn't afford and not paying their monthly rates and all that - my parents lost most of their stuff and now they have to live like common riffraff. One car instead of four, a nice, big flat instead of a massive house, the steak comes from Aldi, that kinda stuff. Middle class. Yes, German Aldi sells steak. Not just beef. Ostrich, too! And they're oh so fucking miserable! Because it isn't horse meat. You'd think they live in cardboard boxes and eat out of garbage cans when they have absolutely nothing to worry about. The last Christmas I actually got to celebrate with my German family consisted of twenty minutes of eating, a massive argument about Wham's 'Last Christmas' (my stepmother plays it every year, everybody fucking hates it, but god forbid if anyone dares say something), my old man disappearing to get back to World of Warcraft and everyone trying to get home rather quickly. I got a pair of underpants and a bottle of Tabasco.
This is the third year I get to celebrate with the Bear's family since moving to the UK. We'll get there in a second hand Volvo. Which replaced a second hand Kia. Which replaced no car whatsoever. We'll be celebrating in a living room, which is smaller than my parents' old garage. We might end up playing some old video games or watching dvds. No BR. No HD, not even HDReady and certainly no 3D. And nobody is bitching. Nobody is whining about how the car is too cheap and too slow, about the telly being too small and too old, about how there's no room for everybody or some shit, nobody runs off to play MMORPGs in the middle of a fucking family gathering. There might be alcohol and jokes about German sausage and I'll do whatever I can to get out of any card and/or board games they might decide to play. And I'm gonna have a fucking good time.
I'm also gonna be fucking tired. It's 4am. I gotta get up in 5 hours. I only got up at 4pm today. I'm self-employed, I like to work nights and sleep in during the day. Now I'm supposed to be awake and reasonably presentable by 9am. The horror!
And I fucked up the one thing I'm supposed to be good at: Cooking. Even though we're invited to Xmas dinner and everything, I like to cook up some sauce for all the meat and stuff. So I went and got a whole lot of nice ingredients. Wine, tomatoes, basil, peas, carrots, onions, chicken stock... I don't know what the hell I was thinking. It seemed awesome in my imagination, but the final result started off being terribly bland and boring, then went to tasting weird and finally tasted and even smelled awful.
Great. The one thing the family around here talks about. My cooking. I cook stuff, people eat up. Heck, I can cook weird local stuff like cottage pie, which I'll admit isn't the most complicated thing on the planet, but there's never anything left when we have guests over. A few hours from now, I'll show up with absolutely nothing and tell people I fucked it up. Critical failure. I rolled a one. Twice in a row. A ninth circle pastamancer fucking up. Man I can't wait for 2012 to be over!
Well, I guess we all have our awful moments. Except when it comes to stuff we were born to do. Wrapping presents, for instance. I can wrap any kind of shit and it instantly looks good. It's a German racial ability. We get born with the ability to wrap gifts. Don't get me wrong - they look shit by German standards, but they're cooler than most English presents you'll ever see under a tree. I don't know how or why. I don't even know what the fuck I'm doing, but they always end up looking all neat and tidy. Or like giant pieces of wrapped candy or some shit. Thanks, genes! I mean, hey, I could be the lead singer in a world famous band or be a successful race driver, but having the ability to wrap fucking Xmas presents is really handy, as well. Sigh...
We'll probably get a ton of chocolate tomorrow. Or money. Or maybe that thing I hope for. I'm pretty sure there won't be any fucking underpants. I don't really know what the message was, there. I mean... why would you.... how... I don't get it. "You look like your balls are cold. Try some of these!" Well, that's not so bad, I suppose. Unless... "I want you to touch my present with your penis." If you don't dare say it, then a pair of boxers would be a reasonably safe bet. I'd much prefer to rub my cock against a brand new Playstation 3, but gift horse and all that.
Bleh. Writing down random thoughts. So girly. Should rename this blog to 'Dear diary'. Or maybe 'Kitten's log'. Damn, I wish STO really gave you an impression of what it's like to captain your own starship. They're showing endless re-runs of TNG these days and I'm pretty sure the basic idea behind many episodes is to make people think, "What would I do in this situation?". For me it's more of a, "I'm so fucking glad I don't have to do any of this shit at my job" kinda thing. How random.
What a dumb year this has been! The fucking expensive Electrolux vacuum cleaner broke for the 3rd time. Groceries became more expensive than ever. Lost more than a night's worth of sleep due to unpaid bills and an uncertain future. Funcom laid off their awesome community manager. My favourite lector is no longer proof-reading my shit. My column about how much the dungeons in Guild Wars 2 suck had caused a medium shitstorm. Our snake died of old age, and one of the beardies lost a foot and most of her eyesight, probably due to the same weird problems, that killed off every last one of her siblings at the shop. We never had the money to have our cats fixed and their horny yowling drove us insane every other week. We haven't been to McDonald's, Burger King or the cinema this year. At all. Oh and some dipshit killed 27 people in an elementary school, because his brother liked Mass Effect on Facebook. The first Skyrim expansion was about fucking vampires, the second one about building a home and settling down with a spouse and kids. The Bioware founders are now brewing beer or some shit. The pandas were real. SWToR is getting more stupid flash points nobody gives a fuck about, got the most retarded "F2P"-overhaul of the century and there isn't a word about any more story-related stuff, even though they had supposedly created enough content in that regard to keep us covered till what, 2015? Lies!
Dexter, Sherlock, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones - tons of fucking great shows, every single one of which aren't running at the moment, forcing us to wait for the new season. ARGH! And the average moron on Black Ops 2 has a YOLO or SWAG clan-tag and a penis, a pony or a pony sporting a huge penis on their player card. This is the new generation of gamers! This is the kind of people the industry is creating their shit for! My PC broke down, I lost a lot of data, then Claire's PC died right after I fixed mine, even more bills to pay, yay!
2013 is just around the corner and it's already looking very promising: I'm looking at the biggest work order of all times, all due in January. To make things even weirder, the deadline is very humane and the whole thing will be paid rather handsomely. None of the usual, "Okay, I'm reserving all this work to you, so we're gonna have to dump the price a bit" or "Can you send me all 30 pages next week?" stuff. You might think I'm joking, but I'm talking about a line of work, where people genuinely ask you to write a 4 page preview about a game, based only on a 5000 characters press release pdf file and two concept drawings.
'Dragonborn', the new Skyrim expansion, is on the horizon (or already there if you play it on the Xbox), so I had a fiddle with the old mods and settings and shit, finally figuring out a way to record some full hd gameplay that doesn't run in mega slow motion. My only problem right now is the horrible Youtube compression. Stuff still looks okay, but it doesn't do the source material any justice. I mean, just fucking LOOK AT EET!
I'm seriously hating this right now. I have a whole lot of work to do, Xmas time is family time, there are four more prestige-ranks I have to gain on Black Ops 2 and then this stupid game looks better and runs faster than ever and is so fucking immersive and breath-taking and more awesome than anything I've ever seen on my PC and it looks so good on the huge-ass LED screen andand... shit!
Speaking of Black Ops - I have found my "mojo". Turns out said mojo is really just the fine art of exploiting shotguns and SMGs. I tried convincing myself that they aren't ridiculously overpowered, that you can master any weapon by just adjusting your play style, blah blah blah. Thing is, if I can shoot an SMG from the hip, at some guy who happens to be half a mile away, kill him and still have 30 bullets left in my magazine, switching to an assault rifle, which requires me to hit the same guy at the same distance about 8 times and seriously sprays all over the place even with a scope, well...
Let's just say my recent super high scores and epic K/D ratios have very little to do with personal skill and are mostly related to the game's weapon balancing. Or lack thereof. I refused to walk the path of the SMG laster sight noob for a long time, but if you can't beat them... well, you get the idea. I'm not really proud of myself here, I like to stand out, be different, do my own thing, but I can only take so many crushing defeats until it gets boring, now I'm topping the scoreboards again. Oh well!
Also, The Hobbit. I'm still worried. They're turning a pocket-book into three super large movies? Yes, they're adding a bit of Silmaril here and there, but... well, all my friends say the first film was fanfuckingtastic, so I can't wait to see it myself. Hopefully sometime at the weekend. It's weird - given our dire situation, we can't really afford going to the movies right now, so I had several people jumping me, trying to force free movie tickets down my throat. I managed to fend most of them off until somebody did a little research, figured out which theatre is the one located near us and just bought a coupon.
I'm grateful for friends like that and getting so much support really makes me happy, but it also confuses me. Let's not sugar-coat this - I'm an asshole. I enjoy being an asshole, I revel in it, I even get paid to be, well, me. Ya know, write about how shit everything is and people give me money.
The last time a friend asked me if I could help him with a problem, I said there's nothing I can do about his fat face and retarded accent. People laugh about this kind of stuff and think I'm joking. Maybe I'm just misunderstood. Maybe they're trying to make me a nicer person by being nice and generous to me or they're afraid to be the next ones to get on my bad side or... eh, fuck it. I'm already overthinking it. I suppose people just get weird around Xmas. So yeah, thanks for the ticket. Should I ever amount to anything in my life, I'll be sure to return the favour someday. But don't hold your breath. Somehow I doubt that browser-based F2P games are gonna make me rich in the near future.
Oh and - to all you fuckers, who are going crazy about this new trilogy, yet never bothered to read the fucking source material: KILI, FILI AND THORIN FUCKING DIEEEE! Eat that! :P
Ahh yes, games. Did you know I used to create a few of those? Nothing spectacular or anything, but... well, take a look:
This stuff is over a decade old and the basic game engines weren't mine, of course. The first bunch of pix are rather obvious RPG-Maker stuff, the rest was made with some fun little tool, which was a complete Zelda rip. But all the levels and landscapes, stories, characters, speech (!), flags, events and shit were made by me. Ya know, if the player triggers this'n'that event, monsters will overrun and destroy the starting village, game moves on, that kinda stuff. Moving, transparent, parallax-scrolling fog. Stuff nobody gives a shit about nowadays, but pretty awesome to me when I pulled it off. In fact, that stuff got me a job offer to be the map designer for America. I refused, because I wasn't done with school back then. Looking back, it was a rather stupid decision, since I never graduated, anyway. Sure, America was crap, but it could have been my first step into "the industry". Oh well.
I dunno. Maybe one day, when I'm really, seriously bored, I'll look into a current version of RPG Maker and create Berserkerkitten - The Game or something. The stuff you can create with these tools may look a bit dull and generic, but a good story, witty writing and fun characters can help a lot. And people are crazy about their retro shit anyway.
Six more days till Xmas. Or seven in the UK. I'm not sure. They have weird shit like boxing day and what not, everyone is sending cards and best wishes, it's all very confusing, even though it's the 3rd time I get to celebrate it all over here. In Germany, it all happens on the night of the 24th, then there's 2 Xmas holidays after and that's that. Around here it's a bit different, kinda, but... I dunno, I'm still getting the hang of it. There's gonna be weird paper crowns and disgusting vegetables that look like potato chips.
The Bear says I should hope and wish for something I really, really want, because the whole family must have chipped in and they have a biiig surprise for me and they wanna give me something cool. I'm pretty sure I know what it is, but then I might be getting my hopes up and it's gonna be something else. And I can't just go ahead and say, "Well, you do kinda suck at keeping secrets and by the way you react whenever I bring it up..." I dunno, wouldn't be fair. But I hate letting things go, I like confrontation, bringing shit up. Gotta shut up and wait another week. ARGH!
"Winter" is a total joke this year. It's seven degrees out while I'm writing this, yet everybody complains about how cold it is. Even British cats are total wussies in that regard. They both sleep on the kitchen heater and flat-out refuse to hang out in the living room. On the plus side, it's also too warm for snow. Don't get me wrong - I love snow. That fun, crunchy sensation when you walk around on it. The way it seems to muffle all the noise, how it sugar-coats everything. And let's not deny the fact that it's incredibly fun to piss on. :P
But I'm waiting for the grocery fucker right now. Nothing fancy, just the usual tomato stuff, which is all we can afford, but it's still food. I like food. I like it even more when it arrives in a timely fashion. And it never does when there's snow outside. In England, snow means instant stone age. The shelves at the supermarket won't get restocked, the mail man doesn't deliver anything, shit just stands still. Because of two inches of snow. In Germany, that stuff can be knee-high, but it won't stop anyone. You can see legions of little Germans with mighty shovels and salt instantly clearing the streets. Monster plows keeping the roads in shape and all that. No such thing in the UK. People see three snowflakes and panic. Rightfully. No salt, no shovels, the shit just freezes over and becomes a death trap.
They're fixing a hole in the roof on the house that's right opposite to ours. It's so annoying and stupid to masturbate when people keep staring through the fucking window all the time. Not annoying and stupid enough to stop me, but still pissing me off. Don't they have a fucking roof to fix? Maybe I should just go have a shower...
Ahh yes. Black Ops 2. Still. Or CoDBlops. Sounds like fish-based cereal. Apparently, they're going to nerf this:
Yes I know, I get killed by the last guy, but come on. Still pretty neat, no?
And since doing this kinda stuff doesn't really require any effort, they're nerfing it now. Patch 1.4 has hit on PS3 and it adds more spread and recoil to SMGs. I haven't noticed anything on the PC version so far, so maybe the nerf was very subtle or it hasn't gone live on there, yet.
Oh well. Big nerf, small nerf, yes nerf, no nerf - I'm not a fan of doing what everybody else does, so I switched from SMGs to LMGs and I'm paying the price right now. My scores are absolutely abysmal half of the time. It's gonna take some adjusting and I might not stick with it in the long run, but I do love that whole Rambo look and feel. The sound. Shooting a guy through a solid brick wall from a mile away. Downing an enemy chopper without reloading. We'll see.
At least the Bear is improving. Scores are getting better and better, we're seeing the occasional multikills and scorestreaks and watching somebody grow from a total noob to a talented gamer always warms my heart. Reminds me of myself when the whole Counter-Strike hype first came up. Or Action Quake, a bit before that. To think that most people turned around using their keyboards back then... shit! Heh!
Now I get to watch the same process, the growth, the learning curve, all over again. Strafe when you shoot, don't stand still when you reload, stop sprinting when you approach a corner, keep an eye out for red dots, yada, yada, yada. It's a small handful of basic tricks, the rest is about awareness, good aim and quick reflexes. Shoot first. Han Solo vs Greedo all over again. I like watching the Blocky Cow's more successful matches in theatre mode, have a look at the play style and what have you. Sometimes I wanna yell at the screen, "He's right there, for fuck's sake!" when CowBearBlock seems completely oblivious to their presence. When shots constantly go straight for the legs, not the head. When the magazine is down to 10 bullets and there's no reload. Or when I see a reload after literally two shots, right in plain sight. We've all been through this at some point. I remember going through the same stages with my brother when he was new to CS and online gaming. Little did I know he'd become a professional gamer and compete for massive amounts of prize money. I've watched him play live on tv. Crazy shit.
And everyone at LPSG, our little "clan" of sorts, is making progress, as well. While I was having the worst night I ever had on BO2, Syrius, our usual bottom feeder, ended up scoring some impressive kill streaks and got "knighted". Basically, that's what happens when people accuse you of cheating. So yeah, the guy ended with well over 20 kills, had about five deaths and the first idiot shouted "OMG HAX!1". You know what it's like. Which is funny, because that kinda shit usually requires at least 30 kills, but there ya have it.
Watching killcams and replays, I have seen very few suspicious players, one, maybe two of which convinced me they were using an aimbot. You know, crosshairs instantly jumping from one target to another after each kill, zero "sway", crosshairs following people through walls and solid objects, the kinda painfully obvious crap that made Modern Warfare 3 so much fun.
Strangely enough, I don't even see any of the more subtle crap on BO2. Endless sprint, endless ammo, infinite killstreak rewards and the like. It's just not there. There are some people, who always magically seem to be able to sense my presence even without the legit little tools and helpers that let you detect enemy players. Might be luck, lots of great guesswork or simple wallhacking. That's terribly annoying. But that's about as bad as it gets. I had nights on MW3 where a guy would appear on a rooftop, one-shot everbody on the map, right in the head, through walls and everything, and spam a message with every kill. I have yet to see that kinda shit on BO2.
I'm not sure why that is. The new report button to rat out cheaters? Damn thing makes me paranoid. I get accused of "hacking" a dozen times each day, so what's gonna happen when enough morons report me? Is it because the crazy Russians, who invent all this shit, suddenly charge people a massive amount of money PER MONTH to use those bots and hacks? I'm not sure what's going on here, but I like it.
The one thing that does bother me, of course, is the constant whining about cheaters. People with 3 kills and 20 deaths accusing everything and everyone around them of cheating. I stand at the top of a stairway, guy throws flashbang up the stairs, I blindly shoot down the stairs and kill flashbang guy. "Fucking aimbot!"
You stupid shitdick. We're on a set of fucking stairs. I was looking at you when you blinded me. There is no way in hell I could possibly assume you're behind me or next to me or god knows where. You're right the fuck in front of me, on some stairs, so I shoot and - holy fuck - I end up killing you. Logical conclusion: I'm cheating.
Moron is camping in the corner of a house. Just sits in that one corner and waits. A whole five minutes. I enter the building, camper sees me, camper shoots me. Stays in his corner. I respawn. I walk back to the house. I move to the moron's corner from OUTSIDE the house, shoot him through the wall. "Wallhack! Reported!" Yes. You spend the duration of the entire match in the same fucking spot, the kill cam shows your victim your exact location, so there is absolutely no way in hell I could have known where you were hiding. Unless I was cheating.
People are predictable, stupid and highly resistant to learning. I place a mine in a corridor, guy walks into it, dies. I place another mine in the same corridor, same guy walks into it again and dies some more. I place yet another mine, guy watches the corridor, sees no mine, starts running through and gets blown up by the mine I placed around the corner, at the end of the corridor. And he calls me a noob. An intelligent player would: a) Switch classes and use Flak Jacket to survive the explosions
b) Switch to Engineer and see all my mines from miles way. Through walls.
c) Switch to Black Hat, hack my mines and kill me with them
d) JUST AVOID THE FUCKING CORRIDOR FOR FUCK'S SAKE!
But I'm the noob. When I kill people with pistols, I'm a pistol noob. "OMFG l2use a real gun!11". I kill people with an SMG. "Noob sprayer!" So I kill them with an LMG, from a distance, using my scope. "Noob camper!" Conclusion: When you kill somebody on Call of Duty, your instrument of choice automatically makes you a noob. If you kill people a LOT, it makes you a hacker. If you stop killing them, it makes you an even bigger noob. My absolute favourite insult is so incredibly stupid and hysterically funny, I couldn't possibly make it up: "OMG get skill!" I've seen that one at the end of matches since Modern Warfare and it's still around today. Priceless!
People have a very distorted image of themselves and their abilities. It cannot possibly be that the other guy just beat you because he was better, he reacted faster, he outsmarted you. If the other guy wins, something must be wrong. The game generated over a billion (!) bucks 15 days after release, there are more active players around than I dare count, so why the FUCK is it so hard for people to believe there's a pretty decent chance they might run into somebody who is actually a little better at this game than they are, if only for one match?
Oh well. Still a good day. Female monster belching and ISS DEIN SCHNITZEL!! on Teamspeak. We had fun.
The other day, I sat around wondering about the effects of age on reflexes and general gaming ability. Then a friend of mine, who happens to be nearly a decade older than I am, joined up for some after-midnight fun on Black Ops 2 and... well, let's just say that I had no reason to worry about anything. We're constantly competing for first place, people accuse us of cheating and wallhacking left, right and center and at some point, he ended up winning a match with 23 kills and zero (zilch, none, nada) deaths.
I like explosives a wee little too much to be successful in the 0 deaths department, but I'm doing okay here, as well:
It's the kind of brainless, pointless fun I'm looking for in a shooter. My friends in the "pro" department would strongly disagree with me here. You see, I don't think when I play, I'm just dicking around, doing my thing, having fun... we're usually making up weird songs on voice chat, we're talking about the weather in England, and I'm pretty sure an outsider would have a hard time figuring out whether or not we're actually ingame, judging by what's being discussed at the time.
Then I have friends, who have played every single CoD religiously. Those guys have formed their own clan, they're playing pretty much all night and day and, while I generally enjoy playing alongside them, they always become a little unbearable when a new CoD comes out. Every new game of the series is the "worst game ever" and "they're never gonna buy another one again" and what have you. I've already mentioned the drama regarding lag compensation, now they're raging about submachine guns and the laser sight attachment thingie.
Because everyone is using SMGs and shooting from the hip now. Right. Because that totally didn't happen on the first Black Ops, with the 'Steady Aim' perk and the AK74u.
It's amazing what a bit of nostalgia and selective memory can do to a person's perception. People used to complain about lag compensation on Modern Warfare 3, saying it's ruining the game. Now they say the exact same thing about Black Ops 2, BUT: "...I'm gonna go back to MW3 until this is fixed." Mkay. Right. Because for some reason, lag compensation is okay on there now, but it ruins BO2.
Meanwhile, the first Black Ops is now turning into some kind of holy grail. The untouchable game, the flawless one, the one last enjoyable CoD thou shall not flame. How about a quick reality check: The spawns on that game have been broken since release and some shitdick spawn-camps the enemy team *in every single match*. If the weapons are oh so fucking balanced, why is everyone using the AK47/74 and why are people using dual G18s getting kicked for using an OP noob weapon? Oh and since when is it so fucking great to be forced to score countless 'first blood' kills, capture flags and do all kinds of other shit nobody gives a fuck about in order to unlock all the fucking pro perks every single time you prestige?
I'm not even missing dedicated servers anymore. Don't get me wrong: I love them for their relative stability, the presence of admins who ban people for cheating and general dipshittery, but at the end of the day, I could divide the list of available, lag-free dedicated servers in two categories:
1. Full
2. Retarded rules: We will ban you if you camp for more than 2 minutes, use rocket launchers on people, use the grenade launcher attachment, dual wield, show suspicious behaviour on the killcam etc.
Regarding the second kind of server, there are clan forums, where members are actually required to video themselves whilst playing the game (as in, camera pointing at the actual person and the screen) to prove they're not cheating. Registration for a VAC anti cheat profile is recommended, as well. Do you think this is a motherfucking game? Call of Duty is serious business! I so wanna post a pic of grump cat right now...
I don't give a shit about any of that stuff. I lack the patience to camp and I suck with launchers, but if somebody sits in the same spot all the fucking time, so be it. That's what the killcam is for. I'll know where he's camping and I'll kick his ass. And I tend not to cry about people blowing me up with an RPG. Damn thing is in the game, let people use it. What's with the constant urge to rule, regulate and overthink everything?
On a happier note, the Bear has now joined me on Black Ops 2, as well. We're on there now as Kitten and BlockyCow. Look at the cool player emblems I have created for us:
If you're not familiar with CoD emblems, they're basically created by combining and colouring little shapes. You know, circles, squares and the like. So you can't just hand-draw stuff or download an image off the 'net as you would with a Counter-Strike spraytag, but you have to get creative, yourself. People have already begun ripping off and (badly) copying my emblem, but they do say that plagiarism is the highest form of praise. Besides, it's not like I came up with that thing from scratch - it's clearly inspired by a certain webcomic about gaming cats. *coughs*
This is how the editor works:
Random youtube video, not very good, not made by me, but it gives you a basic idea of how it all works. Oh and something happened last night. Something I said was impossible, stuff that never happens IRL, but it actually did: I kicked a guy's ass, ended up in first place and the guy actually said I'm a great player. No flames, no insults, no accusation, just telling me I'm good. Made my day! Might the internet start to mature after all? Now I'm probably expecting a little too much, eh? :P
Well, looks like we might not be as active on Guild Wars 2 as we used to be, now that Black Ops 2 requires most of our attention. I'm still up for fractals and dungeons and stuff, but it's good to have a bit of variety. ♥
