Well, in, call it three hours, I’ll be gone. Gone gone gone. Off to London and Europe and Whir’s place. Good times will be had by all.
Packing, for the record, sucks a lot. Especially when all my stuff was buried in piles all over the house. Especially because I played so much Battlefield: Vietnam that I didn’t do anything until today. But oh well. Packed, and off we go. To about a 24 hour trip. That’s going to be lots and lots of fun. Or not.
A few issues:
Anybody expecting to actually email me should probably use wolfee at onid dot orst dot edu for the moment, as it has a web interface I know I can check, as opposed to my alsherok account which I dunno about. I’ll know better about the email situation once I get there.
If you want a postcard or anything, I’ll be wanting a mailing addy. Regina’s safe from this, my parents are safe from this. None of the rest of you are. You have been warned. ;)
I’m going to attempt to try and update this thing at least once a week while over there, more depending on what sort of internet I’ve got. We’ll see. Also, picture uploading and such things as that. All depends on what there is available to me.
In any case, I will see the lot of you…later.
Battlefield: Vietnam is worse than crack. Much worse. Nevermind that it makes me feel strange to enjoy a game based on this particular war, in ways that I wouldn’t feel about, say, World War II. I’m not sure why that is, but whatever. At any rate, the game’s fun.
So Cole, Whir, and I are all playing last night. Quite a lot, actually, considering we played a lot the night before, too. And it appears that Cole’s the designated chopper pilot, because he’s the only one of us who can actually do it, Whir’s the designated sniper, and I’m that one guy over there with the M-60 and the LAW, who’s job is to play hide and go seek with with T-54s and BTRs. And let me tell you right now, unless you’ve got a tank handy, BTRs are nasty, nasty suckers.
So anyway. It’s like us three and a couple of bot flunkies on around 20 NVA bots. And there’s a whole lot of Communist killing going on, such as in Quang Tri 1972, where we’re fighting them in our one spawn point, their tanks and everything, and we’re respawning and getting shot before taking two steps, and we at one point have to evac to a spawn point we stole, which meant we were without a spawn for a bit, and I was out of the game. Oh yeah. And I got to play hide and go seek with a pair of T-54s at the same time.
Or there’s the whole Operation Hastings thing, where we leap in a Huey, drive it over top of their main spawn point, and eject, capture the spawn point, and then valiently attempt to hold off wave after wave of fanatical VC.
Or there’s the couple of games Whir and I played on the exact same server settings as when the three of us played, and we barely scraped out a couple of wins with like 1 point and 3 points. Intense times.
Then there’s me, who in an effort to be different, decided to play NVA for a while, on the off chance that their weapons weren’t as sucky as I had remembered. They are, with the exception of the AK-47 and the RPG. Plus there are confusion issues. Like when you come around the corner, see a bunch of guys with red names, and you’re like “DIE EVIL COMMUNIST SCUM!” as you spray the group with your…AK-47. Crap. Or that time in Hue, when I’m following this dude around for like a block, right behind him, and then he turns around and I realize he’s got an M-16, so I quickly yank out my gun and shoot him.
Also on the “fairly bloody intense” sheet, another time in Hue as an ARVN trooper, who’s gunning down lots of NVA with my M-60. Hear somebody shooting at me, turn around, and here’s this guy right behind me blazing away. The 60’s out of ammo. Ack. Pull out the handgun under fire, and empty the clip. He falls, right as time gets called.
Yeah. Fun game. Very fun.
Well, I didn’t really, but one sec on that.
Let’s see. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything of substance. Got my grades back, and I did about like I expected: bombed the one class, barely passed the others, waded through my 407 class. That having been done, I’m on track to formally graduate in the spring. Life is good.
The orgy of computer gaming has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, almost. There will be new Civ by the time I leave on Saturday, and I’ve played a whole bunch of other stuff, including the newly acquired Battlefield: Vietnam. It made me buy a new video card to play it, and I must say that so far it’s been worth every bit of it.
On the off chance you have no idea what BF:V or it’s predecessor BF1942 were about, think lots of people with guns online shooting at each other. In this case, it’s in the jungle, and there sure are a lot of tanks and helicopters and things running around, which leads to a situation I was in, where I’m this tower dropping Communist infiltrators with my sniper rifle, listening to the Armed Forces Radio in the background, when I miss one of the Communist infiltrators, who runs up, leaps in my side’s Cobra gunship, takes off, and promptly collides with somebody’s jet fighter. Or the one where my and my guys are holed up in this temple, and there’s NVA pouring through this door and dropping to my M-60, and there’s this highly annoying PT-76 outside blowing us up.
I think my favorite, though, is a story of Marechal’s:
“It is nice listening to the music in helicopters… and in jeeps and such… it’s so damn funny … I was sitting in the brush sniping the enemy base and my brother drives past me with a jeep and you can hear “I fought the law, and the law won” blaring from there as he drives by, machine gun blazing, as he tears through the enemy village.”
Yes Virginia, you can blare music from your combat vehicles. Super Sounds of the Sixties and Seventies, as it were.
And never mind that every time I play the game, I have this strange little internal moral conversation with myself over it, which I don’t really have the words for, but will represent with this Penny Arcade instead.
Too, I finished Truman finally, after like 3 months or whatever. We went to visit relatives yesterday, and we all know how spending like 4-5 hours in the car gets you all up into reading exceedingly long books. So that’s that. In other news, I have a huge stack of airplane reading, which lacks only Ender’s Shadow to be complete.
You say ‘Ok. Some ramblings about Darwin, and that’ll do it.’
Whir says ‘Darwin? That guy wasn’t right about anything.’
You say ‘Poor Darwin. He gets so beat on.’
Whir says ‘Well if he had realized that our entire existance was machined by a far superior alien race, I’d give him a little more credit.’
You say ‘Squirrel aliens might have been a bit much for poor Darwin.’
Whir says ‘True.’
So while I was home the other day, I shot a few pictures of the property. Enjoy.
This is from the front yard, looking up at the house. That’s my car in front.
This is from the front deck, down into the front yard. There’s a whole field down there you can’t really see very well. On nicer days than this, you can see the mountains in the distance.
This is the back yard. That’s my old fort there in the background, still choosing the proper moment to collapse finally.
This is from the top of the driveway by the house, looking down on the office and shop.
This is from halfway up the driveway by the shop, looking up to the house.
This is by the shop, over to the side yard and the neighbor’s property.
This is from the foot of the driveway, looking up over the whole nine yards.
Some year, I’ll put up interior shots. Mom has, however, forced me to promise to wait until she cleans. ;)
Die, you fucker. Die. All eventual 19 pages of you. Yes, that’s right. You. Die. Diediedie. Diediediediedie.
Yeah. From now until about Sunday, there shall be enormous descent into an orgy of video games and CC2 mapping and such. And there will be much rejoicing.
Dammit, I don’t see anybody rejoicing. Get busy!
So, as far as the whole paper thing goes, I think this email I just sent to Tali and Laurent about sums things up:
Tricksy paperses! We hates them, precious! We hates them! Filled with nasty quoteses and nasty citeses, yes precious. Nasty, nasty quoteses. *gollum* They hurts us, precious, yes they does. *gollum* The tricksy footnotes, they hurts our brains, don’t they precious? Yes, yes precious, they hurts us. *gollum* But we’ll make them pay, precious, won’t we? Yes, precious. Yes we will. *gollum* *gollum* Hurty quotses and citeses and footnoteses. We’ll make them all pay, precious!
It’s due today, though, so with just a bit more pain, it’ll all be over. And then I’ve got 7 pages for HST 335, and random tests for poli sci and Mythology, but oh well. We concern ourselves not with such minor speedbumps on the road to my getting the hell out of here.
On another note, it’s the one-year anniversary of this blog today. For all the protestations I made to Whir before it went up, and all the talking me into it he had to do, this sure has worked out pretty well, I think.
Anyway. Happy birthday, blog.
So, I basically only have one thing to say about Kill Bill: ph34r t3h cute ones.
Probably only Whir will get that. Ah well.
So, the paper is almost done. I’m almost about to collapse, too. The darkness, it’s beautiful…
*zonk*