Dream of Waking

So my vacation’s basically over now. I go back to work on Monday. It was nice having the two weeks off but I guess I have to get back to doing something sometime. Though it sounds nice I can’t spend the rest of my life doing nothing! Not that I have the opportunity to do such things.

Matt came down here Thursday and Katie and I gave him a quick tour of Clarksville and the mall at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. He was totally impressed by Dawn of War. It’s easily the best purchase I’ve made game-wise in a while. It’s hard to believe I only spent $10 on it.

I’ve become something of a casual pirate lately thanks to bittorrent. Like if I’ve got nothing to do I’ll look to see what I can download and play. Half the time I delete whatever it is I wanted before I even try it out. And now that Katie and I don’t have that free blockbuster subscription anymore, I’ve been pirating movies too. Just the stuff I don’t want to buy though. But not all pirating is bad. God knows how many CDs I’ve bought because I pirated the album first and loved it. I just thought I’d share all that.

Yup, working again in two days.

Anyway, with my birthday coming up in about a month and a half I updated my Amazon wishlist. I’m not pimping my wishlist because I want anyone who reads this to buy anything from it because this is mainly for my mother. I’m just sticking it here for an easy place for me to find it when I send it to her.

So for this entire weekend, my mission has been to find the Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar artbook. We went to two malls in Nashville, neither had it. Nashville was fantastic though. Easy to navigate, not too terrible with traffic but the construction was kind of heavy. All in all it was a good trip, minus the part where Katie finds everything she wants and I find nothing.

So today we hit the local mall and EB has Raising the Bar… for $35! That’s like $10 more than anywhere else, including Amazon which I was kind of saving as a last resort. I also braved Books-A-Million on Harry Potter Day in case they had it but it wasn’t there. So Amazon it is. I ordered Raising the Bar and The Making of Doom 3 together for a discount and I threw in Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning… Was the Command Line (an essay on PCs) for good measure.

And THEN I find out that Circuit City’s big game sale was this week and ending today so I ran out there and picked up Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, and LOMAC (or Lock On: Modern Air Combat for the n00bs, and Chris) for $10 a piece. I wanted a copy of FarCry because Matt said it’s good but they were out. The Doom 3 expansion is more Doom so that’s a winner and Dawn of War is a nice RTS with lots of stomping around and killing crap. I haven’t tried LOMAC.

Mom leaves tomorrow. What an eventful weekend!

So the laptop and about 75% of the goodies it came with are here. Still waiting on Katie’s camera but my pocket pc, the printer, the mouse, and the external hard drive are all here. Waiting on that camera and the laptop’s soundcard. Not that the laptop doesn’t already have sound but I’ve got an Audigy 2 on the way and Doom 3 will sound much nicer on it with a good pair of headphones still to be purchased.

With the external hard drive (100gb) I’m ripping nearly all my CDs. I’m not taking any discs to Iraq if I can avoid it. ANY. I’ll rip all my CDs, all my good games, and whatever movies I can get. I’ve got 200gb of space and nothing but time right now.

There’s a new video from Nine Inch Nails on their website that was directed by David Fincher, who did Se7en and Fight Club and it’s pretty cool. Nothing super-artsy or deep but it’s a technical achievement. Just watch it!

So now that I’ve finished Half-Life 2, I’m stuck in that gaming rut again. Can’t decide what I want to play and nothing is good enough. I’ve started replaying Half-Life 2 but I need fresh new levels. I should really finish off Painkiller but I totally dread getting back up to where I left off before my last hard drive fiasco. So I’m installing Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Hopefully this will tide me over till this weekend, when I can get Far Cry and give that a shot.

Oh and the laptop and friends show up today. !*@&@($#@&&

I just finished Half-Life 2. It had some outstanding urban fights. Lots of really tense moments. I can’t really see how someone could look at Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 and say one is better than the other through. They both have their own style of play and they both excel at it.

I really want to acquire the soundtracks to both games. Half-Life 2 had some really good “Dawn of the Dead”esque scores in it and Doom 3 had a good techno-horror soundtrack. Having these in CD or even mp3 form would make my day.

Oh and I’m officially on vacation. For two weeks.

I was in the process of writing an enormous entry comparing Doom 3 to Half-Life 2 in every aspect, in depth. But then I realized that no one reading this really gives a damn about Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 and anyone who might would have to ask for permission to be added to my friends list first. My opinion is no longer a public service to anyone. So screw it.

Doom 3 will be the first game I install on the new laptop.

I finished Doom 3. Kind of weak ending, and I only fired the BFG twice in the entire game. It was pretty easy on “normal” difficulty. Or maybe I had too much ammo because the flashlight mod let me see what I was shooting at.

Another fun weekend at home. I’d say more but I’m pretty tired.

P.S. We’re now $5K in the hole, new laptop here we come!

So here it is. I’m being deployed to Iraq for a period no longer than twelve months. This might not include time spent in Kuwait, before and after the twelve months in theater. Now I’ll cut and paste a comment I made earlier.

I’d like to take this moment to point out that a 12 month vacation in Iraq isn’t the end of the world. If you know nothing about modern military units, the 101st Airborne have been considered among the best fighting units since World War 2. Not to mention I’m a computer guy in an infantry/cavalry unit and considered by my superiors to be a valuable asset to the unit, so I’ll be spending most of my time in an air-conditioned tent/bunker and probably won’t leave the camp, ever. So worry not.

It’s not like I haven’t been told since day one that I was going to Iraq, it’s just mostly been a matter of “when”. I’ve had plenty of time to prepare mentally because of this and the primary reason I’ve never made a big deal of it is because I don’t want anyone else making a big deal out of it. Like I said, it’s not the end of the world. I’d rather go sooner than later, twelve months (plus whatever amount of time spent in Kuwait, if Donald Rumsfeld has his way) certainly isn’t as bad as eighteen, and when I’m back I won’t have to even think about going again for at least a year, if at all. It’s just one of those inevitabilities, when you sign up for six years you can’t expect to spend them all in the comfort of the states.

But thanks for everyone’s concern.