Dream of Waking

So far I’ve settled on Killzone as the game of choice. I had the horrifying urge to reinstall Red F(r)action but I don’t quite hate myself that much. I almost did it though.

I don’t really get what everyone crapped on this game for. It’s got some awesome grittiness to it, the environments look good, it controls well. It’s got some chop to it when things get hairy but that’s about it. I’ve read that some thought it was repetitive and nowhere near the “Halo-killer” that it was hyped to be. These must be the same people who thought Halo’s “Library” level was “fun”. Then again I am only on the fourth level. Maybe I’ll get bored with it later. I love the way the game feels though.

I got tired around 9pm tonight so I thought if I crash out early I can get some real sleep for a change. I get some sleep and then I realize I didn’t set my alarm. I set it and see the time is midnight. And now I can’t sleep.

I think I’ve bored of Shadowbane already. Whoops.

I finished Shadow of the Colossus over the weekend. The ending was poetic.

If I had to hazard a guess I’d say I’m halfway done with House of Leaves. You see it’s written like a research paper. It has footnotes and two appendixes and an array of exhibits and an enormous index. So between page numbers and what I’ve already read of the appendixes I’m probably about halfway there. It’s a pretty unconventional book and there’s parts that are boring but I get the feeling that those parts are boring on purpose. It’s pretty clever.

I stacked up four PS2 games that I’m going to play this weekend; Drakengard 2, Dot Hack: Infection, Front Mission 4, and Killzone. Hopefully one of them will hold my attention.

So quite a while ago Shadowbane went from pay-to-play to free. The servers were supposed to shut down but apparently they’re still up and now I’m playing it. I’ve managed to find a guild (Nox Noctis Fatalis) and now I’m being powerlevelled. It involves me standing behind a rock in a group with a bunch of other newbies while a maxed out character nukes the bad guys around us who’d destroy all of us newbies singlehandedly. I’m even going so far as to try to get Ventrilo working so I can coordinate with these nuts.

So if you’re totally bored I’m on Braialla server. Make a character, leave your name in the comments, and I’ll message you or something.

Katie’s a big ho and won’t let a sick man enjoy his ice cream. That is all.

I’ve caught some early Fall cold and it’s plugging up my sinuses and making me generally miserable. Tomorrow is part one of my laser surgery, for reals this time. This means I have a week of further misery in my very near future. By someone’s good graces I don’t have duty this weekend either so I should have a pretty enjoyable four day weekend.

About two weeks after I got home I went crazy at Books-a-million (worst store name ever) and came home with Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, Survivor, and Diary and George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. I did a ton of reading in Iraq so I guess I thought I’d be able to get through books just as fast here as I did there. Well not quite. I was already knee deep in Dan Simmons’ Olympos and since then I’ve only finished that, read Choke, and now I’m about to finish off A Clash of Kings. Earlier this week something possessed me to buy more books so I ordered Penny Arcade Vol. 2: Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

Now Palahniuk’s books are larger than standard paperback but only 200 something pages in length. I got them because they’d make good breaks between Martin’s epics, which span around a thousand pages each of small print in standard paperback size. Now that I’ve got House of Leaves though, I think that’ll come after A Clash of Kings. It’s 600 pages and pretty huge but it’s got some crazy typography (stuff printed sideways, near blank pages) and after reading lots of good things about it I’m really looking forward to starting it. Then maybe I’ll follow that with one of Palahniuk’s books before jumping into A Storm of Swords, which I’m told is the best book of the series so far.

Note how this whole entry is about books but not what the books are about.

I’m bored. Let’s analyze today’s news!

Reuters: Bush says pope sincere in apology on Islam - What? So the pope made some reference to crusader times islamic philosophy, the muslims get all rioty as usual, pope says he’s sorry to have kicked off yet another muslim issue, and now Bush is giving the pope his official seal of approval. I’m convinced the pope has more global appeal than George W. Bush. The pope is supposed to be god’s chosen on Earth. George W. Bush might have been elected by the people of the United States. And what happened to seperation of church and state? Who is George W. Bush to weigh in on such an issue?

AP: Iranian leader urges more papal protests – Well this is helpful. The leader of a country whose religion is primarily Islam, the religion of peace, is urging more rioting over what the pope said. Let’s break it down a little here. Let’s take this to a lower level. Do these people not have jobs? When a public figure deals muslims a black eye do they all drop what their doing to start riots? I suppose the country of Iran did not grind to a halt or else it’s leaders wouldn’t have to urge more rioting. What would happen if the catholic church were to take up a similar stance? What would happen if every slight to the catholic church started riots in the streets?

E! Online News: Shocking! Willie Nelson Busted for Pot – Even for E!, this is not news. This is like when they busted Snoop Dogg for possession. Somebody in the police department didn’t fill their quota, saw old Willie, and knew he could make an easy bust if he searched him. Did they even get him with intent to distribute because they found a pound and a half on him? It’s Willie Nelson. He’s not selling it. He’s smoking it. There’s something hypocritical about how someone as public as Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg can take such a huge pro-pot stance and no one really seems to care and then someone comes along and busts them way after the fact. If they were going to crack down of Willie Nelson’s pot habit, shouldn’t they have started decades ago? I don’t think this is really going to teach him any lesson at this point.

Katie made stir fry. Zucchini, mushrooms, fried tofu and some kind of morningstar farms chicken in General Tso’s sauce, and white rice. I’m about to burst.

I show up for my duty bright and early at 8:50am. One of the higher-ups on Rear D (rear detachment, aka the guys who stayed here the whole time my unit was deployed) is in charge and I voice my opinion on being on the duty roster. He listens and gives me valid reasons why though I still don’t agree with him. I resign to my duty and we’re watching a bootleg of The Da Vinci Code when someone else on another duty fucks up. Long story short, I get let go for the guy and the idiot who screwed up gets to sit behind a desk on his Saturday.

This is common practice. When joe screws up (and given enough freedom and enough joes, one will screw up sooner or later) those in charge will usually stick him behind the desk and let whoever else is on duty off the hook, sometimes even when the guy behind the desk is the last guy who screwed something up. It’s a punishment because sitting there all day, especially on the weekends, is boring and painfully restrictive. It’s also a good way to keep the screw up occupied and a way for the people in charge to keep an eye on him. So here’s hoping someone does something stupid next weekend too, if I can’t find a way out of that shift either.

So with my Saturday returned to me more or less unharmed I went back to sleep. Katie wakes me up around 3pm and she wants to go downtown. We get there and there’s some kind of craft fair. I’m horrified and start accusing Katie of setting me up but either she loves me or she didn’t see anything that interested her because we didn’t stop at any of the booths and only spent a small amount of time in an antique store. We did some more wandering around downtown Clarksville to discover that downtown Clarksville pretty much closes on the weekend. I had a pricey sandwich at a sandwich and coffee shop and Katie took any number of pictures of me eating and looking awkward in front of a shutdown fountain.

I’m stuck again. I can’t play anything for more than 10 minutes. I’m going to try Descent 3. See if I can make it through the whole thing without the last level crashing on me.

I guess talking too much about it hexed me and now I’m waking up bright and early on my Saturday to go in for my 24 hours of sitting at a desk. I guess this will give me plenty of time to finish A Clash of Kings and Megaman ZX. I might get so much done that I’ll be bored next weekend, when I’m doing it again except on a Sunday.

Megaman ZX is beyond awesome. It’s basically Megaman Zero with a Metroid-Castlevania open-ended design. You still take on missions and fight bosses and minibosses but there’s hub areas connected to those levels and hidden stuff is everywhere. You also get different armors, each one being a copy of a major character in the X series. There’s the X armor, the Zero armor, Harpuia, Leviathan, Fefnir, and Phantom. They’ve all got different crazy abilities. I’m about three or four hours in and just finished the first four bosses so it’ll probably end up to be around 10 hours of gameplay, which is twice as long as I spent on Megaman Zero 4. And that’s without hunting down every single secret in ZX.

So I’ve got one single shred of hope that I’ll walk in tomorrow and whoever they found to replace me will already be there. Or else I’ll be sitting there, asleep or finishing off Megaman ZX.

I’ve got a gland on the back of my neck that has grown to enormous size. It’s below the bug bite behind my right ear.

I was watching X-Files on my X-box tonight. It was X-treme.

Tomorrow will be a good day. Tomorrow is Mega Man day. Mega Man ZX comes out tomorrow. I’m very excited.

So I’ve been home for close to two months. Everyone else came back last Friday. At my unit we keep a kind of help desk manned 24 hours a day. It wasn’t manned 24 hours while we were deployed but shortly before everyone came back the guys who stayed behind started doing it 24 hours again. When the first flight came back (after mine) I sat the desk because everyone was pretty spread thin and I didn’t have anything going on that day. It was basically a favor. I was doing it to help out, not because I was scheduled to do it or because I belonged there because I didn’t. I didn’t spend the whole year in the States, not even close, I just came back early and took a tiny bit of leave before I got back to my task at hand.

So imagine my surprise when I saw I was on the duty roster to have that 24 hour shift again. Twice. On two consecutive weekends. It’s as if the person who did the schedule said to themselves “well he may have a job to do all week but he won’t mind sitting at this desk and forfeiting his weekend too”. Alright. I, Specialist Hub, probably don’t have the authority to say “hey guy, that’s fucked up” so I sat on it. Patience is a virtue.

Today I was talking to my supervisor (who just came back on that last flight) and somehow duty rosters came up so I let him know they’ve got me on it already. He said it’s not right and he’ll do what he has to to get me off. I’m optimistic. He’s pulled me off some stupid crap like that before. So now I’ve got a weekend to look forward to again.

This is what I woke up to.

[00:47] some dude: hey man, str8/curious guy here visiting clarksville, lookin to give no strings blow job, strictly discreet, no reciprocation needed, gate 1 area…hit me back if you’re interested.

Why can’t Tool be a consistantly good band? Why must they continue their downward plummet? Here’s a helpful timeline of Tool’s path to sucking balls:

• 1992 Opiate – KICKIN’ RAD!!!
• 1993 Undertow – Solid but not great.
• 1996 Aenima – Outstanding!
• 2001 Lateralus – By no means perfect.
• 2006 10,000 Days – Why?

And there you have it. It’s no gentle slope but a rollercoaster of pain and disappointment. Why is it that I can leave Opiate on repeat and never get tired of it yet I feel compelled to stop 10,000 Days after three tracks? Listening to 10,000 Days is like listening to A Perfect Circle’s Emotive. They come off of the awesome Thirteenth Step to deliver twelve tracks of godawful protest songs including a gut-wrenchingly bad rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine”.

It’s painful.

So this weekend was my birthday. A rather low-key event this year as we used the money we would’ve used to come to Springfield to get the brakes fixed on the Saturn. 3 hours and $200 later we have a new rotor and new pads and no more grinding sounds.

I got pancakes for breakfast and a strawberry cake and a Nintendo DS lite and a (second) copy of Metroid Prime: Hunters and Silent Hill (the movie) on DVD and the first season of Darkwing Duck. I traded in my DS fatty and got Killer7 for gamecube and Resident Evil: Deadly Silence for DS but RE was really just the first one all over again and I don’t think I can go back to no ammo, no fun Resident Evil anymore after playing Resident Evil 4. So I took it back and got Star Fox Command and pre-ordered Megaman ZX.

Star Fox Command is fun and hard. I haven’t really played a Star Fox game since the first one on SNES and Command is a different creature. Instead of linear shooting levels you start with an overworld map and from there you intercept wings of bad guys with your fighters to keep them from getting at your base. Once you’ve encountered a wing, the game goes into a timed free fly mode where you sue the stylus to fly around and blow up and required number of bad guys within the time limit. Your time limits carry over from one level to the next so you can’t waste a lot of time goofing off but there’s power-ups that give you more time that are worth the effort to find. I’m on my fifth mission and this game is kicking my ass but it’s from lack of practice and not insane difficulty so I’m working on it.

I had an appointment with the laser surgeon today. They took pictures of my eyeballs until the nurse asked how long I’d had my contacts out. It was about 12 hours at that point and she said they needed to be out for two weeks prior to today and that we were wasting our time since they’d been out for only 12 hours. What a pain in my ass. Now I have to spend the next couple weeks contact-less and then I have to call them on the 15th to get my next appointment. If they had told me when I made the appointment in the first place, this wouldn’t have been an issue. Making and remaking appointments and wasting time make me want to strangle the kind people at the laser clinic. It’s okay though. Two weeks of glasses to remind me that I won’t be needing these when they’re done with me.

Silent Hill the movie was totally awesome. Very true to the games and the story almost exactly follows the first Silent Hill but with a female lead with a very appropriate ending.

That’s about all there is to my weekend. Two more days of work and then I get another. I love weekends.

TV isn’t a responsible parent. Positive reinforcement doesn’t work. Kids aren’t learning manners when the parents aren’t teaching by example. The experiment is a failure. Flush it all down the fucking drain. The kids, the parents, and the rest of us who stand idly by, we all need to fucking shot.