Vidjia Games!
Games!
This is long winded and a tangent from my daily life, so... yeah you've been warned.
I just watched Adam Sessler's (from the ill fated Tech Tv of my pre-drinking days) response to the flame war regarding his Killzone 2 review. (available: here and pretty damn funny to see a tv host with the freedom to tell people to "shove a cock in your mouth.") Let me brief you as I'm fairly sure only META has any idea what I'm talking about. Killzone 2 is a game that just came out for the ps3. It's apparently good. It's earning good reviews from the sources I trust.
Sessler's review has created a flamefest rekindling some "xbox 360 vs playstation 3" internet flamewar.
What the fuck.
This generation - that I think I'm still a part of - has the desire to go out and defend a consumer product vehemently on a multitude of shared conversation spaces across the internet. Let me restate that. There are lots of kids. Who go online. Who then post messages to forums at a hundred a minute. Defending a consumer product. As if it's their own kin.
This issue speaks to me fundamentally. Our generation (it's becoming harder and harder to lump myself in with my perceived idiocy of my peers - a hauntingly hypocritical statement) has been lam-blasted with commercials, product placement and the most materialistic culture in known history since conception. McDonalds has had toys in it's food for as long as I can remember. Saturday morning cartoons are about collecting shit and competing with (beating's more accurate) your friends over all else - due to a larger collection. It's these fundamental aspects of our culture that has given the message board dwellers the entitlement to name call and defend an entertainment system with such bravado.
Of course, it's not any one company/person's fault that individuals act this way about an entertainment system. It's everybody's. We all buy into consumer culture and feel some of this - that's how it has become a value in the younger generation. (I've heard sociologists refer to it as 'generation entitlement' - not much sums up my view more elegantly.) We're all guilty of replacing social interaction with some easier convenience, slowly weakening our ties to our community and neighbors. We are more "social and connected" than ever before, but in reality, not many of us will ever talk to a stranger in their daily life unless they physically bump into them (I do. Fuck does it startle people. ESPECIALLY students! ha!) We exist solely in cellular 'tribes' of people, larger cliques that occasionally interact and exchange members with one another, but pretty much stay within our well defined walls. We'll sit around at home talking to other friends on the internet instead of existing in our local community.
This brings me back around to the 360 vs ps3. One group of people who "invested" in the xbox and one group of people who purchased a ps3. A very obvious, core value to each of these groups is that they do not OWN the other console. There is an instant, implied loyalty there. After a person makes a 300$ investment, they now are entitled & even expected to defend their investment in the eyes of their peers. (peers in this case are 'gamers as a whole' not the individual groups of xbox/playstation.) They have created the shared group identity solely in opposition to the other group. It's not "I play games on the xbox!" that comes across in any game forum. It's "Playstation 3 is SHIT for x, y, and z reasons now fugoff" or "you're bias against SONY because you're getting PAID by MICRO$OFT!" Instead of a greater community that any new game or system is accepted and judged on it's merits, we have games that are instantly filtered through a "oh it's a PC game instead of a console game" lens. (it took me quite some time to actually judge the xbox fairly as an entertainment system - years in the 'PC trenches' caused a deep biases.) That a glimmer of my perception on why people are so dumb about something as simple as a review of a game.
So, Adam Sessler, it's not your fault. It's just you reported (fairly) on something that's a pulsing, inflamed and raw nerve amongst our generation. That's why the pires were constructed and burnas applied.
My solution? Light a cigar, kick your feet up and antagonize playfully - only through self realization will this culture refocus its alignment towards something besides materialistic shit. Read Fight Club. Eat a good steak. BREATHE.
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*edit: I should have titled this "SUCK ON SOCIOLOGY!"
ZOMBIES
Meatspace: This weekend was very nice; I spent the majority of it playing Left 4 Dead (link to allan's synopsis) with Bicho & random other twats on the interwebs, hanging out with jess, watching movies and drinking. Jess and I watched "Brick" under the recommendation of Xich and it was fantastic. I dig Tracer Bullet style dialogue and noir themes. Good stuff.
I rebuilt my desk with a solid door flat and some adjustable sawhorses. My only qualm with the sawhorses is they require an awful lot of under-table space to get the full A frame shit going. I may scavenge around a scrapyard for a couple pieces of angle steel to zap together with my MIG - I'd like to move the monster server case under the table again as it'd free up monitor clutter and I wouldn't have to wall mount those two poor speakers. Here's a shot.
I also received my bindings for my snowboard. I have everything I need to hit the slopes sans a pair of good winter gloves - anyone have any recommendations on some really good gloves? Otherwise I'll just be hitting amazon's reviews.
Fallout: This fantastic game has been put on the back burner of "whenever Bicho's not online for left 4 dead goodness and I want to play something." Anyway, here's a glory shot of Cuntastic. (since I don't think you can take a screenshot from the sexbox 360, this is literally a macro photo of my tv) Presently level 17, rocking some outcast power armor and a gatling lazer. She's pretty much unstoppable, resting at a native 10 luck - all the critical bonus feats, and a retarded amount of damage soaking; there's simply not much that can take her down. (outside of a misplaced mini nuke or one of those fucking unkillable giant rad scorpions.)
Jess says she's a Dike. "Bittercup" from Big City keeps giving her drugs and running off, maybe she should hit that little lezz's shit.
Oh, I did find "Dogmeat" thanks to Bart. Sweet puppy has a fantastic habit of jumping RIGHT INTO the V.A.T.S. targeted minigun blasts to the face. I've not seen a dog take that much fire from "Eugene" before.
Future: As some of you may know, I've recently reenrolled into university courses. I have finally decided on the reason that I'm not satisfied working at an extremely good job at a university: The IT industry is just a fancy facade for service to people who don't know how to use computers as well as the IT folk. In this way, it is becoming the new service industry. I'm totally not satisfied with that - I feel that I'd find more reward working harder and learning new things that will directly benefit me. This is where being a researcher/professor holds such benefits. I will still have the socially rewarding aspects of teaching and assisting students, but I'll also be in a position where my skills with computers will directly benefit my research and my projects. This in turn will benefit the university as a whole and the route to satisfaction is MUCH more direct.
In other words - I find myself much more satisfied playing with tech on my terms. I don't want to be told to 'research n and decide if it's best for a, b, and c.' I'd really like to be in a situation where I end up thinking "damn I could certainly use something to automagically kick off these 15 tests each time lightning strikes." Then spend the next week producing some poorly hacked together software & hardware to get that task done.
Anyway, that's my driving reason now for going back to school. Don't worry, I'm not quitting my day job for a couple more years - it really is a damn sweet position with rockstar benefits and no pressure. I just don't want to 'settle' until I can't wait to get out of bed to go to work in the mid afternoon.
Fallout
Work: yesterday was cvap. I spent 4 hours doing a doctoral student dissertation's quantitative statistics figures and the end result turned out to miff him. Not a big enough cohort selection or whatever. Blah, fuck it, not my job to care.
Today's looking better - already riding a post-hangover coffee buzz that has me getting what shit I can done. Everything else is contingent upon other peoples actions, so I can take a break and pick at my ass... er.. blag here.
Meatspace: Hit up the Lyon after work with Anthony. That shit was FUN. Three pitchers then a chipotle burrito (which, btw, is gonna make me take one of their patented monster-ream-out-my-fleshy-insides poos later today) and about 3 hours of great conversation. Didn't realize how much I missed hanging out with him.
Games: I received Fallout 3 yesterday and dug in as deeply as I could around bar time & playing geometry wars 2 with Jess. Escaped Vault 101 at the... uh... shegrin? expense? yeah expense is right. At the expense of every other soul around. I literally started that game's combat with a crit headshot from a 10mm pistol. That guy's head EXPLODED, in a panoramic slowmo, and then he was immedately disrespected by a group of giant "radroaches." I then continued to play with the games combat systems by killing every other meatsack I ran into along the way.
The beginning stages, as I hinted at on the tweet system, were cute as fuck. Paging through a childs book to set your stats? Taking a 'placement exam' with hilarious questions to judge your perks? It was all pretty awesome - and ironically, my answers built little "Cuntastic" into the bruiser I would have created anyway. She's not as hawt as Princess Shepart from Mass Effect, but I've got the feeling that she's gonna be an even colder, calculating bitch. Who will use a giant motherfucking energy weapon. GIANT. ENERGY. WEAPON.
(for now she's just clubbing everything with a police baton. gets her through the day.)
I've been looking forward to a new fallout installment for quite some time - I never really dug into the original rpg style games that much - but fallout taticts ate my soul alive for a solid 3 months. The only thing that made me stop playing it was a harddrive crash and failure to restore the savegames. The environment of the fallout serise aligns so perfectly to my dreams that it heightens my enjoyment of an already solid backstory. Now I'm afforded to wander around a mutant infested wasteland, next to utterly destroyed chunks of highway and ruined cityscapes with giant weapons and a chip on my shoulder the size of liberty city? What's not to love?
Gentoo: OMG FUPPES WORKS! it WORKS! everything but .mkv audio transcoding, I'll figure that out when I don't have freaking AWESOME downloaded tv to watch and even AWESOMER games to play.