Roborant

Topical Posting? Why not!

I picked this article out of my gmail news headline filter:

A-List Stars Flailing at the Box Office

It’s a decent read. I was gonna block-quote some of it, but I couldn’t find a really choice part.

The article got me thinking though. So much so that after I had closed the article and was going to turn off my computer, go downstairs, and make brekkers, I decided to blarg it instead.

And now here we are.

Most of the movies it mentions are ones that I considered seeing. Although I hadn’t even heard of Duplicity and Imagine That. But… I didn’t. I work weird hours, and usually the only person I talk to about movies is my roommate with no job. And he’s usually already DLed and watched them. I never sweat about missing a movie in the theatre anyway, because I know it will be out on DVD (or the webs) soon enough for 1/3 or less of the price of a ticket.

I think that the end of the article could have made a better point though. People Blackberrying their friends saying “LoL, Travolta is too old to be a terrorist” is probably a potent force against people seeing these bad movies. And I applaud that. The only memory I have of going to see a movie in high school was fucking Boogeyman. It’s probably the worst movie I have ever seen. If I’d had any idea what it was like before I walked into that theatre, I would have told my friends to get fucked if we were watching that garbage (because I was even mouthier to my friends back in high school than I am now). And check out that Wiki page because that movie made $68M on a $20M budget. I love the quote at the end trying to spin the focus towards this summer’s blockbusters being a bad crop. What a load of shit.

However, no ammount of Blackberrying is going to stop the people lined up on opening night. And these days opening night is all that counts anyway. If a movie doesn’t make a profit in the first 2 or 3 days, then it’s considered a failure, and people start hoping to make it up in DVD sales.

But nuts to all that. Read it yourself. Start some commentary! Do we need stars to sell movies? People Like Pitt, Depp, and… Wow, Julia Roberts is the only woman on that list… Are all talented actors, but what should their place really be?

Is the movie theatre headed in the same slow direction as the public library (or the real theatres, for that matter)?

Stay tuned to see the story unfold in the comments!

So, here’s a little two-fer for you.

A story, and a question. What better combination?

So, once upon a time two weeks or so ago, I was hanging out with Ben and his fiance. This is nothing new. We hang a lot, and the times are good. On this particular evening, Ben and herself (I try to walk a fine line between the people and things that I name here. A topic which could rate its own post…) had just returned home from a birthday dinner with her parents. And at dinner the rents had produced a Wii for her.

So when I telephoned later that night to see what was up, they invited me over to play some Wii before our regularily scheduled plans took effect.

I got over there, we hooked the thing up, and I began the painful process of pretending to enjoy playing the Wii. It was obvious that she was overjoyed with her new toy, and I didn’t want to shit all over her birthday.

After a few games, we settled on a tennis match. My only experience with Wii Tennis at that point had been in the Wii Fitness Test (My Wii Fitness Age is, like, 57 by the way). So, with no real idea of what to expect except ‘wait for the ball, flail arm’, we launched into combat.

I should mention at this point that I am a minor fan of real tennis. Although perhaps ‘fan by association’ may be a better description. My father was a die-hard Agassi fan, and when Nadal eclipsed him in his final season, my father found a new player to follow. So I spent much of my daytime downtime the last 2 summers watching tennis with my Dad.

Anyway, knowing what little I know about the game, I was somewhat stunned to see how far Wii tennis strayed from that. I mean… the game moves your players for you so that you can always hit the ball.

As the game progressed, I noticed an interesting pattern. Neither her nor I were launching any interesting shots. One would serve, the other would wait, and then flail their arm at the appropriate time, herself from a spot on the couch and me from a ridiculous stance on the other side of the room.

And back and forth it went until one of us fucked up and flailed at the wrong time. A point would be scored and we would move on.

The games were close. One of us would score 1 or 2 times in a row, but then the other would come back. I was beginning to show something of a talent for appropriately-timed flailing. However, the way the game played itself was beginning to bug me.

I turned to her and said, “Do you get the feeling that this is a game lost by the losers instead of won by the winners?”

Now, I’m going to break the flow of the narrative here and explain that as best I can. I picked up the term from a really interesting article (I’ve never played EVE, but the ‘no holds barred’ PVP mechanics really interest me, and I often find myself reading articles like that one. In fact, I’ve been keeping up with his column ever since I read that), and I hadn’t really had a chance to use it. So I flung it out there with the hopes that it was a somewhat familiar expression. I hoped to elicit some camraderie along the lines of ‘yeah, I know what you mean.’

After all, my experience with the game was that… I wasn’t really playing her per se. We were taking turns playing the machine. One of us would serve, which didn’t actually have an affect on the other person’s shot. No matter where the ball went or how fast, the machine moved your little peg-person into place so that it could be intercepted. All the serve did was prime the pump for the first man vs. machine encounter. If you flailed at the right time, you sent the ball back, which set up the other player. Since the machine always placed you in a spot to hit the ball, your input had no effect on the other player. In essence, all we were doing was waiting to see who fucked up playing chicken against the machine first.

Or, to put it more plainly, we were basically evenly matched. The first one to fuck up lost the point, instead of the first one to make a good shot or set up a scoring opportunity.

So, lost by the losers instead of won by the winners.

But instead of that little tidbit of game design philosophy, all I got was polite confusion from her… and a look of pure murder from Ben.

“Did you just call my girlfriend a fucking loser?”

Oh god… Oh dear god, no.

I spent the next minute frantically explaining myself. They seemed to buy it. But no one was really having fun at that point.

I ended up beating her. Ben immediately requested a match against me.

What proceeded was an incredibly quick virtual drubbing at Ben’s hands, the likes of which I can confidently say I have never experienced before in any game. I did not land a single point. Ben sat on the couch, a Coors Light in one hand, the Wiimote in the other. The only motion was relaxed sipping of the beer and the tiniest wrist-flicks with the ‘mote.

It would appear that Wii Tennis is more complex than I imagined. However, things moved so quickly once Ben got started that I have no idea what was happening. As soon as the ball left his racket it would double in speed and move at a ridiculous angle. My impression of the game is basically unchanged because I was afforded no opportunity to learn before it was over.

I hate that fucking Wii…

Which brings us to the question.

This is actually a really old gripe of mine. It started niggling in the back of my head back when Wolfgang won his button from Granite through a series of posts and counterposts which eventually boiled down to… I don’t know… whether Samus would rather go to prom with Master Chief or Gordon Freeman.

It was a terrible time. A great read, but a terrible time. I did my best back then to just stay the hell out. I know Wolfgang would have liked to have an ally in those arguments, but I didn’t want to be dragged in. And then it was over. Wolfgang went back to his irregular posting schedule, a new button was born, and we all moved on. In the more recent past, Wolfgang had another spurt of posts, where my least favourite issue reared its ugly head.

So here we go. I’m not casting judgement on Wolf or Granite. Wolfgang is pretty embittered against the Wii, and Granite often finds himself cast as Defender of the Faith, willingly or not I have no idea, in Wolfgang’s criticisms (usually by spam-ish comments left on The Box).

All I wish to do is lift out a certain segment of argument that continues to be repeated, but never fully explained. It goes like this:

1) The Wii is the least powerful current gen system. The games (obviously with exceptions) are boring shovelware, even the quality of first-party titles is inconsistent. The controler, while highly innovative… is still a pain in the ass a lot of the time. (This is Wolfgang’s part of the refrain)

2) Nintendo is making a literal killing in the video game business. They are rocking profits that no one has ever achieved before. Without profits, a company will die. Dead companies make no games. (I’ve heard this from everyone except Wolf [and by 'heard' I mean 'read', obviously])

Part 2 infers part 3:

3) With record profits and an unprecendented number of customers with a vested interest in supporting the Wii (because they’ve already bought one), Nintendo is in the best place possible to revolutionize video gaming as we know it. They are able to take risks no one else can take. If 1% of Wii owners buy a new game that goes against mainstream trends etc, that’s still enough people to make that game profitable (especially given that a risky venture of that nature will have a much smaller budget than a major release along predictable genre, or other, lines).

But… hold on. Part 3 contradicts part 1. And part 1 was the entire reason that we started this little hypothetical situation.

And this ends up turning the argument into a circle. Someone complains about the Wii, someone else mentions that Nintendo has never been in better shape. This infers part 3, but the people bitching in the first place aren’t satisfied, because they can’t see any evidence of part 3. There’s lot’s of evidence for 2, and plenty of anec dotal experience to kick up fuss for 1. And what happens?

We get part 1 again. Maybe it’s a different post. Maybe it’s a different poster. It’s probably worded differently and using different games or situations or anec dotes, but it’s basically the same.

There we go. I’m not really interested in starting another fire.  I’m going to be monitoring the commenting here as closely as I can, and if people step out of line, I’ll start removing comments or just lock commenting down.

Your comment must relate to:

1) Welcome back, Liam! We missed you so! What a hilarious set of circumstances between Ben and yourself!

2) A non-judgemental discussion of the questions raised in parts 1, 2, & 3. Have I got them wrong? Am I distilling (or deriving?) the argument too far, and thereby losing critical details? Etc.

Bon soir!

I am already working on another post. It shall be password protected. Expect more racy material. Not really.

The first of the 2 smaller posts that I promised below.

This one concerning the devil that is TWITTER!

I’m going to summarize it by saying this. My introduction to Twitter was basically Bravo coming out and saying that he didn’t bother blogging anymore because Twitter was his new shining mistress. This also prompted Granite’s brief Twitsperiment.

And, well, you just need to read the 17th comment on Bravo’s post to see where my general opinion of Twitter lay. From what I’d been told, it was little more than an MSN substitute, where all your conversations were overlaid on each other and every once in a while you’d have the Beastie Boys yell something from across the room.

For that reason, I would never bother picking up a Twitter account. It would be nice to hear from you fellas, but I don’t want to know that you just killed an exam. Or should be studying for an exam. Or are pooping. I don’t care. Unless those thoughts are coupled together and given life as a real statement, they’re just random thoughts. If I wanted to hear people’s random annoying thoughts every 5 seconds, I’d have a girlfriend. Except in that case, I’d also get laid. When Twitter can throw me a BJ, I’ll follow all of you to the ends of the earth.

But

Then I was at work one day. I haven’t told anyone what I’ve been doing for work these days, but rest assured that it’s not too too interesting. My crew and I spend most of the day talking to each other over the roar of the machines because our job is neither mentally stimulating or really physically demanding.

Anywhoo, I was chatting it up with an older guy on the crew. He’s a general labourer like myself, but he’s early 40s, got 3 kids. So I was amused to hear him bring up the subject of Twitter. Ready to vent spleen all over the dude, I instead sat shocked while he blew me away.

Let me make that even clearer: The combined (although perhaps not totally focussed) efforts of you rag-tag group of technophiles totally failed to convince me that Twitter is useful to my life. Then a month later, a middle-aged dude who thinks it’s cool that phones can take pictures managed to show me that Twitter could actually be a positive force for me.

In addition to mouth-breathing twitter-shitters, this guy followed 2 other things that I was way more interested in. He had our town’s newspaper. Every time they put up an article on their site, he was informed. But even cooler, the City has a Twitter account. Whenever a job opens up (I’m unclear as to whether this was working for the city or working in the city), they drop a Tweet. Boom. Throw out a resume.

It still hasn’t persuaded me to actually get a Twitter account. But that shit is fucking cool. If my band takes off (Those recordings are pretty bad. We’re going in to do some better ones in June), I’ll give it a Twitter account to help people keep up with shows and the like. I don’t value Twitter as a tool for personal communication, but as a way to bring attention to important things, I’m beignning to see the light.

You know, I once spent 6 hours on Google trying to find out what that song was. I didn’t find it.

I’d heard the song on The Hawk and could only remember the chorus line “I love you!”. So that was what I googled. Or rather, the term “I love you” and the word lyrics.

From the original search returns, I removed all the obvious red flags, adding -Rihanna, -Mariah, -Timberlake, etc.

6 hours spent looking through the rest.

No dice.

In the end I finally heard it on the Hawk again and went to their site to look it up.

Anyway, onto the meat of this post!

As I mentioned in the comments of the below post, this is going to be a quick one on a topic I thought about posting a few days ago.

I’ve been remiss in my duty as administrator. It’s just total dick behaviour any way that I look at it.

I’m sorry that I haven’t responded to any comments in, like, two months.

Sorry about that.

Specifically, I stifled multiple oportunites for rich debate in the comments of my last post concerning pro-gamers v athletes. So this post is basically just a quick response to those comments and an open invitation to continue the debate in the comments of this post (I have a real post in the works, I swear. Actually, another small one, and then a largeish ‘state of the Liam’ type post).

So, let’s get the ball rolling! The first response to my post was from Granite. You might want to read it.

Is DDR even dancing? I wouldn’t say so. But, let’s say that it is. Please refer back to the beginning of the post. Read the Table Tennis article. Then watch some video of a DDR match. Why are the tennis players olympic athletes while the DDR kids are sweaty nerds beneath contempt (ah, lovely hyperbole)?

I think that a major problem here is that there are no perfect analogies between these games. There are lots of examples, but they all diverge at some point. After all, the easiest answer to my own question at the end of the paragraph is that the TT players need to react to their opponents’ moves. DDR players (while certainly working just as hard as the TT players in a head-to-head competition) are simply reacting to the game, not each other.

Starcraft forces you to react to your opponent. But the physical aspect is lacking. This is why I included my second olympic example, the air riflers (watch that video!). Now we have a case of athletes who don’t need to react to oponents (except in the sense of “I need to score better”, just like DDR players). But these guys don’t need to move either. In fact, they don’t want to move (Like WOW players. Zing!). Forgive me if I’m parroting my own post here. So, in terms of physical activity, these guys are on par with SC. Their sport is totally dependant on a mechanical interface, totally analagous to SC’s dependance on mouse and keyboard. I mean, they aren’t even holding the guns up! And they all have small LCD monitors (see seconds 6-10 of the video)! Their purpose is almost certainly to assist the olypians in aiming or calibrating the weapons, or some other function.

The point here is that I don’t need to say that Starcraft is on the same level as college football. We all know that that is not true (and insulting to people on both sides). But if I can win Olympic gold for standing still, firing a wepon mounted on a table, and aided by an LCD monitor, why can’t I win one for playing Starcraft?

I hope you won’t consider it a cop-out Granite, but that’s the extent of my response. It only addresses the first paragraph of your response, but already in responding to that, I’ve reiterated half of my original post. If you aren’t going to address the points that I specifically bring up, that we’re just going to keep trading post-sized comments with each other. If that makes sense…

Following that, we had some hilarious commentary about condensing my posts into Twoots (or Twats, or whatever you’re calling them). No comment here. I’ve come around a bit on Twitter, and I might summarize those thoughts in a small post later.

Then we got another good comment from Danger. A very good comment. It takes a specific point from my post, calls it out, and totally cuts it up. Like a cold blooded OG killer.

It hurt to read it. But I’m man enough to admit that, for the most part,  he has completely nailed me on my ignorance.

I’ve never played organized hockey. I can’t even skate. I did a bit of roader when I was a kid, but I was never very good. So, my point that NHL players stay on the ice no more than 3 minutes was founded on…..

Something I heard Basso say in exercise science back at highschool. It’s possible that I’m not even remembering it properly. So, I’ll retract that. Everything Danger said there is the truth, and I believe him.

Except for that part at the end.

First off, I’ll admit up front that I don’t know what “sprint jogs” are. That’s likely due to my not being an athlete of any stripe.

However, that is of little consequence, as what we are actually talking about is the 45on/45off pattern that Danger establishes as a norm for top line NHL players.

I would say that that pattern is more like an anaerobic workout than an aerobic cardio one. Do 10 or 15 reps. Take a minute to recover. Repeat. When a hockey player takes his 45 seconds on the bench, he is in total recovery mode, getting ready for another maximal effort. This is all the territory of anaerobic exercise, and by reducing the time to 45 seconds, Danger has actually helped me out.

Cardio, by definition is exercise that stresses the heart over long periods of time, forcing it to adapt. By removing the time factor, you allow anaerobic systems (ATP-PC and anaerobic glycolysis) to pick up the slack. Those systems allow more energy to be produced up front, but last 10-30 seconds and 30 seconds to 3 minutes respectively. It’s obviously not possible to recover completely in those 45 seconds off, but the stress to the heart is not nearly as high as it would be.

Another way to look at it is this: Take a top line NHL player. Get him naked [NSFW or 'phobes].

Now take a champion long-distance cardio athlete. Same process. Notice anything?

The hockey player is carrying way more mass. His body is developed in a totally different way from the runner’s. One of them is optomized for muscles that deliver a mid-level ammount of energy for crazy-long periods of time. Another is optomized to deliver maximum force over a short time. One of those is the cardio athlete.

That is not to say that hockey players have no cardio training. Having a well-trained heart is an asset in any situation imagineable, and cardio training is likely a huge component of training outside of actual games. But the 45on/ 45off pattern is not really a cardio exercise pattern.

From there, we get some comments from my ‘friends’ telling me that they they ‘miss me’ and think I’m a dick for ‘never talking to them’ or something.

Whatever.

So, here’s my rundown on the ‘Are pro gamers athletes?’ question raised by Granite recently.

Well… let’s start with one point about pro gaming, before getting into the meat of the problem. Granite mentions people “excitedly talk[ing] about SC” as if it were a real sport. Now, from the audience perspective I don’t think there is any real difference. Whether it’s the Super Bowl or the WCG finals, I’ll be watching it from my computer chair with a bottle of water and a bag of M&Ms. They are both just games that I could never play as well as the people putting their skills on display, and I will never, never, see either of them played live by ‘world class’ players.

When it comes to the term ‘athlete’, I’d say that he’s mostly correct. I think that the term intrinsically associates itself with people engaging in physical activity. That is definitely a basic ingredient of the phrase, and it is also a defining factor in what makes something a ‘sport’, as a specific subset of games. All sports are games, and all athletes are players (or gamers), and the reverse is not necessarily true.

However.

I don’t think that there’s a clear-cut line, and therefore the terms themselves are what cause confusion. Hockey players and SC players are definitely on different ends of a spectrum, but there is plenty of grey between them. I mean, where do you put professional arm wrestlers? They are also people honing particular skills in a game which is physical. But would you call them athletes or gamers? Let’s face it, having super huge arms really won’t take you that far in life (outside of the ‘sport’), and they aren’t really increasing your health in any meaningful sense. And a big part of Granite’s reason for not calling pro gamers ‘athletes’ is that games do not improve your body or your health.

What about this? It’s an Olympic sport. You’re telling me these people are ‘real’ athletes who ‘actually work… to compete in their sport of choice’?

And these dudes. Also an Olympic sport. All of them are considered professional athletes. A large part of their sport involves standing as still as possible for long periods of time.

But to return to an above point, once you get a certain bit above average fitness, you’re not really increasing your life expectancy or anything else health related anyway. You’re just pushing your body to get better and better at a more and more limited skill set (which, reduced to those terms, is not that far from what pro gamers do), and you’re radically increasing your chance of having a serious injury. Aaaaaand the principal of dominishing returns means that you need to work harder and harder just to keep your head above the water, let alone improve.

The obvious exception here is the cardiovascular exercise most athletes do. But again, get past a certain point and you might live to 85. Just with no knees. And many sports are not that cardio-oriented. While running and swimming are wonderful cardio exercise, both sports have a huge percentage of athletes focused on sprints, which are anaerobic exercise (since they don’t really tax your oxygen intake, your heart doesn’t need to improve as much as it could). In the NHL you will probably only play on the ice for 3 minutes before being rotated off again.

Which makes for another grey area because it is in pro gamers’ interests to perform physical training. Good cardio health can really help you keep calm during any tense situation. Additionally, spending hours and hours in ‘training’ at the PC or console will give you repetitive strain injuries. Those can only be avoided by carefully honing form (in much the same way that a musician would to avoid similar injuries). You might also resort to specialized equipment such as wrist braces to deal with the increased load on your carpal tunnels, just as many athletes will use braces and tensor bandages to compensate for increased load on major joints in order to keep playing. Although for that matter, your special equipment should also include all your IO devices (And I’ll touch on input devices again farther down), your chair and your desk.

And by Granite’s reasoning, nutrition should be at least as important to pro gamers as it is to ‘real’ athletes if the gamers want to be considered athletes. Sitting in front of a screen all day will make you ‘larger and lazier’, if you don’t watch what you eat. Since there is less time in the day for the pro gamer to devote to calorie burning exercise, the gamer needs to be even more careful than the athlete. Not to mention that a good diet keeps memory and cognition at their finest.

Of course, we know that most pro gamers are not this careful.

So why?

I’d say that the easiest answer is that pro gaming is not yet ‘a culture’, or at least anything approaching a mainstream one here in the west. And I’d say that the main reason for that is that it is still too hard to associate a face with a game. Players still get sponsorships, sure. But how many pro gamers’ faces can you recall right now? For me the answer is zero. How many ‘real’ athletes’ faces can you picture? I’m not a dedicated follower of any sport, and I can picture at least 10 without trying.

So, let me say 2 things:

1) One day pro gamers will be accorded the same status as athletes in the west (I can only assume that they hold that status in South Korea). When that day comes, they will not look anything like you or I. They will be fit, with gelled hair and all the other bullshit.

But I don’t think that that day can come before:

2) A revolution in input devices/methods. I know that Brendon wrote something about this a while ago. This might be the article, but I can’t remember. It seems to be from a long time ago, possibly before I was reading his blog regularily. Anyway, I don’t think that anyone will be taken seriously as an athlete while manipulating a mouse and keyboard.

So it’s interesting that Granite caps his article off with a reference to the closest thing to a revolutionary interface that we have: The Wii. Now, I’m with Wolfgang on the Wii basically being a sugar-coated novelty item (please don’t leave any comments about that. It isn’t the focus of the post), but it is a step in the right direction. I think that pro gamers will get more cool (and mainstream and rich) the more that they are able to customize their gameplay. And having a more personal interface with the machine is a good way to get there (obviously more in-game customization would be helpful as well, and the Miis are… sort of doing that… not really).

Tangent: Should DDR be considered a sport sooner than SC? DDR fits the definition much better than SC, and the major difference is the input method.

Anyway, it’s also important to note that by adding more and more motion to the game interface, we emlinate the very problem with which we began: Video games making you fat and lazy versus sports making you big and toned.

There. That’s why I couldn’t just leave a comment. I know there’s no real conclusion, but I just really want to sleep.

Epilogue: Pro athletes are douchebags.

They’ve spent their entire lives being given free rides in other areas of importance because they’re so fucking good at throwing a ball. They get laid all the time. The best ones are elevated to places of fame and paid incredible ammounts of money. Yes, what they do does take skill, but does anyone here not remember high school? There were fellas there who shouldn’t even have graduated, but never had to worry about a thing. Many of them got really nice scholarships for it.

I’m certainly not beholden to those fuckers for anything, and I didn’t think Granite was either. I’m not trying to start a class war here, but I could really give a shit if anything I do demeans guys who are constantly told that their sports are more important than basic academic achievements and that they are more important than other human beings.

I’m not saying pro gamers aren’t douchebags either, but I doubt most of them get tattoos of their favourite games, or go out expecting to fuck any girl they meet. Or get short-listed for co-op jobs in Kitchener-Waterloo so that they can play out the season without having to commute.

Pax.

Ladies,

It’s been a while. I’ve hopefully got a nice big ballbuster of a post in the tubes, but I’ve got something more important to tell you about.

I got Steam. I know, I’m many many years too late. That’s not important. Because for all those years, there was nothing that could pull me hard enough to get it. Nothing that could entrance me to adding yet another little icon to my taskbar.

But all that changed last week.

Those of you who pay too much attention to my posts, or who have exceptionally keen memories, will remember my fondness for the Dawn of War franchise of RTS games. For those who don’t, I would sum it up quickly by saying that DOW is the only game I have played which could be called a serious successor to Starcraft. Admittedly, the core game on its own isn’t much better, but its popularity won it 3 expansions over its 4-year life, and once you have those you’re looking at something much more. Starcraft blazed the trail, and its still fun to whip it out. But if that Starcraft style of RTS play appeals to you, then you’ll never want to go back after playing DOW.

There are simple advances. Have a large army in SC and want to know the health of more than the first 12 units? Too bad. In DOW, your individual units are placed into squads with an overall health rating. And if you produce more than 12 squads (again filling up the onscreen space), it’s a simple keystroke to cycle down the units until you’ve seen them all.

But things get ever so much better. With all 3 expansions you’re looking at 9 balanced playable races to SC’s 3, with some of them (such as the Tau [my little favourites]), having branching tech trees, thereby making them really 2 different races at Tier 3 (theoretically boosting the number of possible races even further).

So anyway, you might be able to tell that I love this fucking game. It is unquestionably my favourite title for PC of all time (and I don’t think its really fair to make comparissons with console titles, especially in RTS).

Sooooooooooooooo

When I did my usual weekly round-up of Penny Arcade a few weeks ago, I read that Dawn of War 2 is slated to hit stores this month. I immediately dropped everything else, and went to the official site, which has remained an open tab in FF ever since.

If you think you might be down for some good old RTS action, give the site a look-over. They’ve got some cool videos (both gameplay and cinematics). If that gets you hot, they’ve even got a link to an HD download of a test match between some developers. And if you’re into that sort of thing, the forums are very active (from what I can tell from the few I’ve lurked).

And if you’re still turned on, you can take the last step: There is an open multiplayer beta going on unil the day the game ships, and it’s hosted on (da dada dum!) Steam.

So, please please please give it a look over. If you like it enough to give the beta a shot, please add me on Steam (Hell, add me anyway. I don’t really know what its good for except for launching DOW2).I don’t have any friends aside from Wolfgang, and he doesn’t want to play with me. The beta is mostly 3on3 matches, and it would be great to have a couple of friends who I could game with.

My email (for anyone who doesn’t know it) is a clever anagram of my own name:

Lineman (dot) macK (a la) gmail (dot) com

Oh and, full disclosure, you also need to get a Games for Windows Live ID. Which if you have a hotmail account, is the easiest thing in the world. I think. Since I already have an Xbox Live account, I didn’t need to really get into that at all.

Also, speaking of demos, betas, successful franchises, etc.  Granite (and any interested others):The Resident Evil 5 demo dropped on Xbox Live the other day. I picked it up and it looks pretty slick. You should join us Xbots soon and check it out.

The Fear2 demo came out at about the same time. It was an odd experience playing the two one after the other when I DLed them, but F2 only made RE5 look even better.

But I must be moving on. If I can tear myself away from the online ball-smashing long enough, I’ll keep spinning up that new post.

Toodles.

Wow, you think, Liam has stooped to using lyrics right off of the radio. How crass!

Well, it’s true. But just to reassure you that I haven’t really changed, I’ll now explain that I’m forced to listen to Kool FM (that’s ‘cool’ with a ‘K’) every day at work. And, while their agreement to only play the same song once every day is certainly progressive for a popular radio station, it just tends to mean that every day blends into the rest. I mean, obviously every day I’m going to hear Doughtry, Fallout Boy (the donors of the above lyric in case you were wondering),  the Trews, 3 Doors Down, and other people whose latest hits I now know off by heart. But do they need to recycle the same older songs day by day? I mean, Born in the USA was released 24 years ago. I’ll wager that no one who will ever read this post was even born  (let alone in the USA) then. Why would I need to hear that 2 days in a row, even if it’s only once? I mean, I’ve got nothing against the Boss, but let’s get real here.

If it’s really pissing you off, you can just imagine that the title was “All I Need is a TV Show, that and the Radio, Down on My Luck Again, Down on My Luck Again” (And then listen to that song if you don’t know what it is. It’s on Yootoobe, yoo’ve got no excuse).

Anyway, I’m sure you’d rather hear more about my supposed job than about what I listen to whilst performing it.

And here let me momentarily digress and say that I am so happy that I’ve been fortunate enough in the last 6 months to land 2 jobs worth making dirty jokes about.

Basically, I went from being an Erection Specialist over the summer, to being a Professional Shaft Handler here in the Royal City.

An average day will see me work about 10 work orders with anywhere from 5 to 120 shafts per order, depending on complexity. I’m pretty sure I topped out about 2 weeks into the job after handling roughly 600 shafts in one day. Those were the good old days, when the shaft handling was simple:

-Pull the required number of shafts and other parts. The shafts are long, hard, cylinders of steel.

-I then pull the secondary shafts. These, while hard, are made of quartz glass, and come in a protective casing which has to be gently peeled back. It’s also imperative that I wear protection, in the form of gloves and safety goggles while handling these secondary shafts.

-Insert the secondaries into the primaries. Gently.

-Lube up some O-rings and slide them onto the glass shafts so that they can stay inside longer.

-After adding some ancillary parts, I have to suck the shaft out. Given the volume of shafts which I (and my coworkers) handle in one day, it is out of simple necessity that we accomplish this task with a vacuum machine. Also, protocols are in place which prohibit me from attempting to suck the shaft without a properly fitting ‘rubber’ between the machine and the shaft.

-Now, if the shaft can hold its air,  my job is done. The shaft has been handled and is added to a bin. However, if the machine detects fluctuations in pressure (naughty behaviour on the part of the shaft), I must do things the old fashioned way: by making the shaft spray liquid everywhere.

-I first have to tie the shaft up. My material of choice is teflon tape (pink, of course), and I must wrap it tightly around all the drain ports on the shaft. Then I attach some fittings and a spigot, which I then attach to a long, smooth hose. The hose is connected to a pump, and thence to the main water supply. After filling the shaft and sealing the valves on all the other ports, I turn on the pump. The presussure starts low… But as my hand gently, slowly, caresses the worn knob of the pump, it starts to get a little higher.

-And then a little higher. All my co-workers, as well as several prominent engineers within the company, have stressed the importance of really taking my time with this. Aparently you just can’t get really satisfactory results if you rush it. Anyway, it just takes time. Whether its at 20psi or 200, eventually things just get to be too much for the shaft, and it’ll start leaking. Maybe just a trickle, maybe a surging stream, but I always get the job done.

That’s it, basically. I mean, I have to talk to people and listen to the radio and eat, but those are sort of tangential. Let me give you an example:

Me: (While attaching a number of fittings to allow a particular shaft to interface with the water pump) This is so damned convoluted!

Coworker: (Thick with Newfie) What’s convoluted?

Me: (Pointing sharply at the fittings) The damn number of fittings I have to use!

Coworker: No, what’s convoluted?

Me: (Shooting him a quizzical look) This, man! This right here!

Coworker: (Now with some annoyance) No, what the fuck is convoluted? What the fuck is that?

Me: Oh… It means complicated. Sorry for yelling.

I was going to write some more, but it’s no longer topical. I hope everyone’s doing well in this new year!

Just a quick blurb:

OH SHIT! It’s time for another Super Awesome ‘Hurray for the Culmination of Your Vaginal Journey, Liam’ party at my parent’s house in the Old Hometown.

Next Saturday (the 27th).

Any and all are welcome to attend. It will be a night of booze and… probably not much else. If that’s not your scene, I’ll pour one out on the curb for you.

If you need directions, throw down an email. If you don’t have my email, look back to those mass emails Brandon was sending out when I joined the RCG and we switched hosts, etc. It’s in there.

The party will be rolling at… I dunno. Party time. If you think you’re coming too early, you probably are. And it’s pretty much going to be impossible for you to show up late.

So yeah, drinks and conversation. And loud music, assuming those 2 are compatible

Invite all your hot single female friends!

Episodic Post Number 2:

How I spent my unexpected summer vacation (aside from re-roofing my shed): A two-part-tale of morality and circumstance.

Prologue: Does that technically make it a 3-part story?

Setting up the details and then setting the stage:

1) My erection job was part of one life-plan I’d drawn up for myself. When I set it up, I had no idea how long I’d be staying in the old hometown, and just wanted a break from my day-job. I assumed I’d be leaving Jan 2009 at the very very earliest, and still didn’t know where I wanted to go, but possibly staying much much longer. Thus, I made arrangements to return to my ‘real’ job after Labour day (including taking deductions for my [paltry] benefits for July and August out of my last cheque in June so that I would still be eligible for benefits in September). As it happened, I went back to the job just for September, and that was only because I felt I owed them for 5 years of good employment.

2) Midway through a summer of days spent working outside, staying out late (I never worked before 10am), and generally having an awesome time, I realized another year of working in a sunless tomb, always going to bed early, and having (almost) no friends might just kill me.

3) I decided that Guelph was a good choice. First off, I had Ben, who had been begging me to come and get a job and an apartment with him for over a year. Then there was Robin (who most of you don’t know). We’d had some really really good jams before he moved a Guelph in March of this year. He had also been begging me to move there and jam some more. I got in touch with both of them and they both agreed that it would be great to see me.

Now that you know the sequence of events that led to this story, let me set the particulars: As you may recall, I had been let go from my job due to my father’s agitation on behalf of my rights as a worker. This left me with 3 weekends and 2 weeks until I went back to my full-time job after Labour day.

Part one: ‘Networking’ in the G-spot

Having recently informed my parents of my intention to move, I decided to make good on that by visiting Ben and getting a job with his company. Since I was no longer working, I went down for saturday, sunday, monday. The weekend was for kicking ass, monday was for an interview with the owner of the company. It’s a family-run affair and they’re eager to hire friends and family of their workers in order to have a cohesive atmosphere. Or something.

So upon rolling into Guelph (upon a horse of iron) I met Ben and Gemma and we moved some furniture. You see, after a year of cajolling me into moving to Guelph to live with them, Ben finally gave up on me and they got a new 2-bedroom apartment. I think it was less than a 2 week difference, but when I emailed Ben, they’d literally just signed the lease on the new place. And in preparation for that move, we were dumping some of their old furniture at Value Village.

Once we had that out of the way, we magically fastforwarded to dinnertime, where Ben and I were joined by his supervisor Joel and their friend Fluffy (also from the company). We split 100 wings at a local bar, and I had my first sense of apprehension at leaving home. The wings at this bar… well… if you’re used to Boar’s Head and OEP wings, these things really just didn’t compare. They were cheap of course, but half the size, and they came unsauced. The sauce was served alongside in little dishes. According to the waitress, this was an advantage. After all, we could order 6 or 8 different sauces and mix and match. But at the heart of it, I’d say the cooks were just too lazy to sauce 100 wings in one order.

However, things just got better and better from there. It was roughly 5pm, and we decided it was time to get thoroughly drunk. Shots, Jager-bombs (just more shots of jag for myself), and other alcoholic delights began to flow. Half an hour later, we asked the waitress for the status of our tab. Only $70 between 4 of us! Awesome, let’s have another round of shots! As Ben and Fluffy ducked out to the can before the next round arrived, the waitress came back and said that the tab was actually at $130, with the next round of shots coming on top of that. Needless to say, my estimation of her tip was 15%, but it turned out to actually be 1.5%.

After that hideous affront, we decided to head for another bar. I don’t know how the subject came up, but for some reason we decided to head for the seediest bar that the town had to offer: The Dip. Now, I know that that seems cliche (the Dip being a dive, after all). However, we were 4 young drunken men and apparently no one had ever had the heart to go there before. This bar has the reputation among everyone I’ve talked to in the city of being the number one hangout for prostitutes, drug dealers, and general scum — all in the 40+ age category. It is the place where the walking dead go to kill their hopes for the future.

They also had domestic bottles for $2.50, I believe.

We walked in and set up camp in front of the pool tables. It was a dismal sight. Shitty tile floors were everywhere (although that did give me a great opportunity to Heelie everywhere). The bar had one overweight unhappy woman behind it. No wait staff. 4 bouncers floating around, all of them skinny and 30+. There was a tiny, sad little dance floor, cordoned off by iron railing, no more than 10×10 feet, in front of a stage that couldn’t have held more than one mournful country singer and his ‘companiment. The tables we’d placed ourselves in front of had seen better days as well: inner workings torn out, there was merely a gaping hole in the side of each table where the chipped, faded (is that even possible?) balls would try to catch some rest before being sent back onto the tired felt battleground. While the delicate curves of the cues may have been aesthetically pleasing, they did little to enhance the game except add an element of surprise.

The only triumph of the place (the screw-drivers were rancid, thank-you for asking. Prince Igor cut with watery Sunny D for $3.50 a pop), was the beaten-up juke-box in the corner. 3 songs for a dollar, all of it classic rock. Things were starting to look up. We killed an hour or two thrashing each other at pool, cranking up the tunes, and having a good time.

Then one of the bouncers came over and unplugged the juke.

This caused some minor unhappiness amongst our group of adventurers, and we petitioned the bouncer for the reason the tunes had been killed. He responded that karaoke would be starting momentarily.

Oh goodness. That was what the undersized stage and dace floor were for!

Now, I don’t want to cast any shadows on the image of extreme manliness that I’ve been projecting thus far. But we closed that fucking bar on the karaoke stage. Once we got a good look at the catalogue, we couldn’t have done anything else. Oh, and Joel started hitting on a really skeezy woman, so the comedy factor was another reason to stick around.

Highlights of the evening:

1) Joel and Fluffy singing Don’t Stop Believing!, featuring Fluffy drunkenly ‘selling’ the song, and Joel standing still with one hand in his pocket looking at the floor.

2) Myself, rocking Boyz in tha Hood (as you can see, not the good version ), as a way around my poor singing ability.

3) Ben tearing into Enter Sandman and destroying the hearing ability (and faith in the youth of today) of the other patrons.

About halfway through the karaoke, Joel passed out on the table. Ben and Fluffy were up doing Down with the Sickness when he awoke. A terrible look came over his face and he made a bee-line for the front door. I assumed that he’d be going to puke. I wanted to stay and listen, and I figured he’d be back soon.

But he never returned. There is speculation as to whether he absconded with the skeeze, but he can’t remember, and other expeditions to the Dip (to be spoken of later) have failed to find her again.

Eventually, one of the karaoke dudes came by and collected the songbooks, warning us that it was last call both for booze and for songs. We elected to close the place down with Bohemian Rhapsody and successfully convinced the 10 or so other young people who’d filtered into the bar to join us.

After that we were presented with some swag for being generally awesome. Ben took a Coors Light bottle opener, and I took a water bottle that had been sponsored by a local cab company.

After that, Ben and I continued our tradition of extremely long walks late at night (which started last thanksgiving). This wasn’t a lovely old walk through suburbia talking of old times, though. This was a ‘dude, who wants to shell out on a cab? Let’s just foot it!’ sort of walk. Ben described the distance as ‘a walk from the Boar’s Head to my mom’s place’. Now, Ben’s mom has very recently moved into my family’s neighborhood, and the walk from there is like, 15 minutes. Tops. Approximately 25 minutes later, Ben clarified that he meant his mom’s old house. Which was out past Sobey’s.

Sunday was recovery, followed by dinner at an amazing restaurant whose name escapes me. I tried calamari for the first time. Ben and I also banged out a resume for me to show to the owner of his company. I know that that sounds dumb, but I’ve only ever had 3 jobs. And none of them required an interview. The resume I made for Co-op in 2006 likely doesn’t exist anymore, so I had to dig one up from scratch, with Ben’s templating and design skillz helping out extensively.

Monday morning he and Gemma left for their places of work at 6:30, leaving me a map to get there later and keys to lock the apartment. I took a shower, read some comics, and waited for the phone to ring. I was supposed to show up around 10 or 11 once the boss was settled in for the day. A call came at 9-ish telling me to hold off until 1pm. I lounged. The TV wouldn’t work, so I was forced to compulsively Stumble for a while. I walked across the street to a gas station just before noon and bought some really shitty gas station food for lunch. Then another phonecall came.

“Don’t bother coming in. Joel and Fluffy gave you such a good talk-up that he says you’re hired and needs to know when you’ll start. I’ll see you at 5.”

I took the iron horse back that evening in triumph, and spent the rest of the week preparing for a longer trip of an altogether different nature.

Well, that’s Part 1. But this is long enough already, so I’ll make Part 2 into its own story (Thereby eliminating the problem I introduced with my prolgue).

Chow.

Episodic Post #1:(If you don’t know what that means, read the post below first)

So, here we are in Episodic Post number one, collecting the earliest storried tale that my readers have missed out on. This is the story of how Liam ended his career as an Erection Specialist and stewed in self-righteousness for a while:

So, the erection business often found me called out to strage locales. An Erection Specialist is like a Grisly bear: we’re near the top of the food chain, and we need a lot of territory in order to stay solvent. Or alive, if we were sticking with the bear metaphor. Also, it only takes a few seconds of though to realize that the sort of people who order erections like ours need to have a few thousand square feet lying around not being used. So, I spent a lot of time in the country.

Obviously, I didn’t just fly there or something. We had a large cube-van which transported tents in the back and folks in the front. Except that there were only 2 chairs. And a lawn chair wedged between those 2 chairs.

Now, this was not an issue until about halfway through August. Earlier, the boss had come with us on big jobs and his pickup held 2 passengers (if you didn’t mind the garbage). Also, there had been a lull of 2 or so weeks with only small to medium size tents going up, mostly in town.

Then we got a call for a job in Wellesley. 40 by 100 (our largest standard tent), 200 chairs, 30 tables, and a 12 by 24 foot dance floor. It takes us an hour alone just to load the truck, and obviously for a tent this big we need the whole crew (4 people at this point). So, two in the front and another in the overflow lawn chair, but that still leaves one person without a seat. That person (after rock-paper-scissors, 2 out of 3) was me.

I climbed into the back of the truck and made myself a little nest out of tarps. Now, let me make one thing clear: This was (marginally) safer than it seems. The truck was packed to the gills because of all the tables, chairs, etc. There was nowhere for the load to shift to because it was crammed in wall to wall, and I was on top of it all, with nothing around me that wasn’t tied down.

Anyway, what with the darkness and the monotone thrumming of the motor, I fell asleep, only waking up at my co-worker’s valiant attempts to reverse the truck down the country lane we’d arrived at.

It was all downhill from there:

FIrst of all, we couldn’t get closer than 100 feet from the tent-site. We normally prefer 20 or less.

The clients couldn’t decide where they wanted it. 20 feet of margin in the x and y axes, and they spent at least half an hour figuring it out. Note: The tent is always packed onto the truck last so that we can get it out and get it up first. Without a place to put the tent there was no way (and no point) to unpack the rest of the truck.

After they picked, we began laying the tent out. First come the tarps (my former nest). They’re big, ugly, dirty, and grey, and they keep the tent from getting muddy before it gets put up. People always think that the tarps are tents and start to piss their pants wondering if they can get their money back as we roll them out.

Anyway, once the tarps are down, the tent comes out in 20 by 40 foot sections. In a 100 by 40 tent that means 5 of those sections laid one after another. We’d gotten the first two sections laid out on the tarps when:

The clients decided to move the tent again.

And then it rained.

Twice.

…

I got home 9 hours later. Frustrated by a hard day made unnecessarily harder, and by the fact that I’d had to cancel a private swim client in town because the job had run 3 hours late. I ate dinner, told the story of the day to my folks, and went to bed. We had an almost identical job in Ingersoll the next day.

However, fate had other plans for me that morning. As I was checking my email and preparing for the day, my father let himself into my room (terrible habit by the way), with the words, “You can’t go to work today”.

We proceded to argue for half an hour about my job and how they were abusing my rights as a worker by making me ride in the backs of trucks. This was shortly after that incident out west, so my dad’s massive concern was understandable, but still totally unwarranted.

Yes it was touching. Yes, I would be sad if he hadn’t expressed his concern. But that really didn’t change things for me. I liked that job, and I was well aware of the things I would be doing when I joined up.

By this time I had 10 minutes to dress, eat, and bike to work. I tried to be diplomatic and shelve the argument for that day.

My dad went off the scale. He stormed out of my room, leaving me to get dressed quickly, yelling for my mom to stop him from whatever he was going to do.

When I got downstairs he had already called my boss. He’d gotten the answering machine and left a terse message regarding ‘worker safety’ and asking to be called back immediately.

As I stormed out the door and got on my bike, he was on the phone with the Ministry of Labour, who shunted him over to the WSIB.

I got to the shop where we keep out inventory just as the guys with the truck were pulling in. As I put my bike inside I explained that there could be some issues with my working that day. Likely I wouldn’t be able to go on the job, but I’d help them load the truck.

As expected, 10 seconds after I’d told them that, they got a text from the boss simply saying “Don’t take Liam on the job today”.

An hour later, truck loaded, he called back.

“Since you’re unable to get yourself to jobs [he knew I couldn't drive], we’re going to have to let you go.”

And that was it. I haven’t seen or heard from any of my old co-workers since.

So that’s part one (how Liam lost his job), but what about part two?

Well, left on my own with no employment, I really didn’t have too much to do. And, coincidentally enough, my parents had planned a major renovation of our garage for that time of the summer. Crazy, hunh? And they really needed a hand re-roofing the place.

Now, to top this off, the work is being done by a handyman. Not a contractor (Wolfgang belabours me on this point constantly), although I have been told that he has a PhD in archtecture. Or something. He’s a massive hippy. Anyway, the point is that he’s not exactly WSIB compliant himself. This is a point which almost never matters, because he works alone and always does a good job.

So if it was him up on the roof with the 40 degree slope, with no fall restraint, no resperator, no work clothes, and no gloves, I wouldn’t care. After all, the guy can take care of himself.

But no, it’s me.

And what really gets me is the flaming hypocrisy of the situation. I get fired, and my father almost takes down the entire business in the process, all because of one unsafe incident.

And 2 weeks later I’ve been pushed into working for my father, for free, in an environment which contains multiple risk factors 100% of the time. Cutting inslation with a bread knife.

While balancing on 2x4s.

On the aforementioned 40 degree slope.

Which turned out to be a piece of cake. I was really missing those 2x4s once we’d covered the entire roof in plywood and I could only stand (lying down or otherwise distributing my weight lowered friction and I began slowly sliding off the roof.

But yeah. I still did it. it was for my parents, and I was leaving soon enough.

Stay Tuned for Episodic Post #2!