The End of the World as We Know it

I bought Fallout 3 when it came out the other day. Duh. It’s fairly similar to Oblivion, which I was hoping for (I liked Oblivion. I have never played Fallout. So sue me.) and it’s… really good. I was planning on posting about my various role-playing adventures in the game, but no reliable method of screenshot capturing stopped this immediately. (I got it for a console, not PC. Again; so sue me.)

So, a quick review:

Firstly, the character creator is fairly less in-depth then I’d hoped. Most of the guys look the same unless you move the sliders to ridiculous extremes, and any given face looks just about the same no matter what race you give it: unless you design a face to be Asian, you can’t just move the slider to “Asian” and make it look as such. Also, no matter what, your character will always sport the same scowl; you can’t change anything about the mouth except for the size and color. Also, why is the number of options related to facial hair so much less than that of regular hair?

The tutorial, however, was alot better: none of Oblivion’s “I have seen your face in the stars” nonsense; it actually makes you feel for Vault 101’s characters. When you leave the vault, practically nothing compels you to go anywhere, so you can just follow your instincts. A few other changes from Oblivion exist, some good, some not. First, the positive (I apologize for the bullets, but this time you can bypass the lawsuits and bite me):

• Items are repaired by using other items of a like nature, not repair hammers; so if you’ve got, say, two half-damaged handguns, you can use parts from one to fully repair the other.
• Your Pip-boy 3000, which replaces Oblivion’s journal, is actually a computer, which helps to explain some of it’s more esoteric features.
• Items and ammo are few and far between, and you’ll likely need all of them on long treks, assuming you don’t just fast-travel everywhere.
• The date is actually displayed in standard earth units, which helps you make vague comments (September already? I hear it’s feral ghoul season)

Of course, some of the changes suck as well. Namely:

• Dialogue: It’s fairly obvious wihich ones will earn you positive and which will earn yyou negative karma (For example, “Fuck you”, which is a disturbingly reccuring option, tends to not make you very popular)
• Character creation: You get way fewer features this time around, as I’ve mentioned.
• The world: why is it that, to get anywhere in the south end of the map, you have to travel through miles of subway tunnels?
• Currency: Why am I so poor?

All in all, I like the game, even though it’s sucking up all of my free time and I’m far more popular in the game world than I am in reality. Plus, you can shoot a guy so hard, his head falls off. His head.

A Piece of Resistance

I know, I know, you people (I’m still under the delusion that this site gets visitors) were expecting an update concerning pumpkin scooping. You want it? Alright. I’ll spare you no detail:

I arrived at the compound at 9:30am. These two women told  me to walk along a path to some “palettes”, which had pumpkins on them. At this point, I was expecting, y’know, painter’s palettes. For painting. So I followed the path along some admittedly cool-looking pumpkin carvings, which seemed to be expertly scooped (gulp). I reached the end of the path, looking around for some “palettes”. There were none. There was only a pavilion, which was roped off. I jumped the rope and serched around the area, finding just benches, knives, and several cans of Raid. Which is used for killing ants. Gulp.

But no palettes. I backtracked along the path, then tried taking the other path at a fork in the road I hadn’t noticed before, but it led to the same place. Fortunately, at this point, one of the people in charge came and pointed out some “palettes” (which are those wood grills you hit people with in Half-Life 2) that held about thirty pumpkins, and informed me that these were the rejected pumpkins (so, there’s a quality standard then. Dammit.) and needed to be moved ten feet to the left to rot away in piece. She gave me some gloves, and I started lugging them around. I figured out what the can of Raid was for at this point, by the way.

After that, which took about half an hour, she gave me the job that I did the rest of the time: Not scooping pumpkins, but moving them out of their boxes onto some other palettes (wood grilles). Not rotten ones, but newer, significantly heavier ones. She also told me to clean them, but I didn’t bother. After I did this for two hours, still no one had shown up, and I was dirtier than the pumpkins I was carrying.

So that’s why I didn’t update: It made a two-paragraph post. That’s it. Fortunately, Over the week I had not one, but two, public-restroom escapades (No, not like that. You have a filthy mind. Shame on you, imaginary reader.) They both took place between noon and one o’clock, both in the same school bathroom, and both sucked.

So, on Tuesday, I go to the bathroom. I, ahem, step up to the urinal and begin, as it were, and some guy walks up right to the urinal next to me. Now, this is in clear violation of guy code; there was a perfectly good urinal that wasn’t uncomfortably close to mine, which would have given the guy not one, but two (2!) buffer urinals. So, I blame this other kid for what happened.

My cell phone, which has the oh-so-convenient feature of simultaneously ringing and vibrating, went off. My pants started vibrating, and loudly emitting the Free Credit Report.com Song. The vibrating freaked the hell out of me , and the song definately scared the guy next to me, as he moved a urinal over. Like, while peeing. I have never seen someone successfully do that before. So, I answer the call, only to listen to some old guy asking for a Bradley. Ooh. Wrong number.

On Thursday, I had another rather interesting encounter. This time, I had just finished washing my hands, and there was no paper, so I wiped them off as best I could in my pockets, then pulled the door’s handle. Off. Like, the door’s handle became a separate entity from the door. And I was trapped. In the bathroom. Another person was in the bathroom with me, but he seemed quite busy in the stall (I mean he was taking a shit. Not that.) I managed to bang the handle onto the door, quite loudly, which probably creeped him out, and left. Later on in the day, by the way, I saw a guy leave and just take the handle with him. I wonder if it’s still gone.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering if the reasone I hadn’t been posting is that I got into the Resistance 2 beta, you’re totally incorrect. I did get into the beta, yes, but I’ve been largely unable to get into any games. The first day I had it, I was fine. It was awesome, even the severely nerfed carbine and shotgun. And the online Co-op is nice. Especially this one time where we had like six Ghostbusters Medics shooting at the ginat guys at once, and everyone started humming the Ghostbusters theme in perfect harmony. Beta gamers are polite like that, not like their “Dude I am so totally high right now” non-beta bretheren.

A Matter of Honor

So, I was contacted by the National Honor Society recently. Apparently, I’m part of an elite group consisting of everyone in my grade who fulfills the requirements necessary to join. When I saw the letter informing me of this, my initial reaction was, “Do I have to, like, do anything?”

Apparently, the answer to this is yes. They require forty bucks on my part, apparently to fund the important activities they perform, such as mailing letters and demanding money. In addition, they require at least twenty hours of community service, at least three of which have to be completed by the eleventh of November. Not too bad. In fact, they even gave us a sheet listing possible volunteer activities, such as:

• Scooping out pumpkin goop for a jack-o-lantern festival
• Visiting old people, who we’ve never met before and probably never will again
• Cleaning public buildings
• Making sandwiches

Clearly, they want us to aspire to gretness. Since I’ve never thought of myself as much of a “people person”, in that I never have interactions with people, at least not in person, the old people angle is out. I won’t much enjoy cleaning things, especially since my house is decorated in the popular “stuff everything in the closet” method. And, if I ever made someone a sandwich, they would only be able to use it as a sponge.

So, I had to go with the pumpkin-scooping job. I called the listed number, but got to her answer machine, which stated, “We no longer require pumpkin scoopers. If, however, you were to leave your name and number, there is a slight chance we have an opening for you. Thank you.” I left a message, not expecting much. Fortunately, by some miracle, she called back, telling me to come on Sunday for three hours. Which is a convenient amount of time, to say the least. So, I’m going there tomorrow, to scoop goop out of pumpkins for three hours straight. Sounds like fun, no?

Oh, also happened this week: I bought these four awesome shirts. Which brings my grand total number of awesome shirts to… four.

Get Active

Not physically, I mean. That hurts too much, what with the pulling of tendons and the moving and the muscles contracting and the joints turning and the tendons stretching and all sorts of other nouns verbing. I meant this website. Which has been inactive since around September. In case anyone has been paying attention.

This is not because my life hasn’t been busy. In fact, my life has been surprisingly interesting lately. Too interesting. Now that it’s resuming regularly (except for PSAT’s tomorrow, which are these silly tests that tell us how well we would do on a test if we took it with a year’s worth less information than we will be) I can once again post with aplomb. (Look in a dictionary).

So, what has been happeneing? Well, I got into the LittleBigPlanet Beta, for one thing. It was cool, but I did notice a little thing. See, the beta went active on the 23rd. Of September. At around this point, I got tons of emails telling me to go to Sony’s official homepage. I didn’t. October came around. The beta continued. Sony, apparently, had wanted, wanted, to give me a beta code, but I, fearing salespeople, had shied away from their site. Great. So then, finally, on the eighth, Sony finally, begrudgingly, sent me a code.

Yay! Except… the beta ran out less than a week later. So, I missed out on fifteen whole days of awesome. But I can only guess that they did this because I didn’t go to their site. I will be going to the websites much more often now. That Resistance 2 Beta’s just around the corner.

As for the beta’s actual content, it was pretty cool. They gave us a handful of editing tools, way too many stickers, and the first area from the game (including the final iteration of the first level we saw, an awesome throwback). A few qualms, however- most notable with lag and the fact that gamers, appaerently, are not very creative. I noticed LittleBigColossus standing out from the pack, as did… wait… there’s gotta be another one…

So there’s that. Other exciting things that heppened whilst I was gone? Well, I became quite excited about the upcoming Fallout 3. After all, it features a unique experience concerning blah blah blah you can punch a guy so hard, his head falls off. That deserves a look-see. Plus, it’s made by that same guys as Oblivion, which I liked. A lot. Even though I got… wait for it… THE CONSOLE VERSION. I KNOW. Apparently, there’s some sort of unwritten rule that allows PC gamers to subjugate and cutterly control the lesser, console-playing masses. Judging from forums, this seems to be the general attitude. So, please accept my apologies. Also, if it makes anything better, I do occationally play Peggle.

Also, my body was recently brutally assaulted by some kind of martian death virus clearly not of this world. Perhaps this explains the headaches, stomachaches, armaches, and aches in various other body parts as well. I am thankful this is over with, as sickness effectively halves all my stats. Should I continue the metaphor, or end the article? I thought so.

Spirit Weak

Welp, Spirit Week just ended at my school. About time. You see, the whole thing was pretty much an exercise in pointlessness. What is this? You get a bunch of teenagers, tell them to wear the most ridiculous outfits imaginable, and tell them that it “builds pride in your class”. Well, I don’t know about you, but I would have a lot more pride in a school whose students didn’t dress like morons.

Monday: Western day

Ugh. Monday’s bad enough without being surrounded by people shouting, “Howdy!” and wearing hats clearly created a a joke. Most people wore jeans and flannel, the itchiest material known to man (besides burlap), as well as a cowboy hat they got when they were four. Be aware that, under New York State laws, about half of these people can legally drive.

Tuesday: Twin day

Today, the object was to dress exactly the same as somebody else. Granted, we do this every day, but today we made a big thing about it. Now, not to be sexist, but the males and females all wore things along the same lines: The guys all wore either jeans and a nondescript shirt, whereas girls wore entire outfits designed for the specific purpose of being worn on this day (for example, I saw two sets of Doublemint Twins). Notice the alliteration. (Tuesday-Twin) I used this in my argument for Miniskirt Monday, but this particular request was turned down.

Wednesday: Class day

Today, each class had to wear a different thing. Unfortunately, most of the cagegories were really, really generic, which meant that everyone in a particular class wore variations of the exact same thing. For example, the freshmen had to dress as nerds. They all -every last one- wore a plaid shirt tucked into jeans, and accented with large glasses. The sophomores had to dress as superheroes, and so all wore a cape. The juniors had to dress up “in a futuristic manner”, and all wore tin foil. The seniors had the theme “party animals” and all wore either a single party hat, or an extensive, expensive, full-body animal suit… with a single party hat.

Thursday: Dress to impress.

We had to dress to impress. This meant either black, white, or beige, and included pants, a jacket, and a dress shirt. This is logical. I wanted to do this one, if only because we actually looked respectable. But I couldn’t. See, the last time I had to “dress to impress” was at my friend’s Bar Mitzvah. in 2006. The only thing that fit me was a black shirt I vaugly remembered buying, and I just wore the darkest jeans I owned on the basis that they looked like dress pants to anyone who had been blind since birth. As someone remarked, I was “dressed to depress.” Ha. Puns are funny.

Thursday, part deux: Boneheaded American almost fractures wrist.

During a commercial break during the Colbert Report, I decided, out of nowhere, to try and balence myself on a basketball. This struck me as perfectly normal at the time. Don’t even ask. I almost got it, but then the basketball, totally ignoring my instructions, flew off to the side. I fell squarely on my left hand, which didn’t hurt so badly except for the fact that my wrist still hurts, three days later, and that all the blood and air rushed out of my chest, so I almost fainted, and that I ended up missing the rest of the show. Damn.

Friday: White and Maroon Day

Our school colors are white and maroon. Now, these are actually pretty badass colors, but after careful comparison I feel that black and maroon is just so much more so. Ah, well. Today sucked. For one thing, everyone was chanting either two- or four-syllable chants that convenitently required little brain activity to come up with or remember. They were all making a really big deal out of the Homecoming game, which was apparently between my school and this huge rival. Or something. I don’t really care about football teams; to me, I only watch football to watch football. The actual winner or losing of the game is irrelevant. This, presumably, is not the approach taken by most people. So, here I am, with my wrist pulsating, enveloped in a sea of maroon and white, with people shouting and high-fiving (ow) all around me. This, or course, culminated in a pep rally.

Now, pep rallies were events designed in 1939 by Nazi scientists who wished to weaken American culture to the point where it could be easily beaten by a stick. Unfortunately for them, we had control of various forests that produced synthetic rubber.  But we still were unable to defeat them quickly enough to stop the pep rally from permeating our country.

You see, as far as I can tell, the object of pep rallies is to see which school has the loudest, most obnoxious dicks. There were people running around, screaming and hitting things. People jumped up and down on bleachers. Air horns, and whistles, were blown. People disrobed and painted letters on themselves (however, pep rallies also lower IQs to the point where people cannot remember which letter is supposed to stand where, so you would end up with, say, NISERSO where SENIORS should have been)

Even worse, this pep rally was a semi-mandatory event. I was almost going to be among the lucky ones who managed to nonchalantly sneak out of the school, until a screaming, shirtless dick grabbed me and – this is true- shoved me into the gym.

In case you were wondering, my school won both the football game and the loudest, most obnoxious dick contest.