The adventures of Zook

Writer's Block: A Few of the Challenges I Face

2009-07-11T04:00:51Z

What challenges stand in the way of your ideal lifestyle? How are you working to overcome them?

Presented by Intel, Sponsors of Tomorrow.

Challenges? Money. Money. Money. Money.

Laziness. My own inherit slothiness.

What will I do?

Nothing. Or, maybe something. Maybe I'll figure out what the hell I'm doing and be less of an idiot in the future. That's a distinct possibility.

I have a lot of thoughts floatinng around in my head. The thoughts are great, creative, funny, spontaneous. Cohesive. I have these thoughts so much that i forget to commit them to paper -- so in my mind it feels fresh, as if I've done something, but in reality I've done nothing. It exists only in my head, like one key to a safe of precious jewels that could be lost with just one slight bump.

Writer's Block: Transportation

2008-10-14T03:39:52Z

In the past they promised us jetpacks for the future. We’re still waiting. What is your ideal mode of transportation? Has it been invented yet?

View 500 Answers

Giant scorpions.

Me and Billy the Tree-Eating Scorpion would tear it up.

Take it like a man, but not in the face.

2008-04-04T16:52:12Z

I started writing again.
I'm aiming a bit smaller as a warm-up this time, a 30pagish short story that I'm going to publish on Amazon's Kindle or on-demand book publishing thing.
I've been trying to pull myself out of this apathetic state that hang over me. Hopefully I'll there soon.

Dude, what?!

2008-03-12T03:47:45Z

Another killer headache again.

Hope it's not a brain tumor.

Optimism, right?

It's on Craigslist!

2008-03-08T23:46:45Z

People I've "met" via CraigsList:

* A Carnie / Sub pretending to be a Dominatrix
* A handful of bored wives looking for excitement.
* Two psych majors who think I'm batshit crazy.

Guess that makes me a crazy magnet. :)

Throbbing headache right now. I want to get back to writing, but if I can't even keep this blog up to date, how am I supposed to do that?

I'm going to write some tonight, hopefully 8 or 9 pages...

Enter the Dragon?!

2008-01-29T09:16:28Z

Have you ever wanted to be a kung-fu legend? Wanted to feel what it was like to destroy legions of foes with well-placed strikes that took you years to hone somewhere deep in Tibet.

I've always wanted to be extraordinarily adept at annihilating people with a rogue touch, but that would mean I'd be a different person than I am now.

But it would be cool if I knew how to do it. I could be all, "Flying lotus blossom! Angry turtle spits sunflower seeds!"

I, uh, yeah, that's it.

People who think Infarto is real: rofl

2008-01-20T07:56:37Z

Infarto ('heart-attack' in Spanish?) is an awful fake reality TV show. That's not interesting.

What is interesting, however, is that some people state-side think it's real.

Hello? Have you motherfuckers seen that show? What planet are you on? Even if it WERE real, there'd have been a lawsuit or a murder by now -- and trust me, some of those situations are the kind where you could kill everyone involved in production and get away with it, or at least get off with an extremely light sentence.

It is, however, watchable if only for it's awful acting. Yes, stare at the camera while pretending to be on a reality TV show. Also, when faced with imminent death, don't beg for your life! Instead, say some completely random sentence that you heard once from an American movie.

I wonder if exporting good actors to Mexico would be a profitable business venture?

The Legend of Black Heaven / Kacho-Oji

2008-01-20T04:06:08Z

Watch it.

1999, and a little corny, but still, good stuff.

The Legend of Black Heaven... hard rock saves the space!

Call of Duty 4: MegaFail.

2007-12-30T03:07:22Z

Man, fuck. Everyone on my Friends list was playing this game, but I had played the multiplayer beta and was like, "Well, I've already got one generic First Person Shooter, why another?"

Eventually I relented, got it two days ago, and finished the single-player today. Would not recommend it -- the singleplayer, I mean. Easily the most awful generic game I've ever played. I played Call of Duty 2 once, a long time ago, and I remember it was so fucking cinematic and epic (I only stopped playing it because of 'cheating AI').

Where was I? Oh, CoD4 single-player is bullshit in a can labeled 'Delicious Tomato Soup.' It is, literally, "Generic Military Shooter."

Multi-player is another matter. Sometimes it's golden, sometimes it's "why the fuck am I playing this?"

Game needs more polish. You ever play a game of capture the flag in any game where the enemy spawned right next to the flag? Welcome to CoD4's Headquarters and Domination mode.

Here's another bundle of fun: roaming spawns. Nothing will ruin a sniper's day more than an ally appearing RIGHT NEXT him while the sniper is trying to sneak up on opposing forces. Roaming spawns also render C4 virtually obsolete, since there's no "strategic" way to use them. The only games I've found them effective in is Search and Destroy -- no respawns, so there's none of this assorted bullshit occuring:

* Your team steps into a woodland area, securing the choke-points.
* You setup a block of C4.
* You setup a block of C4.
* You're killed because an enemy spawned behind you, BEHIND YOUR DEFENSIVE PERIMETER.

Yeah. That's super-fun-tactical. I once just lobbed some C4 over a wall and detonated it right after, killing a few guys. So far that seems to be the best way to use it -- as "close range" grenades.

I was really hoping for a more tactical game like Rainbow Six. You know, holding down key choke-points on a map, flanking an enemy that's breached the defensive line. The firefights at a RSV choke-point can be fucking cinematic.

CoD4 has its own style of tactical fighting, but it's mostly about your team moving around in large "blobs" rather than, say, attacking the enemy's forward position while flanking, because, rest assured, motherfuckers on your own team will start spawning next to the flanker, thus destroying your own front-line. I learned that really, really quick.

"Organized" team work is relatively absent, since it's not really required for one team to put up a pretty decent fight. IE, no choke-points to hold since the front-line always changes with every enemy (or ally) death, etc, etc, etc. The most I've seen in the game is when playing Search and Destroy allies will call out the position of the bomb carrier. Play some Domination and sometimes you'll get sporadic teamwork ("let's go for objective C!") but nothing that really gets you going like in Rainbow Six Vegas.

Smaller games (3v3 or 4v4) work out a little better, since everyone seems to live a little longer, but it's not really that much of a difference.

It is a good deathmatch / team deathmatch game, but since I don't have a particular fetish for military-themed shooters over sci-fi themed shooters, it definitely wasn't worth the $60 for me.

I give it a 6/10. Single-player is a big bucket of fail, so all 6 points go straight for the jugular. Uh, jugular? Multi-player.

Merry Christmas.

2007-12-24T22:30:44Z

I am a loser.

In an attempt to counter-balance that, I'll be uploading 2 chapters of SoS to the usual place later tonight. They're only about 6, 7 pages total, but since I've been a slouch and neglected the whole goddamn site for almost a year, it's the least I can do.

I used to think, "work sucks the creativity out of me."

Untrue!

I'm just lazy. I've had it in me all this time, but I've been too damn lazy to unleash it... like warming up a generator, takes too long and I get bored and distracted too easily.

I need a muse. Or a crazy BDSM mistress who keeps me going. Or a muse that is a crazy BDSM mistress.

I need more POWER

2007-11-24T20:36:27Z

so I can use it to keep random women from crushing on me.

I feel like I'm the last man standing sometimes. Yeah, bitch, I said something nice to you -- you've got nice hair. I don't want to turn your ass out with my admittedly large-and-in-charge penis. Not right now, anyway. Back off.

BACK THE FUCK OFF.

I might be partially to blame -- I guess I innately know the right things to say for a given situation, and it must give me the appearance of the 'Ideal Man.' Minus the money, the boats, the charm, and the fame.

IRONY OF IRONIES <-- that's DOUBLE THE DAILY DOSE OF RECOMMENDED IRONY --> I'm not really interested in using my power to bed people, although that's exactly what this superhuman ability was meant for.

So, I need more POWER. Maybe i need ANTI-POWER. You know, to keep my uncontrollable powers, controlled. Wouldn't that be nice?

Whatever.

There's a time for dancing...

2007-11-19T20:27:40Z

Alright, no more lazy. I'll start working on my book again today.

Kane and Lynch: Dead Men // Fragile Alliance

2007-11-19T03:17:00Z

I completely forgot to talk about the games underrated multiplayer mode, "Fragile Alliance."

The premise is simple: rob a bank, together. Or, betray your comrades, kill them and take their share of the loot. Of course, the dead come back as angry officers of the law, and with a 10% finders fee of how much money they recover...

When I heard of it, I thought it possibly couldn't be any good. Sounded stupid: I assumed everyone at the end would just turn on each other and fight it out Death Match style until there was one last man standing to escape.

Turns out its a lot different from that. For one, you can escape at ANY time: if you betray a team-mate and are suddenly standing there with $600k burning a hole in your back pocket, you can head to the extraction point and escape -- without having to share a dime. So, if you find yourself in two-men teams, and the guy with you has bagged some serious cash, its tempting to pop him right then and there then make a run with the money.

It breeds a serious amount of adrenaline pumping paranoia, too: my very first match, I was playing with some achievement whores. One of the dead (really dead -- killed by the cops, then killed by us) team-mates kept saying, "kill him, man, you've almost got 2 million, just kill him and take his cash." Him being me, I mainly ignored it until the guy said "kill him" again and the very last guy left on the map with me started running in my direction. I immediately removed his face with a lead massage and left the map with almost 3 million dollars all to myself.

Fragile Alliance is definitely to be played, even though the shine wears off after a couple of hours.

Kane and Lynch: Dead Men

2007-11-19T02:57:57Z

Verdict: OKish.

The controls are kind of sticky. Gun accuracy isn't too well. The friendly AI is borderline psychotic (like Lynch): they'll either run into your line of fire and crouch in front of you (?!), or they'll bravely run out into battle (talking about you, Lynch) with just a shotgun as they're being raped by long range rifle fire coming in from every direction. Lynch always starts off with a shotgun, but trading it out for an assault rifle is a no brainer -- his shot is awful either way, but with the assault rifle he won't run out from cover and get blown to hell.

If you were wondering, the rest of your squad has a bit better aim, but they're not as valuable as your comrades from Rainbow Six: Vegas.

Story wise, starts off strong. Gets real interesting -- but then, all of the sudden, towards the end of the game it turns into a freakin' *war-sim*, and completely looses its uniqueness. Went from jail-breaks, and running through the streets of Tokyo while under sniper-fire to boring, slow-paced war-in-the-middle-east style fighting. If you're familiar with BioShock, this is similar to the point where they stopped plot progression completely and turn the adventure into straight run-and-gun action. Yeah, it's that bad. In Kane and Lynch, they just... stop. There's no more character development at all. The story for all intents and purposes is just over.

There are two endings, but one of t hem is so awful that it shouldn't have even been left in the game.

Anyway, I give it a C+ -- good effort, but it just sort of falls apart for no apparent reason at the point where things should have become deeper and more meaningful.

As an addeum:

2007-10-31T03:31:31Z

They delayed Army of Two until 2008.
You. Freaking. Savages.

What I've been up to lately?

2007-10-31T03:28:57Z

In two words or less, anonymously blogging.

After reading this guide to anonymous blogging and then the EFF's recommendations I considered it way too much work if I wanted to just rail on someone or something. I didn't want to make a Blogger.com or LiveJournal or WordPress account because that would mean more usernames, more passwords, and eventually I'd get too familiar and comfortable and let something stupid slip on a post and not realize it. When you've got a collection of postings you can attribute to one entity, you can infer certain data from that -- where they live, where they work, etc, etc, etc.

So, as a weekend hack, I created FearlessBlogging.com, threw up some ads on it (because all good websites have ads), and generated enough traffic to the site to have plausible deniability. ;)

Now I can pop on the site, let something god awful slip, and then vanish into the crowd. Or, I can stick around and respond to comments on it (in theory) for awhile. I don't keep logs or anything, but I do collect anonymous visitor stats to satisfy the voyeur in me. So far, the three or four times I've actually used it, it's a lot easier than getting a new account somewhere. Yeah, I know, I am *seriously* lazy.

The site also makes for something to do when I don't have anything to do, because I know that sentence made PERFECT sense.

Not sure which one of you wrote it...

2007-10-13T00:25:22Z

...but i more or less share the same opinion on this. Compare the stuff you hear on the radio today vs some Indie hip-hop guys like K-Os and it's a world of difference.

I got in the Call of Duty 4 beta!

2007-09-13T23:58:58Z

Gorgeous graphics. Good sound effects. Beautiful world. The guns feel very, ah, gun-like and when the heavy machine-gun purrs you can really feel it.

Matchmaking is 'heavily inspired' by the Halo series, which is a fancy way of saying that its completely identical. It's great, except that it doesn't respect preferred playing language -- every lobby I've joined we've got people speaking English, French, and some other fucked-up language... all on the same goddamn team.

Thankfully you don't really need to communicate with other players that much, because its pretty much straight deathmatch no matter what game-mode you play.

There's not too much strategy to how the game operates aside from the basic death-match battle strats -- camp, run and gun, never turn your back. There's random spawns, so you don't really know if any area is "secure" -- more than once someone has just arrived out of the blue, just in time to shiv me in the back. me in the back. In, say, Rainbow Six, this wouldn't have happened because they'd have to move through a choke-point to get behind me, but because of the way CoD4 works, there's a good chance they just spawned behind me and saw me on radar.

The way radar works is kinda OK, but not ideal for someone who likes playing more strategic shooters. Firing an unsilenced weapon puts you on the radar as a red dot. It gives away your EXACT position, rather than just the general location you fired from. It leads to a lot of run-and-gun, since once you've opened fire there's a good chance you'll be attacked from multiple sides if you just stay there. It also fucks up any "covert" style strategies -- you've got exactly one chance to kill as many people as possible once you've let off your first shot. Couple that with the spawn system -- which apparently drops players on your team next to you if there are no bad guys nearby -- and you've got one really hectic battlefield.

I think I'll be passing on it -- I'm getting Halo 3 for sure, and since I'm not really deep into run-and-gun deathmatch games, I'll have it to feed my desires for random mayhem.

I'll probably still be playing Rainbow Six Vegas for the near future.

Game Rant - Company Of Heroes

2007-09-13T23:38:21Z

I just finally got around to finishing Company of Heroes today. The game has some good strategy elements, but the campaign missions start to lose their charm after the first, "Omaha Beach"-style mission.

It's a world war II strategy game, focused on maneuvering small squads of forces into enemy territory to capture resource points and crush those wankers on the other team. Like most strategy games, you're locked into a fairly basic unit set at the beginning, generally progressing as you move through the campaign to more and more advanced units -- my favorite pet peeve about strategy games. Gimme all the good shit at the beginning -- if I wanna spend an hour on the first mission building up a super army to crush a basic enemy strong-hold, let me.

There's a "feature" called, I guess they're medals of honor, something like that. Basically for completing certain non-critical objectives you get a medal. One medal per mission. Some of the medals are boring and trivial to get, some of them are completely retarded, and some just don't make any sense. For instance, there's a mission where your objective is to hold a freshly liberated town from a German counter-attack for about 30 minutes. To get this mission's medal, you have to kill 250 enemy troops. Sounds good, right?

Well, wrong. You see, as you kick ass and take names, the game is apparently scripted so that you lose the center of the city when you've got about 5 minutes left until the reinforcements arrive. My second time through this mission -- after I had beaten the game -- I had launched an all out offensive on the German forces as they marched into the town, and completely annihilated every wave, right up until the scripted artillery strikes kicked in and wiped out a big chunk of my forces. No worries -- there was a secondary base deeper in the town that was pumping out units, so when the Germans marched into that part of the town I quickly dealt with them.

The problem was, of course, I was nowhere near the 250 kills -- even though I was slaughtering the opposing forces. By the time the game ended, I had 225/250 -- 25 short, even though no German squad actually escaped the town once they had appeared on radar and I engaged them with my own units. The last mission, coincidently, is similar -- kill 300 enemy units... but the twist is, if you actually follow the mission objectives and are a decent player (which you should be, since this is the last mission) you'll clean up the enemy forces attacking you and complete the mission in about 30 minutes, well, well short of the required 300 enemy kills.

There's another completely arbitrary medal objective that punishes players who don't tank rush the mission, but its not worth discussing. Basically, the medal system in the game is bullshit -- they're just random objectives someone added at the last minute in order to add "replay value" for missions that aren't good enough to replay again just for kicks.

Yeah, the missions aren't good. There are a few gems like the first mission, and another mission in the middle that was OK but not good enough to really remember. The rest are just bullshit filler, intermission until you can slough through to the end of the game. The final mission...

...which is easily the worst last level in a game I've ever played. That mission is pure bullshit, start to finish. Not only is it the easiest mission in the game, it's also not epic. The last level in a game should be legendary - it should be the part of the game you rave to your friends about, the part of the game where you scream obscenities and rack up a pyramid of Dr Pepper cans while playing it.

I won't spoil it, but the last mission isn't exactly the big bang you've come to expect from games. It's subdued, subdued in a bad way, and completely disinteresting. Did I mention it only took me about 25 minutes to finish on "normal" -- or medium, or whatever the default is. I don't play games on their hardest settings because the game mechanics usually change to something stupid, like the enemy AI having economy bonuses or better hp / armor or other random bullshit. If you can't tell, I'm one of those people that get annoyed when the AI gets a ton of handicaps that aren't related to the campaign mission.

This is the part of the entry where I'd write about the Axis campaign, if there was one.

Yeah, there isn't. It's 15 missions, allied only. Yeah, a strategy game where you don't play the other side. They're still making those? Apparently.

Anyway, I give this game a 7/10 -- the strategy mechanics are really good, but the single player is bullshit. It's fun to play on Skirmish mode or with other players, but that's about it.

Dear Kroger Girl,

2007-08-25T21:26:48Z

I'm sorry for not flirting with you.

I didn't have anything to eat that day -- I got up, took a shower, paced a little, and then went immediately to get some groceries. I normally get fast food before i do any shopping for the day, but I just didn't feel like making a run at Krystal's that day.

So, by the time I got to the counter where you were standing, I was:

hungry,
tired,
hungry,
still kinda wet from the shower,
and lastly, hungry.

You're a cute girl, Kroger Girl, and I was totally digging your earrings, but I'm just not On when I'm starvin', so that's why I just nodded and mumbled "have a great day" instead of teasing you after I signed my credit card receipt.

It wasn't you -- it was me!

About me!

2007-08-21T01:07:16Z

A subject that is rarely spoken of, by myself or others -- me!

I'm awesome.

But enough about my awesomeness.

I've taken to feeling that a lot of people think I'm easily influenced or malleable in some sense. This is probably because it *seems* like I am. Seems being the key word here.

In reality its a mixture of apathy, indifference, and the exact opposite of the last two things I just mentioned. When dealing with indifference / apathy, as long as something isn't particularly annoying or I have designs against it, I'll just go with the flow. However, when I don't want to -- and that happens a lot -- I don't. Most people don't see that side of me because I tend not to group with those kinds of people, but occasionally some motherfucker comes along and gives it the old "Heave, Ho!" anyway and I end up having to humiliate them or look at them LIKE I'm about to humiliate them, which is almost as good as the genuine thing.

Anyway, that's all for now.

I'm bored.

2007-07-31T05:31:23Z

Bored, tired, and lonely.

Yeah, that deserved a whole post didn't it?

I hve 8 cavities!

2007-07-29T07:02:49Z

Yet another reason that I'm with a new dentist now -- that old motherfucker I was with for most of my life didn't bother to tell me I had EIGHT CAVITIES, even though I paid extra for those motherfucking bite-wings they do for the sole reason of detecting cavities.

The bite-wings are like 40 bucks extra!

Geez, what an ass-hat the old guy was.

Anyway, they put me under Nitrus Oxyde for the drilling. I don't really like drugs of any kind -- prescription or otherwise -- because I've always been afraid that they'll alter my state of mind, make things worse, more fuzzy and clouded than they are now.

But under The Influence was strange. It's been almost 10, 12 years since I've had my teeth drilled. That hour and a half with the drill in my mouth, my mind has never been clearer. I could actually *think*, the monologue of my mind flowed perfectly, no interrupts, no erratic schisms. I didn't have to do one goddamn "do-over" because something went wrong.

I'm going to have to learn to meditate or something to get that kind of concentration and focus on-demand. That is a state of mind I can't afford to lose forever. It's just too good.

Zelda: Twilight Princess

2007-07-19T04:47:33Z

Awesome. Hell, even if it turns out to be the only game worth buying on the Wii, it's totally worth it.

It's been a long time since I played a game that I was truly *satisfied* with. The last game like that I can remember was Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Like Snake Eater, Twilight Princess is amazing in every way that's important for a video-game. Oh, and it looks freakin' gorgeous. And it's fun to play. The last battle is great.

Hopefully the next Zelda Wii game will come soon, and be just as good as the last one.

Work be damned.

2007-07-11T05:26:17Z

I had to work TWO 9 hour days back to back, and that really pisses me off. By the time I'm done, nobody is around -- 'specially people I need to talk to.

Tomorrow I have to go to the dentist in the afternoon, so that sucks up a couple of hours. Then I have to get back and call Microsoft about my Xbox which should have been fixed by now but isn't so goddamn Microsoft (etc).

I don't think I'll be working tomorrow. I need a day off.