With the wife and my tiny female quasi-clone out 'o town, I spent most of the weekend on my couch playing Mercenaries with my Xbox hooked up to the home theater.  I LOVE that game.  You've got to love core gameplay that revolves around blowing shit up.  Did I mention that I love blowing shit up?  If this were a real blog that people read and not just for my personal amusement, I would post some screens of shit blowing up here.  But that's way too much trouble.  My current video card doesn't have video capture so I would have to take pictures of my craptastic 27 inch low def TV.  And I'm just not going to stoop to that level.  Maybe I'll post some PC gaming screens later.  Probably pics of me flying something Russian in IL-2 or LOMAC.  I would love to post me gibbing someone in TF2 but it's really hard to take action shots while you play, especially when you're not very good in the first place.

Whew, I got away with preserving my half assed, hack attempt at writing in google cache forever without any injuries.  Now when my great great grandkids google roosterfeet they will be able to find my work.  That's why I'm never telling them my username.  I don't want them talking about how grandpa was a douche for generations after I'm gone.

In other news, I fucking hate Gamestop even more that Best Buy now.  The other day I bought a used copy of Mercenaries for Xbox and an S-video cable so I could enjoy some 2003 style gaming while the wife and baby are out of town.  The cable had a busted pin and the game wouldn't load.  I wound up wasting my whole night operating on the cable and buffing the game disk with a cloth diaper.  The result is a working cable and the cleanest, shinyest, coaster I've ever seen.  So I'll take the game back to Gamestop this afternoon.  Hopefully the console gaming only smacktards that work there will be able to find a solution that involves me playing Mercenaries for less that $20.  At this point I don't care if it's the PS2 version, I just want a copy that works.  I managed to get in a game of Gears PC online and loaded up ARMA for the first time.  Both look like pretty promising multiplayer options if I can just find some active servers.

So Giant Bomb is live and it looks like it is going to pretty much eliminate the need for game entries on wikipedia.  The thing is a massive public gaming encyclopedia, review site, and social network.  One of the obscene number of features is blog space for all of us ubergeeks that get excited about the stuff in the last sentence.  We don't even have to register a Typepad account for j33bus sake.  So allow me to earn my "I made a blog post for the first time ever" achievement.  I present to the 'series of tubes and not a big truck,' for your amusement and riddicule, a piece of short fiction that in all likelyhood, only my mother will read (if I tell her about it).


The Hole

The car groaned to a halt, grey steam and a foul odor were hissing into space from under the hood.  Jim got out to inspect the damage.  It occurred to him that he had no idea why the engine stopped running and that he would still have no idea if he spent the rest of the morning looking at it.  It further occurred to him that the rush of steam escaping his vehicle meant that it was probably too dangerous to look anyway.

            Jim recognized that his biggest problem was neither the car breaking down nor being completely lost.  It was definitely the combination of the two.  Plus the fact that he was profoundly drunk.  He tried to ignore the probability that the latter had a cause and effect relationship with one or more of the former.  He had far too much on his mind: being lost; his girlfriend leaving him; his girlfriend leaving him for Chad; his girlfriend leaving the bar with Chad; and how badly he needed to urinate.

            It was the need to urinate that drove Jim away from the highway and into the woods.  A subconscious desire not to be seen piss drunk and urinating next to a smoking car, which may or may not have hit something metal and attached to ground, also played a role in Jim’s decision to take a stroll in the woods.

            Once Jim felt that he was far enough into the woods to avoid being seen he went to work searching for a satisfying looking bush to relieve himself on.  During his brief search he tripped over a root and fell on his face.  He brushed himself off and removed a pine cone from his hair.  He decided that the tree responsible for his trip to the ground was a prime target of opportunity and proceeded to unzip.  Once he was finished ‘getting back to nature’ he came to yet another stop on the day’s short bus of realization.  He had no idea which way led back to the highway.  There was no discernable path to follow so he decided to use his favorite and least successful decision making technique and ‘go with his gut.’

            Jim’s gut took him precisely eleven steps before he found it.  ‘It’ was a very deep hole in the ground concealed beneath brush and fallen leaves.  Gravity took him on his fateful twelfth step into the hole. 

Jim fell screaming for several minutes.  When he was done screaming he began worrying about the inevitable sudden stop and end to his life that waited for him at the bottom.  After a few more minutes he stopped being concerned about his mortality and started wondering just what the hell kind of hole it was he had fallen into.  He was considering the possibility that he had died and had almost gotten around to the unpleasant ramifications of falling down an extremely deep, dark hole, post death, when he was saved from such unpleasantries by the sudden stop at the bottom that had previously occupied his mind.

He awoke on top of an enormous pile of old socks, car keys, parking garage tickets, and innumerable pens and pencils.  He had no explanation for where he was other than in a dream.  The searing pain calling from every bone, joint, and muscle of his body however, told him that he was not.  He slowly heaved himself into a vertical position and was able to discern three things.  Nothing was broken.  Unless every world religion was completely wrong, he was not dead.  And he was unquestionably lost.