Stumpy Kitten

Finally got our working schedule for next week. Some people got Fridays and Saturdays off, but I got Sunday and Monday off. Booya. As such, I also get a 3 day weekend this week. Booyax2. Caitlin also has Mondays off. Booyax3.

The actual hours are swanky: 1:30am to 8:00pm which means my hours are synched with Shane's.

That would be Booya + Booya + Booya + Booya. Ya.

I get to be rich, sleep in, AND stay up late.

Back at school...er...work...again.

HR is coming in today to learn us some Harrasment training. I assume they mean in prevention of Harrasment, but I can hope.

We got our teacher a couple of Transformers and GIJoe Crossover comics for a "Thanks for not being a hardass like most of the other trainers supposedly are" present. He will really like 'em.

Last night was awesome. Got home from work at 3:30. Read for an hour. Fell asleep. Woke up at 6:30. Ate vile hotdogs which I will ONCE AGAIN vow never to purchase and eat. Read for 10 minutes. Came up with some fun ideas for D&D characters for this weekend. Fell alseep for another hour. Woke up when Shane got home. Yabbered. Fell alseep until 4am this morning. Best. Day. Ever.

Yeah, so D&D this weekend if all goes well. Playing with Shane's group, consisting of buds from his work and formerly from his work and their wives and stuff. Should be pretty fun to introduce them to my brand of character. Heh, only Shane knows the possibilities, but I will be nice the first little while until I find out how far the DM will let me go and the stages of each other player's rage. Heeee.

I guess I'm done blogging...but the teacher is still not back...went to get something or other...still no word on our shift bids. It'd be nice to know what hours I'll be working NEXT WEEK, but whatever. I just hope they don't jump us with it on Friday and say "You all have to work HORRIBLE hours THIS WEEKEND!".

Bite, slash, claw. Yeah.

Phone should be hooked up tomorrow. That'd be nice. Internet would be nicer. This weekend will be super.

Yeah, got 100% on the 10 minute multiple choice, open resource 'midterm'.

Yeah.

I'm in claaaassss
Sittin' on ma aassss

It's so frickin' boooorin'
Everyone is snooooorin'

It's like a country soooong
Where the singer whiiiiiiines

I'm gonna stab out my eyesssss
Just for somethin' to doooooo

*cue sorrowfull guitar music*

At least blogger isn't blocked on the class machines. My delightful link to the outside world. I have been here for 3 hours and have done nothing. I think Afi (the teach) is still marking our 'midterms' so he's just giving us useless busy work so that the zombies don't forget how to do stuff after the 'long' weekend.

The new apartment is nice, although it will be better when we get essencial things such as phones and internet and a bed for me. The floor isn't so bad for now, but my hair is really screwed up when I wake in the morning and I need to gel it a lot even after a shower. The floor is unacceptable for when Caitlin comes up this weekend, however. Rug burns are about as fun as a busted spine from an air mattress.

It is much like living inside the sun, temperature wise. My room is right next to the boiler/laundry room, but the apartment building in general is super heated. It would not be so bad if I could open my window and leave it open for a bit, but there is no screen on it and it's also at ground level.

Moving took...um...7 hours on Saturday and a couple more on Sunday...just to move one apartment. Shane was very unorganized and I still owe him a good pushing down some stairs for unnecesarily depriving us of internet, phone, and tv for the weekend. For him it was no big deal since he had stuff to unpack and Erin to play with. I had little to do.

So: I was in a hot, dark place, sore after heavy activity, sleep deprived, with no phone or internet and all I had to play was a buggy, poor excuse for a videogame.

I really want to know what horrible thing I did in a previous life. I hope it was really cool, like taking out a President, or starting the cold war.

First paycheck. YES.

I played the much anticipated UFO: Aftermath demo (post release).

I was very disappointed.

Mostly, I was frustrated by the poor interface and control. They also added 'roleplaying' features (just a fancier, but no more interesting version of those in UFO Defense) and removed the Macromanagement of your bases, aircraft, ect. The missions were the meat of XCOM, but all the macromanaging was the gravy.

I shed a tear for another useless XCOM product, but would like to vomit my steamy stomach juices on yet more developers that just can't make a playable game.

Look at this.

If you still don't want to play World of Warcraft, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Updated the description.

The patch, by the way, created a few problems in addition to fixing some things. The range of Vanu weapons is not too great, it makes fighting them as TR super hard (in addition to being super hard to fight them at close and med range...). The Lightning is now much slower, accelerates like crap and because of that, gets hit a LOT more. It has increased armour to compensate, but I think that tradeoff is questionable.

They also managed to bug the vehicle controls, at least on Shane's computer. We have no idea why, but when you accelerate (pushing the forwards key) and then let go (to stop forward acceleration), vehicles continue to move of their own volition. It's a pain in the ass since I keep driving into stuff and over my own team. I pretty much have to play holding the spacebar (break) so it's that much more annoying. I kept bitching about it to people, but no one seemed to be bothered that either there was a giant bug or that our controls had been changed in such a massive and illogical manner...

But, overall the game is much more balanced. The TR don't instantly lose all conflicts and, personally, I last a lot longer in battle thanks to the extra armour on the light tank.

CSI was a rerun last night. It's like 4 episodes into the new season. TV shows are going to shit. People need to either start complaining or stop watching so these pricks smarten up. Dr. Flocks was on Angel...he played a Doctor. Apparently Werewolves are a delicacy.

Let it also be known that I seem to splurge random things when I am at work and tired. Wicked.

So tired...but...we get to play with computer guts later! Yay!

Only 3 more hours until I can play more Planetside...yesss...big patch today...

See, as with most games, once an empire, race, ect develops a sever inability to keep up with the other races/sides, all the smacktards decide that they NEED to play the Empire and thus change sides. So, now, instead of having two strong empires and one weak one, the populations have gone INSANE and now we have one MASSIVE side, one strong side and one fucking USELESS side.

I always manage to join up with the USELESS side when I start playing a game.

But I'm the type to stick with it...if I leave, then my Empire would have no good players at all. Or I will stick with it until the patch...if it doesn't fix the major problems (which it might not...the TR really need an infantry weapons boost and they ain't gettin' it) then it will be pointless to play as that empire and I'll run off to s server with some Vanu and drive a hover tank.

They currently need to fix the TR main battle tank. It holds three people (driver, main gunner, secondary gunner) which means that you NEED 3 people for it to be effective at all (as opposed to the enemy tanks which all need just 2 pilots). It's also ugly and MASSIVE so it can't shoot anything in a giant radius around it and it's really easy to get hit by the mass of fire it draws (it's a freakin tank: that name alone means everyone will unload everything they have into it). And it's weak, shoots slow for the Empire that has the 'fast firing weapons'. So yeah, it needs some work. They are slowing it down a bit in the next patch, but that's the make it more like a tank (and easier to kill, in my opinion) but they are doing that to all the medium tanks. It needs to be a lot tougher (holding 3 people means it should be at LEAST 1/3 tougher than the other tanks).

The need more implants, specifically stuff to deter detection and 'homing' weapons. Driving a Lightning or Mosquito is suicidal thanks to the fact that the VS and NC both have small and fast seeking projectiles in various forms. The TR have SHIT in the seeking department, so infantry vehicle destruction is almost impossible. As such, the other Empires rely little on infantry until they get right inside a base, prefering to allow their soaring number of pilots and strong vehicles to rule the outdoor areas.

And ofcourse, the inside areas are pure death for the TR who have a good weapon in the chaingun, but I find that the basic pool of weapons are better overall than our Empire specific guns. You have the option of shooting around corners and splash damaging enemies with each shot as the Vanu, or killing multiple people with each blast of the Jackhammer auto shotgun (which works well on everything, including tanks). The TR have fast firing weapons, but that simply means we have to carry more ammo and do less damage with each projectile that hits. We are good on open ground since our weapons have superior range, but since our vehicle suck, it's useless when 5 tanks come blitzing over a hill and run us down.

Please fix TR. Please let the non-dumbfuck players come back to TR and rebalance the player population.

For some reason I can't get to the blogger site from my home PC, so I'm using Shane's. It's awesome having to use 4 different computers to do my usual stuff on the internet, such as browse sites and use an online journal.

I was going to mention Megatokyo (which has been just updated now...better than the usual NEVER I guess...) and specifically the topic heading on Piro's rant and the rant image.

If you don't get it, I expect you to be a Priest. (But even then, if it was a pic of a little boy, you'd get it)

I don't think it was intentional on his part, although with all the crap that he spews from his mouth in his rants, and his taste for moody pics of cute, yet excessively young, anime girls....well, it was going to happen eventually.

Anyways, back to wrapping up that school-girl uniform that I got for Caitlin for Christmas...

It's interesting how the dreaded overlords of this office have blocked stuff like Gamespy and Blizzard but allow full access to stuff like online comics and even blogspot...

These overlords, which I must not name in text for fear of mighty reprisal (the IT department) reside in a room in which no one may enter. Blocked by tall doors of the thickest, yet pleasant hardwood, the deadly keycard scanner sticks from the wall like some malevolent and mishapen eyeball. You can hear a low rumble and buzz of all the equipment inside.

It's rumoured that no one has ever seen an IT employee around here and that they either have their own secret entrance and exit, or that they are the unkillable dead and don't need such simple pleasures such as food or air.

It's also rumoured that if you try to swipe your card on their scanner, you get mummy rot and die in a couple months.

Cool, eh?

My 85$ for doing nothing all day is useless compared to Gord's 400$ for doing a little bit all day. But he has lots of seniority on me.

Working ROCKS.

I found out that I'm going to be offering tech support for a very large line of complicated products (like WHOLE PCs)...and I'm also going to be working with U.S. customers exclusively.

This should be FUN ahaha.

V IS FOR VICTORY

Interview tomorrow at a Customer Tech Support place...the same one Shane was at for Co-op. It will be an extreme test of my ability to use bullshit to cover the fact that I hate people and do not enjoy talking to them. Ofcourse, the job requires that you talk to customers with technical difficulties for 7+ hours a day.

It's a good way to sneak into the game industry, though. They always need poor bitches to work the phones to help 14 year olds out with getting that new version of Counter-Strike working. Or (I pray to GOD) maybe sneaking into a Game Master position at an MMO or something. That'd be so worth it.

At least it's 9.50-10.50 to start and they train you like crazy.

I have probably just jinxed it.

One day, I dream of going into an interview and getting hired...
It happened once before, but that seems to be the exception...
Some day, I will go to an interview and I WON'T spend 30 minutes talking to them about their job, only to have them say at the end "We're really looking for someone who has experience"...
Sometime, I hope I won't have an excellent interview with two managers before one of them mentions that they already FILLED THE POSITION THEY ARE INTERVIEWING ME FOR BUT MIGHT CALL ME BACK IN TWO WEEKS BECAUSE THE GIRL THEY HIRED DIDN'T SOUND LIKE SHE WOULD LIKE THAT PARTICULAR JOB AND WOULD LIKELY GET BUMPED OUT TO A DIFFERENT POSITION AND THEN THEY'D CALL AND HIRE ME TO FILL THAT SPOT AND BE TRAINED BY THE GIRL THAT THEY JUST HIRED INSTEAD OF THE GUY THAT WORKED THERE FOR TWO YEARS.

But...
I must not dwell...

Who the fuck am I kidding? I'm going to take that and turn it into my DWELLING. I will decorate the walls with delightful pictures of hate and framed spite and furnish it with pure rage. The carpeting shall be malice and the wallpaper shall be sheer loathing. The Welcome Mat (made from the finest Manager's skin!) shall read "Fuck you all" scrawled in a most foul substance. The taps will run boiling bile and the fridge will be filled with all things Cannibalicious. The four-poster will have poison for a mattress, anger for sheets, insanity for a comforter and the pillows shall be stuffed with the finest, most rabid bird feathers to be found on earth. The key to the front door shall be crafted from the finger bones of a thousand employers, each of which was rent bloodily from their stubby, maligned clawed hands by my bare teeth while I cackle madly wearing a suit and tie stitched together from the thousands of copies of my trashed resume.

This is where I live now. In my own small angry world. I think you've already heard of it. I have visited it quite often, but the cottage has become quite the castle.

No time to blog now! I need to get some Interview Sleep!

Finished Halo today. I've come to think of it as Half-Life 1.5.

The first several hours are very fun. Then you get thrown some 'dungeon crawling' where you run around the same buildings for about and equal number of hours that you've already been playing. These hours SUCK.

But then the game gets back to normal and is excellent again.

The whole game is very solid and would have been perfect if they had omited the giant repetative crap in the middle. It's a super game. I can only hope that my machine can run it so I can partake in multiplayer.