First!

That new blog smell, smells like teen spirit and napalm in the morning I suppose. Here is where I am going to record, rant, reevaluate, give rise to and, in general, act a little retarded on the Interblags. Also a personal forum and way to sharpen my writing skills, practice practice eh?

First things first, I needed a name for this right here and to cut to the chase, I like names. Don’t really know why but I have always seemed to like something more if it has a good name to it. I guess names are like mimetic smells, a bit of mental shorthand that can conjure up intense and vivid memories. A good name should be more than just what a thing is, instead it should be a scaled down version of that thing. Epic places need epic names and well, un-epic places don’t, of course maybe the name becomes epic once the places does likewise, but for the sake of this example ill stick to fictional names. Names like Pillars of Autumn, City 17, Midgar and Tristram should all evoke fond memories from the video gamers amongst us.

Others like Enterprise, Millennium Falcon, Batman and Wintermute also have this nostalgic potential for film and the written word, respectively. However, in my case at least, this interest (or perhaps low temperature love affair) with names isn’t confined to things from the past. In EVE Online, my scouting/stealth/spy/exploration ship is named Mata Hari, and to paraphrase from Wikipedia, “A Dutch exotic dancer, courtesan, and accused spy who, although possibly innocent, was executed by firing squad in France for espionage for Germany during World War I.” Did I choose the name to embody my (Serious Business) internet spaceship with a bit of spy mojo? Or was it just because it was appropriate, maybe it was just for the lulz and the off chance someone else would see the name on the scanner and think “How clever”? Truthfully I don’t really know and I suppose it doesn’t really matter and after 2 paragraphs of semi coherence I’m not entirely sure where I ended up or if anything was really said.

In other news, I have been officially upgraded as paintball player from Scrub to Dangerous Scrub. Strange because I don’t really feel any better as a player, and to use a parlance from EVE, got my shit pushed all the way in at the field on Saturday quite often. I’ll just have to trust everyone else’s opinion and not just think they are lying to make me feel better. I think the worst part is I know just enough that figuring out what I’m doing wrong is no longer a trivial affair, the answer is just play more and bitch less I’m sure. If any of you want to see some of the photos I took of the team (GO TEAM ANOMALY) just roll on over to http://www.flickr.com/photos/teamanomaly/ and check them out. Telling me what I did poorly as a photographer would be nice too, practice practice and all that.

Our weekly(semi weekly) Super Hero game came to a close on Sunday, due to player death induced by our Arch-enemies, Arc-Welder and Construct, though I did go down spitting blood into Arc-Welders face, so I got style points for it. Thus ends (for now) the tale of The Alchemist and Hyde,  while our GM did say that we didn’t die this time for good, since its somewhat of a tradition for the villains to leave the heroes alive to show their power and all that, we decided to give the characters a break. We had been playing them on and off for almost 2 years so I seemed to be a good temporary stopping point. Our game is also getting one of our past players back so that will be nice. It will give us a chance to bring back some older characters that have been gathering dust, to say nothing of the fact that seeing him again will be cool.

Since I haven’t been working very much, I’ve been finding other ways to fill the time, like this blog for example, I have also had plenty of time to work out. This is interesting to me still, since for most of my life I have been, well, not the most physically fit or active person. However since starting to play paintball it has become more of a necessity and I seem to enjoy it, even after several months I find myself looking forward to my morning gymscapades. However today I solved one of the nagging problems with the exercise machine I have at home. When I got it didn’t have an ankle strap, I creatively solved this with a somewhat redneck solution involving a towel and length of chain. This means I can do proper leg workouts now, in fact that’s what I did today…and I can tell that I will be quite sore tomorrow.

The last thing I have been doing to fill the time, is playing a lot of Diablo 2, Hardcore Mode, Ladder, if you must know. Playing a minion necromancer, it’s quite different then my usual fair of fury-druids and barbarians, X-fire tells me I have logged 30ish hours of Diablo 2 this week; I don’t know whether to be proud or further depressed by that. If anyone wants to play with me, I’m on US West Hardcore Ladder, hit me up in the comments and we can go kill some monsters.

Now I am off to rebuild our team website since it appears to have disappeared into the nether, I am not excited about doing this again, though perhaps ill get some subway first, a $5 foot long sounds like a fine plan all of a sudden.