Bored and Whatnot

Oh. That’s right. I have a website or something. Okay, I’m lying. I didn’t forget about it, but there have been a couple things getting in the way of updates.

First, I moved circa mid-April. I went from a house in the woods to the lower floor of a duplex in the middle of the city. Well, not the middle — I’m not downtown but in a bustling commercial area filled with bars, restaurants, and white people. So, I was preoccupied with the move for awhile. For instance, before I’d even gotten all my stuff set up there were 4/20 things to take care of in which I ended up in someone’s apartment with two girls and a guy I’d just met. And I went to a bikini contest last week and cheered loudly (drunkenly) for nearly-naked babes and their wonderful booties — it’s not even summer! Oh, city life. You’re crazy sometimes.

But other than that, what’s been the problem? Well, CoD4 itself. Specifically, I’ve grown tired of the pub scene, and since I don’t have any desire to take it up competitively, that doesn’t leave me with many options. Not that I consider TWL or any ladder that advocates the usage of scrub mode competitive, but still. Someone does want to partner up with me for the Million Man LAN, so I suppose we’ll see what happens. The last LAN I went to I played UT2003 with a few friends if that’s any indication as to how much I don’t LAN. It just never seems like it’s worth the trouble. And with this sort of well-known LAN, I’m not guaranteed to bring home any prizes. Locally I’d probably dominate but this is different, obviously. But I guess you can get drunk and say stupid things that don’t get you laid to pretty girls anywhere, so it’d be worth the trip.

But onto CoD4! Its pub scene has become draining. It’s rare to see a good player (or even one I’d call decent) on one of the very few normal-mode servers anymore. Unless something goes terribly wrong (it happens), I generally steamroll the entire server — I played two games today and my scores were 60-8 and 83-11. While it is moderately entertaining to keep count of how many bad players I cause to rage-quit the server in any given game, it’s frustrating at the same time when I remember back to when this game had seemingly thousands of server choices.

The other day I ended up getting banned from one of the few decent servers left in this unappealing scrub-mode-laden landscape. The reason? I was doing too well. Usually when I rail on some server people just leave or call me a hacker, but in this case one of the negative-ratio neckbeards playing had admin access, so he kicked and banned me and a couple other people for either destroying everyone or having an annoying play style involving C4 and spamming LMGs through walls. Dumb. If you’re wondering, the server was called something along the lines of “A FRAGGN GOOD TIME.” The admins are easy to spot — they wear ROW| tags and they’re bad at the game.

In the end, the game is losing its appeal because I can be assured of a few things damn near every time I play.

• There won’t be many servers to play on (normal mode, 20 or less players).
• People will leave while I’m there. Maybe I’ll get in two decently populated games.
• I’ll probably be called a hacker.

So, like I said via text chat after the 83-11 game I mentioned above, “God, I need to find a new game. Nothing left in this one but terribads.” That is the crossroads I’m currently situated in. I need a new game to get pulled into. I have a few options, but unfortunately it takes a certain something for a game to grab my attention enough for me to play it for more than a week (or a month if it’s decent). That’s why I’ve been playing CoD4 for as long as I have — nothing has grabbed me since.

My options are limited but good, I think. I recently started playing Chrono Trigger (old school, bitches!) and I bought Left 4 Dead a few weeks ago, so that’s something. However, I haven’t played L4D a single time since it arrived. Perhaps the thought of having to actually talk to and work with other Internet people is turning me off to it; I’m used to silently lone-wolfing it and doing better than everyone. Then there’s TF2. I played it for a month a long time ago and then promptly lost any and all interest in it for some reason. It’s been updated a ton since then and is probably quite different, so I should give that one another shot.

Then there are RL™ games like D&D and Magic that I could pick up. My boss is a huge nerd (with a hot wife), so he’s into this sort of stuff and wants to be a dungeon master. I’ve never played these types of games, mainly because when I was exposed to them in middle/high school it was always a bunch of fat fuglies playing them, and I didn’t want to be like them. Now that I have proof that one can play these and still bang hotties, I’m more open to the idea.