Clean the Glass

Yesterday at work, I saw a message scrawled into the seat of a bench.  It read: “Today was a bad day.  Tomorrow will be better.”

Every Year Gets Better

2015 was the year of Haley and Kyle.  We got through a lot.  We got a Little Blue House of love.  We got a Paxie- Boy.  We did therapy, though that journey has not come to an end.  We met three very good friends for the first time.  First, Josh came to see us.  Then, we had Jill and Matt at the wedding- the two people who helped the most through our Black Days.  

We got married.  Our ceremony was held on the shore of Moraine State Park in Pennsylvania in wonderful weather.  My bride was like an angel made human.  A vision.  Though it sounds cliché, she radiated.  I was undone.  There, in front of friends and family, I wept, so moved was I from seeing her walking down the aisle toward me.  I was so, so happy.  (in fact, a few days previous, I had a breakdown in the car.  I was so happy that I didn’t know how to process it.)   Haley was my Evenstar.  It was a perfect, sincere wedding.  Small and intimate.  September 27, 2015 was a very good day.  A very, very good day.

We honeymooned at Disney.  Two wonderful days at Port Orleans and then Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.  It really was a time of utter joy. 

A very close friend reconnected after an extended, bitter absence.

We spent our first Christmas as a married couple.  Newlywed bliss.

Some things have been hard, but on the whole, it has been a good, exciting year.

2015 was the year of Haley and Kyle.  2016 is the year of The Myers.

E3 2015

After seeing some of the information coming out of E3, I really want to get my Wii U gamepad fixed.  Last I looked online, it was going to cost something like $100 to have it repaired.  Which is insane.  That’s a little less than half the cost of the entire system.  Ugh.  It’s been in ruins since before Christmas, when I lived in my apartment.  Our in-all-other-ways awesome dog Noli chewed the dickens out of it when I was out.  She also tore my Lord of the Rings Extended Edition bluray set to shreds. 

I was very angry.

Luckily, I had already purchased a Pro Controller, so I can still play most of my games.  Can’t co-op Hyrule Warriors, which is a bummer.  I just haven’t had the money to get the bloody thing fixed.

I didn’t buy anything during the Steam Summer Sale, either.  Nothing really appealed to me.  I’m waiting for a good GTA V sale, but that one stubbornly refuses a price slash.  Far Cry 4 hasn’t been discounted to my target price, either.  Everything else, I either already own or don’t want.  I still have a load of games to get through on both PC and Wii U. 

E3 had some exciting announcements.  No Man’s Sky is looking pretty incredible.  When I first heard about it on the Crate and Crowbar podcast, I thought it was going to have some pretty retro graphics.  Or maybe some kind of Minecrafty, super stylized graphics.  I finally saw some videos of the game, and it looks totally beautiful.  I’m interested to see how the developers approach the problem of players using obscenities to name new discoveries.  I mean, it’s a cool idea to let players be the ones to discover and identify new planets and creatures, but we all know how mature gamers are.  Which is to say, not mature at all.  I really want to play the game, I’m just not thrilled to land on Cockshitpussycron IV.

I saw the trailer for the FFVII remake.  Color me interested, but wary.  Square Enix has kind of stumbled of late, and I can easily see them cutting out a lot of the fun weirdness and minigames from the remake.  And DLCing the heck out of it.  I wouldn’t put it past them to turn the entirety of the Golden Saucer into a $9.99 DLC pack.  Furthermore, according to an interview, the gameplay will be updated to be more modern.  I dunno, I really liked the ATB system that FFVII had.  And materia is super fun to play with.  Even still, us supernerds have been clamoring for an HD remake of FFVII for years, so it’s nice to finally get one.

One the Nintendo front, Splatoon looks super fun, like all Nintendo games.  Star Fox is a no-question purchase.  And yet another reason to get my gamepad repaired.  I love Hyrule Warriors, so I’ll for sure get it when it releases on 3DS.  I hope it has some kind of neat cross-platform play.  I saw that a Metroid game is also coming to the 3DS, and that a bunch of people are super salty about it.  They’re so angry, that they’ve started a petition to cancel it.  In their defense, it does look kind of crappy, and definitely not like the Metroid games I remember.  Still, petitions to cancel a major release never work.

Earthbound Beginning is on the VC now!  We’ll buy that and cast the dickens out of it.  Earthbound and Mother 3 are the two best 16-bit RPGs I’ve played.  I actually think Earthbound is better than Chrono Trigger.  Which, I’m sure, is an opinion that will earn me few friends.  Playing the first game in the Earthbound/Mother series will be awesome.

Oh, and Ryu in Smash?!  I fricken love Nintendo.

I didn’t really pay much attention to the other announcements, other than Xbox One is going to be backwards compatible.  That might convince me to buy one, especially since our 360 doesn’t work, and Remedy’s next game, Quantum Break, is going to be Xbox One exclusive. 

On the PC side, Haley is really excited for Fallout 4. and I want the new XCOM, of course.  I’m surprised that it’s a PC exclusive, but I’d much rather that than something like PS4 exclusive.

I may have forgotten one or two, but those are pretty much my thoughts on the little I saw of E3 2015.   Looks like a pretty strong showing from Nintendo.  I’m a loyalist, though, and will always be excited by Nintendo stuff.

Say Thanks

I wrote a letter to Stephen Baxter this morning.  He’s my favorite living author, and definitely in my top three of all time.  I wrote it because I’ve never written to an author before, despite wanting to for years.  It was really just laziness that kept me from doing it.  I’d wanted to write to Ray Bradbury and Terry Pratchett, too, but they passed.  I’ve found out that hard way that people don’t live forever, and if you want to thank them, now is the time.  I never got to tell my dad how much he meant to me before he died.  I never got to tell Ray Bradbury just how much he meant to Haley and me, and Terry died before I got off my butt to tell him how much I loved Discworld.

So, yeah.  I wrote to Stephen Baxter.  I told him how much his books influenced me, and how much I love them.  I told him about how my dad brought a couple of his books home one day, because he figured I’d like them.  Dad was always able to do that.  Somehow, despite not being a reader, he always knew if I’d like something.  He was the one who encouraged me to read The Hobbit, even though I’m pretty sure he’d never read it.  He just somehow knew.  I read that in 8^th grade and never looked back.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that he was the one who got me into Frank Peretti when I was younger.   Dad was a pretty awesome guy.

I dunno, I just encourage you to make the effort to tell someone how much you appreciate them.  Even if it’s a guy in England writing nerd books for super nerds.

Hub Worlds and Words

I posted a short piece on my writing journal.  I’ve always like ‘Hub’ settings.  A place where worlds join and travellers meet.  I’m sure my idea has already been done to death, but I wanted to get it down before time and distraction and plain ol’ laziness killed it.
For me, the idea of the Library is neat, because that means you can tell any kind of story and have it still fit in the same megaverse.  Kinda like Not One Zombie, it’s an open-universe idea, so anyone can tell a story in it.  I dunno, I just really like the idea of shared-settings, even curated ones.

Click here to read The Library

We All Have a Hero in our Hearts

Have you ever played an online game and realized that the whole time, you've thought yourself the good guy?  And every time someone kills you, they're either a bastard, evil, or somehow dastardly?

A few days ago,  I was playing Rising Storm as the Axis on some sort of urban map(I really need to learn map names).  As usual, I spent the first ten minutes running to catch up with my team, getting lost, and being subsequently torn to gory shreds. 

Finally, after some time, I managed to find another player in some sort of train station building.  He was on the second floor firing out of a window.  I made my up the stairs and peeked out a window beside him.  A couple rounds impacted on the wall beside me, so I ducked back and decided to cover his back. 

Now, the second floor was more of a balcony that ran around the inside of the building, with a large opening in the middle through which you could see the first floor.  I laid prone with my gun trained on the first floor.  Apparently, my ally was causing some havoc to the other team, because enemy soldiers kept rushing into the building, quickly falling to my gunfire. 

At one point, the return fire from outside grew too fierce, so he left the window as a few more enemies poured into the building.  He dropped down beside me and we dispatched the group. 

At this time, I knew that we had been marked, and there would be a push to clear us out of the point.  Naturally, my adrenaline spiked.  Palms sweaty, eyes wide, breath shallow.  The two of us lay on the floor, guns trained on the area below us, waiting. 

Suddenly, rounds began to explode and tear through the planks between us.  Someone directly below us was firing straight up, hoping to kill us.  As bullets ripped through, just beside my head, I threw a grenade downstairs, hoping to destroy our assailants.  It exploded and I saw a blood splash on the tile.  I crawled over to the stairs, to check if anyone was coming up. 

Once I got there, for some reason, I panicked, thinking I had no ammo left in my clip.  Hands shaking, I checked my clip, counting the remaining rounds.  As I did so, an enemy soldier stalked up the stairs, his pistol ready.  Frantically, I tried to shove the clip back in, but he lined up the shot and all I saw was black.

Initially, I was mad.  What an asshole!  Arrogant bastard, you just saunter up here, smug as you please, and kill me in one shot with a pistol!  What a stupid jerk!

Then, I realized something. In my mind, I was the good guy.  My story was the righteous one.  I was the one who was wronged.  But, looking at it a little more, I began to understand that he probably felt the same way.  Maybe I had killed him a few times already.  Maybe he'd seen his buddies die to our guns.  Either way, we were an entrenched enemy causing problems for his team.  We were the bad guys.  We were the enemy that had to be stopped.  Perhaps he was out of ammo, and his pistol was his last weapon.  Maybe he'd been the one to fire up at us, and his teammate was killed by my grenade.  Then, vengeful and bleeding himself, he'd climbed those stairs, and, vision clouded by blood, body beaten and burned, managed one heroic shot.  Finally killing those assholes who'd been murdering his buddies.

 I wonder what his narrative was.

More Like Dead Orchestra

I got back into Rising Storm/Red Orchestra multiplayer in recent weeks, as Haley can attest to.  I’m still pretty rubbish at it, rarely able to do more than run forward for a minute and a half towards an objective, only to take a bullet to the temple as soon as I crest a hill.  Even still, it’s pretty fun. One interesting side effect of being slaughtered over and over is how much it makes me afraid of war.  Of course, as with any rational person, I’ve never wanted to actually see combat.  Video game and movie glorification aside, at no point past the age of seven have I wanted to be in a war.

But, I’ll tell you.  Red Orchestra/Rising Storm stresses me out and scares me so much that it has crushed any childhood dreams of infantry heroism.

One night, I was playing on a map- I don’t remember which it was, some snowy forest outside of a bombed-out village- and, for the first time that I can remember, I felt scared during a multiplayer map. 

I was prone on the side of a small rise, trying to decide what to do.  I could hear the zip and snap of bullet whipping over my head, as innumerable German troops peppered the forest with gunfire.  I looked to my right to see one of my comrades dash forward in a low crouch.  As soon as he crested the slight hill I was on, he jerked and cried out and a red cloud replaced his head.  His body crumbled and tumbled past me.  Immediately after, a fresh salvo of automatic fire passed overhead, blurring my vision and filling my ears with a terrible rushing sound.  I pushed backwards from the hill, suddenly terrified.  In that moment, I felt real fear. No way was I going to climb over that hill and return fire.  I was too scared to even hurl a grenade.  I was a coward, afraid to die after seeing one of my mates fall so easily.

Then came the shelling.  Sudden explosions tearing up the hillside, shredding trees to splinters.  I had nowhere to hide, so I just cowered, stomach churning as explosive death rained down around me.  It was just like a movie, I looked around and saw other friendly soldiers hunkered down as the bombs fell, exploding in a gory mess.  Just unlucky, I supposed.

Eventually, the shelling tapered off and I crept forward peering through the smoke to try to see any Germans.  A quick snap was all I heard as an unseen sniper spotted me and put an end to my misery.

Later, I was holed up in a shelled building on the outskirts of the forest.  The Germans had pushed us out of the trees and were assaulting our rally points pretty heavily.  I’d pop out of a window, fire a few panicked shots in their direction and duck back, return fire tearing at the windowsill and walls.  They started to enter the building, so I retreated(ran at top speed is more like it) outside.  I put a few buildings between us and stopped to catch my breath.  Then, the shelling resumed.  I dropped to a prone position, hugging the wall since the building I was beside had no entrances.  A few terrified minutes later, the shelling had slowed enough that I moved forward to try to find any friendlies.  A few stray explosions rocked the street and I spotted two friendly contacts across the thoroughfare.  I immediately began to move toward them, as gunfire had resumed.  My plan was to join up with them.  I was just about to cross the street when one last shell landed.  Even as far away as I was, some ten yards, a few body parts landed at my feet.  I was stunned.

And then a German shot me in the nuts and I died.