I find that the above phrase is not used often enough. In fact, so infrequently is it used, that some these days do not know what it means. To clarify, gathering one’s personal effects simply refers to one gathering their personal items. It is often used in a postmortem context, gathering a deceased individuals personal items, but can easily be applied to the living (which is good news, since I don’t plan on dying or killing anyone so I can use the phrase).

The past few days haven’t been very eventful. Actually, that’s not true. Szmyd and I went “Guitar Hero II on the 360 Demo Kiosk”-hunting (I’d make a lame pun about hunting game at this point, but I’ll spare you) yesterday in the abundance of free time I found myself with, now that percussion is in a sort of miniature break until we leave for Dayton and I’ve got fourth block off. The venture was pretty unsuccessful - the only location with a 360 kiosk and the demo was Best Buy, and their controller was absolute rubbish. Turns out there are certain models of the included guitar (based on the Gibson X-Plorer) that are simply shoddy in all areas, from the whammy bar which suffers from lack of confidence or something, causing it to droop down, to the actual strum bar, which John and I discovered registers strums about an eighth note (or close) too late. Alas, Best Buy received one of these awful models, and largely defeated the point of even having the game on display. Oh well.

Getting back to my weekend, John and I then headed over to his girlfriend Emily’s house, where we lounged around, watched Borat, and had a generally good time. Plus I met some great people. Doesn’t really get much better than that. Then I went home, exerted my extra energy obtained from the snow day Thursday and the leisurely Friday in the form of watching TV (which, as one might guess, doesn’t really exert any energy at all), and fell asleep about 2 hours later, at 3AM. Woke up at 8 or 9 the next morning (too early!), didn’t do a whole heck of a lot, and here I am.

I feel better updating this thing. It’s fun to just write. I feel like I want to include some kind of recurring feature for each post, like a song of the moment or something. I think I’ll do that.

[ Song of the Moment: Drist - "Arterial Black" ]

I’m out.

Later.

Not sure I’ll ever be able to replicate this, but for those who play Guitar Hero II, enjoy.

Haven’t updated in a few days…but oh, the ease of use of this thing when I finally decide to.

So, events of the past week. Didn’t get a lot of sleep Sunday night last weekend, so I slept in Monday morning. That helped a bit. Finally got myself back into a regular sleep pattern. Woo! Excedrin PM doesn’t kick in as fast as they say it does.

There’s a parade today. Everyone should go. It starts at 6, if I recall correctly. The weather has been fantastic (strangely enough) the past week, and tonight’s supposed to only go down to about 40º, so come on out and see the Christmas parade. I probably should be getting ready for that, but I’m too comfortable right now. Soon enough.

Percussion tryouts have ended. Congratulations to all the new members, and to those who didn’t make it, don’t give up! The season’s looking good. However, due to the small number of groups currently signed up for PSCO championships in Dayton, we may get bumped up to World Class if not enough are signed up by January. That’d be interesting. We’re definitely doing Festive Overture this year, now that we’ve gotten past most of the copyright blockades. Here’s to hoping I don’t have to kill my hands learning 4-mallet technique.

Finally, went to Mr. Ryan Chesser’s house last night, and viewed the glorious game that is Gears of War. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more gorgeous game. Definitely a shining example of the 360’s capabilities. On that note, a short rant about Halo 3:

Ok, I’ll be honest. The screenshots don’t get me excited, nor do the trailers. The thing that made Halo so great was that it was a break from the mold. It had a good story, good gameplay, good mechanics, the works. Halo 2 was decent: it didn’t do anything drastic, but it did add a few new weapons (which were really rehashes of old weapons under the guise of alien technology or something like that), a new side of gameplay from the Covenant perspective, and so forth. But they were more or less there to help push the story along, which I felt was the only significant improvement Halo 2 made. Granted, it’s a fun game (although the multiplayer kind of frustrates me), but it just needs something never seen before. Bungie can do it, I believe in them. Halo 3 doesn’t look like it’s going to deliver any of that. At least, not from what I’ve seen. We’ve got Master Chief in the shiniest armor yet, and the rest of the game with bloom lighting and HD, but that’s about it. Some massive spaceships add a bit of intrigue to it, but that’s just because I like big spaceships. Beyond that, I’m not about to run out and buy a 360 so I can be ready to play Halo 3 whenever it decides to come out. Gears of War is a step in the right direction that Halo 3 and Bungie’s development team should be following. It’s got interesting gameplay mechanics (a neat reload system, for example), an interesting story (that has room for evolution), and while looks aren’t everything, it’s got graphics that really do take use of the 360, rather than kind of an embellishment of simple textures and such that Halo makes use of. Don’t count me out as a Halo fan - I love the games, like I’ve been saying. I just think that Bungie either needs to start leaking a bit of the better, more innovative stuff that I’m sure they’ve got hidden away there somewhere, or if they don’t have some, they need to make some.

Rant done. I’ll probably still get the game (or play it at Ryan’s/Zach’s) anyway, but here’s to hoping it doesn’t kill interest in the series.

I think the time to get ready for that parade is now.

Later.

Warning: Don’t bother reading if you don’t follow or enjoy video games.

For those of you who follow Day of Defeat (the very few of you who may be reading this) or online games in general, herein lies a brief recap of the past two matches of CEVO-p/CAL-i (well, CAL-m now, but CAL-i before they got rid of it) clan Insomniac Gamers.

Our match versus compLexity was played on Railroad2, a notoriously difficult map to cap on, due in part to the easily-accessible first and second flags from both spawns (meaning once you get the other team’s first or second, it becomes infinitely more difficult to hold it). We took Axis side first half, capping on them once and being capped on at least three times. General disarray and confusion on spots made it difficult to hold key areas like the apartments, but we did our best to prevent a lot of captures.

Allied half wasn’t too much better. I accendentally threw a bad grenade off roundstart, killing both myself and oPlaiD, but a quick recovery allowed us to take back apartments and hold them for at least half the match. coL capped on us a number of times, however, securing them a solid 200+ point victory.

Last night we played JMC on Donner, which I learned later was their strong map. Fortunately, we had actually practiced Donner, and Axis side first half we managed to prevent them from capping at all (and they prevented us as well). Though they held the middle for a good portion of the match, giving them an extra point every few seconds, we ended the round with JMC only 7 points ahead.

Allied half was back and forth. A good initial rush was followed by JMC quickly coming back to grab middle and push us all the way back to our first, where Mission proned outside our spawn and killed 4 of us as we came out to cap back our first (one had managed to hold the second). In the last 3 minutes, we made a push towards their last, with oPlaiD managing to ninja their first and sprint toward their second. However, one capped our second flag at the last second, and 3 more took back middle. oPlaiD managed to stay alive and hold their first, and as 4 of us pushed middle and were capping it in the final seconds, oPlaiD made a mad dash for the only flag they had left (the second), and was just short of it when the round ended. They beat us out by ~17 points, but we were happy that we could defend against them on their best map, since chances are we’ll be playing them in round 2 of the playoffs.

That’s it for now. There’ll be more as time goes on. We start practicing harrington and anzio now to prepare for our first match against .50cal| in the first round of the playoffs, starting next week.

I’ll post with more updates later.