I walked in on my roommate. No, he wasn’t watching porn and jacking off. That would have been encouraging to see him caring about the pussy. He wasn’t playing video games. He was watching other people play video games on twitchtv.
Yes, that’s right, the Gen Y/Millenials can’t muster up the fortitude to mash some fucking buttons… they can only sit there in awe as others mash some fucking buttons.
Pathetic.
Unforgivable.
Soft.
First. World. Problems.
I was at once appalled and fascinated at how people could do this. All these crappy video games, and you can’t think of anything better to do than watch other people play them?
Couldn’t have said better myself. Well, yes, I could have, because I can enunciate. I also understand that I like my entertainment to be an active thing. I don’t just hear music, I listen to it. I don’t just see words on a page, I see ideas- or lack thereof. It’s why I don’t watch television too much. It’s 99.99% garbage, with something occasionally interesting getting through the censors.
How bad is it? It’s not worth wasting any more of my time over it than I already have.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Out of work and really liking where I was living, I wanted to find work where I could rustle up some quick cash. I looked in the Want Ads (remember those) in the newspaper (or those) and saw that a local cab company was hiring. I went to the office, filled out some paperwork, went to the police station, got my permit, went back to the cab stand, talked to the manager, filled out some more paperwork, and was out on the streets. In about eight hours.
Before you let that whole “going to the police station” thing scare you off, it’s a standard background check. If you haven’t been caught doing anything, you should* be good to go. They took my prints, filed some papers, and some cash later, I had a piece of paper saying I’m allowed to operate in [jurisdiction redacted].
The first night was a trial by fire. Learning the radio lingo for dispatch, listening for codewords to indicate a shady pick-up, and getting lost more times than I care to admit… I went home with a good bit of cash in my pockets. Mission accomplished.
And other famous last words.
——–
Ten years later, I moved on to a less glamourous life, which ironically has allowed me a bit more free time to do things I want to do.
Why?
Let’s look at the way things were way back when I started, ten years prior. We weren’t (yet) embroiled in two treasury-draining conflicts. Unemployment was pretty well non-existent for anyone actually wanting to work. The price of… anything was years away from inflating exponentially. Gas was, IIRC, about $1.50 per gallon… and fuck me if people weren’t crying about that price. I spent several hours doing an analysis which concluded that gas would have to hit $5.25 per gallon before financial disaster would strike. What I didn’t factor in was the nature of the business.
Like I said, people were working, people had money, which I am always happy to relieve them of… so a $5, $10, $35, $60 cab ride was nothin’ but a g-thang. Need to get from one party to the next but are already three sheets to the wind? Call a cab? Job’s 10 miles away and you have no car? call a cab. Got a lead on some non-tranny hooker twenty miles up the road? Call a cab. Or maybe it was a tranny… I wasn’t sticking around to find out, I’m heading back to pick up another fare.*2
Then shit started getting real.
First, the budget crisis (as reported by FOX NEWS!!!) caused gubmint to start paring certain things down. Not major, but you could see it… instead of ten trips per night off the local bases, you were only doing nine. C’est la vie. That eventually got compounded by better video networking, which systematically scaled back gubmint travel, which was a shame for us because those were not only good fares, but you’d get the occasionally interesting person who treated you as though you were his/her lawyer or doctor… by doctor, I tend to mean psychiatrist, even though I rarely carried any kind of medicinals on me. :D
Next was the upswing in unemployment. As I said, people who are working, people who have money… don’t mind spending it. people without money… you get the troublemakers who will hop out and pull a Jesse Owens (LIUFY) on you, but mostly just a lot of grumbling about the price of a cab ride, even though rates tend to increase at a glacial pace. We got a lot more people taking the bus. You could tell because THEY raised their rates, to get while the getting is good. So with a little deduction, you can see where things are heading in the wrong direction.
Once gas prices hit the $3 mark (locally), it became a perfect storm of suck for anyone who didn’t have a handful of good regulars. I had a handful of such riders. One guy I got for $300, give or take, every week; as a bonus, we bartered some of his fare. Woot! By that time I’d had a number of years under my belt. I asked questions, and listened to the answers. I learned from other peoples’ mistakes so I didn’t have to make them all on my own. So as bad as things were, I was still having a good time.
Another interesting facet is how tied into the social services you are, even if mostly tangentially. There is a big business for medical transport, which some localities dole out to cab companies, because they’re the only ones qualified to do such work in many cases. You have a fleet of vehicles in good condition, licensed drivers, and the high cost of insuring all passengers. that last bit is important, because “shit happens”. To put it mildly, our company lost a lot of those contracts to up-and-coming companies in the area; ma-and-pa outfits with two cars and the ability to bite off more than they can chew. I respect their mindset, but they really had no clue what they were getting into. Many of them went belly-up after a year due to maintainence issues- that’s a LOT of driving.
The other big ones are the welfare statists, you know the ones, the ones who get paid for not dying for another month…. they were always a pain in the ass. Lazy people make for bad customers, especially when they have three carts of groceries. At first, I followed the philosophy of, “they ain’t tipping me, so I ain’t doing any work.” Then I realized how self-defeating it was; the time I spend waiting on them to load and unload their shit, I could finish another fare. Duh… plus it kept my body from total atrophy, so win-win. After ten years, they still weren’t tipping, they still had bad attitudes… but at least I could avoid picking them up, cuz I got Hack*3 Fu… and shit.
———
I’m not saying I’ll never do it again (although this article might be a nail in the coffin…), but at least I can go into it understanding the pitfalls.
First off, unless you have a horseshoe wrapped in four-leaf clovers up your ass (or alternately, you live out of your cab), you’re going to spend a good bit of time in it. I’d say 4 hours to make lease, 2 hours to make gas, and 2 hours for incidental expenses. So that’s 8 hours before you’ve truly made any money for yourself. That’s assuming you’re not driving during any dead times.
That’s a lot of time to be sitting on your ass. If you are overly-reliant on dispatch services, you won’t get too far from the cab unless you really need to. I suppose you could stretch, do some jumping jacks, or whatever, but likely not. Ten years put a bit of wear on my body from disuse. Mindset number one: make sure to make time to stay fit. Mindset number two: don’t pull into drive-thru windows even though it’s really easy to do so.
Second, you have to able to take everything as the sum of its parts. A mathematical formula might look like this.
P=(f+t)-(g*ppg)-(inc)
P=profit
f=fares
t= tips
g=gallons of gas
ppg= price per gallon
inc= incidentals
That’s the simple version of it, but it gives you an idea. I’ve known so many drivers who judged their days on the fact they got twenty fares and no good trips. After accounting for their costs, they still posted a profit for the day, even though it wasn’t very big. This brings me to the point of living as simply as possible. If you can take the time to cook at home, or better yet have someone else do it for you, you can save a lot of trips to the drive-thru. If you can keep your living expenses down to the bare neccesities, you won’t have an extravagant lifestyle to pay for. I’ve known drivers (male and female) who lived out of their cars for months at a time; from what passengers told me, not very pleasant.
Also, this is more of a mental thing, but don’t get down if you pick up a string of hood rats. If you live in a city with a lot of hood rats… gonna happen. Make the best of the situation. Listen. Learn, Understand the psychology going on, and they won’t be nearly as intimidating. It’s been said that a person who is comfortable with himself is able to simply shut up. I believe it’s more like “people who aren’t comfortable with themselves can’t shut up.” So they talk a big game. Talk about all the hoes they were banging last night, then halfway through the trip their girl calls them up, and you realize who’s wearing the pants. Also, don’t get too excited if you get a string of good trips.
Everything averages itself out. If not today, then this week, and if not for the week, then for the month. The trick is to understand what average is and try to do a little better and a little more, crap trips notwithstanding.
Some may be concerned with the interactions with Law Enforcement Officials. it’s a pretty mixed bag. Obviously, you’ll likely get your permit from a LEO office; many cities have a special division set up with the express intent of enforcing taxi codes.
Taxi codes vary city to city, but are based around three things:
1. Not getting the scum of the earth driving people around
2. Public safety, e,g,, not having a cab billowing out clouds of oily smoke behind it, or stalling every other traffic light.
3. Putting a positive face to the community. This bit is subjective, so YMMV.
That’s not to say these are carved in stone and signed in blood. Sometimes people get through the cracks- it’s a beauracracy. Shit happens. It’s not very often, but every once in awhile you’ll hear about a driver who got popped with 10 lbs of pot in his cab… and they’d been following him for months. It’s a decent cover for the criminally intent.
Next issue that seems to pop up are traffic violations. It’s driving- and lots of it- so accidents and speeding tickets are going to happen. It’s not the end of the world. Understand the situation. Unless you’ve got 10 lbs of pot in your trunk, you’ll get a brief explanation of why you were pulled over, get issued a ticket, and have your day in court. Sometimes the issuing officer doesn’t make it. Have a nice day, amigo. Unless you have a deep history of traffic violations, traffic court judges are generally friendly, especially to someone serving the community.
The anomolous meeting with LEO are the hard ones to put anything to, because they vary so much. I’ve been pulled over several times because thought I might have picked up a suspect. Over ten years, that number is WAYYYYYYY smaller than it should have been. One time, both suspects had guns drawn. The ten LEOs at the roadblock had guns drawn. Me, I drew a cigarette and lit it. No point panicking at that snapshot. I waited the suspects out. They were panicking, so I put on my best game face and laid it out for them: Whatever trouble they were in that had police setting up roadblock, I didn’t care, but if they shot me under the circumstances, they were going to do life in prison with no possibility of acquittal. That got their attention. I offered them cigarettes, we talked it over, and they surrendered. Great bluff. Not romantic, but here I am to tell about it. And I picked up a decent fare 30 minutes later, most of that time convincing the cops I was OK. They thought for sure I’d be rattled, but after spending 6 hours dodging bad drivers and the cars they were in, you get jaded.
There are occasions where a driver will be tempted to press charges, mostly for “runners”, but in the end, it’s usually a waste of your time… unless they ran you around, wasting your time and gas, for several hours before not paying. I did it once, never saw a dime, and resolved to get ripped off less in the future. It seemed to have worked out pretty well. There is an unwritten and unspoken truce between police and cab drivers, or at least there was where I worked. Hell, they even called us in to pick people up. Picked up a police call with a couple, the dude had a concealed carry permit. Given the neighborhood they were going to, I don’t blame him. The police said they could hold his gun until he picked it up at the station, but that would have been a bitch move in my opinion. Registered gun owners carrying registered guns aren’t very likely to rob you, especially when the police called you in. I let him bring it along. Not only got a good tip, but picked them up over the next few months til they got their car street-legal.
——
Before you go thinking it’s all gloom and doom, there’s a lot of positive things about the job. Most companies have a fairly open-ended hiring policy, that is, if you can get a permit, and their insurance company will insure you, you’re in for as long as you want. Most don’t even get pissed off if you hop company-to-company a few times. It’s all business. And there’s a lot of fun to be had, if you have the right mindset.
For starters, a good time to work is the weekend bar rush (maybe week-long bar rush depending on your location). Drunk people say the stupidest things. Drunk people do the stupidest things. Drunk people pick up half-way passable trannies at the club, get halfway home, ask you to pull over, and start walking; when you pull up to ask them if they’re alright, they’ll say “that bitch has a bigger dick than I do.”
What do you do in a situation like that? Take a deep breath, and ask the tranny if she’s still going home. Take her home. Profit!
Even without the benefit of intoxicants, people like to let their guard down. I guess “Taxicab Confessions” inspires it a lot. I watched it once, and couldn’t believe how boring those passengers were. Oh yeah, expect to get asked about that show, as well as “Cash Cab”. A LOT. They didn’t want to do MY version of cash cab… I’d have them paying double the fare due to the truly trivia facts contained within my cortex. Then again, I’ve also picked up college students who couldn’t split a $12 fare 4 ways without using their cell phone’s calculator function. But Taxicab Confessions… fuck, it wasn’t a Friday night til I had two chicks making out in the backseat. I actually had a dude go down on a chick… while I’m doing 70 on the Interstate. Didn’t he realize I was one sudden braking maneuver away from serious neck damage? Anyway, I don’t think she’s supposed to VOMIT as a result of that kind of thing. Ahh, the wretched stench of bodily fluids. I actually had a pleasant old man declare, not five seconds after plopping into my cab, that, and I quote, ” Sir, I just defecated myself.” Which sucks, because I had to drive him home, 6 miles up the road, with the windows down, in the middle of February.Then drive it back to the stand to have them clean it with a special disinfectant.
——–
Cab drivers are, in general, a different breed. I’m sure there’s some abnormal gene required to do it. As a rule of thumb, anyone who’s done it more than two years will evolve their worldview into something “anti-social”. Except me, it actually forced me, a natural introvert, out of my shell. The money was good-in the beginning- but as a cultural anthropologist (amateur), it allowed me some interesting revelations. it confirmed many premises I held before starting. It corrected others. When you drive a 60-year-old white man into the hood to score some crack, that’s eye-opening. So is the dealer you found drawing a gun because he’s too feeble to get the money out of his pocket in a timely manner. PUA sites like to drivel on about beta males. Like the guy I picked up 4 times a week to go to the hood to find hookers. And unanimously, they all couldn’t stop talking about how trifling he was. Hey, it’s 20 bucks to take them back, they can ramble on all they want. How many PUs would turn down a blowjob from a drunk chick? I’d do it all the time. I’m not out here to get my cock sucked, I’m out here to make money. I’ll get my cock sucked when I get home, by a hotter chick. Plus, the VOMIT factor and all that.
Oh, and such the women you’d pick up. I guess if you were desperate for sex, it might not be a bad gig, but I’ve seen a lot of guys get played. One guy chauffered some bitch around for three years, at great expense of time and gas… never got any. Laughable. Pathetic. Atrocious. Those are just the printable words. Seen guys get hit up with rape charges and have restraining orders placed on them after stalking bitches.Laughable. Pathetic. Atrocious. Better off getting a singing gig with one of the crappy local cover bands… less stalking, fewer rape charges. Maybe….
I’ve also met some very concientious parents who actually raised their kids right. That’s like a leprecaun riding a unicorn, a double-whammy to the system, sort of. And doing it in hostile territory. I’ve also met… less than stellar parents, but that’s not that unusual. Racial awareness is high. Even the black drivers hate picking up in the hood… “too many niggers over there.” Those guys and gals were fun to troll, but it got too easy to keep pressing on with it. Most of the white guys would simply goof on the saggin’ pants, and to be fair, who doesn’t enjoy that? Fuck, half the work is done for you if you’re into humiliating people. One of them I had to talk out killing a hood rat who wanted to fuck, er, date his daughter. Glad i did, as I took her to Planned Parenthood a few weeks later. Given the circumstances, I’d say I was pro-abortion in that instance.
I could go on for 100,000 more words easily, but that would constitute a book, and for the low low price of 6.99 as an e-book, I’ll hold off on the anecdotes for now. (The ones I did share wouldn’t make the top 20.)
——-
So it hackin’ for you? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on what you want to do with it. Want to make a million dollars? Roll your earnings into lottery tickets, or a meth lab. Want a high-profile job with great benefits? Go lick the ass of the nearest bureaucrat and their multi-cult handlers. Want a job that will pay the bills, get you some extra cash, and give you some level of freedom not available in the greater workforce? It might be for you.
Should you consider it, do the research. What kind of requirements do they have for drivers, as well as vehicles? What are the rates? Where are the commercial hubs and residential zones, and what is the average proximity? What are the rates or fare schedules? Are there a lot of military or government? Of course there are… who am I kidding? Most of the business is tied indirectly to government spending, from welfare brood-mothers to drunken general officers on the prowl. It’s the normal people you run into who will put it all into perspective.
Notes:
*Note the proper use of the word “should”, (h/t Firepower)
*2 I did my driving in an area with tight “jurisdictional bounds”, e.g., I coulldn’t go into the next city to pick up fares. Not to say I never did it, but you need to be really smart about it… and not get caught.
I chose this version for the cool soundtrack, but dude gets challenged and doesn’t back down… then breaks out some crazy stances, which throw his untrained opponent off balance. He keeps his awareness of his surroundings high enough, and projects enough crazy to keep any interlopers thinking twice about joining in. When it comes to actual fisticuffs, his transition from defense to offensive culminates in a solid knockout.
Well done.
Breakdown:
Ah, high school, where the popular kids get away with murder by virtue of their strategic asskissing and it’s open season on nerds. Only, sometimes the tables get turned. This thing ends faster than it started. No hesitation in Poindexter here. Pretty much one fluid motion and dude gets knocked out of frame. If someone can point me to the inevitable reamatch, I’d appreciate it, ‘cuz dude’s obviously been putting his physics skills to practical use.
Breakdown:
What can I say, I like a woman who can fight. Her situational awareness was slightly lacking and she got caught off guard, but then she used the purse to bait him into her trap and she springs it beautifully. It’s over pretty quickly. Nice tactical retreat when the accomplice comes in to retrieve her thug boyfriend.
Breakdown:
I didn’t realize she had a daughter… honestly. They’re laughing about it now, but the irony that they’re likely doomed to carry on the cycle of alpha chasing makes me grin.
AND THE BEST FOR LAST:
No comment necessary.
-BTR
Edit:
I may stand corrected.
related:
(I’m recovering from an infection and have a bit of free time)
I stumbled upon this story yesterday, having no idea who the fuck Anthony Cumia is, only that he had been fired for making…
wait
for
it
….
“racially insensitive remarks” on his twitter account.
Who the fuck is Anthony Cumia?
Anthony of Opie & Anthony “fame”. Apparently they’ve had radio career that transcended terrestrial radio and into the world of satellite radio for their irreverent humor. Having never heard them, but having heard passing references to them, I have no reference to why people like them.
But, that’s not the point.
The dominoes began falling Tuesday night, after midnight. The black woman in a mini-skirt who punched Cumia in the face in Times Square in Manhattan and called him a “white motherfucker” probably did not know he was a national radio personality. To her, “Ant” was just a white photographer taking her picture. And she did not like that.
Cumia liked being attacked even less. He called her lots of names — the kind that would have gotten him fined had he said them on the air during his stint as a terrestrial radio star. But no N-bombs.
A lot of mistakes here. First off, a white man out by himself (as far as I can tell) in New York City at night… never been, don’t plan on going ($12 for a pack of cigarettes- seriously, go fuck yourself with a red-hit cattle brand), but that’s a crime waiting to happen. Then some black chick gets offended. Offended black chick punches him… repeatedly. All this is bad enough, but then Cumia goes all passive-aggressive on his twitter account. Kind of a bitch move on his part… he was more than justified in giving her a good pimp-slap or two for his troubles, and claiming self-defense. Then he ups the bitch quotient a couple tweets later by pointing out there were “5 black guys” nearby. Wait, he also claimed that he was carrying a (supposedly) legal firearm. If I learned one thing from the Zimmerman trial, it’s better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.
This is not about violence in the black community; that’s a subject worthy of entire websites and careers. Rather, it’s about people who have nothing better to do than to be offended by something.
SiriusXM fired Cumia . . . for what he wrote on his Twitter account?! Let’s just stop right there for a minute. Do you see anything so pathetically and obviously wrong with that? If you don’t you need remedial help in common sense. And as they say on QVC, but wait, there’s more. You have to actually go looking for this horrid Twitter account, allegedly flush with “racially charged” invectives. It doesn’t just fall into your lap, you must seek it out. Get this: In order to be offended! So, you have to pay for the subscription radio service that never broadcast his offensive bleating and you have to go and find the Twitter thread to be offended. That’s a lot of work, don’t you think?
…………………………………………
Unsurprisingly, no arrests have been made.
………………………………………….
I’m not normally the kind to recommend that people sign petitions. That said, Change.org has one floating about. Yes, I signed it because I believe in the principle of the matter. But more than that, it’s a nice little micro-aggression against our collective enemies. Not only will it tell them that we don’t approve of them firing people for what they think and say, on their own time, a disturbing trend in the digital age, but also a way to drop a hint that their days of unfettered shaming are numbered. That our energy levels for cries of racism, sexism, and all their other -isms is depleted from years, decades even, of 24/7/52 coverage.
Or will you simply so nothing, thus snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
If I learned one thing from the Zimmerman trial, it’s that Americans, and even Murkans, are ready for an honest discussion about race. More than that, they need an honest discussion about race. This rusted and battered can won’t survive too many more kicks down the road.
Okay, I’ve been known to make fun of WOW players, but even I must go for the easy kill every now and then. “Going for the easy kill” is a strategy I learned playing Quake, by the way.
And sometimes it’s really not a bad strategy. PUAs do it all the time. You think they’re trying to find the hardest chicks to lay? Of course not, that’s why they go to nightclubs- that’s where the sluts are. And by getting the easy lay, it buffs up their confidence to go out and get the next one.
Some of you may have learned this by spending countless hours reading PUA sites. I learned this a few hours a day playing Quake online with my buddies at work for a couple of months.
So what other lessons did I learn from gaming? Let me plant my geek flag firmly in the turf…
Lesson: If you have a good plan, you may fail. If you have no plan, you will fail.
Culprit: Warmachine-Hordes
Ahhh, tabletop wargaming. Boo-yow!
In Warmachine-Hordes (hereafter referred to as WMH), your toy soldiers line up across an opponent’s toy soldiers and prepare to lay the smack down on each other… often for something as trivial as two control points spread across the center of the board. Tactics. You could just make a reckless, headlong rush to engage the enemy, but if they brought more guns than you did, you’re needlessly sacrificing your army to them.
So you come up with a general plan of attack, say, send these guys around that flank behind the woods to come out behind them while these guys slog upfield behind cover to contest this area here, while these critters here threaten the center. Or something.
And of course, your opponent is coming up with his own plan… or at least he should be. Otherwise it could be a curb-stomp battle for the ages.
But then there’s the factor of the Random Number Generator, aka “dice”. You can move everyone around perfectly. Your opponent can play like a total ape. But you can’t beat bad dice. I’ve tried. Many times. My dice rolling is legendary, even in hell. Lost many games on bad dice. About as many as I’ve lost due to playing like an ape, and most of those were when i was starting out.
Translation: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to hide the bodies of the people who really pissed me off.
Or something like that.
Lesson: Know they enemy, know thyself
Culprit: WMH
A bit of an expansion on the last lesson learned…
What if I told you that one game, I brought an army designed to bring about serious fucking damage to the table. In the process of playing the game, I inflicted two points of damage to the enemy.
And won…
Remember those two control points I mentioned earlier? Well, my opponent decided his best course of action would be to take one with maximum force, and contest the other until he could take that one. A good plan. Until I broke bad with a ninja killer who killed two of his dudes and sauntered back into the woods with impunity. (The game can be occasionally unfair like that.)
At this point, his plan to take the control point to my right was shattered like a wine glass at a Greek wedding… a portent of things to come. He never even tried to take that point after my ninja killer pulled that stunt. The control point he contested… I uncontested it by throwing his warjack off of it. Even hit another one of his other warjacks with said projectile. Scratched their paint… and that’s about it. At that point, all he could do was shake my hand for a good game. (A tradition in the hobby, regardless of game. We are competitive, but we are sportsmanlike.)
Part of the postmortem revealed that he didn’t have a lot of experience against the army I was running, so wasn’t expecting a speed 4 titan to suddenly move 9″ and execute a two-handed throw. Which is kind of the equivelent of a 300 lb lineman walking a 3.40 40-yard dash. (As I said, the game is occasionally unfair.)
His next game in that scenario, I noticed he placed much more emphasis on contesting both control points, and he fared better.
Translation: Sun Tzu was way ahead of his time.
Lesson: Three hours of planning to do twenty minutes worth of work and five minutes of escape.
Culprit: Shadowrun.
Yup, chicks and guns, and lots of ’em. America, FUCK YEAH!!!
In the world of pen-and-paper RPGs, Shadowrun is a rare diamond in the rough. Set in the near (alternate) future, it focuses on societal outcasts doing dirty jobs that “normal” people can’t be bothered to dirty their hands with. Now that I think about, maybe it’s not such an alternative future after all.
Here’s a typical example of a mission: Corporation A has hired you, through several middlemen, to conduct an act of sabotage against Corporation B. Great, you’ve now got a job to do. Now all you have to do is get as much intelligence as you can as far as the physical layout of the crime scene, the defenses, both physical, electronic, magical, human/animal/mutant/spirit (it’s that kind of game), how to defeat those defenses so you can enact said act of sabotage, then get the fuck out of dodge without getting caught and summarily executed. You make sure you’ve got the gear you need for your hackers, your gunners, your beatsticks, your mages, your butchers, your bakers, your candlestick makers… oh, and DO NOT FORGET ABOUT THE GETAWAY DRIVER!!! Don’t panic, and always bring a towel.
Seriously, we dedicated a four-hour session to PLANNING the job, then came back the next day to run it. There’s a reason the first lesson listed is listed first… arrrrgh.
The source material is a fun read to boot.
Translation: Risk and threat assessment is a learned skill. Learn it. Live it. Love it.
Lesson: It’s all about the skills
Culprit: Shadowrun
Ah, character development. Most Murkans don’t have enough character to develop. For those that do, they should continue working on it.
RPGs, whether pen and paper, or computerized, are typically about three things: Stats, skills, and gear. Stats deteriorate over time, gear can be lost or used up, but skills… they don’t go away so easily. So I’ll focus on that.
My first character was a gunslinging sonuvabitch. He’d throw a coin in the air, shoot a hole in it dead center, and catch you between the eyes when the slug deflected off the lamppost. Okay, that was the story I had some neighborhood bums spread around town so people would know not to piss him off…. bullets ain’t free, you know. And it only cost him a BTL chip he looted off some dude who pissed him off, so win.
I focused on the character’s abilites to use guns, and then use guns better. Much as in real life, you focus enough on a skill, you’re gonna get good at it, then you’re going to get better at it. Then a few sessions into the character’s career, I made a glaring error: I invested available skill points into hacking… as in hacking computers. Which might have been cool if he’d already been skilled at it, but he wasn’t. To make matters worse, his stat-set didn’t exactly make him a candidate for the skill. Needless to say, I went out of my way to protect the team’s hacker just so I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself by attempting to use the skill when I needed to. Funny thing: When I had to (team hacker was otherwise occupied), it worked like a charm. Yes, the dice actually deigned NOT to shit on me.
Translation: Get good at something. Get better at it. Do it. Get even better at it. Keep doing it. If you can, do. If you can’t, teach. If you can’t teach, teach gym.
Lesson: You’re never too good at something to stop learning
Culprit: StarCraft
might be enough…
Yeah, I thought I was hot shit. I’d beaten my friends. Beaten my co-workers. Even made the top 100 on the USEast ladder. Someone suggested I try the action on the Asia server.
Man, did that fucking suck. Turns out the Asia server was full of players whose overall game was far more advanced. And why not, SC was a competitive sporting event for the better part of a decade in South Korea. No, it was bigger than a sporting event.
On the upside, some of the players were good enough to pass on some secrets, such as playing on all the maps as often as possible, secrets to good micromanaging, resource management, and just overall… play, play, play, practice, practice, practice. Good advice. It got me to quit playing the game for a year to focus on guitar again.
Translation: Stay humble. Stay hungry. Always keep an eye and ear out for good advice.
Wrapping Up: There are countless people around here who will bemoan the pointlessness of video games. In the modern era of VG, I’m inclined to agree. Mostly because the games just don’t look to be fun anymore. Make fun of Call of Duty’s stupid achievements for eating, sleeping, walking, talking, shooting, and shitting like a United States soldier, I just don’t see anything that makes it look fun to me. For the longest time, Daikatana was the industry’s punching bag… and it had it’s problems… but the game was so over the top with its wackiness that you didn’t care. Reviewers liked to point out the , um, awkward arsenal the game gave you to handle everyday problems such as robotic frogs, robotic crocodiles, robotic mosqitos… they said the Shotcycler-6 was a poorly-designed weapon.
I say: “That thing is BAD ASS!!!!” Then I say, “Where can I haz one plz!” Then I offer the following breakdown. The SC-6 is a pretty cool weapon design. A double-barreled shotgun that fires in 6-round bursts. Once I tried it out for a few levels, I came to realize that it was one of the best weapons in FPS history… in the hands of a skilled user, e.g., not video game reviewers and non-elite-FPS players. Definitely not CoD players, who would get an achievement simply for simply having this cool thing in their game.
The key was to draw small groups of enemies into a confined space, line em up, pull the trigger, watch hilarity ensue. Oh, and you could execute a rocket-jump-style manuever with it, so it had additional utility in deathmatch games when you needed to make a quick escape. Oh, that’s right, video gaming “grew up”, got married, lost the house, the kids, and its testicles in the divorce. Because everyone wanted “reality”… Let me tell you something, gaming, whatever the medium, is no place for reality. I want reality, I step outside my door, go to Wal-Mart, and watch some 400 lb 20 year old fat chick in a tank top and a thong roll around the store on a scooter oblivious to her kids going wild on the other side of the store. Call of Duty would be a better use of my video card than that.
It’s the temporary escapes from reality that keep us sane. For some, it’s the bottle, for some, it’s the crackpipe. For some it’s being smooshed into latex and ball-gagged while being spanked for being a bad boy or girl. Or so I hear…
And for some, it’s the act of immersing yourself into another world for a few hours, engaging in an epic strife where the improbale becomes possible, the laws of physics are temporarily put on hold, we get to play with some BADASS weapons, and maybe, just maybe, we learn a thing or two.
