Friday 17th October 2003
Lots of little bits of news....
Fr: mac_queen2001@indiatimes.com Dear Sir,
Before I pose my request to you I will firstly apologize the way this mail is been sent to you and and I will solicit for you not to take this request as a scam mail or something else.
I am pastor Thomas macqueen of the Christian Church of Christ Warri, Delta State;
I was been attacked during the warri crisis between the Ijaw's and Itsekiri's in Warri Delta state.
Because I was proclaiming the gospel to them telling them God is not happy with them, after then I was been attacked by some of the ijaw youths.
Since then I have been hospitalized and undergoing through different treatment and not responding, I was diagnosed and they found out I had an internal bleeding in the head unless they operate it, I won't survive it.
Now I have been seeking for financial assistance from different organization and persons in order for my head and waste operation to be successful.
I was been charged to pay the sum of Thirteen thousand naira (13,000), which is hundred thousand U.S dollars ($100,000).
Please for the sake of Jesus Christ, I solicit for you to assist me with any amount of money in order for me to get back my life and continue my work for God almighty (Jehovah).
It will be my utmost pleasure to see that my request is been considered. I await your urgent response to my mail.
Regard's,
Pastor Thomas Macqueen.
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As for the images....
That's the news. Gotta go now.
We named the cat. This is a simple story with a bit of a history. It goes like this....
In 1995, Swyndle and I were sitting at my Amiga, playing around with a programme not unlike Flash combined with Premiere combined with Photoshop. It was for this thing we were kindasorta talking about doing. A cartoon. So I drew out this house as a backdrop for a scene.
The house looked a little too simple, so I added in this cat in the window. Since the cartoon was drawn at 320*180, I didn't actually have many pixels to play with per inch, so the cat's head was about ten pixels by eight, or so. Then, because it wasn't totally clear that this pixelated lump was supposed to be this simple black cat in the window, I thumped in a pair of what turned out to be red pixels [remember that I'm colourblind and shouldn't have much to do with cartoons in the first place] for its eyes.
Gremlin's rendition of original Zombie the Cat, circa 1995.Now we've got a simple little black cat with massive glowing red eyes. Which Swyndle pointed out in a cackling flash. To which I replied: 'Yeah; it's Zombie the Cat.'
Zombie the Cat then became an accidental integral character in the potential cartoon: a cat muttering meow in the same sort of voice used by the zombies in Return of the Living Dead screaming brains.
Entertaining though that all was, the cartoon never really happened. Which is a longer story.
Eight years later, in 2003, I'm playing Resident Evil: Dead Aim [more on that in a couple of paragraphs] while an unnamed cat is bouncing about in that particularly mammalian fashion and meowing a lot.
Until.
Just as I was about to splatter a zombie all over this cruiseship--which, as I keep forgetting to learn, requires the L1 button in Dead Aim instead of the X button--the cat teleported over and bit me; by extension, the fucking zombie in the game bit me too. And so.
Zombi the Cat: approximately fifteen weeks old; already 3.7lbs; evidently anthropophagous.And so: we now have Zombi the Cat. And no, that's not a typo. While Zombi the Cat isn't actually a hypnotised Hatian shuffling about looking for trinkets, she's also not a reanimated revenant shuffling about looking for brains. In point of fact, she's more interested in trinkets--anything small, noisy, and important which she can toss about and hide on me. Hence Zombi. Also, since the cat's female, the more feminine-looking Zombi makes more sense to me.
So, that settles that. Zombi the Cat, Twitch the Iguana, and Cope the Indicus. It all has a certain rhythm to it, or something.
Okay. Dead Aim.
I'd put off getting this thing at all because A) I typically hate firstperson shooters [the only one I've ever been able to stand at all has been HalfLife, and not by much] and B) Resident Evil: Survivor was nearly as useless as Resident Evil: Gaiden. Even still: I picked it up the other night, mostly for research purposes. I figure that, if I'm still planning toward Deadache one of these decades, I should know as much about the things I'm spoofing as possible.
I haven't actually got a gun for the PS2. Or, thinking about it, for any of the other systems I have. So I'm playing through this game with nothing more than a standard PS2 controller. While I can see the benefits to having a Guncon2 for this thing, it's not technically required.
The game--in case you've avoided it to date for the same reasons I had--isn't really an FPS at all. If anything, it's a lot more like Silent Hill than a Res game--pure 3D; rotating, trailing camera; and so on. Also, the Item Boxes we lost in RE0 haven't yet returned. Not that they're really required, since the categorisation system has been improved. There's a limit on the number of bullets you can carry, but that's just in the first slot; the second slot is reserved for the various tools you'll need--and there really aren't that many. The third slot is reserved for plants, spraycans, and these newish little pillcards which are reportedly temporary healthfixes and which are fucking everywhere in the game. The first time I actually got killed was in the final battle when I, without a gun, had to rely on the R3 button to track the badguy's head and shoot it to prevent him from smooshing me. Which, of course, I didn't prevent.
Most of which, thinking about it, is incorrect. The first, second, and third slots are actually the second, third, and fourth; the first slot holds your guns. There doesn't appear to be a knife in this game--in case you were planning to shoot someone with a bowieknife by using a Guncon2 controller. Instead, you've got a basic, and boring, 9mm pistol, a nearly-boring 9mm pistol with a silencer [useful at one point when you're fighting a big, fat, blind, labotomised thingy], an unboring 9mm pistol with a three-round burst, a fairly common pistolgripped shotgun [the greatest advatage to this thing is that the spread almost always connects with the critical hit point, which then sprays the zombie all over the walls--finally earning that Violence and Gore warning at the beginning of the game], an assault rifle which holds a hundred rounds at a time [roughly the same as the AR15 from RE3 in application], a grenade launcher [largely useless until you wanna kill the Glimmers dead], and a particle accelerator rifle, which is hours of fun--or, it would be if it lasted for hours, which it doesn't.
Meanwhile, the graphics in this game actually rival those in RE0. So now we know that the PS2 can actually handle that sort of thing. I hadn't realised it before, but Dead Aim is actually the first Res game designed for the PS2; Code Veronica was a DreamCast game, after all.
Also: this is the scariest fucking game I've ever played. And that's saying a lot.
The sounds are a large part of it. The game begins on a ghostship; the only reliable lighting at all comes from your torch; the incessant moaning is usually from this floating coffin rocking slowly on the waves, until, at the last instant, the moaning changes pitch and Roger Bannister the Sprinting Fucking Corpse appears just at the edge of your vision and bites into you. I'm never disturbed by these games--Res, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, whatever; but this one is just wrong.
Of course, after five or ten minutes, you notice that you've collected enough little Chiclets to regain your health more times than you could ever get bit. Or swatted. Or stung. Or leghumped and yarfed upon by Glimmers [words fail; you've got to see it for yourself]. And, again, the only time you really end up in any sort of peril is in the last five minutes of the game when the final, major mutant is able to kill you dead just by reaching you.
So that's that. All advanced marketing to the contrary, this really isn't a bad game. It's a bit short, of course: stopping to look around at everything thoroughly, I still got through it in less than three hours. But it works. Spooky, entertaining, elightening [lots of new information on the history of Umbrella], and nice to look at. Especially if you like watching zombies explode and redecorate entire rooms.
Let's move on.
New merch I keep forgetting to ponce out at people.From the Shameless Plug Department, there's some new and reportedly-cool stuff at Wasted, Inc.; look around a bit; I don't remember what's new, specifically....
From our Surrounded by Idiots Department, we have, for a change, USPS.
The fucking post office. The people I nearly completely avoid. Until I need something I can't somehow download. And then, they suck utterly. And routinely.
We've been ordering various stuff lately online. Last week, the mailman showed up here, rang the doorbell, waited a good five nanoseconds, left a little You Almost Got Mail slip on the door, and shuffled off. Not before we got the door open in time to see him shuffling off, but before he reached that magical three-metre threshold beyond which governmental employees become deaf.
Because the package the 'tard didn't bother giving me was actually of some importance, we gave him about an hour to get back to the post office, figuring the maximum amount of goodies he could possibly carry, multiplied by five-nanosecond stops throughout the zipcode. Apparently, we misfigured that; he didn't get back there until after four. Best guess: he pretended to be a mailman long enough to hand out lots of You Almost Got Mail slips to everyone, then went off to the pub for three hours.
For that, Hunter made the arguable mistake of telling the 'tard's manager that no one in the zipcode was actually required anymore, and that we could simply have these things sent to the POBox where they'd actually be waiting for us when we got there in the middle of the night.
Which, it turns out, is not exactly the case.
So it's twelve thirty in the morning. We leave the restaurant which closes at midnight, and, since you're not actually allowed to turn left out of the carpark into a street devoid of both traffic and medians, turned right and drove down the street to the other post office, which contains my POBox, to get whatever we've been sending there since the post office which falsely advertises itself as actually serving the zipcode I live in has proved itself to suck beyond potential future use.
Here's how a POBox works. You've got this box. Which is already a misnomer, since there's no back wall to it. But there are two sidewalls, a floor, and a ceiling, all surrounding the basic volume of a shoebox. On the sixth side, at the proverbial fourth wall, is a door. A bit of metal on a hinge which stays solidly connected on the other side with a rotating bit of metal which, in theory, rotates out of the way of the door when you insert and turn the key.
It works pretty well, until a fucking moron jams the rotating little bit of metal in place by pushing a cardboard box into its path.
So now it's slowly pushing one in the morning, and I'm actually trying to pick a lock on a POBox for which I have a key. Which, incidentally, doesn't work.
They had a number to call in case of an emergency. So I called it. I'm not sure what constitutes a postal emergency, but I'm assured that my inability to get the mail from the idiots I pay an annual fee to deliver doesn't count, and that my only recourse is to go back during the day, when Heir Taxbase is fucking open, to talk someone who was able to test low enough to get a governmental position into lumbering over, getting my fucking mail, and giving it to me. Provided that said imbecile isn't off at the pub with the guy who doesn't deliver my mail to my house.
So. New rules. Based on my experience with these idiots.
1. Deliver my mail. Somewhere in your monosyllabic colouring book of a postman's manual, you'll probably find a similar guideline. You. Get mail. Bring mail. Give mail. Go away. No tip. Okay? Good. Let's clarify.
1.1. Do not ring doorbell, leave note, and flee. See 1., above.
1.2. Do not cram mail into POBox beyond 150% capacity; in the event that I, with more friends and mailorders than you have, get more mail in a day, place excess mail in larger box, and place key to larger box in smaller box.
1.3. Do not trespass into my backyard and leave mail postmarked in January on my back porch under the snow, so I can happen across it in June. That angered me.
1.4. Do not break mail. I don't know how in the living hell you can break mail, but, as I've seen, you're somehow able to do it. 1.4.1. Do not eat mail. I haven't had a problem with this yet, to my knowledge, but I'm allowing for the possibility.
1.5. Do not fail to deliver mail. If that's too complex a concept, then do not lose mail. If you the Post Office haven't got my signature on file in relation to a package you claim to have delivered, then, in accordance with the scientific method, you did not, in fact, deliver it. 1.5.1. Do not get someone who isn't me to sign for my mail; this counts as failing to deliver it. If you need a hint, I don't live in the landlord's office; there are no ashtrays there.
1.6. In the event that you work out the self-awareness to stop long enough to deliver mail, instead of delivering a You Almost Got Mail slip, don't park behind my car while you're doing it. Unless you want a broken mailtruck.
1.7. Do not spam me with letters begging me for money. I'm paying you for the POBox. If I ever mailed anything, I'd pay for the stamps. You're not in marketing; you're a mailman; see 1., above.
I think that's about it. If this is too complicated, stop being a mailman; consider an exciting career as a cadaver.
Speaking of spam. I nearly sent this into the folder containing spams from people owing me five hundred bucks per file, but I happened to notice something odd in the header and bothered to look at it after all....
To: hunter@gremlin.net
CC: gremlin@gremlin.net
Subject: SOLICIT YOUR ASSISTANCE(FROM:Pastor Thomas Macqueen)
Good guess. Especially in Hunter's case.
So far, it looks a lot like a spam; so far, you appear to owe me five hundred bucks.
So you potentially owe me ten thousand; let's find out....
Were you been, now....
So they had defensible provocation for was been attacking you....
So there's hope....
Waste operation? You're a janitor?
How mathematically convenient....
I always like being told how I can help out for the sake of an omnipotent organism....
Sure. Since you've told me that deities exist, I'll give you, say, negative ten thousand bucks, as outlined in my disclaimer.
Odd place for an apostraphe....
N.B:The first and second pictures was after the attack while the third picture was before the attack.
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'Brains....'
'Brains...?'
This was the before shot? Yikes.
More later....
--Gremlin