Monday, January 31, 2011

Fringe is awesome, reason #4957563

Edit: MIKE, stop reading this post, contains major spoiler.  Seriously, it'll ruin half of season 2 for you.

I reserve the right to post at greater length on why Fringe is some of the best television of my lifetime, but this moment from last friday's episode is particularly amazing, but it requires some setup if you're not familiar with the current plot.  In short summary:

Peter is Walter's son.  Except Walter's real son, Peter-1, died in childhood, so Walter stole Peter-2 from an alternate universe in the 1970s.  Peter-2 is the biological key to operating some kind of mystery doomsday device that was left behind by an ancient civilization, and is currently stashed away in a secret FBI/military compound.

So the lead bioscientist at Walter's science corporation, Dr. Falcon, is running tests on Peter to see what precisely makes him the only thing that seems to activate the doomsday machine, which theoretically can destroy an entire universe.  Peter is played by Joshua Jackson.  Falcon.  Joshua.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Lying on the Internet

This Deadspin article was something akin to fetish porn for me.  I have to admit that between ages 12-16, like Katie Baker, I was both a heavy internet-chat addict and and shameless liar regarding my personal details.  The early years of AOL were an untamed frontier of liberty and experimentation, a playground my parents couldn't comprehend at the time, unmonitored and totally open to a specific kind of fantasy-is-reality dynamic that proved wholly addictive to my blossoming little teenage mind.  I'm not sure if this is coincidence, but this timeframe happens to map neatly to the onset of my psycho-social afflictions.  I can't say if internet chat was a cause or a result.

It began in the Teen Chat rooms on AOL, and I was onboard early enough that these rooms never numbered into the double-digits, and they were populated wholly of middle-upper class teenagers with way too much unchecked freedom, from families who could either afford the punishing hourly rates or parents aloof enough to not connect mysterious multi-hundred dollar bills to the newfangled internet thing that was spreading through my demographic.  Teen Chat was largely a 23-person gripefest about school, homogenous conversations about the types of TV shows, music, and movies that appealed to spoiled white kids, flirting, and lying about ages to graduate into the band of chatting girls who would talk openly about sex.  Reflecting back, this was well before the persona of the Internet Fuckwad had developed, so it was a remarkably civil time.  It was also horrendously boring and homogeneous, unless you could snag one of those whales, a girl who'd talk about her body or things that could be done to it in a private IM.  Again, age 12, this was the great undiscovered country, the holy grail: sex talk without the awkward face-to-face repercussions of addressing the subject with somebody you know or resides within your real life social circle.

I recall once incident where one such whale, apparently impressed with my ability to type quickly (which resulted in longer-than-average chat posts, which when 23 people are all feeding the same chat window the extra length gets noticed) asked for my phone number.  She wanted to talk, to pass the time.  She claimed to be 16, and given that age +2 was basically the standard rule for Teen Chat, it meant she was 14.  I, probably 12 at the time, was claiming 14.  Whatever.  A fucking girl wanted to talk on the phone about high school stuff, I was in.

The most vivid memory was the sound of her voice, that particular vocal occlusion and vaguely wet tone indicating braces, which wasn't aided when midway through the two hour phone call she ordered and received and began eating pizza.  It was puzzlingly endearing, which was the only reason I stuck around for two hours, since she seemed only interested in having an ear on the other side of the line while she cycled through the mundane features of her life and house in maybe the most superficial way possible.  This is important because it marks the moment I decided that teenagers were boring, and I set my sights somewhat higher.

I skipped the Twentysomethings rooms.  They were literally full of sex-starved guys typing every ridiculous come-on and sexual reference in the book at the few scant females who bothered to respond, and the chat rooms resembled what I imagine most Teen Chat-spawned private IMs looked like.  While you might argue that I just claimed sexual conversation was the ultimate goal of teenage presence on AOL, the Twentysomethings made it just way too easy.  It's the equivalent of walking through the city, horny and looking, but passing on the prostitutes on the corner.  Like a porn star, it's something best viewed but not participated in.

Thirtysomething rooms were my haunt of choice at the time.  Unlike the frat party atmosphere of the twentysomethings, here there was actual conversaion occuring, about subjects more complex than how cool the latest MTV spring break coverage was.  This appealed strongly to me, at this age (12 or maybe 13 by this point), a venue to experiement with writing and ideas and concepts that while not necessarily academic were still mature, and to receive instant feedback.  This might have been the primary allure for me, an evolution chamber for rhetorical style and beliefs that were instantly judged, the weakest offerings with ridicule, the strongest with rewards of invitations to private IMs that wanted to inquire more deeply into the person behind the keyboard (though not necessarily in a sexual manner).

To facilitate my presence here I needed to fabricate a person interesting enough to be welcomed and respected, but generic enough to dissuade probing questions or queries into the technical nature of jobs, hobbies, and political beliefs I had no information on.  I invented Thomas Vicario, a 31 year old sound editor at a small recording studio in Tarrytown, NY, who rented a room out in Ossining.  You see, Hackley was in Tarrytown, and I really did live in Ossining, so I had enough background info to work with if somebody says "Hey, I live there!  What road are you on?"  This was pre-Mapquest, pre-Google, on dial-up, and such information wasn't necessarily instantly searchable.  Thomas liked sports (flag football), romantic walks on the beach, and whatever poetry we were working on in English class at the time.  If this all sounds pathetic to you, I freely admit that in hindsight it's rather sad.  However, I must emphasize that to an early teenage brain who was slowly developing social anxiety issues, anonymity on the internet was somewhere between spiritual succor and heroin.

Thomas was also, thanks to his relative youth, athleticism, and sensitive side, the perfect bait for lonely thirtysomething women, with nothing better to do that spend whole evenings on AOL, looking to flirt or otherwise seek attention or validation, which was something I just couldn't get from the girls at school at the time.  I was popular.  Like Katie Baker and her Miss Flyers Newsgroup 1999 nomination, whenever such popularity contests developed within the Thirtysomething community, someone would toss "xcmt" into the ring.  It was addictive to be wanted.

Around this time I then discovered ImagiNation Online, an internet playground operated by Sierra Online.  It had the same sorts of oversized chat rooms as AOL, but it also had integrated games.  Board games in the Clubhouse, casino games in LarryLand, some arcade games in SierraLand (Red Baron, golf, etc) and a kind of D&D-ish dungeon crawler RPG called The Shadow of Yserbius, which I suppose is more accurately described as a graphical MUD.  This is where I spent countless hours as Tiamat (to much humor as it was later pointed out that Tiamat was a female dragon, but I was stuck with the name), playing my first MMO, simultaneously engaging in a kind of strange roleplay-RL hybrid in the tavern chat room.  The atmosphere of the game was such that everybody was "themselves" in chat but also had clearly defined roles as the characters they played, which occasionally was tugged into chat-driven plots and frivolity, and the lines between what was Chris, what was online-persona Chris, and what was Tiamat were largely blurred and rather confusing.  For example, players talked as players, but then some characters "got married" and the roleplay during such events was somehow simultaneously both in-character and out-of-character (and perhaps it just meant there was no divide between the two within this community, or that the existence of the game itself satisfied the alter-identity requirements for fantasy purposes and muddled whatever was left for the chat lobby).

The combination of the MUD (as addicting as WoW) and the chat (carrying over the appeal from AOL) was irresistible, and I spent a solid two months of my life doing nothing but playing SoY.  I joined the biggest guild in the game and was promoted to the leadership council within three weeks because I played the game so much and so often I matched existing leadership's character levels.  I befriended a guild officer who went by Selene, who was mature and awesome, hand-held me through the game, took me on quests, showed me how to acquire the best equipment, accompanied me on many ventures into the dungeon, and I quickly developed an overwhelming crush on her, despite never really talking to her outside of the game's confines or scope.  I should note that it was me, Chris, who developed this fantasy-driven and private crush.  It must have shown because it rapidly became rumor within the chat room (which housed multiple guilds) that the character Tiamat was "courting" Selene, even though this literally never developed as roleplay or OOC talk in any context, and Selene remained publicly oblivious.

It was a strange situation to be in, to privately be extremely happy to see this person's character name pop up in the chat list, and to constantly be publicly ribbed about it in that strange semi-real semi-fake way in the chat room whenever she wasn't around.  In a way, it became something of an identity crisis for me, because I didn't really know how to respond; addressing the issue with Selene privately could burst the bizarre semi-roleplay bubble we'd surrounded ourselves with (which I was enjoying too much to stop, and I had no idea if Selene and I were ever interacting player-to-player or character-to-character, or real-Chris versus fake-Chris, so there was also the difficult matter of which angle to address it from), and ignoring it meant ever-increasing pressure from the peanut gallery to "do" something (in what capacity?) which actually became rather stressful after a while, because teenage crushes are the biggest deal ever, and the real-or-pretend nature of our budding friendship confusing and painful to someone still developing a sense of personal identity.

In the end, the matter resolved itself.  Selene pulled Tiamat into the dungeon for a private conversation.  As we navigated the haunted halls, slaying fire skeletons en route to a corner of the game world none bothered venturing, my heart raced.  Does she like me?  Does she know?  Are we breaking up?  We're not even together and this is a breakup.  Deeply buried in the game world, she finally laid her heart bare:  Selene's getting married!  She was confiding in a best friend.  I was the first to hear the news.  This is Selene the character, by the way, not the anonymous person behind the mask, though maybe.  In my chair I was crestfallen, my prize stolen away by some dude I'd never even heard of in the game world.  I guess at this point I have to admit I'd fully bought into the dissolution of the boundary between real and fantasy, drunk with the joy of having people interact with me in fully adult manner.

This was another important turning point in the development of my comprehension of online roleplay etiquette, that IC and OOC need separation.  While I was personally heartbroken, Tiamat had to be happy for Selene, and I tried my best to type such, but...again, the chat room denizens either knew better or pretended to.  All anyone would say was "I'm so sorry" and "That has to hurt" as though Tiamat-Selene was destiny broken, and I had to keep playing Tiamat as chipper, while quietly I was fuming.

Did you know that 30something year old cyber-hunks who are also simultaneously guild/game royalty AND simultaneously wounded ducks are like catnip to the female population of SoY?  I could hardly log into the game without LadyInRed or HelgaBarb or whoever inviting me out to a private grinding session (grinding = repeatedly killing the same enemy for experience, you pervs), in the twisted MMO version of what I guess is dating.  Looking back the whole enterprise was seriously fucked up.  Anyway, LadyBow became the rumor mill's leading lady to hook up with Tiamat (yes, I know this is increasingly ridiculous), and she was also the motherfucking queen of blurred-IC/OOC lines.  We flirted.  A lot.  It was simultaneously both IC and OOC, or rather perhaps simultaneously neither.  I fell for it because I was secretly on the rebound and seeking positive attention, and it sold in the chat because everybody assumed Tiamat was on the rebound, and I was 13 so I didn't think any more of it.  Tiamat was pressured into inviting her as a date to Selene's wedding (where T was her Lord of Honor, natch), so now I had to juggle my personal conflict over how I felt about an imaginary persona in Selene, how I had to pretend to feel about LadyBow, and how I had to pretend via Tiamat how to feel about...fucking hell, I was a mess back then.  Anyway, we exchanged mailing addresses and flirted offline too.  She signed her letters as LadyBow.  I never did learn her real name.

And quickly it didn't matter.  The ImagiNation Online and phone bills came in.  $800.  If I've ever told anybody reading this about the time my mother broke through my locked bedroom door with a hammer to yell at me face-to-face, these bills were the root cause.  My online access was revoked, and I never got to say my goodbyes to anyone.  Though one person did try to say her goodbye to me.

Some weeks later, I came home late from a school basketball game, and my mother handed me a sealed envelope addressed "T" and thank God she didn't interpret that as Theresa.  LadyBow apparently had a cousin that lived in Millwood, and seeing as she just happened to have my physical fucking address she dropped by mid-day to see if I was around.  Luckily nobody was, so she left me a hasty handwritten note, though I'm kind of skeptical about having letter-sized envelopes available in the car without premeditation.  She was confused about my disappearance, missed talking to me, blah blah, XOXO, LadyBow.

Katie Baker was caught.  I very nearly was.  It was a scared-straight moment for me, the prospect of some 400lb divorced mother of eight swinging by the house to have a chitchat with my mother about that darling fellow she rents a bedroom to.  Or who knows, maybe she was a smoking hot 18 year old model with some free time.  Either way, this is when I learned that some lies run too deep, and that you can dig yourself into quite a challenging hole, whether lying to others or yourself.  While I did venture into some online fantasy roleplay in the future, I think my early exposure to the questions of identity, reality, girls, and what levels of interaction can be interpreted as real and what are just stories helped me avoid most of the personal troubles that my online contemporaries in the RP field seemed to fall prey to.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

BC2: Isla Inocentes

Isla Inocentes

Rush Attack:  I've always had problems attacking on this map.  Each substage involves crossing a wide open expanse of land or water to assault an entrenched position.  Poking your head over a hill or around a tree can and will expose you to sniper and medic fire.  Taking a boat creates enough noise to let every enemy know exactly where you are.  Taking a chopper is risky, since I never seem to latch onto one being piloted by one of those God's Own Hand kind of players who magically avoid tracer darts and AT4 rockets.  No, I always get the guy who flies straight on, doesn't turn to let me shoot the minigun, and blows up before completing his first 180, if not crashing under his own lack of coordination.

Island stage:  I prefer to heli-gun here because I've not yet solved a decent way to approach the island.  As mentioned, taking a boat over just means you're at the cliff base and the three dudes protecting that side of the island know where you are and have the only firing lines on you, while you scramble around looking for the beach access.  Taking the road over gives you cover until the bridge, but then you're boned, because you have to cross a clearing and the river, and again shooting down is far easier than shooting up.  You can generally snipe successfully from the hill across the bay, but that's boring, and you'll probably get counter-sniped by another recon or (if you're like me when defending) someone on the heavy MG doing nothing but countersniping.  The good news is that the chopper respawns almost instantly upon destruction.  So, gun it, parachute out onto the island when it inevitably blows up, and you might get lucky.  Kit:  Assault with the M14A2, 4x scope, extra grenades and magnum ammo.

Village stage:  In my experience, taking a boat up the middle to the docks is instant death.  All the MGs point at the water, and they can see you coming all the way from the first island.  I prefer to walk up the road (bonus if your tank driver can give you cover) on the right and cover the eastern M-COM from the road/stairs area, picking off the inevitable engineers who come down the hill to take out your tank.  This is actually also a good spot for being a tank gunner, since it's nearly impossible for enemies to flank your backside, so you can focus just on what's ahead of you.  Most of my kills come at this stage; there's not much cover when guys come jumping down the hill to address the tank or disarm the M-COM (and your tank should have blown up every building on the eastern half of the map anyway).  Kit: Engineer, UMP-45 and Carl Gustav, 4x scope, extra explosive damage, V-alt (the machine gun is more useful here than smoking off tracer darts since they're still firing head-on and they'd hit you anyway without the tracer...just kill them before they shoot).

Fort stage:  Sniping from the hilltop gets you killed.  There's something like five machine guns here.  As infantry you need to run down the hill as fast as possible and get into their base for building cover.  Stay alive long enough for your dead squadmates to join you, then slowly push to an M-COM.  I prefer the western one first because it's a shorter run distance, less MGs on that side, and you get to cover faster.  Enemies tend to come from the raised helicopter platform, so keep an eye up by that fence while you guard the charged M-COM.  Also, if you're in a tank, park it at the top of the hill; there's a small bend there that gives you 100% cover from RPGs but still lets you shoot over, so you can provide covering fire for your squad who prefer to grind out their deaths on the eastern half of the map.  Kit: Assault, XM8, extra grenades, mag ammo, V-smoke.  (Engineer if you're going to camp the tank, since you'll neeed to repair it occasionally.)

Rush Defense:  Unsurprisingly, I prefer the stationary weapons on all three stages here, and engineer the whole map due to the prevalence of tanks and helicopters.

Island stage:  Priority 1: tracer/RPG the choppers.  If they have v-smoke, then run over to the stationary AT and try to get a lucky shot before you get sniped.  When the chopper's not up, I stay on the heavy MG closer to the water on the western side (on the right, if you're facing the attackers) and do nothing but spot snipers/medics on the opposite hilltop, intercept boats coming around the hill, and spot assault/medics coming down the road.  If the MG gets taken out or there are too many snipers, the white concrete blocks on the western side (the water side, I think east-west stays the same on the map when perspective is reversed but I'm not sure) provide nice enduring cover while you guard the water routes and the path up to both M-COMS.

Village stage:  The western MG tends to stay alive longer, so I plant on that one and cover the docks area.  It gives really good sight lines on the warehouse where attackers tend to camp when they come up the water route, so it's good for kill farming and keeping them stuck at the warehouse instead of moving up to the M-COM.

Fort stage:  The western MG on the ground (not the tower) has a bullet shield that'll protect you from casual gun fire.  The angle up the hill isn't great, but at least you're safe from everything but a clever engineer and his CG while you suppress the entire right side of the map.  The tank can't hit you from this position unless he comes all the way down the hill, and if he lives that far, your team is awful and you're going to lose anyway so just enjoy the pretty map images while waiting to respawn.

Monday, January 24, 2011

BC2 Strategy: Oasis

Another narrowly focused post on Battlefield BC2 and how I prefer to address each map and game type, probably broken up over multiple empty afternoons.

Oasis

Rush Attack:  Base 1 is a tough cookie to crack.  In something of a reversal of nearly all other rush maps, the most defensible sub-zone is the first instead of the last; the high hills on the west offer little cover for infantry advancement, the river bank on the east is easily spotted from everywhere in the base, and central cover is far enough removed from the main base that the gap between becomes something of a killing field.  Given the building density here, recon is a difficult class the entire map while attacking.  I think the obvious play here is engineer, at least at the start.  Both sides have two tanks to play with, and the prevalence of stationary weaponry requires removal from safe distances if your infantry is going to advance.

Base 2 onward as attack, once you make it to the plantation area, favors assault and shotgun-recon, since sight lines are severely restricted by buildings, and engagements become purely close-quarters.  The only rule of thumb while attacking on this map is that the river is usually your safest advancement path, since 80% of both teams prefer to duke it out on the roads.

Rush Defense:  I've played entire Oasis matches using nothing but stationary machine guns and grenade launchers.  They're best on base 1, but still usable further back.  They're really that good.  The heavy MG on the rooftop at base 1 even has a bullet shield, so you're invincible to snipers on the main land mass, and you're free to nail them in the hills when you're not destroying the mid-map cover.  The MG also hurts the chopper.  I like to engineer base 1 to tracer/RPG the chopper and snipe tanks (when I'm bored with the grenade launcher), but it's perfectly fine to use other classes and just jump down to the anti-air cannon if you need to wreck the chopper.

Base 2 onward, I like to go shotgun recon or medic.  I'm always the one idiot that gets stuck behind, alone, guarding both M-COMS at the plantation while the rest of the team is hundreds of meters ahead, so recon for motion mines, and medic for some decent midrage-longrange stopping power when I spy dudes coming up the river.

Conquest:  Assault or shotgun recon.  75% of my action happens from one side of the B dock to the other, so I specialize in that close-to-mid range with unscoped ARs or shotguns.  Between guarding the middle of the map and the opened sight lines, there's never really a good reason NOT to choose to fight at B.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Head, meet desk.

The new Republican plan to avoid default by pinky-swearing they'll use existing revenues to service debt interest first is kind of like promising your credit card company you'll make this month's payment because you're skipping the rent.

Bad Company 2

Intended to occupy the 11am-1pm gap in my morning dreary, this post will discuss my favorite class weapons and loadouts in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.  Anybody not playing this game 1) should and 2) may not find this post entertaining or even interesting, since it may dive into the specialized language of shooters and draws on game-specific references that aren't easily enjoyed by those unfamilar with its gameplay, kind of like how discussing World of Warcraft mechanics in mixed company is a poor idea.

Also, I want to touch on point 1) a little more thoroughly.  I hate shooters.  I hate the FPS genre and always have, and I think it's ruined many a RPG franchise that decided to do the FPS-RPG hybrid and managed to fail on both counts (I'm looking at you, Fallout).  While there are games that break the FPS monotony with interesting equipment systems (Borderlands) or very high writing and environment quality (Mass Effect) they tend to be the few shimmering stars in an otherwise dark sky filled with brainless military shooters (just about anything with online multiplayer) where the object is to take generic gun X and shoot the closest moving object until you've earned enough kill-points to feel good about yourself.  Bad Company 2 (BC2) is a little different in that most of the online game modes have objectives that aren't strictly point-whoring.  The bad-assest elite never-dies sniper who sits on a hill and shoots pure death is totally worthless to your team if he never helps you capture flags (conquest mode) or attack/disarm M-COM stations (rush mode).  In fact, the medic with a 0.4 kill/death ratio might be more valuable in a strategic sense, to the overall game, than LOLZSNIPEDU who has 40 kills but never leaves his home base.  That these game modes are more objective-based than just killing everything you can helps alleviate the irritation I experience at being generally poor at shooters.  I still die, a lot, to superior players, but I can still push the battle line forward, defend my M-COM, spot enemies on the hill for my dudes to blow up, and have fun while still being bad.

Additionally, the inclusion of vehicles and stationary defensive weaponry adds interesting wrinkles and some rock-paper-scissors elements to the overall strategy.  There are positional and resource concerns, and the whole map feels more like a real battlefield than some other shooter's sandbox for spraying lead.  If you've ever watched some of the competitive shooters highlighted by MLG (MW2 or Halo) you can see that they're just frantic run-around matches, with the victor determined by whoever can run around a blind corner and headshot at close range more quickly and accurately.  BC2 is absolutely nothing like this (though you do frequently run into people at close range, and it can become a matter of whose trigger finger is quicker, that one kill or death is almost irrelevant to the larger scheme of your team's performance).  Maps are much more open, you can spot for your allies, every building and wall is destructible by enough explosives or tank fire, and there's always a flank to cover.  You can be bad and still play well.

That said, here's how I like to play:

Assault kit

1: XM8 Prototype.  It feels as though the iron sights on this gun have a small amount of aim assist, because I've killed dudes from way longer using the irons than I ever have using a scope on an assault rifle.  Firing quick 2-shot pulses can quickly and accurately take out guys from medium to long range, but it also fires quickly enough to win close-quarter firefights against engineers and medics.

2: M416.  I don't have much experience with it yet, but it comes equipped with a scope sight standard instead of irons, and its diminished kick means it's more accurate for long-distance shooting.  I'm trying to use this gun with a 4x scope on wider maps (Harvest Day, Heavy Metal, Oasis) to get a feel for it.

3: tbd.  The only other gun I've used extensively is the AN-94, and it's awful.  It fires 3 round bursts with minimal kick, but they just don't seem to all hit where you're aiming.  I've gone through 24 bullets taking someone down shooting at their back, and you just don't always have time to plow a full clip into someone.  Maybe there's a use for this with a 4x scope and trying to headshot, but I can't imagine a situation where I'd prefer this up-close to the XM8 or to the M416 at range.  I'll get to know the other guns soon.

Accessory: 40mm grenade launcher.  Being able to blow up cover from a distance = win.  Also, firing into windows to take out snipers inside.  Haven't even used the shotgun or the smoke launcher, and there haven't been any instances where I would have wanted them.

Perks:  RDS or 4x scope (unless I'm using the XM8, then it's extra grenades), magnum ammo, V-Smoke.

Engineer kit

1: UMP.  The most damage per bullet for any gun except a sniper rifle, with the smallest spread and low kick, which makes this the best overall engineer SMG.  It'll win a CQC duel against a medic, can be pulsed to take out recon, and will take out an assault as long as you get the first shot.  I like it with a 4x scope even at close range, since I prefer to hang back as an engineer and pick my spots, waiting to find something to blow up with an RPG/CG salvo.

2: SCAR-L.  The benefit here is that the gun is silenced, which can help hide you from probing assault and medics.  The damage is the same as the UMP, but the silencer adds some spread so it's not too accurate.  This is more of a house-to-house weapon, so RDS or iron sights are the way to go.

3: RPG-7.  Engineers get to choose from the RPG (high damage vs vehicles), Carl Gustav (high explosive range vs flesh), M136AT4 (tracking system), or anti-tank mines.  As an overall choice I like the RPG because it's good versus tanks (medics and most assault have no tools to take them out) but can still blow up a machine gun or the walls protecting a sniper, and it's heat-seeking with the tracer gun.  The CG takes way too many shots to blow up vehicles, and the AT4 is impossible to aim against anything that moves.  On non-vehicle maps I'd go with the CG, but I'd probably be more likely to just play assault or medic instead.

Perks:  4x scope or extra explosive ammo, bonus explosive damage, V-Smoke.

Medic kit

1: MG36.  This gun is a beast, but only if you exploit the game mechanics.  The idea behind medic LMGs is that they gain accuracy over time, so they were intended for sustained fire (100 bullet mags) where the initial shots are kind of wild, but then the gun settles into a longish-range machine gun for suppression fire and, with luck, some kills.  However, the very first bullet is always on target.  So instead of mashing the trigger, you fire blisteringly quick 1-2 shot pulses, and the quick-by-design accuracy recovery built into LMGs keeps those shots perpetually on target.  So then on top of this, the MG36 has a pinpoint scope built in, which you can amplify with the 4x.  So you basically have an automatic-fire sniper rifle with greater-than-sniper accuracy over the same distance, without sniper bullet drop.  I played on a Nelson Bay rush map last night where I just parked on the hill outside my base and killed snipers on the tower in the back of the enemy base.  The only downside to this gun is the crazy spread when you get into a full-fire close-quarters fight, since you don't have time to pulse.  So hang in the back, snipe entrenched enemies, and rez your squad when they fall.

2: M249.  This only sees use in really tight maps (Cold War, others whose names I can't remember) where there's more building cover and surprise encounters, and you need CQ accuracy.

3: Irrelevant.  There's no use for any other gun.

Perks:  4x scope or medkit-bonus, combat armor, V-Smoke

Recon kit

1: GOL.  I think this is the best bolt-action rifle.  It feels more accurate than the M24, fires faster than the M95, and has a nice clean scope.  If you're sniping, I like this gun.

2: SVU.  This is a semi-auto sniper rifle, and it's a nice alternative to the GOL when you feel like spraying body-shots instead of trying to aim headshots.  It's also usable with a 4x scope for more medium-range stuff when you're tired of squatting in a bush on the other side of the map.

3: VSS.  An automatic fire silenced sniper rifle.  It's kind of like a really strong but inaccurate assault rifle with limited ammo, so it's usable in CQ situations, but it really needs assault ammo-kit support.  You're probably better off with a shotgun or the G3 if you're going to be on the front lines.

Accessory:  C4.  C4 kills tanks in one shot, if you lay it down on the road, or somehow manage to run up behind one.  It also damages M-COMS, blows up buildings, and is generally awesome as long as you're not bush-squatting.  Mortar strikes almost never kill anyone and don't kill tanks even with two direct hits.

Perks: x12 scope (RDS for the VSS), magnum ammo, V-Altfire

Non-kit gear

1: M1911 pistol.  Standard for all builds except engineer on vehicle maps (tracer dart).  It shoots quickly enough for headshots at close range, and does amazing damage.  Should take someone down in 2-4 hits.

2: SAIGA w/ buckshot.  Shotguns are tricky, since buckshot sprays everywhere and slugs can easily miss.  I think the proper route here is the semi-auto shotgun, so you can try to spam-fire and hope for some headshots.  I can't tell you how many times I've used the pump shotguns, didn't kill the target on the first shot, and was killed during the eternity they take to reload.  A properly aimed SAIGA w/ buckshot only needs two shots.  Slugs need 3 and are harder to aim.

3: Any stationary machine gun.  You're exposed to helicopter and sniper fire, but you also spew death with 100% accuracy.  On maps like Oasis where you get nearly 180 degree FOV, one guy on the MG suppressing the infantry in the middle can easily win the match while your team casually takes out the vehicles.  It's less useful on, say, Cold War or Nelson Bay rush where buildings and trees block your firing lines, and snipers tend to make up half the opposing team.  Though if the other team doesn't have a sniper smart enough to look in the back of the base on Nelson Bay, the MG again can singlehandedly hold off an infantry push on the main road.

Things that suck

1: The UAV.  It dies in three hits, and the crazy long-distance accuracy of almost every class means you're under fire immediately upon takeoff.  The hellfire missile doesn't have a big explosion radius and reloads every 25 seconds.  The altfire machine gun is hard to aim on the move, which you need to do at all times because you die if a stiff breeze hits the UAV.  A safe vertical distance is too far away for active spotting.  Nobody ever does anything useful with the UAV.  AND you're totally exposed while you're using it; anybody can casually walk up behind you, type in the chat that they're about to stab you, make a sandwich, and then kill you.

2: Tanks.  A properly set up tank, with a v-smoke driver, a gunner that isn't an idiot, and two engineers on perma-repair support can dominate a game.  What always ends up happening is that support runs off into the woods, and any recon/engineer/assault can 1-shot you from behind with C4 or a mine he put down on the road five minutes ago and can't be spotted.  Or some tank takes one hit and starts frantic reverse driving, exposes his engineers to death, doesn't sit still long enough for repairs, and takes himself totally out of the fight and tries to "snipe" with shell fire, which doesn't work.

3: The AN-94.  It sucks.  Don't use it.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Bored time: Norben at level 6

Note: will not reflect actual level 6 strategy w/r/t spell usage

Str 14
Dex 10
Con 12
Int 14
Wis 18
Cha 14

Feats:  Extra channeling, selective channeling, combat casting, heavy armor proficiency

Buffs: Bless, Divine Favor, Shield of Faith, Channel Vigor, Weapon of Awe, Bull's Strength, Spiritual Weapon

Hit:
+4 BAB
+2 str
+2 generic magic weapon
+1 bless (morale)
+2 divine favor (luck)
+1 channel vigor (haste)
+2 bull's str (enh to str)
= +14

Damage:
+2 weapon
+2 str
+2 bull's strength
+2 divine favor (luck)
+2 weapon of awe (sacred)
= +10

Math vs AC20 using old crit rules for consistency:

+14 [1d8+10]:  .70(14.5) + .05(.75(29) + .25(14.5)) = 11.41875
+14 [1d8+10]:  .70(14.5) + .05(.75(29) + .25(14.5)) = 11.41875
+8 [1d8+2]: .4(6.5) + .05(.45(13) + .55(6.5)) = 3.07125 == 25.90875 DPR

AC:
10 base
9 armor
2 armor enh
2 shield
2 shield enh
1 dodge (channel vigor)
3 deflection (shield of faith)
= 29 AC (could pump to 30 if buffing cat's grace, or 31 with mithral material, but...meh, already bending the earlier gold guidelines for three pieces of +2 equipment.  Also, tower shields might be something to consider when feat-collection begins.)

There's just no way to get his DPR anywhere close to the other attackers I've posted, even eventually digging into stuff like power attack and martial weapons.  I think the only thing to do is buff defenses and continue trying to be a front line distraction and combat generalist/field medic.  The next few feats should be heavy armor prof, tower shield prof, maybe shield focus.  I'd like to squeeze extend spell in somewhere.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Educational Atavism

I have mixed feelings about this recent report on a North Carolina school district's attempts to rollback longstanding diversity policies.  Before speaking on the matter, I need to note that I attended a small upscale private school, whose graduating senior class of 120 consisted of precisely one black student, so integration and daily interaction with the African American community isn't something I was exposed to from 7th grade onward.  We did have many Japanese and Korean students (the majority from the infamous Moon clan) though, and I would posit that while the cultural isolationism was even more severe between them and we white folk than between a theoretical black Hackley population, the asians often came from families even more moneyed than the rest of the school (rich enough to afford full multi-year and almost always multi-sibling tution, room & board, and all the imported gadgetry you could possibly want in the late 90s), so the socioeconomic schism wasn't so stark as I suspect OHS or Wake County, NC might be.  This lack of field experience might color my opinion somewhat.

I have to state that my initial reaction was "This makes sense."  In poor economic times, for cash-strapped schools, optimizing bus routes to be maximally local might help the district save a little money.  My very first reaction was from a budgetary viewpoint.  The secondary opinions on enforced diversity and, subsequently, on the larger political war over public education didn't form until much later, after I'd read Education Secretary Arne Duncan's letter to the editor, and digested the zeal with which Republican-sided commentators attacked that letter.

The partisan in me desperately wants to ascribe racial motives to the greater conservative educational movement in the various moves to end affirmative action, diversity regulations, and basically all the rules and systems put in place to try to dig African Americans out of their collective socioeconomic hole.  It would be terribly easy to just say, oh look, a slave state wants to put all the black kids in the most underfunded schools.  Those fucking Republican racist fucks.  But to go there would ignore the equally-poor rural white areas that would be forced into a similar cirumstance.  While I'm sure there are high-ranking Republicans on a mission to twist "equality" initiatives back onto themselves for discriminating against white people, I think there's an easier explanation here, or at least an easier liberal argument to make against the specific North Carolina news.

Reshuffling the demographics of school systems to purely local parameters will also reshuffle them back into purely economic castes.  Creating poor black urban and poor white rural schools, drawing only local funding, educating only local students who traditionally perform worse than their more well-to-do peers, will create designated failure schools.  I guess it's similar to the argument made against charter schools and voucher programs in DC, NYC, and other areas:  Taking funding away from public schools makes those schools more likely to underperform, which strengthens the national argument against public education as a whole, which results in more charter and voucher programs and private institutions, which takes more money from public education, and so on.  So dividing NC schools into rich-school poor-school will, theoretically, be another black eye for public education.

I can't say whether or not I received a better education at Hackley than my friends at OHS.  I have no clue.  Any possible aggregate comparisons between the two student bodies will be rendered totally pointless when factoring in family income levels, which affects tutoring, opens up doors at colleges that poor and middle-class families don't have, is a loosely correlated factor in parental involvement in student education, other cultural factors, etc.  I guess this is also an argument against charter schools, since the perceived increase in test scores can just as easily be attributed to parental involvement as school management and teacher performance.  What I can say is that, not burdened with a union, Hackley can and did routinely refresh their teaching roster when certain educators were thought to be slacking.  I can personally verify that teachers whose classes were total jokes, who were poor communicators, who let the students have free reign, were almost uniformly let go shortly after my experience.  There's some argument to be made for a market-driven educational approach, however small or insignificant you may feel it is when compared to the aims of public goals.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that the racial arguments w/r/t school segregation may not be as persuasive as the political one.  Public education has been on their to-kill list for some time.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

The Debt Ceiling

The conservative argument that raising the debt limit would inhibit economic growth and, therefore, shouldn't be done is perhaps the single stupidest thing to have been written or spoken by a human being in my lifetime.  In an era that's celebrated the excesses of idiocy (Jackass, Jersey Shore [virtually any MTV vehicle], Judd Apatow movies, my sister, hip hop and country music, the ascension of the pre-teen pseudo-porn book genre, Failbook, etc.),  I want to emphasize that the refusal to raise the debt ceiling still trumps all of these things by a wide margin.  It's so incomprehensively dumb that I'm having difficulty summoning the explanation in a manner that doesn't sound like I'm explaining the plot of Green Eggs & Ham to a golden retriever.

Okay, so, the argument goes that perpetually raising the debt ceiling enforces no legislative budgetary constraints, so congress will always raise spending levels, meaning more and more of the annual budget going to interest payments, our debt-to-GDP ratio steers into the Africa zone, etc.  Incidentally this is all correct.  The linked chart is accurate, if criminally misleading in that I believe those figures aren't adjusted for inflation.  Anyway.

Then phase two of the argument is that because raising the debt limit is no constraint on federal spending, the only way to constrain federal spending is to not raise the debt limit.  WAT?!?  You can't argue both sides.  Either the debt ceiling is or is not a passive check on federal spending.  If you say it isn't, you can't then immediately turn around and claim that it will.

But this isn't even the fundamentally stupid part.  "But Chris," you say, "the Republicans mean that the debt ceiling isn't a check on spending levels when congress can just arbitrarily raise the ceiling when they need it.  Once there's a hard, unalterable limit in place, congress will be forced to cut spending."  This is the short-bus argument, and it's retarded for two reasons.

1) Federal spending is not a tap that you can turn on and off at will, all or none, instantaneously.  There are spending obligations that cannot be revoked in anything resembling a timely fashion, certainly not timely enough to immediately halt spending by, say, April, when the Treasury estimates we'll hit that limit.  You can't just immediately cut a trillion dollars of spending by snapping your fingers.  The limit WILL be hit.

2) When we do hit the limit, and we don't raise it, this is what happens.  Let me put it in some familiar context:  Do you remember the 2008 crash?  The whole thing about the derivative debt fiasco, fraudulent credit ratings, write-downs forcing some of the world's biggest banks to declare bankruptcy overnight, forcing even Republicans to support TARP and multi-billion dollar bailouts, etc?  And how it brought the stock markets crashing down, killed retirement accounts, yadayadayada?  Let's have a quick refresher course.

Housing bubble leads to lots of mortgages, given to people with questionable resources, but seem affordable because rising housing prices artificially inflates the equity value and keeps a variable interest rate low.  Wall Street discovers that if they bundle mortgages together, then chop them up into chunks again, they can trick credit agencies into rating them AAA while claiming absurd rates of return.  Wall Street gobbles up mortgages and sells them off as collateralized debt obligation vehicles (CDO) to any pension fund manager, mutual fund, institutional investor, and other bank who'll throw money at at.  It's all AAA debt.  Housing bubble bursts.  Home prices crash.  Bad mortgages have their interest rates increased.  Homeowners default on payments.  CDO revenue stream starts drying up.  Panic.  Credit agencies forced to reassess CDOs at lower ratings.  Triggers reserve clauses at banks, who now A) need to have more cash on hand to balance the bad debt and B) need to write off the loss of market value.  Banks start to go bankrupt.  CDO values nosedive.  Anbody holding a CDO is now sitting on a pile of steaming shit and doesn't know what's inside.  Mutual funds drop 45%.  State and institutional pensions experience catastrophic loss.  Stock market crash.  Banks disappear.  Investment vehicles underwritten by those banks disappear.  Global fucking meltdown.  Etc.

Ok, so this happened because CDO/CMOs, a relatively modern invention, had a sudden credit-worthiness shock, which set off the domino chain.

Now imagine how many investors worldwide, how many banks and firms, pensions and IRAs, are holding US Treasury bills right now.  Way more than were holding mortgage-based CDOs, right?  And guess what happens to the AAAAAA++++++!!!!!111eleven credit rating of United States paper when we hit the debt ceiling and have to start missing interest payments and defaulting on government-issued debt.

Take a wild fucking guess.

And it's not even just about megamclargehuge financial institutions and the circle-jerk of interconnected debt and macroeconomy.  When we hit the debt ceiling, what stops getting paid out first?  Ok, interest on debt, covered that.  What about...social security checks?  What about medicare reimbursement?  Military salaries?  That anybody could seriously consider federal default is a sign of fucking derangement.  Holy fucking shit.