Why I Fail at COD

Hey Sexy Sexies. Your brain could use some stimulation, so lets get reading.

**Disclaimer** I am aware there are women that play the game we are about to discuss. Girl Power. Women's Rights, and stuff. That's cool if you have a vagina and do play. I don't play, and have yet to find any women who really play it for themselves and not just to impress or interact with people with balls, so for all intents and purposes, this discussion is probably going to offend you.

For those of you that aren't aware, Call of Duty, or COD--if you want to sounds cool and like you know what you're talking about, which I do-- is a video game that was originally release to the masses in 2003. Since it's arrival almost 10 years ago, it has blown the F up, and morphed into something akin to electronic crack for men and boys between the ages of 12 and 35. There have been like 8 or 9 versions since the first one graced humanity with its presence, and each one incites riots in Walmarts and Best Buys across the globe upon it's date of release each consecutive year.

COD is defined as a "First Person Shooter", but what most people end up playing is a multi player version of the game referred to as "Team Deathmatch" which basically means the dude you are controlling is on a team with other dudes and their main goal is to kill all the dudes that aren't on their team as many times as possible in like 10 minutes or something.**Side Note**I do not actually know how long the TDM's really are because my husband constantly lies about how much  longer he is going to be playing by telling me "I only have 4 minutes left in this one, just hang on, almost done"

How I understand it, my goal, if I were to play this game would be 1) See bad guys 2) Shoot. Got it. Sounds easy enough. So the first time my husband passed over his Xbox controller and told me to try playing, I figured I was going to kick some mother fucking ass. Ha. Pssssh. This is not hard. How can it be hard? All you do is run around and shoot people. I've played Mario Kart, and won. I dominate at Wii bowling. I'm like a level 57 gardener on Viva Pinata 2. I've fucking got this shiat in the bag.

30 seconds in, and I somehow managed to find the only real corner in the entire map--which is set to be outside mind you, how are there corners when you are outside?--and am stuck in this corner staring at the fucking sky, shooting at a wall. 

31 seconds in and I get knifed in the back by an opposing team member since I'm still stuck in the corner, looking at the sky, shooting at the wall. After being stabbed in the back, and then mocked by whatever 12 year old killed me, I do something called 'respawning' which means I get to come back to life in a different section of the map and try my luck again at actually identifying an opposing team member and successfully hitting him with a bullet. I quickly realized that the issues I'm having stem from the fact that with COD, I'm supposed to use one joystick to move my dudes body around, but also need to use a separate joystick to move his head, to simulate his line of vision. Now, I understand that this is done to make everything seem more real and lifelike and wonderful, but in reality this is just stupid because in real reality, I don't have to consciously think about moving my head. I just fucking do it. So forcing a player to try to do both these things at once isn't only annoying, it's fucking inaccurate. Take that nerds who invented this.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that I failed the mission, and let my team down. But I will: I didn't even come close to hitting anyone. At all. After 3 minutes of frustration to the point of tears and building humiliation as my husband literally rolled on the floor laughing at me, not to mention the mean things all the middle school boys were shouting into my headset, I had just about had enough of this game, and yell something like "fuck you I'm done" while throwing the controller on the floor.

Because I'm pretty competitive and am usually good at most things I do--this is a statement of fact, don't question it--I wanted to know why I suck at this game. Someone with moderate level intelligence like myself should be able to figure out how to work a controller with multiple buttons on it. It really shouldn't be that difficult.

So to make myself feel better and help explain away my ineptitude, I have come to a conclusion, a hypothesis if you will, on why I can never be good at COD: It all comes back to a little thing called Aiming Accuracy. And I give you the science to back it up:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16350603

This explains why my dude is always either staring at his feet or looking into the sky. It also explains why I am unable to hit anything other than inanimate objects like that broken down tank in the middle of the street or that pile of rubble by the fire escape, even though there is a dude running straight at me. Either my head or my gun, I just dont have the genetic cajones to figure it out. And that's ok. Because as much as I was hoping to get to Prestige Mode faster than my husband and all of his other dork friends, and even though I was really looking forward to using my kill to death ratio to justify my existence on this planet, I know, that as a woman, I will always have my cleaning and baking to fall back on.

 So today's post is dedicated to all the men and boys (fine, and women) who waste away the precious moments of their life playing a video game that simulates the horrors of war without making you go through any of the bad parts: May your desensitization to violence never come back to haunt you in the form of 15 to Life. May your wives and girlfriends and boyfriends and significant others never realize that you play this game to get the F away from them. May your chopper gunners be plentiful and your enemy's sentry guns easy to destroy--you're never getting to ghost pro, just accept it. And lastly, May you one day realize that the meaning of life doesn't come in the form of an Xbox controller, no matter how sweet the graphics may be. You can get there. I believe in you. Never give up.


~Maria

Deer Trail Death

Hey there. I hope you are having a nice morning so far. I woke up to the sounds of my husband's laughter as he explained that our dog had run into the house holding a 4 ft long stuffed Grinch toy in his mouth. We don't own a 4 ft long stuffed replica of the Grinch--for some reason.

So really, whats going on is our dog steals shit from our neighbor's yard...daily. To date, this winter, the following items have been brought into our home that don't belong to us: a child-sized red ruby slipper, a stuffed kangaroo, a stuffed cocker spaniel with a santa hat on, 3-4 large rope dog toys, a small stuffed duck-looking japanamation thing with a pink bow on its head, a child's blue headband, a giraffe beanie baby, literally 20-35 tennis balls, a lacrosse ball, a soccer ball, a plastic power ranger, a child's ballet shoe, and now, this 4ft long, neon green, grinch stuffed animal. I don't understand whats going on. Do they have a hole in their wall? How is he getting this shit? Or are the kids that live there just really uncontrollable and throw their stuff outside on a regular basis? I don't know. Either way, my dog is a thief, and I owe my neighbor upwards of $200 for all of his children's belongings that my animal has destroyed.

 Alright alright so speaking of neighbors, lets get on with it already. I live in a suburban area that is populated with various forms of wildlife. We often see wild turkeys running in packs down the street--**Side note**wild turkeys are fucking huge. They look like velociraptors.--as well as lots of bunnies and squirrels and raccoons and song birds and what have you. We also are lucky enough to have quite a large deer population, which is odd considering we are an actual neighborhood, and not a bunch of homes separated by acres and acres of forest. When I first moved here, being a city person, I was really excited to see deer literally walking down my street.

  Over time, this excitement began to wane a bit, but I still jumped up if I saw a buck run through our front yard or something. So I think we've pretty much established that I'm a nerdbomb, and I like deer. Alright, lovely. So wheres the conflict you say.

 After reaching our first winter in this house, we were driving home from the grocery store at around dusk. We turned off the main road on to the street that is the entrance to our neighborhood. This street has a walking path on the left, and woods on the right. On the left side, there are only a few houses, and these houses are only 30-50 feet off the road, so fairly close. We came up on the first house, which has a huge deck on the back of it, and I noticed that what looks like a search light was illuminating the entire backyard. In this spot light I saw at least 25 deer. Because I'm sometimes slow, I began to freak out and was all like "holy shit, what the junk, Jimmy do you see all those deer, what the hell why are they all standing in that spotlight, why would deer stand in a spotlight, do you think they are having a family reunion or an orgy or something?"

My husband looked at me like I just asked him how to chew gum, and goes "....There's corn on the ground. That's why they are there. They're eating corn." Oh. Right. So Apparently the people that live in this house enjoy feeding the deer. Ok fine whatever. At first I'm jealous that they thought of this before I did. I want to feed the deer! Fun! But. A few weeks past, I begin to see how wrong I am. Feeding the deer is not fun. It is anti-fun. It is a death trap. 

 Fast forward to today. After almost either hitting, or almost being hit by deer over 50 times, at seemingly any time of day as I pass this house during the fall/winter, I am beyond over the magic of deer. They no longer have the same majesty and grace they once did. Now when I see them all I think about is how stupid they look standing in the middle of the street just fucking staring at me, or how pissed I am going to be when one of these beasts inevitably runs into the side of my car in an attempt to reach the delicious corn on the other side of the street.  But then I realized something: it's not the deer's fault they are dumb and have a passion for corn. The fault really lies with the aholes who don't realize that attracting deer to their backyard with corn forces said deer to cross the only road in and out of the neighborhood more than they would normally, thus making me 100 x more likely to bust my Corolla seeing as I rarely drive less then 10 mph over the speed limit. Sigh.

So today's post is dedicated to the geniuses in my neighborhood who feel the need to feed the deer every fall/winter: Dear Ethel and Artie--I can only assume you are old as hell and have the time and extra pension money to waste on industrial sized bags of feed corn--I get that in your later years, nature suddenly becomes one of the only things that isn't scary or trying to scam you out of your savings, and I can respect that. But for the love of Charlie Murphy, can you please at least place the feed corn further back into the woods, and then invest in some good binoculars or something? Because the way things are going now, I'm going to end up hitting one of your precious deer, and I don't think any of us want that, and you really don't want that, because if push comes to shove, I'm submitting our story to Judge Judy-or whatever her equivalent is now-and you will be buying me a new front bumper or drivers side door. So come on you guys. Do the neighborhood a favor. Thanks.

~Maria

Reddit

Oh Hey There Everybody. I hope this morning finds you well. Or afternoon. Or evening. I just realized today that not everyone sits anxiously waiting at their computers checking this site over and over again between 9 and 10 am central standard time. So I have been doing a disservice to the readers out there that read this at 2am when they are bored as hell and have insomnia. Or the ones who read it during lunch because their work blocks Facebook and their coworkers didn't invite them out to get food so they are sitting at their desk eating a lean cuisine hoping to make it look like they chose this state of loneliness since they are clearly reading. Or the ones who accidentally stumbled on to this page at 6am after trying to find Billy Madison quotes on google, read 3 sentences, and then decide to go see whats shaking at TMZ. I love you all the same. Just like Jesus. PS-I saw this billboard on my way home from work yesterday:

 I don't get it.

Alright so, is this supposed to make me happy? I get that the message is "We are all Gods children" but what does God not being a grandparent have to do with anything? That seems rather ageist. And grandparents are fun when you're little. So if anything, this sign makes me angry because now I know 2 things: 1) God will not let you come over to his house and watch movies and eat pizza and candy and stay up later than 8:30 when your parents are on vacation. And 2) God hates the elderly, which is probably why he makes them lose control of their bowels and takes away their mental functioning, and forces them to want to eat dinner at 4:30. What a dick.

 On to the Big Show. Ok so unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, I'm sure you have seen, or at least heard of a website called Reddit. If you haven't, here, check it out: http://www.reddit.com/
Reddit's tag line is "The Voice of the Internet--News before it happens". Now I know that when you first enter the site, it's kind of confusing. It looks like this:

There is a reason for that. This format was selected because it's Reddit's own way of testing if you are smart enough to become a regular user, or Redditor. Much like the Vision Qwests or the Coming of Age Ceremonies of old, learning to navigate Reddit's waters successfully marks you a worthy candidate, and means you have past the first test in joining this community. I want to tell you more about what you're looking at, but that defeats the purpose of learning how to use the site. "And on this the 11th day of March it was said, I shall teach a man to fish for from this day hence he shall go forth and multiple the wisdom of the vine and never shall he be hungry again". ~Book of Maria, Chapter 3, Versus 17-152.

From my humble beginnings as a once a week visitor to the site, I have discovered a few things about the general population of reddit. 1) They are statistically funnier than the average person. 2) Most of them are intelligent. 3) They are so addicted to being online that 75% of them have fused into their bean bag chairs or couch cushions, and must be tube fed a steady liquid diet of Doritos, Ramen, Colt 45 or Mountain Dew Code Red. 4) They get defensive of their own. For instance, a friend of mine was on reddit and made fun of adult men with ponytails--as he should--and was basically electronically lynched for saying such a thing. Which leads me to point 4a) A high majority of these people are uber nerds. I'm also a huge dork, in that I read fantasy books and watch Science channel daily, so settle the fuck down I'm just stating a fact. This is what I imagine a composite of every reddit user would look like:

 From what I have gathered, avid reddit users are people that can devote 50-87% of their waking life to searching the internet for interesting, funny, or controversial shit, or that can devote 50-87% of their waking life commenting on links to interesting, funny, or controversial shit. Either way, they are spending the majority of their time living through their computers. And on one hand, this is sad. But on the other, bigger hand, it gives me interesting, funny and controversial shit to look at every week, so for that reddit users, I salute you. Your sacrifice is not in vain. You have created a community where like minded people can come together to make fun of things, discuss conspiracy theories, ask for advice on anything from sex to baking pot brownies, to finding secret weapons upgrades in Black Ops. You have filled a void that other sites can not fill.  You have banded together to raise money for victims of natural disasters and victims of bullying. You are getting noticed in a way many of you might never have been noticed before, and that's nice. Im glad for you.

So this post is dedicated to all the reddit superusers out there. Thank you for being willing to give up normal face to face interaction, the chance of ever losing your virginity, and basic personal hygiene, all in the name of  hoping someone else out there likes what you have to share.