All I smell is cherries...

For the past couple weeks I've been dealing with different kinds of solutions that my dad has been making to prevent the cracking of cherries with varied results. As you might have guessed, I am starting to get a bit tired of cherries and honestly the smell of them is kind of gross to me now if you can believe it. Well, that is not entirely true. The smell of soaked cherries is what is making me sick. See, we stick these cherries in bags for hours upon hours and see if our solutions have kept them from absorbing water and cracking. We check them every two hours and by the time we are done the whole area in which you are working smells like bacteria infested warm wet cherries...just foo.

My friends and I have started to get back into Day of Defeat which is a half-life modification (branch off of a previous game redone for the World War 2 era). Since it is extremely old and hasn't been updated the game can get very frustrating to play. The hit registration is horrid if you have a latency connection (ping, or time it takes to send information from your computer to the server) of double than the person you are playing against because the server has to make guesses as to what it thinks you will do or where it thought you were when the other person shot. This makes for ridiculous kills and frustrating matches. Anyways, we used to play this game a lot and enjoyed it quite a bit and even went to Canada and Texas to play in a couple tournaments. We never accomplished anything super spectacular in terms of finishes but we were always among the best in the United States while we were in practice (2003-2004) but now it is quite the different story.

I don't have the patience for the crappiness of the game anymore and there are so many exploits and random inexplicable shots being had that it is more of a "who can pull off the more amazing shot than the other person" in order to win, not cool. Another gripe of mine that has been since the beginning is that sound is absolutely so crucial in this game. Now you might think "well duh" but it gets to the point that if you move without crouching or even run for a split second that people are able to pin point your exact location these days. Now to me this is insane and people will honestly crouch walk or not move for minutes at a time just to avoid detection and to get the upper hand and get a kill. If you have ever played a video game before in your entire life then you know that action is what drives a lot of the fun, either that or the suspense of something. Let's think for a second, how about we wait 2-3 minutes to wait for something to happen only to get rocked and think "wow, what a waste of time." It's like playing counter-strike and getting killed within the first minute and have to wait another 4 minutes just to be able to play again...lame. I like a game where you have to not only outsmart them but outplay them skillwise. Day of Defeat has become more of outwaiting and hoping that your shot registers than anything else...not fun.

Either way I will continue to mess around with my friends and play this game but only because it is a game we all can play and enjoy only because we are playing it together. I would try and suggest another game but of course as is always a problem among a large group of friends, it is hard to find an activity or game that everyone can agree upon to play, ugg. I think this is why it is good to be open minded and be able to appreciate many different things/genres of activities or games. I like to think that I am this way but like many I do have my limits of things I can tolerate. Country music, dancing, being around strong personality people, mushrooms (I know it isn't an activity but I can muscle them down if I have to), soap operas (I don't think I've ever actually sat through an entire one before), and there are many more things you could put on this list.

As you can see your mind talks about what it wants to and completely neglects the subject of the post, heh. Anyways, I feel better now and most likely the majority who will read this will think "hmm, that was interesting up until he started talking about day of victory or something like that" which is understandable. Just for kicks I'll post an old screenshot of a match that I played in and did exceptionally well.

I am [C.A.P]Reubenec for your information






As you can see I was able to pull off a 2:1 ratio in both halves of this match which is actually quite hard in this game. As of late I am having scores that are close to 12-24, so sad. Although I did have one half in a scrim against old cal-invite players where I went 26-24 so I haven't completely lost all of my skill :).