Wife-Aggro

I think something like this has happened to all of us.

You’ve been playing a game for quite a while and, frankly, most of the tricks are known. So, when you’re driving your somewhat non-descript sports car down the highway and you see one of the collectible objectives, say a radio tower site, in the distance, you immediately begin setting yourself up to blow it to hell.

Your eyes scan the terrain around your objective for the enemy troops that you know must be there. Nothing in sight this time, but there’s one of those little huts nearby that always seems to spew forth an inexplicable number of soldiers like a clown car at the circus. 15 or 20 party crashing soldiers would have been an issue last week. But this week you’ve been putting points into submachine guns and the two that you know you can call forth with the punch of a button should make quick work of anything this target can throw at you.

Still, you’ll have to keep your eyes on that hut as you pull off your masterful attack.

There’s a nice piece of ground heading up towards the towers. Rolling slightly left to right, so you know that if you pick up just a bit more speed on the highway, you can slide down across the shoulder and then up that nicely placed soil ramp, propelling yourself safely above and over the ground nearest the gate. There’ll be either mines there, or possibly dogs. Dogs aren’t a big problem when you’re not on foot, but there’s a sick side of you that just sort of likes the sound they make as they compress against a 90 mile an hour car and the fence. And at the speed you plan to hit the ramp, you’ll clear any potential mines with ease.

And with any luck, you’ll clear the mines, AND, separate a guard dog from its noise hole at the same time.

The car is going to be wrecked. But the game is full of them and you’ve gotten pretty good at parting the next one from its occupant, so that’s a non-issue as far as you’re concerned. You just passed some sort of camper vehicle so if you’re really quick, you can clear both towers out of site, and get back to the highway before it comes along. You can’t recall if you’ve driven that type of camper yet, so maybe it’ll be the one that gives you one of those undocumented driving achievements.

Bonus.

So you’re set.

You slam your foot down on the gas and let the car drift just a little bit into the oncoming lane so that you can have just a little more pavement between you and the jump when you make your turn. Sometimes the controls are a bit wonky, so that might help.

Right as you get the car up around 95, and get ready to turn towards the tower site, the alarms go off.

Alarms are something new. You don’t really recall hearing an alarm near a tower site before. Or at any non-story mission site, really. And it’s a weird two toned alarm that is really gods damned annoying.

Also, the car coming towards you is flashing it’s lights. That’s also new. You’ve seen the lights before, of course, the game has a really nice day night cycle. Shooting at night is kind of crappy, but the fact that the game developers put some time into coding night time is something you can appreciate. But the typical traffic that’s you’ve played high speed chicken with over the last couple of weeks since launch couldn’t care less which side you pass by them on. They’ll jump out of the car and scream NPC gibberish at you when you run right into them, but that hasn’t happened, on accident, in quite a while.

So lights are unexpected. Like the alarm. And, just slightly heard over the grating two tone alarm, you think you can make out a horn coming from that camper behind you.

Time starts to compress around you as you glance to your right. Speaking of new things, by the way, you really can’t recall seeing the passenger seat in your car. Or, for that matter, the car’s back seat behind you.

And there are two people also in the car screaming at you.

Which suddenly explains that odd two toned alarm. Woman screams, boy screams. It’s weird that you didn’t catch that before.

Other things start to pop out to you.

There are birds on the power lines crossing the road, for examples. That’s some pretty good detail level for the 18 month old machine you’ve been gaming one. Way too good.

And that car that’s now blaring it’s horn at you, and flashing it’s lights at you, also appears to have a GMC logo on the front. You really can’t recall seeing logos before.

Somewhere in the back of your mind the notion that this isn’t a good time to attack the radio tower site after all. So you slide back into the lane that you were earlier. Besides, you seem to recall really liking this car since you picked it up… actually since you bought it. Since you don’t normally buy cars, this car must be special. Perhaps even unique. So wrecking it seems like a bad call.

And slowly, from the very back of your mind, the notion that these two people in the car are importantly to you comes to the fore. So, taking on 15 or 20 soldiers, much less the 20 foot jump through the fence into the site, seems too risky.

So does 95 miles an hour. So you pull over the right lane and slow wayyyyyyy down.

That turns off the alarm…. Well, that stops the screaming. Your passengers who’s names you’re just starting to recall are still staring at you, but at least that annoying noise is going away.

Right about then your male ego defense system starts churning through reasons for what you just did. You’re starting to realize that you’re going to need a really good one this time, and a brief notion of blowing up two cell phone towers isn’t going to cut it.

Dear Mrs. TheRoflPant’s Mom, 

I’m writing to talk to you about your son, and our World of Warcraft guild mate, TheRoflPants. 

First of all, let me tell you that he’s a fine boy and very mature for his age. In fact, we were all sort of surprised to find out that Rofl is 11. We have a sort of maturity rule in our guild and until we put in the TeamSpeak server, we all assumed he was an adult like the rest of us. Even after we started using TS, we sort of had a debate going about Rofl being a young boy or a woman playing a male character. In the end, though, we were surprised. 

In hindsight, we probably should have known from some of the jokes he’s told us in guild chat. Don’t get me wrong. Your son has a very… mature sense of humor. In fact we’ve found him to be very mature and a fine fit for our guild. He’s become an integral part of our guild and we’ve come to rely on his Death Knight. 

That’s sort of why I’m writing to you. 

Recently, our guild has started to play through the 10 man raid content in WoW and Rofl is one of our 10. Yesterday, though, Rolf posted to our guild forums that he’s grounded for the week for messing up the computer room. Without Rofl, we’d be unable to run our planned instances this weekend, so we were hoping we could discuss alternatives to Rofl being grounded during our runs. We feel sure that if you knew that your decision to ground Rofl impacted the other 9 of us, you’d reconsider. 

We hope we’re not being too forward. Since we found out how young Rofl is, we’ve all sort of adopted him in spirit. And in that spirit, we kind of feel that this punishment is something you’d want our input on. Honestly, Rofl spends more time in WoW then any two of the rest of us, so he’s probably spending more time under our supervision then yours. So, we’re kind of partners in this. I mean we’re partners in the raising of him, nothing else. Although we do have two members that live kind of close that have indicated they’d be willing to drive up there every so often. Rofl did post a couple of your pics on the forums, and if you don’t mind me saying, you must work out, or something. 

Anyhow, we’ve come up with some alternatives to Rofl being grounded this weekend. 

First off, we thought it would be a good punishment, knowing how hard Rofl has been working on his gear score, if you let him come with us on the raid, but we don’t’ let him loot anything. You might not know this, but having a piece of gear that you’ve been wait to drop get disenchanted in front of you is pretty rough. I’m positive that would teach Rofl to clean up his soda cans. 

Additionally, we’d be willing to change our guild MotD, Message of the Day, to “ROFL! CLEAN UP YOUR MESS” or something like that. Whatever you’d prefer. 

The two guildies that live fairly close have volunteered to call Rofl every so often to remind him as well. I think we already have your home phone number on our forums somewhere. In fact, if the address that Rofl posted is still current, we might work out some sort of thing where they drive up there and help him clean up once in a while. 

We’re pretty dedicated to helping resolve this issue. Hopefully, you’ll be willing to meet us halfway on this. 

Anyhow, 

Thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing from you. 

The Members of Yo Mom’s My Epic Mount.

This week I bought a new printer for our house. It’s an ok printer. Pretty standard actually for today’s crop of multifunction devices. It prints, it faxes, it copies and it’s home network ready. Even connects to our home router wirelessly with WPS. All good stuff. In truth, there was really nothing to distiguish this printer from the other 11 sitting next to it at the store outside of some manufactuer names and price differences.

Thinking back on it though, I know what one feature prompted me to buy that particular printer over all of the others that I looked at. I think I just had to work through some denial issues about what that meant for me as a consumer, and perhaps a person, when that became the feature I look for the most in a home appliance.

I could print to it from my IPhone.

I’m not entirely certain when “mobile me” began to replace “old deskbound me.” I also refer to him as “20th century me,” by the way. I’m going to have to go ahead and blame Apple for this one, though. Like most people, I’ve had a cell phone for a few years now. I’ve also performed my daily job activities on a laptop for about the last 8 years. Of course this latest laptop is firmly docked to dual monitors 95% of the time any more. So I’m not sure either of those really prompted me to move away from a sendentary life-style.

Nope, it was buying an IPhone last November that did it. Obviously I was late to that game, but I’ve not really wasted alot of time getting caught up.

I read my email from that phone as often as I read it from the computer I’m typing this on. I browse the web on it. I play the usual suspects of games on it. It’s pervasive.

Quite honestly, the idea of printing from it never even occured to me until I saw in a review (of the printer I purchased) that I could. Then it was a no-brainer.

I don’t see Moble Me, hereafter refered to as just “MMe”, waning anytime soon. In fact, until just a few weeks ago, I was contemplating bridging the gap between our current desktop bound home computer network and the eventual laptop and desktop home computer network by intruducing an IPad into the mix.

Just because.

-dr

I’ve decided that it’s time to make my son into a man.

Or at least move the process along.

There are a couple of reasons for this that have been bouncing around in the back of my melon. The first is that, quite frankly, the little guy has lived a pretty sheltered life. Then, secondly, there’s the whole looming end of the world thing.

I recently finished reading The Road. Not to give away any big spoilers but I think that the story would have had a much better ending if the main character (the father) wasn’t forced to haul a boat anchor (the boy) around for the whole thing. Looking at my son through that filter, I worry that I’m going to end up lugging a pretty heavy sack of needy-hungry around if and when my own piece of earth turns to ash.

Thanks to the rigorous video game training course we’ve been putting him through, though, it’s not all bleak. Since he was first able to hold one of those little Xbox controllers in his hands, we’ve been ingraining all sorts of post apocalypse / alien invasion / pimp survival skills in him. I’m pretty comfortable in the belief that should push come to shove, he could certainly hunt us down some mutant rat person when needed. Assuming that we can get his hands of one of those sniper rifles he’s so fond of.

He certainly knows the best places to shoot a zombie should something like come to pass.

But I fear that that there are a couple of gaps in my son’s education that need to be completed before the words of the prophet Roland Emmerich come true. Namely, I need to work with getting the boy familiar with women and male conflict.

Women will be kind of tough. I sometimes wonder if his perception of how women behave is a little skewed towards the barking-at-the-moon crazy example he’s getting from the women in our family. To be clear, nobody has recently gone off the rails over the use of wire hangers, but there’s definitely an aura of bat-shit crazy here from time to time. Which I’m pretty sure to experience another example of 10 seconds after my wife reads this post.

It’s probably too late for the little guy on that front.

I think I could probably do something about male conflict though. I’m just unsure what would be the best method to take.

I could send him to some sort of mixed martial arts classes. But 2012 is sort of looming over us at this point and I’m unsure if we really have that kind of time.

Option two would be to just get him into a fight at a truck stop somewhere. I can’t remember, though, whether it’s better for him to win his first big coming-of-age fight or learn some sort of lesson from getting the crap knocked out of him. That’s not the sort of thing that you’d want to get wrong. There are really no do-overs, if you muff that up.

And I have my doubts that child protective services will sympathize with my goal of preparing my son for the end of the world by telling a 290 pound trucker that my son called him a punk bitch and is waiting for him outside.

It’ll probably also be hard to find a 290 pound trucker willing to instruct an eleven year old boy in the gentlemanly art of closed fist fighting when said boy is balled up in the corner of a parking lot crying.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I guess we’re stuck just sticking with his current course of video game training. Thank the gods for M rated video games being there for us parents.

 -dr

Just a quick update after the last post.

During my last trip to the coast for work, I do this pretty much every Wednesday, I tried stopping for dinner at a different fast food place. In this case, Taco Time. Taco Time is like a slightly better Taco Bell. Slightly better food, slightly higher prices. I was happy to break out of my rut. My stomach was not. What began to unfold during the next two hours of the drive home was a frantic race between the car I was driving, and my colon. I’ve already explained the fact that I have a borderline phobia about using toilets outside of my house. Side-of-the-highway rest stop toilets fit nicely into the screaming hysterically side of that phobia.

Mothers with little kids whom they’re trying to get to get to stop peeing in the car seat are not the least bit amused by a 40ish year old man screaming hysterically in a bathroom stall. The sound in those places carries like you would not believe.

So for the sake of the little kids, I do not stop at rest stops. I go home and do my business there.

Anyhow,

Thanks to my attempts to break out of my rituals, I spent about 90 minutes of my life careening down the highway at 75 miles an hour, butt elevated over the car seat, legs pinioned to the floorboard, face, I’m sure, alternating between a look of blind fear as my stomach was mid spasm and one of near biblical ecstasy as the spasms temporarily recede.

I don’t recall a lot of the drive except for bits and pieces. I recall a few of the pot holes on the highway near Ellensburg. Very gods-damned funny, Department of Transportation. I recall the 3 semi trucks that for about 10 miles blocked all three lanes of the highway, each truck going about half a mile an hour faster then the truck to it’s right. And I do recall passing a school bus on the right.

I was a pretty amusing sight, I can assume from the faces staring at me in slack jawed hilarity. Looking back, I’m not as irritated with the tax payers of tomorrow as I was at the time. I’ve heard all about the trials facing today’s schools and I have a hint at the future facing the kids on that bus and I’m sort of glad, now, that I could offer them a short respite on their way towards mediocrity. In fact, I’d say that it’s a 90% chance that at least one of those kids will probably grow up and end up working at a Taco Time to pay the bills.

So the circle of violence will be complete.

Who’s laughing now, you little bastards?

-dr

I’m starting to notice that as I begin my fifth decade spinning around the sun that I’m starting to dig a rut. A history nut will tell you that Henry Ford’s real innovation wasn’t the Model T, it was the way he built it. Teach enough people to do one small part of a larger process and they’ll develop comfortable expertise in that task.

I think that comfortable expertise is something that we all subconsciously try to achieve in our personal lives as well. Well, at least I do. It could be that the rest of you revel in your uncomfortable ineptness.

I buy gas at the same two gas stations.

I drive the same route to the coast every time I go there for work. I eat at the same fast food restaurants on the way there and back. And when I’m there, I tend to eat at the same 2 places for lunch. Probably because the people that I eat lunch with are stuck in their own rituals.

I hit the treadmill at the same time every day that I work locally and walk the same 4 miles. Being a treadmill, the scenery tends to be the same.

And I definitely like using only one toilet in the entire world. The rest just give me the sceevies. I’m not sure if that’s ritual though. Quite likely it’s some sort of deep seated neurosis or phobia. Only my wife probably knows for sure.

Most of these rituals I think are kind of normal. But I think that over time I’ve developed some that I’m having issues with and trying to change them is proving to be harder then I expected.

Years ago, when I first started playing MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online games, for the tragically lost), it use to be a lot of fun to get together with my online friends, drink enough to blur the lines between my keyboard and immersive gaming, and have a generally good time.

Through Asheron’s Call, Everquest 2, Anarchy Online, EVE, Conan, Warhammer Online, and a ton of others, this became my norm. The games changed and, except for a few exceptions, so did the people I played them with. But the ritual stayed the same (the alternate song title that Led Zepplin rejected).

I’ll admit, though, that the *Amount* of drinking varied. It was sort of a bell curve between two beers over a four hour period on one end and, “Where the heck did Dog go? He stopped moving and now he’s disconnected” at the other end. The gradients in the middle generally involved either normal drunken gaming to pissing off everyone I know. But I digress.

I’m not sure if you can call it a New Year’s Resolution, or parental concern for the environment that our son was growing up in, but the wife and I stopped drinking at home at the beginning of the year. As some of my more vocal friends will tell you (I’m looking at YOU, Rob) this isn’t the first time. But you have to start somewhere and so far we’ve stuck to it.

Well, I have. My wife is barking at the moon crazy half the time and I’m not sure if I could tell if she’s drinking or not any more.

The bitch is, I”m not having as much fun playing MMOs.

A few of us decided to give WoW a try again after being clean for 2 or 3 years. There really isn’t a coin that they give you for that, although there should be, so I’m sort of unsure on what our record is. But we re-activated our accounts three weeks ago. My son is a lot older now, and he’s playing with us. So that’s pretty cool.

I can play the same old games with the same old people. I even enjoy it. But I have to admit that I really miss the ritual.

I think I need to replace my old bad example ritual with a new ritual.

I wonder if playing nekkid is bad?

-d

Social media games are making my friends, family, and old school chums (most of whom I’ve not actually seen with my own eyes since 1998) into the worst sort of telemarketing asshats. And it’s become such the norm, that I don’t think they even realize it.

I’m a big fan of multi-player gaming. I’ll play a game with another person or other people on the PC, console, or even my phone.

First Person Shooters? Done em.

Massively Multi-Player Game? I’ve been an elf, a dwarf, a sorta cow thing, cyborg thing from the future, and even a Jedi, as well as many other offerings.

Hell, I’ve even played Candy Land.

But lately, I’ve noticed gaming taking a dark turn towards turning everyone I know into an un-intentional, and unpaid,  marketing employee for their game of choice. I’ve stopped going to Facebook even though I kind of liked catching up with old friends. I’m just tired of turning down requests to join farms, or mafias, or whatever the flavor of the month game is over there. Not that there’s alot of work in chosing not to participate in the game of choice for these friends and family of mine, but these ARE people that I tend to care about. And turning them down sort of feels rotten. A fact that I’m pretty certain these gaming companies are counting on.

Now, the social gaming disease is spreading to my phone. Closely modeled on what is going on in Facebook, MySpace, etc., tons of “social” games are popping up in the IPhone App Store.

Do any of us really want to live in a world where we’re forced to reject our Mom, Dad, Wife, Sister, or kid we played Jr. High football with’s request for a friend to play some game with when we go to order pizza?

I think not.

-dr

‘ve been thinking alot out my own version of the bucket list this month.

I’m not in danger of dying anytime soon, I don’t believe, unless this year’s physical generates some surpise bonus content to my life. But it seems to be that if there are things you want to try to complete before you pass away, it’s better to start thinking about them at 40, rather then when you’re spending your last few days debating the existance of an afterlife with yourself. Hopefully, at age 95.

And a half.

I completed one of my life goals this last week. Which is probably where all of this stems from. I purchased a new car and had the dealer build it the way I wanted it. Rather then just buying the closest thing to my vision on the lot that day. It was kind of cool. And pretty damned expensive. But it did get something off my list.

I think I want to write a story. Not a novel, but perhaps a novella? I’m an avid reader and can spin a story from time to time. Years back, I participated in an IRC Star Trek group. The Captain’s role was to organize a story for the members of the crew. Each week, I’d take my crew of 8 or so “crew members” through a mission. Borrowing heavily on the lore of the setting, to be sure. But everyone seemed to have a good time. Every good author that I follow seems to have a group of people who proof read thier work and help move each story along. Maybe I should tap into the seemingly critical brain trust here at wife-aggro for some of that feed back.

We’ll see.

I’d also like to complete a full song. I can put together a little intro piece for a podcast w/out straining myself to overly much. Now I think I’d like to do the full 3 verses, 3 choruses, and a bridge. It’s in me. I think I just need to focus.

Those two goals may not be entirely unrelated. I suspect it’s just two forms for the same goal of tapping into my creative side.

Maybe I need a Bucket List catagory.

I  purchased tickets to see Nickelback, Shinedown, Breaking Benjamin and Sick Puppies in Spokane this May. That, to me, is a pretty solid lineup.

It’ll be my second time seeing Nickelback, Shinedown, and Breaking Benjamin. I’ve seen Sick Puppies three times.

I bring this up for 3 reasons.

Number 1. Every one of these bands puts on a great show.  Nickelback and Shinedown have a great veteran vibe and know how to work up a crowd. We caught Nickelback last year in Spokane and Shinedown on their own tour at the Showbox Sodo in Seattle. ((On a side note, there is NO better way to watch a show in a medium sized venue then the SoDo)). Nickelback had Breaking Benjamin (as well as Papa Roach and Three Days Grace) on tour. The Shinedown show included Sick Puppies (along with Adelita’s Way and Cavo). The first Sick Puppies show we caught was on the 3 Doors Down tour (with Staind and Hinder).

So, I’m really happy to be going to see these bands again.

Secondly. I went ahead and opted for VIP tickets this time. Partly because the show is around the time of our wedding anniversary so the little extras, early entry, and the better seats sounded like  a good anniversary type gift for my wife.

But also, and this is number 3, because the lady (Live Nation employee) that I spoke to on the phone about tickets seemed to be completely lost with regards to me buying something from her.

I’m aware of the ticket purchasing issues with Ticketmaster. I’ve heard the stories about unfair fees, jacked up ticket prices, and whatnot. But I’ll say this for Ticketmaster. When I’ve wanted to purchase at ticket, and I’ve purchased alot of tickets, they seem to completely understand the concept of giving me a ticket to a given seat in exchange for my money. Not so, it seems with this Live Nation employee that I ran into. In the course of a 15 minute phone call, I was put on hold no less then 4 times so that the person at the other end of my phone call could check with another person. First that there was a Spokane show. Then that there were tickets available for the show. Then that there were still VIP tickets available that weren’t special pre-sale tickets. Lastly over which of the 3 types of VIP tickets were available.

Finally, I put her on hold (hung up) and puchased the tickets over the internet. It was actually cheaper. I can assume that there is some sort of extra fee for the “privledge” of speaking to a live person on the phone.

If this is an example of Ticketmaster’s competition. I think they’re safe.

Ticket buying drama aside, I have high hopes that I’ll enjoy the show. It being part of an Anniversay gift, I’m planning to spend the night at the Davenport and do the whole limo to the show and back deal.

Don’t tell the wife.

-dr

Without a doubt, 2009 has been a good year in games and music.

Not to miss out on a bandwagon, here are my top 5 games that came out this year. I’ll note how I played them.

5) Plants VS Zombies (PC)

4) Left 4 Dead 2 (PC and 360)

3) Borderlands (360)

2) Assasin’s Creed 2 (360)

1) Dragon Age: Origins (360 – so far)

To be fair, there were alot of games that I didn’t get to this year that might have made the list if I had. Modern Warfare 2 and Batman: Arkam Asylum come to mind immediately. However, I didn’t play them, so I can’t rate them.

I’m not going to rate music as I can’t. I love the hell out of every song I bought this year.

Sonar 8.5 dropped this year though. HUGE improvements. ’nuff said.

Here’s hoping that 2010 is just as feature rich.

After all, it’s only 2 years from 2012 and according to Hollywood. And I guess the Mayans, that year is going out with a bang.