Here's to beginnings and ends.

So it's been over a year since I've posted any blog at all. I haven't had the motivation to post I guess. Or I've been too busy. Insert 5 more random excuses for my non posting. I guess on that note I should give an update on what's been going on with me for the past.... year? or so.

• Graduated Fire Academy. Got my EMT.
• Finally got a new pc (YES!!!!)
• My team made cevo playoffs but then fizzled out.
• Started a new "be annoying on the forums" project, bamf.sports. Taking TWL by storm.(follow us on twitter!)
• The fantasy football gods have decided to hate me.

Ok so I didn't really need bullets for that but who gives a shit they look cool.

CEVO-Professional playoffs are over and done. CEVO-Amateur Playoffs are in lower bracket finals, which are being delayed a week due to nerv lan. With Black ops coming out early in November, I really don't foresee us having another cod4 event unless black ops is just plain awful. So that leaves a void of around half a month to maybe a month with no events to play. (CG is finishing up their playoffs, this CSN thing is done, no other competitive leagues out there.) That's why we're(my team, not cevo) spending our time in TWL hardcore league and promod league.

On that note, the hardcore league is amazingly fun. I forgot how much fun this game was before we stripped it of everything and I started hating it. There's stuns, rpd's, m21's, dragonovs, cook nades, everything that a competitive player would scream and bitch about if I still left it in a league. But its the most fun I've had in CoD4 in 2 years or so. Plus the deagle is basically a one shot kill. How can you go wrong there? You can't. First time I've ever played Chinatown in a match either. Gotta admit I kind of regret stripping everything out of the game. While we wait for blackops since the cevo season is all but over I'm thinking about putting on a retro cod4 tourny, rpd's, stuns, perks the works (poet and didn't know it) on. Any comments?

And that brings me to my next point. Black ops is coming out soon. Lets hope treyarch learned from the mistakes of infinity ward (I mean they kinda did, they put dedicated servers and record function back in.) I said it in my last post about mw2, and I'll say it again. People need to slow their roll and chill the fk out if they want to start making demands on what we should and should not strip. I guarantee between alienware, cevo and all these other tournies out there that we will have enough competition in the first month of the game to decide what is good for it and what is bad for it. So save your bitching until after that. (CEVO will still be backing Ingram's Promod btw.)

Thats all of the updates about the beginnings and ends, the alphas and the omegas if you will. Here's a few more things I feel like ranting on for people to chew on:

• My friend Melissa is debating on coming back to CoD4. You know her as e-rev Sparkz. I told her I'd mention her in my blog and I gotta say. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO mel, don't do it! Wait for a better game! :P
• The Texas Rangers have made the playoffs for the first time since I was a junior in high school. Nolan Ryan said the rangers would win 92 games this year. They won 90. Nostradamus anyone? I don't even care if we win the ALDS, although it would be nice. I'm just happy they are in the playoffs. Baby steps.
• I never finished Dragon age. Couldn't bring myself to commit to it with other games coming out. Should I?
• Civ 5 was a giant disappointment for me. Just saying.
• NHL 11 is possibly the second greatest hockey game ever. The first? Blades of Steel.
• Follow bamf.sports for greatness. I mean who else gets a twl hardcore match shoutcasted and goes Double OT? Thrills that kills.
• If Ray Rice doesn't start producing My hair is going to fall out. Oh wait my hair already is doing that, thanks for reminding me roommate.

Thats all for now. Gotta be careful what I rant about , because heaven forbid someone will confuse my post as me being out to get them. (Not naming any names) I may decide to rant on something later. I may not. Deuces for now!

Late night rant

So you would think I would find something better to do at 3:45 AM in the morning. Most normal people are you know, sleeping right now. However, I'm an insomniac anyways and we had a fire page that woke me up. So here I am. I thought of trying to tie this part in about how loud the fire alarm was and how much of a screeching wake up call it was in reference to all the things on my mind but its just one giant clusterfuck. A "CF", if you will. Scrambled around in my head like a tv catching nothing but static. Its like waking up still drunk, not knowing where you are with your pants off, your head around a toilet and asking for crackers from your kitchen(Thank you, WSVG and DRT.) A CF, A giant , festering CF that nobody knows what to do with. That word so aptly applies to so many things this week. (See what I did? Made you think I wasn't gonna tie anything in but then decided to use CF's to tie everything in, I'm like a regular scholar or something.) For CF not only describes my reaction to a 3 am firecall, or the experience of having a little too much to drink, or one of my espn fantasy football teams after having not started ricky williams this week (not the supermen league) but also describes the state of the call of duty community right now.

They say you learn from your mistakes. My CF's, if you will, sometimes are mistakes, sometimes are not. For example, I learned a long time ago if I don't want to get rudely woken up, I should turn my fire pager off (something I will never do.) I learned that I should never, ever get as drunk as I did at WSVG 2007. I learned never to start my backup QB over Aaron Rogers if I can avoid it. I also learned that Activision is a money grubbing tycoon who won't listen. Have you learned that yet?

Lets review some of the things we've found out about Activision in say, oh I don't know the past week. We've learned that IW.net is apparently spreading a trojan because of being hacked. (see: source) Oh sure, blame that one on us hacking the game to put in record. We've learned that MW2 has not only a hidden gametype, but hidden maps (see: source) And we've learned that iw plans on eventually making the multiplayer pay to play. (see: source)

They say every blunder is a learning opportunity in disguise. For example. Child gets stung by bee. Child learns bees are not a thing to mess with, and avoid them in the future. So how is it that a child can learn better than we can? We're supposed to learn from our mistakes and yet we keep trudging on blindly convinced that some great thing will happen to this game. And yet IW has proven to us that we make up a fraction of the opinions they listen to, and generally we are ignored.

Who's to say they planned on making us purchase these new game types? I'm no Nostradamus mind you, so I'm not going to throw that out there but it does strike me odd that not only would they lock away new game types, new maps, BUT THE ABILITY TO RECORD, HAVE CONSOLE AND DEDICATED SERVERS too. We hung treyarch out to dry for similar blunders, and now, with treyarch wanting our help we're ignoring them still. How do we not do the same thing to IW?

And no, I do not own the game. Yes, I have played it. And I will agree it is amazingly fun to pub. I love the ideas of ctf almost as much as I love trying to eliminate certain red haired freckle faced people from my fantasy football league. (Not naming any names but you know who you are.) But seriously, why do you guys think we can push forward without a record function?

A certain admin who I hold in high regard told me he didn't think record mattered. I told him to start his league, and I will just glitch the shit out of everything and good luck proving it.

Seriously people, have we lost our common sense? Are we that blind by a false sense of hope?

I fully hope the game does get fixed for competition. I agree everyone's tired of CoD4 and needs a breather or something new. But is a demoless, serverless game really the place to go to?

All I'm saying people is to open your eyes and think about it. Stop being blinded by how fun the game is to pub and think about how upset you will be after you get screwed in a match and we have no way of proving it.

At any rate, that's my rant on that. Here's a few other things to take interest in.

I finally put down dragon age : origins. No, I have not beaten it yet. However my roommate bought Assassin's Creed 2 and so far it has been addicting. They even reference that pesky red hatted plumber, who does that?! (See : It'sa me, Mario!)

The game has been thoroughly entertaining for the most part so far. In the first installment of the series, I became bored very easily. Everything was repetitious after a while. Same moves, same everything. So far I've been pleasantly surprised by still finding things to do, although I'm sure at some point things will become repetitious.

L4D2 is here! Its a blast to play, and valve might be on to something with the scavenge mode. Iw, take a hint from these guys on how to run your shit correctly. CEVO is hosting a versus and a scavenge tourny for l4d, so make sure you check it out here. How can you go wrong with free entry? You can't. And just like the last l4d installment, some of the better cod teams are hopping over to play this as well. (Loaded and a few others) The game will be played almost out of the box, just with a ready up mod. I highly recommend playing it.

We're working on another cod4 tourny for now, be patient. I've decided to make it back to mr12 again. Part of me thinks that people get annoyed playing cod4 now because it takes so damn long to finish a match. Like I said, I try to learn from my mistakes, this was one of them. It'll still be knockout mode, but just mr12 now. Also we're including some maps like toujane and powcamp which will be sure to be entertaining.

Dragon's Age still kicks ass. There's an accomplishment on ps3 for getting busy with all the main characters, how sad is that? Lots of blood and guts and a cool dog. No airport terrorist scene though.

Avatar (the movie) a new final fantasy game, Star Wars The Old Republic are all supposedly somewhere around the corner. As if I don't have enough games to play already! I will be going republic in SWTOR, saying that now.

Thats really all the ranting I have for now. Remember, IW is currently a bane on our existance. A giant CF that gives us nothing but headaches. Show yourself to be smarter than a 6th grader and learn that you shouldn't do something that won't be beneficial to you. Is it fun to play? Yes. Absolutely. Will it work in leagues? No, it won't. So swat that proverbial bee and don't let it sting you or get you into a CF.

Question of the day

How do you lose to a team that lost to the lions?

Pretty Pathetic showing broncos.

Reflections on CoD this year

I started this blog because I figured I could find a use for all my negative opinions/complaints/concerns/griping. Lord knows I hear enough thoughts on what to do with cod competitively that I've had to set a brain filter switch so my head doesn't implode. As I sit here typing this I find myself asking, infinity ward, what were you thinking? No record? No dedicated servers? really?

Now I switch thought processes, as I do often because my mind is like a distorted version of a bad john cena action movie (a lot of moves but no real plot), and I want to focus on another subject: Competitive CoD.

I've had several people come to me griping that I should put Modern Warfare 2 into leagues right now. "Its ready!" they say. "You're an idiot for not pushing it out now." "CTF is the way to go!"(that one I do agree on) "Record function? Just use fraps, problem solved."(This gamer has obviously never fraps'd while in game.) "Who cares about dedicated servers? Just split tournies regionally" Or my personal favorite: "CEVO doesn't ban off demos, so you don't need record."

Needless to say I've blown up on a couple of people about it. Told one person to stick to writing, Berated a couple of people as fools. One of my European friends just suggested I come up with a thumbs up/thumbs down system of approval, Late Roman Empire style. I like it. I could see myself in that role. So I think instead of blasting people and their ideals, I'll divert this blog to that.

Big thumbs up to Joker and other modders for cracking the record function and taking the initiative to save our game, since IW obviously isn't going to any time soon.

Thumbs down to pokeefe. You make assumptions like you know what the hell you're talking about. We don't need mod tools? Really? How would you know if we want to make this game into cod4? Have you ever personally been an admin or know how to run and keep a community stable? Do you really think that no dedicated servers is "not that big of a deal?" IW.net is better than dedicated servers in the long run? Are you daft? What alternate reality do you live in? Take your own advice and stick to college instead of trying to tell us what to do.

Thumbs down to anyone thinking that our petition/signatures will matter in the long run to iw. Especially when none of us carry through on our petition. Sure that money will hurt them its money they want but they know you're going to buy it anyways.(their first day sales thursday at 310 million in the US and UK alone, which practically topples halo. do you really think 100,000 signatures matter to them?)

Thumbs down to people making giant suggestions in the first week of the game being out and the two weeks before the game comes out. Yes, of course the admins of the community are complacent right now. We're waiting to see what happens. Simply put you cannot have a game ready to play competitively without the record function. (The first one of you that mutters about fraps I'm stabbing with my mind.) We'll announce something as soon as we know for sure that its a viable option for competition, I don't see the point in all the arguing and bitching and theoretical bullshit. For now you should prepare for at least another cod4 tourny while we wait.

Thumbs up to people liking ctf as a gametype. Way to finally break away from the SD mode! (I had to say at least something else positive)

Thumbs down to Infinity ward. It seems as if you left the code for dedicated servers, record, and other things in just to taunt us. Did some paper pusher decide at the last second hey we're going to just turn all of that shit off? You're making my decisions on bad company 2 and l4d2 so much easier.

Thumbs up to the people smart enough to realize that while we are keeping an eye on things, that you can't rush mw2 into the competitive scene right now before things get fixed. Euros tried that and it was a giant fail. Sure it was for other reasons besides the game being flukey, but the point is that they weren't prepared and rushed it. We have to take the time to make things right the first time.

Another thumbs up just because I had so much negativity going on that I felt the need to put one. Congrats to the USA AVA video game team of snatcch, michaelD, gnome keith and juve on your trip to korea. Represent!

I think that sums up my rantings and bitchings for now. Sure I left a few people out but I griped them out on xfire anyways. Like I said. We're watching over mw2 carefully to see what develops. But we're not going to push it in and fail in a first event, nobody is that stupid. That's all for now. I am going to spend my day torn between the star trek original series marathon going on on the big screen in my roommate's room or watching and cursing football like a member of the league on that new tv show. Keep an open mind, and stop being blind idiots!