Team Fortress 2 Sprays

About two years ago, I posted a list of usernames from The Playstation network that I found amusing. They were culled from the records on my PS3 while playing Team Fortress 2. Since then, I've purchased a new computer and purchased the PC version of the game. Far better than the PS3 version, as the PC version has:

• Enough updates and added content (free!) to create a whole second game
• More users than the 10 people that played on the PSN
• Developers that didn't implement to half-ass security

I wanted to do a second post like that one from two years ago, but Steam doesn't save all the people that I meet in a single place the way that the PS3 does. Then Valve added a feature where you take screen shots in any Steam-enabled game by pressing F12, and I thought that all of the fun little sprays that people use in game would be even more entertaining.

BTW, for the uninitiated, a "spray" is a little .jpg image that you can post on a wall with a press of a button. Originally used (I guess) for tactical marking of way points or spots of interest, now they are primarily used to for humorous purposes.

Or Pornography. Lot's of T&A sprays too. Or shock images. When a game that has any online modes at all, the ESRB rating will be marked with an asterisk and a note that says "Online Interactions Not Rated". That's basically their way of saying "Look, the studio didn't add any sexual content to this game, but we can't stop people from showing you a screen grab of Two Girls One Cup, or from reading Scat-Porn featuring the cast of the Super Mario Games."

And yes, the latter had actually happened to me before. Some things you just can't unhear.

Anyway, Instead of posting them all here, I'm just going to send you to Flickr, where I've saved and commented on some of the better ones:

Team Fortress 2 Sprays

And don't worry, it should be clean enough for all but the most sensitive among us. The kind that think that extra mild salsa is a good idea. No shock images, no boobs.

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Well, maybe some boobs:

Foodies, Hunger, and Class Warfare

At the al-dente blog at amazon.com, one of the authors (Tracy Schneider) is attempting to feed herself on $7/day for five days, as part of the United Way's Hunger Challenge. Caveats: She cannot accept food from family, friends, coworkers, etc. This week, there's no doughnuts or coffee provided by the office, no accepting dinner invites from friends, things like that. She has to eat Breakfast Lunch and Dinner, everyday at this cost, and no adding ingredients that she already owns except salt and pepper. Also, in the spirit of the challenge, she's going to attempt to use fresh produce and protein whenever she can. The $7 amount was chosen as it is the maximum amount of money a (single) person can receive on Food Stamps.

Some of you may be thinking "That's not hard. Heck, I've been feeding myself on $4 per day since I left home!" And frankly, you'd be right. That's $210 dollars per month, which is pretty rich for one person's food budget, except maybe in an area with a remarkably high cost of living (NYC, for one).

Unfortunately, a lot of the comments, in the true fashion of internet trolls, have resorted to name calling and attacking the writer for this. When Ms. Schneider wrote about using a leftover Rotisserie Chicken Carcass to make homemade chicken soup, the attacks began right off the top. The first guy, "greg", thinks he can write a book on what's wrong with Schneider's posts and believes himself to be an expert on what poor people can't afford (ding! Stuff White People like, #62!).

Then there's "marissa" who sounds like daddy didn't hug her enough when she was little. The Irony Police will be probably be knocking on her door soon for calling Schneider a "pretentious asshole" after calling her a "fucktard" and still attempts to take the high road.

This isn't the first time the Internets were outraged at what well-to-do journalists called a tight budget. This article from two years ago on CBS told users how they could put together a spaghetti dinner with a tossed salad and dessert on a shoestring "recession budget" of... $35.00. Or another article on 20-something hipsters who's post-graduate degrees in poetry (seriously) aren't giving them good job prospects, and they're using their taxpayer funded food stamp money to buy Free-Range-Grass-Fed-Organically-Grown-Cruelty-Free-Vegan top dollar groceries from Whole Foods. (hat tip to my sister for the link)

I can understand the indignation. When people read these articles, it brings up images about some Trust Fund Baby who's woefully relaying the tale of how she had to sell the vacation home Vail, CO in order to keep the one Santa Monica. The recession is soooooooo cruel! Meanwhile the guy mowing her lawn is using his $50/day wage to provided food for his three kids.

The commenters raise some good points (rotisserie chicken wouldn't be available to be purchased via Food Stamps, for one thing), but generally need to chill the hell out, a point not lost on other contributors to the al-dente blog.

Here's my only real conclusions on the matter:

• Eating well on $7/day is not terribly difficult.
• The spirit of United Way's Challenge, I think, is to replicate the challenge of living on Food Stamps, so I think the restrictions of not buying things you couldn't via Food Stamps is a good idea.
• This is not a "living in grinding poverty" challenge, and I have several friends who were or are currently on Gov't nutritional assistance and they have a working vehicle, even if it is a little beat up. If Ms. Schneider uses a car to go grocery shopping, let that one slide.
• Tracy Schneider may very well be what is described as a Bohemian Bourgeois. For the rest of us, it is OK to roll our eyes or even snicker at those that have to totally rethink their grocery shopping and eating habbits to fit them within a budget that a lot of us might consider to be lavish.
• Name calling and making personal attacks are NOT ok, and it does nothing except make yourself feel like a bigshot, while everyone else feels embarrased for you. Maybe you should slide over to the message boards at Fark or 4Chan. You'll fit right in. Or maybe get eaten alive by some professional grade trolls.
• Yeah, give me a jar of Prego, some Barilla pasta, a bag o' salad greens, and some Yoplait, and I could recreate that $35 recession budget meal (*snicker*) for about eight bucks. Some of you tightwad superstars can certainly do it for less.
• Just because you're on Food Stamps, it doesn't mean your diet should move to ramen, Bar-S hot dogs, Hormel Chili, and Wonderbread. If you can still eat Whole Foods groceries on Food Stamps, then that's great! I'm glad to see you're doing OK, but the next time you try to get sympathy from me by complaining about how poor you are, I am totally permitted to give you a swift kick in the ass for bitching about it.

As for me, I just used my budget from last year to calculate how much per month I spent on groceries last year. It averaged to about $154 per month, or $5.10/day, which isn't bad. Some explanation on this this number:

• It includes non-food household products, such as toothpaste, deoderant, soap, etc.
• I also filled up a pantry with canned goods, and my freezer has filled up nicely on this $5/day.
• I do my grocery shopping locally (there's a grocery store in town about a mile away, the nearest Wal-Mart is about 40 miles away).
• The United Way's challenge stipulated you had to pay for breakfast lunch and dinner. A lot of times, I skip breakfast, so for me, it's probably closer to something like 2.2 meals per day, not three.
• I try hard to avoid most instant and microwaveable over-processed foods, opting for fresh produce, dairy, and meat; but a can of chili or a Totino's Pizza still slips in now and then.
• If I started with a totally empty pantry and fridge and ended them the same, I could feed myself on... I guess...$4/day.

As for buying fancy stuff, I just try and keep it fresh. I still have a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli in the pantry that has a use-by date of November 2008. As long as I possess this unopened can of bland pseudo-food, I know that I'm winning the nutritional war in the Kitchen.

Eat well, and keep it civil, folks!

Fark-Roulette

Internet message boards are like spider webs for arachnids that feed on stupid. In spite of my general preference to stay away from them (for no one cares what you think, Internet!), I've developed a way for people to create betting pools based on some of the more predictable trends. I call it Fark-Roulette.

You need a group of friends, that agree to only visit a chosen website (Fark, in this case) once per day, as a group. Honor System enforced, as there's no way to keep people from accessing during the day. Read through the headlines, and each person chooses a good one. In this example, I'll pick "From the 'We've all wanted to do it' file. Man gets drunk and fires round after round into the company server" The betting begins!

I picked this headline, so I choose the Winning reference: Office Space, Image, The cast beating up the office printer. Then, I choose the number representing the earliest comment that I believe the chosen reference will appear. I pick the seventh comment, believing that it will appear early, but not quite immediately.

Another bettor believes I highly underestimate the speed at which this popular movie scene will appear in the comments, especially because this headline could have been ripped right from the script of Office Space. He chooses the 2nd Comment. Gutsy.

After everyone has placed their bets (with an agreed upon amount of money, peanuts, M&Ms, etc. in the pool,) You look in the comments and see where it appears. The person that guess correctly (or has the best Over/Under) wins. In the case of this thread, it showed up 3rd. I would lose to the man that bet on the 2nd comment.

Try it sometime. Even if you're just guessing by yourself. Whenever a headline about McDonalds appears, or another alarmist article about how our kids are getting FAAAT comes up, try to guess how soon this Fark-favored picture will show up:

The Internet Tries to Guess My Location

A lot of advertising on the web attempts to guess your location based on your IP Address. Since I moved out here. I'm constantly amused by the precision, or lack thereof, on the ads.

"Salt Lake City Dad whitens his teeth by doing one simple thing. Click here to find out the secret, you butter-spitting yellow toothed baffoon!" The closest you can Get is Salt Lake? Try again, Bucko.

"Draper Mom makes %320,0000 a year by sitting on her fat ass and playing Windows Solitare on her computer. Click here for a lazily lucrative lifestyle that has NOTHING to do with whoring our overpriced products over the intterwebs!" We've gone from from Salt Lake proper, to the greater SLC metro area and it's suburbs. I'm not sure if that's better or worse. NEXT!

"Granger woman drops 300 pounds in a weekend by following this one easy tip that we won't bother to print in this ad. Click here with your sausage fingers to find out how!" Getting closer! At least you landed in Wyoming this time!

"Lyman man gets epic huge p3n!$ by taking a daily suppliment of stuff the FDA would destroy on sight, along with anything and anyone within a 20 mile radus! Unless you enjoy being hung like a housefly, click here and let our servers download our spambot software on your machine right now! HURRY!" This is the best I've seen, a mere six miles from Mountain View. Congratulations, malware distributor, and I'll be sure to look out for the guy with the the 18" wang!

Twenty-Five Character Profile

While gaming over the Internet, you encounter a lot of people, but interact for only a brief time. Unless you use voice chat, you don't get to know anything about them as a person. And chatting with strangers over the Intarwebs, voice or otherwise, is NOT reccomended, because as I noted before, people suck. I think that Mad Scientists get their inspiration to destroy the world from hearing the words "Noob", "Sux", and "OMG ROFL!!!1" too often.

So while playing Team Fortress 2, I recalled that the PS3 saves the names of people that you've played with online, so I decided to go through and document some of these and share them with the world. I think you can have up to 25 characters for your PlayStation Network handle, and through this, you give major clues about your personality. So now, here's a few of the more interesting handles attached to people I've met while playing TF2:

• Armageddon513 - This guy probably was surprosed that someone already took the name "Armageddon," but he'll be damned if he lets that person be the only guy with his totally original nickname! Or maybe he's propheizing that the Earth's Final Battle will fall on May 13th of a year yet to be determined.
  
• TheDarkGaurdian - Maybe he's like me and favor's the Demoman class, who is in fact Black and excels at defending control points in the game.
  
• abraham007 - In 1863, Gen. Robert E. Lee is preparing to unfurl his Confederate Machinations on the world, starting at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Union's last hope rests in one lone agent with the cunning, training, and Veto Power to stop him. This summer, prepare to be... emancipated! Abraham 007 - From Gettysburg With Love. When he addresses an Army, YOU'D BETTER LISTEN!!
  
• timburtonfan - Appropriatly, his icon was a cartoonish Grim Reaper.
  
• burntbrowniez - Mmmm... Brownies, burnt or not, are always good!
  
• hyphyxxl - I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but his icon was a Rubber Duck next to a Shark.
  
• thewaterispoison - Oh, another warning handle! But what water is poison? The Tap Water? The stuff in the Old Well? The irrigation water used around here has all kinds of runoff from the cow pastures, so that stuff is pretty close to poison. Or maybe he's another sucker who fell for that whole dihydrogen monoxide hoax some years back.
  
• NBK_GAYBUTTFUKRS - Somewhere, there's a twelve year-old boy laughing at his brilliance, thinking he's the most clever and edgey person ever to push an envelope. "I MADE A SWEAR IN MY NAME! I'M AWESOME!!"
  
• UPD8_TF2_4ConsoL - A request from a player, dismayed that Valve Software is pushing all the new goodies on PC, while the Console versions languish in their inital release. I think 4 maps have been added, but still only a pale shadow of the goods the PC players get.
  
• MissyMisdemeanor - Chances of this really being Missy Elliot? Only slightly better than NBK_GAYBUTTFUKRS not being a complete ass.
  
• KodaChromed - SONG CUE! Give us the niiiiight's bright colors, give us the greeeeens of summer, Make us think all the world's a sunny day!...
  

And that about wraps it all up. By the way my handle on the PlayStation Network is Pittencream, an obscure reference used due to every single nickname, screen name and alias I've ever used in my life being somehow unavilable. Guess the reference (without a google search. Honor System enforced) and you win Mad Props (cash value of Mad Props is 1/100 of a cent, void where prohibbited).

In Which Fuzzy Endorses his Hobbies

As a displaced tabletop game enthusiast, I have a lot of difficulties finding other players out here in cowboy country. All of my peers have at least two children under the age of 5, or are too busy working nights and weekends on the family ranch (seriously). As a result, I have to resort to the Internet to find opponents. And this is where I plug GameTableOnline. 

Originally I discovered this site after Wizards of the Coast contracted the guys that ran GameTable to develop Java versions of some of their I.P. for use with Gleemax, which was to be a social networking site for gamers. 

Gamer... Social... Networking... Site. Ugh, I'm not sure if I can make that sound any more lame.

The games they built for WotC were Acquire (my favorite), Robo Rally, Vegas Showdown, Guillotine, and the most popular one to date: Axis and Allies. WotC decided that between everything else they were trying to focus (such as the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which was getting ready to launch at the time), they decided to cut loose some projects, including the Gleemax site. Rather than let some pretty good electronic versions of their games dissapear, they allowed GameTable to post them on their own site.

They also have a few traditional board games such as Chess, Backgammon, etc, and other games from independent developers.

Right now, they are looking to change over to a subscription based business model so they can make their product sustainable. I think it's worth at least a couple bucks a month just for Acquire alone. Check it out.

And in the hopes of motivating some of my friends back home, I'll say these three words: Kill Dr. Lucky!

Nerd Education

I realize that a lot of the people in my department are sharper than me, more experienced then me, and (professionally speaking) just plain better than me. But that does not excuse the lack of knowlege of various Internet memes.

Today, I had to educate one of the supervisors on what exactly all your base was, and why it belong to us. Seriously, he drew blanks on this. "So... does the name Leeroy Jenkins ring a bell at all??" **He shakes his head**

Ugh. My fellow nerds need more nerd pop-culture in their lives.