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what i learned from the game Modern Warfare 2:

• the CIA is perfectly willing to slaughter hundreds of civilians as part of undercover op
• all brazilians are armed to the teeth
• the russian military gives each person a totally different brand and caliber gun
• heartbeat monitors can detect if you’re friend or foe
• and so can UAVs. they even mark foes with little red rectangles in real time
• specops can drive snowmobiles one handed while shooting and reloading an uzi, but is completely befuddled by chain link fences and barb wire
• it’s possible to get good consistant bandwidth in a remote mountain house (note! this one might not actually be true)
• russia can launch a full land invasion of america with 1 day prep

and that famous part to MW2, the “kill the civilians” bit, it’s funny to me that it’s that big a deal. you’re playing a shooter and have already shot dozens of random people, will continue to shoot hundreds more, and because some of them are unarmed it’s a big deal? yes, they get hit in “realistic” means (as much as that applies for computer games) but so does every other character

cmon now, you call in airstrikes in crowded cities and grenade marketplaces, but apparently all those are abandoned and/or no one cares about brazilians.

eh, whatevs.

there’s some microsoft offer to sell windows 7 to students for $30, and since my email address looks rather studentlike, i briefly considered getting in on this.

i was just about to fill out the form when i suddenly remembered: i don’t have a single computer that runs windows anymore. work mac laptop, mac mini at home, and 2 old unix laptops. i guess i could upgrade my xp that runs in parallels but i’m too worried it’d blow away the rest of my partitions in the process. i only use it to test sites in obsolete IE versions anyways.

for the curious, the machines are:
- work laptop, macbook pro. i take it home though since the border between work and not-work is sorta vague in my life
- home mac mini. hulu, netflix, bluetooth keyboard that reaches the couch fine. it’s basically the cable box replacement. i just upgraded the ram on it so i should see if it can run games at all, i think i have an xbox controller hooked up to it with drivers installed. i should see what i can do with that
- circa 1999 thinkpad, running ubuntu. it can run terminal just fine, but attempting to run a modern gnome gui causes serious lag. i use it as an always on personal subversion server, and since it sits at work, to show most recent server errors from the logs in streaming format
- circa 2002 sony, running ubuntu. default home laptop, doesn’t run movies too well but is a pretty good machine otherwise. usb wireless since this was the last model laptop to not have a built in wireless card

i don’t have a gaming pc anymore. it’s fine, i don’t really have time to play games enough to justify the investment in one, and when i do game it’s usually just dwarf fortress, eve, or xbox, none of which require a omgwtfsuper pc.

besides, it’s not like there’s any space to put a gaming rig in the apartment. i’m still juggling to find a way to keep my clothes semi-organized