Grenadeh's World

Guys suck!

2011-02-24T18:37:00.001-08:00

Here is my comment to a recent WSJ

article

It's unfortunate that the Wall Street Journal, which is supposed to be a respectable institution, actually will print this dreck, on the internet or with ink - the very fact that it does lends nothing but credibility to an article which, interestingly enough, has very little - in their perception, "Guys" don't read the news. Maybe they're right, I don't read the news. I was educated when I was a child by the news itself to never watch it again - it's nothing but bullshit

"Police today continue the search for a family of four who went missing last Tuesday", etc. etc. etc.

"4 people died off the coast of Somalia"

Really? Give me a fucking break, you only put this crap on the news because peace doesn't sell, and no one is buying it.

If the intent was to point out a sociological shift in America, it was successful. However, the opinions expressed therein are ridiculous.

First of all, Star Wars is not a movie for people half our age. Twenty-somethings like myself, those of us who grew up in circumstances kind enough to provide us with classic films, grew up watching the original Star Wars movies, or Star Trek - I challenge you to find a 25 year old male in America who can form an intelligent defense for truly respecting the Star Wars prequels - these are a whole different matter unto themselves, and I wouldn't even suffer children to watch them, because they are garbage, save for the few saving graces in Revenge of the Sith. Any Star Wars fan who didn't enjoy seeing Anakin and Obi-Wan's vicious light saber battle across a crumbling hellhole is confused.

To suggest that we are immature, or we pale in comparison to what men once were, because we have passion in something, whether it's science fiction movies, or video games, or rare collectible items that cost ridiculous amounts of money, or consumer electronics, is not only ludicrous, but certainly moronic. Yes, "the times they are a changin" - we have longer lifespans, we live in a completely different world than even our parents' generation did. Blatant facts that apply to 99% of all first world countries are not compelling evidence why the male gender has suddenly become worthless.

I personally live with three guys easily described by the Hollywood propaganda that drives this article - they do exist. I myself have an obsession with action figures or "toys" as "women" would call them; I've spent easily 1000 dollars on them in 2010. I own many video and computer games that I rarely have time to play, an expensive television, a nice car, nice furnishings from Ikea (dispute that if you wish), a diverse bag of friends, most of whom are married and younger than me, or in the process of being married, and I am growing to hate my entry-level IT job as a software engineer/web designer/database administrator. And today, after working my ass off 50 hours this week only to be summed up in my company's improving profit margin during the dead season by some numbers, getting the quarterly "Be my bitch or I'll find a younger, fresher college graduate that will be a mindless American Psycho drone that does only what I tell them and can't think for themselves - which is the crux of existence [you could argue conformity is the actual answer]" speech, and fighting the urge to break my LCD panel in half over my knee for ten hours - all I wanted was some wings and beer. That must make me an un-marriageable, irresponsible, stupid young adult.

Do women ever consider that they are a major contributor to the problem? I personally have stopped thinking about my girlfriend - she doesn't bother to text, or call, the majority of the time. I get scolded if I send more than one text in 3 minutes. Lo and behold, she happens to be in her "pre-adult" stage as well. Maybe you should consider the fact that "GIRLS" are an emerging sociological occurrence as well - ages 18 to 25, they claim no responsibility for anything that doesn't directly and adversely affect them, they do whatever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason, share equivalent obsessions with bands and rockstars that couldn't care less about them, or revel in idyllic fantasies that will never happen because they ignore what could be a great "guy" with little or no attempt to find out.

Perhaps the very reason we exist in this state is because we have retreated to the mindset that all women our age are immature, flaky, boring excuse makers who are so busy filling their day with what is utterly unimportant and overexaggerated nonsense, that they have consigned to the fact, without any empirical evidence, that we are whatever they think we are. So that, those girls who are actual beings of substance are hidden in the shadows of shallow, stupid bar-hoppers who show more breasts and legs than their face and personality, or they are too busy with their eyes in a computer screen or a book or whatever is that they like to do, appear to us like they don't exist, or have some defect that is preventing them from drifting into our radar. Maybe they are purposely trying not to.

I personally managed to find one of these pre-adult girls that was actually worth all the trouble, despite the fact that she unfortunately was describable by some of the things I've written. And, because she was too busy being inacessible and acting like getting a 9.0 GPA was paramount to the extent that it warranted a new adjective (Yes I realize it's impossible, l2hyperbole), the root of all our conflicts stemmed from her never being able to spend any quality time. Sorry but guys don't mess with that bullshit either if it's someone we truly care about. That was 5 years ago and personally I feel like I'll never care about anyone that much again, that I'll never connect with anyone that well again. To me it's offensive to be tossed into this stereotype with millions of other people that happen to be described by some of the same adjectives. Amy and her comedian inspirer must secretly work at an IT firm that links all these meta-tagged websites together based on a few common words, when in fact they have nothing to do with each other whatsoever.

If you purport there are no good men around, trust us, we're sitting around our big screen TVs with our beer saying the exact same thing about you. You don't seem to need us, and there are many more of you than there are of us. We've passed you the ball, so what are you doing now? You're travelling. And you're crying that the hoop is within your reach but there are people in the way.

Saw 6: Free Speech Dies, this Halloween.

2009-10-17T01:56:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in 4 months because there's nothing I am going to bother with. Things have happened like the Nobel Peace Prize which I am pretending doesn't exist at this point but for the most part I've been being constructive and using my new mission-specific blog. Until this. This doesn't even merit an explanation because if you can't derive from the title and one paragraph alone why I'm absolutely correct, you need to be locked in a padded room.
Saw 6 is coming out in 2 weeks. Um...............Saw 5 didn't even come out one year ago and there's already a new movie. It's a "halloween thing."
I'm guessing Saw 6 will just be Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln and the Adams and other great Americans locked in a gigantic Hollywood microcosm and each one faces an incomprehensible patriotism challenge to which the expected answer is the antithesis of all that is or ever was good, decent, or American. In the end they all die a horrible death and a movie producer takes the reigns of the New World Order.

Please get rid of any first amendment protection that allows Hollywood to do what they want. I'm sorry, but this is incredibly unacceptable. Words can not describe this.

Empire Total War - F this game

2009-07-08T04:55:00.001-07:00

A review for those who actually play Total War.

Oh, god. Where to start with this release. Maybe an intro paragraph entirely unnecessary because the title f the game is self-explanatory . It's the 18th century, a period of colonization and mass emigration, ideological revolution, theological revolution. Revolution, in other words. So obviously the game encompasses the entire western world and leaves the other four continents to serve as land for the raping.

Empire started, in the minds of Total War players at the least, as a dream after Medieval included musketeers and cannons at the end of the game (which i might mention were 100 times more reliable and lethal than any unit in Empire Total War with the exception of quicklime and grenadiers and percussive exploding shells). Everyone went "Oh, hells yes. They should make a game with real guns. And Napoleon." In the mean time, Imperial Glory came out, essentially a carbon copy of total war but with much smaller units, and of course, realtime naval battles, completely identical to the ones later implemented in ETW. Then they showed us pretty screenshots of ships on fire on the high seas and whatnot, showing us that we needed new computers if we hadn't gotten them already. It looked awesome and everyone thought it would be great because, after four successful total war games and and four expansion packs, how could they possibly go wrong this time?

Oh.....creative assembly. I used to believe in you. To put it briefly, I wouldn't buy this game if Sega sent a truck full of games, girls, energy drinks, Pocky, enough materials to build a BD's on my street and staff it from which I would receive all profits, and my own personal contingent of Creative Assembly developers to both a) Give me a job as either a programmer or a game media designer with their company and b) stand gaurd while i play the game and endure me throwing stones at them every time something pisses me off and c) a sixteen thousand dollar Alienware machine to play it on. Unless of course my friends peer pressure me into doing it so we can kill each other and strangers online, which is granted.

Empire Total War is without a doubt the biggest pile of fail I have ever seen come out of the gaming industry in 20 years, and trust me, I'm including incredibly nightmarishly awful games like ET, Cyberia, Shenmue, Summoner 2, Mechwarrior 4, you name it. And no, it's not because it's a terrible game, it's because it's a horrible misrepresentation of what Creative Assembly is truly capable of, which is to say briefly, far greater than this game.

Don't get me wrong: It's good enough for me to make 15 gb of room to install it, and spend a LOT of time playing it because my game for whatever reason ran as slow as possible, to the extent that as I did in every total war game, I took over the entire campaign map and then purposely incited revolutions and whatnot just to have someone to fight. Having said that, it's a disappointment and it absolutely does not improve over the first four games in any way at all.

There are new features: Naval battles, garrisoned buildings, DLC, the Road to Independence campaign (which is fun after you're finished literally assaulting forts every turn and losing 800 men for no reason), the technology research tree, which rather makes the game a pain in the ass because the only way to learn it peacefully and quickly is through diplomacy, requiring you to have lots of money, meaning you have to take over everything to get money, negating any point in advancing your technology or in being diplomatic if by the time you finally get rifles you already control the world and the only enemies left are your allies, the united provinces, who have supported you honorably for 200 turns, and achievements.

Unfortunately, this game is likely to be infinitely better for newbies to the franchise than it is for die hard TW fans. We've endured the same relatively awful AI and awful glitches for years and years and assumed they would be fixed to make the new game enjoyable. They weren't and they still haven't been in the three month since I wrote this review.

At least 5 times out of 10, your units will entirely ignore your commands. The other five times, assuming they even attempt to follow orders, they'll likely get themselves killed, such as marching towards an enemy you tell them to shoot, but instead of shooting when they're in range, they just keep walking straight into them. Or grenadiers, which although they are an incredibly useful and awesome unit, are retarded all the same. They have to be within 10 feet to throw their grenades, which is fucking stupid, because they lob their grenades 100 feet in the air and drop them down on an enemies head, entirely unnecessary when you can overhand through a grenade at them from 100 feet away and still kill just as many. Because of the arch, trying to throw grenades at units that are running away becomes a pain, although admittedly using grenades on routing units or moving units is just trying to be mean to them.

Equally as annoying is the fact that, just like the Aztecs in MTW2, the natives are insanely overpowered. They run far faster than your units, and do far more damage, and their cannons actually work better than yours a lot of the time. However there fortunately is a bright side to this as they do tend to break morale without too much effort, whether they are your own units or enemies. The natives are way overpowered and too fast, but occasionally so are the other factions. Like the Sarmatians in RTW, the Marathan units easily raped so many of my units the first time I went to India, it got to a point where I literally had sent an expedition to India (as it is a requirement for Britain's victory), three full armies with my two best 10 star generals, full of top level elite troops, thinking they could at least gain a foothold and hold off until I sent reinforcements, seeing as it is a ways away. They all got systematically raped by the AI's new perseverance. The same thing happened in France, but worse. I sent an army to place-hold my position for 1 turn before i could get more armies there to support it, across the English Channel, and as soon as the turn ended, the French attacked me 9 times in a row, losing each battle until they finally killed my army by attrition.
The AI is far more aggressive this time around, though still somewhat retarded. As I said, the same thing happened in India, which finally pissed me off. Losing three 10 star generals and thousands of troops made me rather angry: I literally sent 30,000 men to India after-wards, and trained over 10,000 more after conquering it. The first 30,000 conquered all of available Asia, 10,000 of them dying in the process through battles and through strategic blunders on my part, such as splitting my fleet into multiple single ships to carry so many armies (a strategy that worked well in previous Total War titles, unless there were ships right near your fleet). Speaking of, shipbuilding is an arduous process this time around and you simply can't wait 4 turns for two ships. Unfortunately, as the AI is far more aggressive, it also literally violates the programming of the game.
The AI will, at whatever point, literally spawn armies on the spot if you invade them. You'll march on Paris and you'll be able to SEE the city and see that it only has 2 armies, and then they will attack you the next turn with 10 armies. Granted Paris can train about 5 units at once in the beginning, that's no explanation for 15000 troops coming out of nowhere. It's like Barbarian Invasion except that the entire tribe springs forth from the nitrogen in the air or something this time on the spot.
It's pretty though, that should make up for it, right? Despite the common sense needed to realize how much better the game looks, some reviewers seem to overlook the fact that the graphics engine is very much revamped from MTW2. I play all the Total War games regularly and I can easily tell how much better ETW looks than MTW. The smoke effects, heat distortion, explosions, quick-lime, musket fire, cannon fire, fire fire, shading, and water look beautiful, even on low graphics, which I'm using. However this comes at a price because the performance of the game is notably awful.
For those using AMD processors, I wouldn't even bother installing. You be the judge, as this makes no sense to me: The first time i played the game, and the machine I'm currently using, is a Pentium D 805 dual core running at 2 ghz, with 1 gb of DDR2 667 and a 7950 GT OC 512mb GDDR2 card. The game runs absolutely fine NOW on this machine, but the first time I did my Britain campaign where I took over the world, the AI turns (with ai move turned off obviously) would literally take MINUTES. The battles run fine of course, but the Campaign map is god awful. The computer I'm writing this on is brand new (though by no means a monster) - Turion X2 2ghz, 4 gb DDR2 800 mhz, geforce 7150 with 1900mb ram. The game runs absolutely horribly on this computer, on low graphics. The campaign map however runs perfectly fine - on this machine. Frankly, the campaign map is absolutely stupid in this game. Every single object on the map has a shadow and moves with the wind, that's thousands of trees, making it laggier than hell.
Speaking of the campaign map, it's actually much better this time, from a game-play perspective, ignoring the performance. Instead of everything being in the city, the parts of your region are spread out. Colleges and churches and shipyards and farms and the like are their own towns. and you control everything that develops. Also, new towns automatically grow in your regions according to the growth rate in the region and nation, which is affected by technology and tax policies and your government. The campaign is now two turns per year, i assume it was the only way to make the game last relatively long, since it seems to crash at 1829. The campaign map is the same as always, with the addition of those great changes. There are the same stupid quirks about it, as well as new ones. For example an army will still, instead of marching straight to a spot right in front of them, decide its better to go in a 5 turn march in a circle to get there. Or for instance, when an army gets off a ship, they have no move points, which is also stupid. There are some neat things now, like if a fleet is carrying an army, you can tell that fleet to attack anything on land and it will know to tell the army to do it. Unfortunately, the campaign play seems stifled this time. It is a race to control trade resources and make money and its hard to make money it seems now because everyone already has dibs on the trade theaters by the time you get a trade ship there, and you don't want to declare war on the entire world at once, do you, especially without any money. The first time i played and took over the entire world, by the time I had 50 or so provinces, I was raking in serious money. I make about a million per turn on my old Britain campaign. I don't know how i did it: all i did was gain the colonies first and then capture Paris, which eventually had a population of 200 million. In my new campaign, I'm lucky to make 5000 money in a turn. I have no idea what the deal is.
Also unfortunately and imo, downright stupid, you can't cheat in the game anymore. At all. You don't necessarily need to cheat, but cheating was in the first 4 games and frankly it was nice to be able to increase the population of your towns in less than 500 turns, or actually have an army. Another stupid thing missing since MTW2 is AI controlled reinforcements. Granted that in RTW the AI would often get your 10 star generals and elite troops killed, the fact that you could have EPIC battles with tens of thousands of men was amazing. That's how i played all of RTW. I actually used realistic legion sizes of 12000 men and marched several armies around as one army, the way it went in real life. It's so retarded now that your reinforcements WAIT for your first 20 units to die before they enter the field, when the enemy can have 30000 units or more if they want.
The absolute worst part of this game is the fact that it's based entirely on Steam. Valve and their quest to control the gaming market is frankly pissing off everyone I know very quickly, and now I'm pissed off too. The only purpose Steam serves for this game is to piss off those people who pirated the game, as all patching and xfire use is done through Steam. Total War players have downloaded their own patches and taken care of their own game for over a decade, we don't need steam. Fuck steam. Also, the Special Forces pack became available for free, as did the Elite units of the west pack, like a day after they announced it. Or it will be free when the new patch comes out. They didn't think it through when they put the game on the steam network, especially if DLC becomes free after people paid for it.

If you have a 5000 dollar computer with three way SLI each using a 2000 dollar video card and liquid nitrogen cooling and 12+ gb of DDR3 then I recommend this game. Otherwise, fuck that. Wait till it's like 15 bucks on Steam sometime. In 2011. After Napoleon has come out and thoroughly disappointed everyone again.

Windows 7 Fail

2009-07-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

I've always been a supporter of Microsoft. That's not to be confused with a fanboy. I frequently curse and wish death upon Microsoft and it's employees when their shit goes wrong, which, when it's happening, seems like all the time, but in reality it's not. However there is an underlying network of stupid decisions and bullshit that Microsoft and other major IT companies have done that all comes together so beautifully to make you angry enough to say, smash your head through an LCD display, or break your keyboard in half, or whatever.
So when I get fucked out of responding to the Windows 7 RC survey 2 days after the beta ends, that royally pisses me off. I had good and bad things to say about 7. Very good things. And then literally an hour ago Seven decided to take a shit on my pc and now I am utterly pissed off in multiple different ways.
First and most egregiously, the schedule Microsoft sent us was wrong. Not just the dates were wrong, the information was fallacious. First of all, the beta did not warn us 2 weeks in advance that it was ending. Second of all, the beta does NOT shut down every 2 hours. It stays on, whilst incessantly warning you that there are 0 hours left in the beta. Then without warning, without asking, it simply bluescreens your computer in the middle of whatever you're doing. There's a difference between blue screening and shutting down, please learn it Microsoft. I'm trying NOT to smash any of my computers or equipment right now so I'll be kind and I won't go on a brutal rant about it. Needless to say, it is fucking stupid that you would close down the survey 2 days after the beta ends. Do you honestly think we have all the time in the world on the 4th of July, or, ANY weekend, to immediately devote to the survey? I didn't even get to use Seven for but 7 days because my old laptop wouldn't cooperate with it. The first thign I did when i took my new laptop out of the box last wednesday was install 7. I had that much time to use it for real; off-line computer usage....theres no such thing. A computer is worthless without a network.

Part II

Dear IT Industry: Stop EPIC FAILING AT LIFE

Microsoft is largely to blame for this, but the smaller companies are definitely not innocent. I don't care how much money it costs, how much paperwork, if you have to sell your soul. Make your shit work with Windows. Microsoft, make your operating system work with other peoples shit.
Now of course when you buy a computer from a company, which is mandatory if you get a laptop unless you actually want to build your own, which is still from a company, or you have too much time and access to hard to get materials, you get your OS preinstalled and the drivers already work. So, in the event that you have to reinstall or install a new OS, you are probably completely fucked, like I am now. They don't offer recovery CDs anymore because you are expected to use upgrade features and all this complete bullshit, which no one is doing. I'm not putting Vista and Seven on different partitions, I don't want Vista. So now I either install Vista and use it offline until Seven comes out (AKA NOT ACCEPTABLE) or use RC 7 until I end up breaking my laptop from the bullshit that I put up with. Because HP is too cool to provide functional wireless drivers for their products. And wireless/network drivers are the only drivers that matter; once your net works windows will do the rest for you.

I hate you Microsoft. I really do. Scratch that, the entire computer industry.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

2009-06-25T19:12:00.000-07:00

Honestly when this movie was being promoted I completely disregarded it and I gave absolutely zero craps about another Street Fighter game or movie. Obviously Street Fighter was a good game and it's the only one of their game franchises Capcom hasn't betrayed utterly yet, but a second, unrelated film wasn't really an obvious choice for any Street Fighter fans. So I didn't actually watch it until now, because of that, and because even as a miniscule Street Fighter fan as I am, I was disappointed they didn't choose someone Chinese, or with giant thighs that could crush my entire body like a steamroller, or bigger breasts, as she is illustrated in every game and picture that has ever existed.

Kristin Kreuk, as everyone remembers, is the slutbag from Eurotrip that sex's everyone, including Matt Damon, so I don't think anyone believed she can act, but she's definitely hot. Well that's me I like girls that look like her. Legend of Chun-Li definitely proves otherwise though. Admittedly none of her lines or scenes are deep, sincere examples of a great actress but in comparison to the original Street Fighter movie, it's definitely good. The movie holds together well and with a believable plot and characters, and even throws in the good old hadouken, though they made her fireball reddish instead of blue. Speaking of that, the movie definitely includes her signature moves: the jebus kick, the fireball, and others that I remember from Street Fighter II. As far as other SF characters go, Bison is of course the enemy, and this time he's played by what's his name from Band of Brothers, who did a good job in my opinion. Vega as well is in the movie, though he's kind of a punk assassin and not too good at his job (I'm not sure what his character is supposed to be really because I'm not a fan), and Ryu makes a cameo in name at the end of the movie.

Action scenes in this movie, unlike the first Street Fighter, actually seem feasible and are believable to people watching, at least to me. I didn't feel like I was watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Physics Book , which makes me happy. And at the same time I didn't feel like it was a nonsensical video game where people throw fireballs constantly. Plenty of guns and shooting and killing are abound in this movie, but not at a retarded Punisher rate, and there are definitely some surprisingly disgusting parts, though they aren't shown fully. All in all, Legend of Chun-Li is definitely a legitimate movie and far better than the original 90's Street Fighter live action film.

Fuck American Companies

2009-04-27T04:24:00.000-07:00

This economy and the American corporate culture and environment is WORTHLESS. If you didn't realize that yet I'm sorry to be the bearer of shitty news but it's been the truth since before I was born.

There is NO corporate responsibility in this country anymore. I'm not even talking about major important shit anymore. Fuck that. Fuck Ken Lay, Enron, Tyco, GlobalCom, Adelphia, AIG, GM, all of these assholes. Let's not even necessarily focus on you worthless wastes of semen anymore.

The American product is worthless and useless. We live in a consumer environment with no accountability whatsoever anymore. You can't even use software because the nature of multi-threaded (aka good) software programming necessitates that there are entirely random and practically inexplicable bugs in the code that an entire team of programmers that wrote it cant even figure out.

Not only that but then there isn't even an ATTEMPT by the firms to support their products and offer the slightest bit of help to end-users. Are you fucking kidding me? If a google search, the documentation, and the companies technical support fail to even ACKNOWLEDGE the existence of your problem, than what the fuck is the point of your company? What the fuck is the point of your tech support when it doesn't even exist?

And why the fuck are you people not upgrading TEN YEAR old software to work with Photoshop CS4? ITS NOT EVEN NEW ITS BEEN OUT FOR LONGER THAN CS3 WAS BEFORE THEY UPGRADED.

Alestorm – Captain Morgan’s Revenge

2009-04-24T13:28:00.001-07:00

Alestorm – Captain Morgan's Revenge

Originally I had seen and heard of this band "AleStorm" through iTunes and CDNow's (I refuse to refer to it as Amazon as the original companies URL still navigates the page, obviously for customer continuity reasons. Don't get me wrong I love Amazon) respective "related artists" and "customers also bought"features. And every time I saw it I said to myself "Well it's related to bands that are most certainly good and indefinitely worth purchasing and listening to, do I really need more motivation?" Regardless, due to being pre-occupied with something or other or just lazy, or a combination of both in addition to other things, I never got around to buying or downloading their first album until the last two weeks. Captain Morgan's Revenge, their major label debut with Napalm Records came out in January 20008, it's now April 2009. As odd and shallow as it may seem, at the point when I discovered this album, I was literally basing music purchases and downloads upon the quality and appeal of the album's cover art, which isn't necessarily a fallible strategy when it comes to metal artists because most metal artists have beautiful artwork on their albums, and those same artists typically end up being the most worthwhile to listen to.

I won't go into the band's history as this is a review of this album, not of the band itself, but as a debut album review I must discuss as much of their style and a brief history of the artist as is required to establish a familiarity. Alestorm hails from Perth, in northern Scotland above Edinburgh and Glasgow, and were formerly known under the name of Battleheart, the original title of the band when it was formed in 2004. As aforementioned, iTunes and Amazon (I use these two because they're the only mainstream music services worth trusting. Don't get me wrong, there are many free music services that are quite astounding.) associates Alestorm with bands such as Firewind, Mastodon, Tyr, Turisas, which all play a genre of music that reviewers are calling "battle metal", and considering it's the name of one of Turisas' albums as well as several metal compilation albums featuring these bands, in combination with their actual musical style, it seems to work for me. Also, I'm not sure if the major music services make this assosication, but I would most definitely associate Alestorm's musical style with that of Korpiklaani and similar bands like Eluveitie.

Unfortunately to anyone who doesn't necessarily listen to those specific bands or metal in general (though I don't know why you would be reading the review instead of just listening to it first if that were the case, I'm glad you are trying) that doesn't necessarily tell you anything. Hopefully the following comparisons will give you a clue but if all else fails I may just resort to some actual descriptive abilities. Alestorm, to me, sounds like Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys, Metallica, Blind Guardian and Korpkilaani had a cross-over dream with each other and it turned into a band. If you ever wanted to hear the inherently cheery and entertaining sound of Flogging Molly or the Murphys set to a faster, metal, exclusively fictional (Pirates aren't fictional obviously, though at this point the popular European kind are) rhythm, I'd have to say Alestorm is exactly what you're looking for.

Musically, Alestorm is exactly as complex as you would come to expect from underrated and less mainstream metal artists these days. Like Blind Guardian, In Flames, Iced Earth, Korpiklaani, Hammerfall, any metal band you can think of that doesn't play the "death" metal style, every song by Alestorm is rich with sound. Their actual instrument line-up isn't any more erudite or versatile than the standard metal band, featuring the typical three instruments and a keyboard, but it doesn't stop them from making each song sound distinct and different enough to be memorable. Their songs range from Dragonforce-style epics (minus the absurd amount of intertwining guitarists) replacing tales of Dragons with accounts of plunder, sailing the high seas and booty, to less serious modern day pirate sea shantys that wouldn't feel too out of place on a Flogging Molly album.

In an age where pirates are romanticized in Hollywood films, video games, novels, and inaccurately used to refer to distributors and illegal acquirers of copyrighted material, debuting to the world with the concept of Scottsh pirate metal is actually a rather intelligent commercial endeavor. Most people in our age group (18 -25), including those younger and older, are quite fond of pirates. Whether because of Disneyworld's ride, its' awful movie trilogy, or because of their strong ideological convictions about file "piracy", people identify to some extent with piracy or are at the very least entertained by it. In addition, with their second album coming out, the recent international Somalian pirate incident and the ensuing South Park parody have done their share to keep pirates fresh on the public's mind.

Other reviewers have mentioned the two potential problems with Alestorm's success and future as a musical artist. I think most legitimate of these two concerns is the Dragonforce scenario, or what some people believe to be the case with Dragonforce. They came out and they were awesome and then almost immediately people said "Okay that's enough, shut up, just shut up with your three guitars and your dragons" and as soon as Dragonforce was "popular" they were immediately "crucified" by public opinion. Maybe that is the case, I don't pay attention to trends in the music audience, I just listen to music I like, because that's what music is for. Second, others have stated that they feel Alestorms style is built too much upon their colleagues in the power/folk metal genre, which honestly is quite irrelevant because that happens with every new band. In time they were chisel out their own unique style, their second major label album hasn't even come out yet.

All in all I absolutely love their first album and as I wrote this I listened to their second album, and loved that just as much. The song that stands out the most to me from Captain Morgan's Revenge is "Wenches and Mead", for its jovial tone and in my opinion absolutely hilarious subject matter. Not because I objectify women and I think it's funny to refer to them as wenches (though you have to admit it's funny to hear the word wenches in lieu of the more offensive bitches, come on) but it's just a funny song when you consider that even though it's supposed to be a pirate thing to head to a tavern for mead and wenches, it stands the test of time both a thousand years before the height of piracy and today, centuries after the supposed extermination of piracy. Could we as males ask for much more? It's quite simple.

A wench by my side and a jug of mead,

these are the things that I most need,

so I sit back and sing this song

and drink and party all night long.

Hey hey, I want more wenches,

hey hey more wenches and mead,

hey hey I want more wenches,

lots of wenches is what I need".

Yarr, ye be buyin this cd, ya hear me landlubbers!

Resident Evil: The Review of Death

2009-04-23T11:44:00.001-07:00

R\Grenadeh's Reviews

Resident Evil: The Review of Death

Part One: resident evil
(2002)

I will preface by saying two things in regards to reviewing in general as well as reviewing these specific movies. It's been eight years since I've written a review of anything, as well as it has been eight years since I've written a public review of anything, as I used to do in the entertainment section of our high school's news magazine. I am not a professional writer, I do not work for the media in any way, I do not run an entertainment-review devoted blog that I think somehow empowers me and qualifies me to have an opinion. I'm a student, a civilian, a technologist, a gamer, a nerd, a liberal, and Jewish. Just an everyday normal person that, like most normal people, actually have a brain in their heads, as opposed to the monkey suits we are expected to listen to in the mainstream media.

That having been said, I will preface this review by stating two things in specific about the first movie: No one's opinion on this movie or this movie series matters to me even if you agree with me, in the slightest bit, though I'm sure most reviews will label these films with similar results as my own, though certainly they will be significantly less scathing or enlightened.

Obviously reviewing a movie several years after it came out, even several years after it came out on DVD/ HD-DVD/Blu-Ray seems quite retroactive, but I am prompted by my recent acquisition of the Blu-Ray of the series to finally start writing reviews again, starting with my opinion on the dramatization of the best video game franchise in the history of video game franchises. Either way, I feel I should give this film series the review it deserves from someone who actually knows what they're talking about. One thing I will admit off the bat: I've seen all three movies at least twenty times, so no matter what I say, obviously the movies were enjoyable (though most of the views are the result of a combination of procrastination and intense boredom). In fact, I'm watching the first movie right now and I have it minimized, because I know the script for the movies so well I don't even need to look at the video.

In 2002 when the first movie was released, Resident Evil was still in it's youth, though growing at dramatic speed. Only four years had passed since the first amazing game was released on the Playstation, and in short order RE2, RE3, and Code Veronica had been released ( admittedly Code Veronica being the last public review I had written). In light of all this, I and my friend among all of our other colleagues were greatly pleased by news of this Hollywood rendition of Resident Evil coming to our theaters in the summer. However, this review is not about the Resident Evil games, which in my opinion don't necessarily even merit any criticism of significance.

Obviously it was established immediately that the Resident Evil movie was not a Hollywood rendition of the video games (no video game movie ever has been, with the exception perhaps of Mortal Kombat), but it was instead based upon the universe created in the Resident Evil games. Technically that doesn't really please any fans of the Resident Evil series. No matter how much anyone, including me, loves the lore and the fictional universe developed by Capcom®, it's easy to say we'd rather see a live action rendition of the events we had to suffer through in the games rather than a Hollywood (and inherently ludicrous) version of different events.

The movie begins and a guy spiels about Umbrella, speaking of lore which matches very accurately that established in the video game universe, fans rejoice. We are introduced through the eyes of a wall to the Hive laboratory complex, getting an up close and personal look at the Tyrant virus, a cute bunny, and its involvement in testing the anti-virus vaccination. Then we are personally introduced to a virus containment apparatus which seems is being loaded with all the available samples of the virus and anti-virus from this cute bunny room. So far, so good, everything is as high tech as expected from Umbrella, and the colors of the viral strains are accurate to the game. Then the shit appears to hit the fan as our friend Spence can be somewhat identified tossing the virus on the floor , indicating to all Resident Evil gamers that the shit has just officially knocked the fan over and turned the fan itself into more shit.

The following events detail to us (as much detail as any Resident Evil gamer or person with an imagination needs) the ensuing viral outbreak and sanitation of the Hive laboratory complex, ending with a woman assumedly being decapitated by an elevator. Funnily enough, later on her head is nowhere to be seen at the elevator bank, assuming it was chopped off, which you would only logically deduce if a woman were put in a computer controlled guillotine with a blade (the solid steel floor) travelling at her head at x miles per hour , the only conclusive deduction judging by how concerned they all are that the elevator next to them has just murdered a plural number of people by free falling about a thousand feet. Insert retarded part number one, they could easily have pulled her back into the elevator or similarly pushed her out of the elevator. Those doors don't get stuck, they're designed to be manually opened in the event of emergency. Ridiculous, excusable, but unforgiveable.

Cut from the crisis in the laboratory to a rather cute and naked Jovavich laying on her shower floor, covered only by a shower curtain, which obviously she had the foresight to pull from the shower curtain rod and cover herself with lest anyone see her naked, alone, in a mansion. The following shots establish that she is suffering from amnesia, yet she can still navigate her own house quite perfectly. Unfortunately for me, this is where the movie starts its downward spiral , though very slowly at this point. She gets scared of the wind, which is completely understandable. Everything about the Spencer mansion is frightening and unsettling, I might be inclined to run away from the wind as well, though in the game they sought shelter in the mansion after being chased by a whole shit ton of Cerberi (zombie dogs.), so everything in and around the Blair Witch 2 looking mansion and the Arklay Woods is uncomfortable in any rendition. Suddenly, oh my gods! A copper grabs her and apparently intends to rape her back, and then cue in the obnoxiously loud and annoying techno music as an Umbrella special forces team busts through the window and the doors, though in real life as well as the video games they would have used the doors exclusively for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that breaking windows quite conspicuously announces their arrival, as well as simultaneously compromising the security of their position if in fact enemy combatants were within the premises.

Here I must digress from a strict focus on the movie and begin the first of several comparisons to Resident Evil itself, though I will chronologically continue the review in the background with the things I criticize. The Umbrella team is quite professional, not to mention arrogant, and ignorant. In many ways this perfectly recreates the Umbrella Special Forces operatives from all the Resident Evil games, though it is unacceptably illogical and unforgiveable for so many reasons. Paramount of all these reasons is a very simple one, an oversight seemingly impossible for "intelligent" writers, which obviously shows you two things: Writers are morons, and movies are intentionally written as unrealistically as possible for the sole purpose of plot progression and consistency. An Umbrella Special Forces unit sent to contain, or to have any involvement with anything whatsoever (in Resident Evil this almost exclusively means a form of violent combat action), is going to be very well informed of all the tactical details of the situation. Now inherently, as they are higher status employees in most circumstances than actual Umbrella researchers, shift workers, whatever, they are going to know what they are getting into. No company involved in ethical businesses needs it's own professionally trained para-military organizations, so it only stands to reason in the job interview or at some point during the course of their career they would have inquired as to "So uh, why do you Ivy League doctor kids need tanks and marines?" . So obviously, by the dictates of common Eff'ing sense, the Umbrella team sent to the Hive : a) Knew the layout of the Hive beforehand , b) Knew that Umbrella was built solely to research and engineer bio-organic and viral weaponry and most importantly, C) Was informed of vital tactical information such as the fact that the only way to defeat any of the Tyrant virus mutations was a massive trauma to the brain. In fact, this is deductible not only by the logical constraints of the established Resident Evil universe, but in real life by actual police, military, and para-military forces. Ask the S.W.A.T, Delta Force, SEALS, whatever force, it's a very public and well established fact : Two in the chest, one in the head. Subsequently by virtue of all, or any of the preceding facts, everyone not only in the first movie, but every Resident Evil movie, and every zombie move in history, should be aware of how to kill zombies, because they are killed the same away as a human being: the head. Shooting people anywhere but the head is a foolishly optimistic and merciless method of killing them. If you were to be killed by gunshot, would you rather bleed to death from your heart or would you rather just die instantly? Easy fucking decision.

Now that all these facts have established the inherent stupidity and absurdity of not only Resident Evil but all zombie movies, it's time to address the few remaining things of note in the movie.

When they discover Spence on the tram en route to the Hive, behind a forcibly shut door, they don't have the common sense to look in the conductor's chamber of the tram for a nanosecond to notice there's a black duffel bag on the floor. What do they think he was doing? Going on vacation into the Hive at the exact time it went Chernobyl? In addition to that, having established both in this review and in the movie through the dialogue itself the Umbrella teams knowledge of the situation and the facility, they OBVIOUSLY should have realized, considering that the leader knew Alice and Spence were security operatives, married to each other, that this random man in the tram was Spencer. This is what I said about intentional unrealistic writing solely for the sake of plot progression and filming. Now, of course, if there were any tint of reality whatsoever to this movie, an intelligent team of Umbrella operatives would have acted out the following script I have so brilliantly concocted.

Medic : Lie still.

(Spencer groggily fidgets around, lying supine on the tram floor)

Medic: I said lie still!

Medic: Follow the light.

(Spencer follows the light with his head, barely able to lift it, though lying otherwise motionless)

Medic: How many fingers am I holding up?

Spencer: Three

(Kaplan meanwhile steps past the two into the tram conductors chamber, looking for anything of concern)

Kaplan: Found something!

One: Bring it out here.

(Kaplan picks up the duffel bag, moving back into the main room of the tram, and sets it on the floor next to Spencer)

One: What's in the bag?

Spencer: What? ……. I don't know?

(Kaplan exchanges glances with the commander, crouching on the steel floor of the tram over the duffel bag. One nods, and Kaplan proceeds to open the bag.)

Kaplan: What the hell? (he produces a shiny silver lunchbox out of the duffel bag, emblazoned with the universally recognizable biohazard symbol).

One: Open it.

(Kaplan opens the lunchbox because realistically if he had the ability to decode the door locks within the laboratory he could figure out a simple four digit encryption on a temporary biohazard transportation container)

(The lunchbox hisses open, some pressurized gas spewing from within the container like dry ice)

Kaplan: ..it's the virus!

Rain: Alright, pack it up. Fuck this shit let's get the hell out of here.

One: No. We have to find out what happened down here.

Rain: What the fuck did you say? The lab automatically seals in an hour, we don't have to do a damn thing. We have the most important piece of company property down here, let's get the fuck out before that homicidal bitch kills the rest of us, too!

One: Oh, good point.

One: Kaplan, can you reverse the train and send us back to the mansion?

Kaplan: The tram travels automatically to its destination, we won't be able to change directions en route. We'll have to wait until we get to the loading dock.

One: Alright, let's do it.

End of fucking movie.

(Why Kaplan? Because Kaplan is obviously the smartest one in the entire group, being the technologist (though he is initially too stupid to realize his turning the Hive off released the zombies) though in a realistic scenario such as my script his display of such possible stupidity would never have occurred because the situation would have ended while they were ahead)

Obviously for the sake of entertainment and intentional irritation of the viewing public, this is not what happened, otherwise the story would have had too happy of an ending and been 30 minutes long. Which frankly would be only fitting, considering that in order to get an A rank in the game, you have to beat it in under an hour, not shoot anyone, and not waste time and health.

Unfortunately this isn't the only thing that pisses me off about the film, it's just one of many things. I'm going to digress from the review for now and simply list them, hopefully in chronological order of their occurrence.

They try to go through the labs which, when looking at the 3d layout of the hive on his wristputer, was a fucking retarded idea in the first place, even if there weren't zombies everywhere. Going down the stairs through the "dining hall" was obviously the most direct route to the Queen's Chamber, though it may have taken a slightly greater amount of time.

The team approaches the good old laser hallway ( of course not knowing it's a laser hallway because after all it's not like they are security operatives and KNOW intimate details about the Hive facility). Ol' Shiny kills all but five of them. This is inexcusably and inarguably the stupidest fucking scene of any movie ever produced anywhere around the globe and I would go so far as to include the entire universe, assuming there are an intelligent sentient race of beings on a planet or space station somewhere that produce fictional motion pictures to sublimate their subconscious desires and distract themselves from their mortal boredom. I've already established the governing principles of why everything I will list is absurd to the point of insensitivity, but I'll restate it for fun.

How the fuck does this team of operatives not realize, after explicitly stating that the Red Queen has its own defensive systems, that there's a LASER hallway governed by an obviously intensely complex algorithmic program that can readjust in real time to sensory information gathered on its "assailants" so well that it can actually trick them in addition to killing them? Now, ignoring that, because when faced by a fictional and non-existent laser hallway governed by intensely complex algorithms, even an Olympic gold medal gymnast would be most certainly boned if trying to outmaneuver it, let's examine the other absurdities of Ol' Shiny. There are spaces on both ends of the hallway which quite blatantly are not susceptible, insofar as the two movies starring Ol' Shiny are inclined to show us, to the reaches of said laser hallway. Use what little common sense that you (as a person in the movie) obviously don't have and hide your stupid body in the ample space afforded by the blind spots at both ends of the laser hallway. At least two of you can survive to watch the rest of your friends die. Is it possible that the laser hallway could adjust its parameters and manage to project a laser beam beyond the reach of the system of mirrors and googamajigs behind the glass on either side of the wall? You could speculate so, but in the movie it doesn't happen, and judging by what mechanical knowledge I have of nonexistent infallible laser grid hallways, the laser beam requires amplification on both ends of the hallway to be effective (or else the lasers wouldn't be so obviously anchored and "generated" by both sides of the hallway), so I don't imagine that one side of the hallway itself would be able to project a dangerous laser beam on its own, or else they would have made the laser hallway scene far more complex because it is in fact probably the most CG intensive scene in the movie, so they may as well have made it worth the massive sacrifice of credibility and characters.

You may have thought at this point that Ol' Shiny's fifteen minutes were up at the end of that run-on sentence, but rest assured, they aren't. Having established the precedent that Ol Shiny can cover the entire Z-axis with an inescapable laser grid capable of slicing easily through not only human flesh but solid metal, it is interesting that the computer components to the Red Queen mainframe stored in the duffel bags carried by the victims of said laser grid did not get destroyed. They most certainly were passed through by the lasers. There is no differentiation between molecular densities or any such chemical properties of metal in the course of the hallway scene to establish any logical basis which informs the audience that the lasers can only cut "certain metals". Now perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps the combat knives carried by the Umbrella operatives are composed of a carbon fiber polymer that is more malleable than steel or whatever the mainframe components are made of(or whatever the hell they actually are) and that explains why they can be cut. I just love the incredibly large holes in logic we are expected to overlook in movies these days for the sake of entertainment.

On top of that, there is one thing that always severely pisses me off not only in zombie movies, but all movies that feature arms of any kind. Why the fuck would you intentionally discard your arms? Why!? There is NO reasonable excuse for discarding your weapons in any situation whatsoever unless they literally weigh so much it reduces your chance of surviving. In Resident Evil the film this is not the case. The Springfield 1911, the Heckler and Koch MP5K, the Heckler and Koch G36, the Beretta 92FS, whatever .357 looking revolver Kaplan had, NONE of those firearms would have been a burden on them in any situation. Yes, they ran out of ammo (because they're too god damn stupid to aim for the head.) If "people" are coming at you that obviously are walking on broken feet, are missing half their heads, their bodies are decomposed, you aren't stupid enough to have any hope that there is salvation for these mutated creatures. Regardless, in a zombie scenario, you don't drop your weapons. Weapons can always be used as clubs. Clubs may not necessarily be the most effective anti-zombie weapon, but they're better than your body. In addition lets examine the reality and the inherent ramifications in reality of abandoning your weapons. First of all, they're Umbrella employees. If they make it out of there, they have to go back to work afterwards. Umbrella's going to scold the shit out of them , dock their pay, maybe even fire them, for leaving several thousand dollars of company assets half a mile underground in a contaminated and compromised research laboratory. Secondly, it's mentally retarded to drop your gun because in the case of Resident Evil, there is a 100% chance you're going to get more ammunition because , as I will touch on later, Resident Evil is not a zombie apocalypse franchise. Resident Evil is a science fiction franchise about corporate sin, scientific and business ethics, and dirty warfare. Every incident that occurs in Resident Evil is an incident, not a part of a global doomsday. There will be more ammo, unless they managed to use billions of bullets, and at the same time all the workers of all the firearms industries die or go on strike.

Other than those things, there aren't more things I find unforgiveable with the movie itself. However, there are things that are retarded in terms of discrepancy between the game and movies. In the movie, lickers are intentionally manufactured BOWs, as opposed to the licker lore of the games (or so you would assume. They never explain in the movie how the lickers come to be, or call them lickers) . In the Resident Evil series, a Licker is formed by a further mutation of the Crimson Head zombie variant, assumedly by consumption of fresh host blood. This in turn has the potential to mutate Crimson Head zombies further into fullblown lickers. Granted, this explanation for lickers is introduced YEARS and YEARS after Resident Evil 2 came out, after it was already established that the Tyrant virus has no ability to cause further mutation in human hosts after the zombie stage, in contrast to the newly developed G virus which forces severe mutation in mammalian hosts each time they integrate additional DNA into their bodies by feeding on a fresh victim. This part of the movie pissed me off the most because they combined the T and the G virus into one ultra virus, as shown by the licker immediately mutating into a full blown G Imago after it killed Spencer, the G Imago being the first boss in Resident Evil 2.

Before I wrap up this first third of the review, I have to make one more obvious observation on the massive inconsistencies in the movie. When Alice wakes up in the abandoned hospital and she makes it out alive, we are treated to her stepping into an absolutely fucked up Raccoon City and taking a shotgun from a police cruiser. It looks like it's about one P.M or so on a rather dreary day, and the entire city area you are shown is derelict and destroyed. Now, we have to put this in a time frame, because obviously the second movie rewinds an unspecified amount of time to show us how the city becomes a wasteland, though it does a terrible job. When she steps out, it's most definitely early in the day. When Resident Evil Apocalypse picks up, it's obviously at some point early in the day (as established by Angela still being at school and one of the researchers being in a bath robe, assuming these are somewhat respectable citizens and they don't sleep all day (obviously overlooking their involvement in incredibly unethical and illegal research when we label them as respectable citizens)). However, in the shots you see afterwards the city seems quite uninfected during the day and it seems that by nightfall a vast amount of the civilians trying to escape through the Umbrella quarantine check point at the Ravens Gate Bridge are still uninfected. It is not until late at night we are informed through the reflection of a motorcycle cop/umbrella special operatives reflective helmet visor that the entire city has finally become the Necropolis. However, it is important to interject that the establishing scene of Jill Valentine is during the day and a zombie outbreak *seems* to be ubiquitous. Either way, the last shot of Resident Evil is of a terribly wrecked, congested, and abandoned street (assume it's main street and that the streets which are navigable are less important) is during the day. It is NOT possible for this shot to have happened the day after the outbreak (outbreak in terms of citywide) because at that point the city has been nuked. Now, it is possible to suppose that Alice was kept in the Hospital facility for a few days after the Hive (it seems odd that they would intentionally wait a long period of time to reopen the Hive), so perhaps as in the game it actually took a few days for the entire city to become infected, which would explain Jills familiarity with how to kill the zombies. Of all the bothersome things in the first movie I'll concede that this one is just convoluted as opposed to absolutely absurd and impossible, but nonetheless it's a plot hole that's rather annoying.

Having said all the negatives, I must admit as other Resident Evil fans did, I thoroughly enjoyed the film. The action was pretty close to the games, the situations were somewhat reminiscent, and they did stay as close to legitimate consistency with the game universe as they could I must say. Additionally, the CG is great, the zombies and makeup and wardrobe are pretty excellent, and the movie is definitely rewatchable. Despite my uber nerd problems with the entire movie series, I give Resident Evil four and a half out of five stars.

I say a lot of libellous things about Conservatives

2009-04-15T18:21:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I encounter people who don't understand why I am actually capable of hating the "other side", in this case in regards to politics, which in reality has nothing to do with politics or government, but rather outlook on life. People that are my best friends even, who I know for a fact share my opinions.

Michael Savage, in his idiosyncratic crying ass Jew radio host method, spent his show today crying about things that no conservative can possibly understand, in this case the covering of the Tea Parties today by the "liberal New York communist media" which everyone knows at this point in America is a fantasy. The media is no longer the Left and Right spin machine, it's just a conglomeration of complete dumbasses whose media "direction" is dictated by even BIGGER morons, as IF they existed.

"I've only seen one African American" I paraphrase from Janet (you have a last name, not that I care to Google it's Italian spelling), a reporter chosen by "Mr. Cline" who is also apparently a left Communist, just like everyone else that's not on your side, right America.

Michael Savage continues to SAVAGEly misinterpret the intentions of this report by crying that "African Americans" were not prevented, discouraged, barred from attending these Tea Parties. Take note class because this is one of the major reasons I and the remaining sane people in this world HATE the fascists in this country.
There was no clarified motive for reporting how many African Americans showed, at least not in the out-of-context quotes that the Conservatives like to play on their radio shows. There may have been in real life, but unlike the fascists, I don't take comfort, enjoyment, in actively seeking relationships between nouns that don't actually exist in anyone elses mind.
If in reality 98% of taxes paid are by WHITE people then our tax system is broken and Obama is right to want to reform it. Regardless that has no legitimate authority to explain the demographical composition of angry anti-tax protestors.
And another thing to the mentally retarded, jaded, pissed off angry redneck wastes of sperm that listen to conservative talk radio (thats right I REFER TO YOU, including my own father) and actually have the audacity to LAUGH at the slanderous fucking filth that the FCC allows on the airwaves, and encourages with Marconi awards among other bastardized and empty honors: The "naive college youth" of this country did not elect Obama. Most of the fucking conservative morons ARE college students raised by their parents not to think for themselves or have any measurable capacity to discern the truth amidst the sea of potential information that exists in our time period. There are not 40 million college students in this country that actively voted in any election, ever, regardless of the fact that this is the highest voter turnout in history. For those of us who did vote for him, we did not vote for him knowing, or thinking, that he would pass massive spending bills, in the midst of the magnificent depression, or do any of the things he did. Frankly I don't support a lot of his administrations actions so far and this is not why I voted for him, but you idiot conservatives have to get a clue and understand WHY he's the president. He's not the illegitimate, the annointed, the magnificent, the great, the savior, any of these stupid fucking names YOU in the conservative fantasyland have granted him. He won because his competition was a woman that everyone in America hates and no one can tell anyone why they do, an old dumbass Republican that not even conservatives believed in, and his running mate, a completely retarded, obscenely negative stereotype of the worst possible stereotypical American yuppie citizen. A stupid cunt even less intelligent than GW, who names her children the kind of appellations found in Saturday morning cartoons and old western flicks, whose children are inherently as fucking tragic of an abomination that has come to represent the common American, who in the typical neo-American way doesn't care about anyone, including her constituents, or her gender, or nature.
I love you conservatives, I really do. You're all so incredibly clueless as to the time, the situation that we have lived in for years. America has ALWAYS been arrogant. Only an arrogant nation could slap Britain in the face at the height of their power as an empire and tell them "Bring it, bitch." Only an arrogant nation could sit back and watch Europe, the entirety of the Western world and the Eastern world be used as a firing range, it's people incinerated, enslaved, murdered, used as lab rats for occult and demonic experiments, not once but three times, biding it's time until the travesty had reached a peak, coming in to the war 4 years late, never at all, or over a decade late, and then have the BALLS to allow it's fascist motherfucker right wing celebrities claim that America "saved the day" , that we'd all be speaking German if it weren't for America. What the FUCK did America ever do for ANYONE? We let 10 million people die in WW2 before we ever even lifted a finger. It doesn't matter why, it doesn't matter that we were "regrouping" and trying to be a worthwhile effort instead of charging in and just becoming victims ourselves. We orchestrated the destruction of Europe and Africa and Russia and most of Asia AND the western hemisphere and we have the disgusting audacity to decry the world for ever criticizing us because they may potentially be "slaves" to this day? We have the balls to berate our president, to crucify him on the altar of public opinion, for apologizing for the word which sums up our entire existence?
Did ANY of you tools EVER take a history class? We found this land on accident, looking for India, at which point after overwhelming evidence proving us to be completely incorrect we actively refused to believe science FACT (Sound familiar?), and set upon calling the native emigrants of Russia and Europe and the Iranian plateau to this land "Indians" just to further engrain our arrogance on the world. And we STILL call them Indians to this day! We killed their entire species, we killed their culture, their religion, their society, hunted and butchered them and then forced them to live on government chosen tracts of barren, useless land, and now we bitch and cry and protest and vote no against "indian" casino laws so that they can't at least have some empty monetary reward for surviving and suffering the genocide of their existence because we have attached a criminal connotation to casinos, which in reality is entirely a product of American fearmongering and radical propaganda. On top of that, we killed the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Inca , whether or not it wasn't specifically America instead of other European nations like Spain, forced people off of land they lived on for generations and generations, and the best part of all is the fact that no one even lives on 80% of the land in America. Half of our country still flies the confederate flag, a symbol of criminality, unconstitutional beliefs and behavior, slavery, arrogance, oppression, and stupidity, under the guise of a symbol of decentralization, of pride, of history. And we encourage it.
For anyone too retarded to understand, the South was not right. A confederation of state governments with no central authority to govern them has NEVER worked and will never work as proven by the history of man. The Greek city states had no central government, they were destroyed, repeatedly. The Italian states had no central government. They were destroyed, nay immediately, and united under a central government. The Germanic states had no central unified government. They were destroyed and in turmoil for centuries. The Chinese kingdoms and states spent the time in which they did not have a central unifying government destroying each other and being destroyed.
In stark contrast, the only stability that has ever come for nations in the history of existence has been with strong central governments. The Persian empire of Darius and afterward had a central unifying government. It lasted centuries. The Roman Republic and Empire, in their original and diminutive forms, were the very foundation of a modern government, and lasted 2000 years. The Parthian Empire, the Sassanid Empire, the Seleucid Empire, the Bactrian Empire, the dynasties of China, Lysimachian, Cassandrian, and Ptolemaic kingdoms, the Phoenician empire, every successful "union" of nations in the history of ever has been held together (for as long as possible) by a strong centralized government. The evidence is irrefutable. The fact that these empires all fell apart (most by military conquest) is entirely irrelevant in a comparison of American alternate history to pre-American real history. America as a nation is only 2 centuries old, there's no gaurantee it will last much longer if at all.
You're right conservatives, I concede, I'm sorry. A country whose entire existence is predicated upon assassination, murder, deception, unbridled greed, genocide, dissention, treachery, rebellion, slavery, pitiful attempts at diplomacy, unasked for international intervention, social cannabalism, fanatic religious devotion, hypocras, corruption, overconsumption, and coveting just to name a few, is by no means arrogant. How DARE Obama make the slightest insignificant dent in the cave walls that are our massive grave plot as a country by attempting to even ACKNOWLEDGE the fact that we are wrong. How dare he observe the traditions of foreign countries. How dare he change the ridiculous diplomatic relations we have had with Cuba and other unpopular nations for the past sixty years. What a prick.

Here, let me just drop this list of noteable terms that you all need to re-examine.

Yellow journalism
The Gilded Age
World War 1
World War 2
Korean War
Cuban Missile Crisis
Vietnam War
Bosnia Herzegovina
Pakistan
Tibet
Hiroshima
Nagasaki
Tunisia
Italy
Okinawa
Spanish American War
Mexican American War
American Revolution
American Civil War
Treaty of Versailles
League of Nations
United Nations
Israel
Somalia
Afghanistan
Iraq
Lebanon
George W. Bush
Nixon
Johnson
Reagan
Clinton
World Trade Center
Fox News
Seven Years War
War of 1812
Berlin Wall
South Africa
Apartheid
Nurembourg Trials
Geneva Convention
Roman Empire
Gracchus brothers
Julius Caeser
Paul Revere
Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Paine
John Locke
Plato
Socrates
Aristotle
Carl Sagan
Stephen Hawking
Rick Santorum
Strom Thurman
Nancy Pelosi
Harry Reid
Tim Geitner
Operation Desert Shield
Operation Desert Storm
al Qaeda
Hamas
Syria
Operation Iraqi Freedom
Haliburton
Tyco
Adelphia
Enron
Ken Lay

Seriously, I could go on for days. Go back to high school, go back to college, and read a god damn history book. Watch a god damn news reel. Go to your library at your university and go to the whatever-ma-jig-newspaper-machine and read articles from back in the day, watch videos. Read interviews. Read the CIA world fact book. You fucking fascist bigot naive zealots would make me sick if your pathetic existence hadn't forced the righteous population of this world to grow such thick skin.
America makes any educated person who has a conscience absolutely sick to their stomachs. Yes, we're not the only country with a crime rate. We're not the only country that murdered people in the name of expansion, freedom, god, money, vengeance, whatever. We're not the only or the first nation to lie, to deceive, to invade, to turn a blind eye. But you know what we are? We're the best at all of those things.

"We're the best, oh whooaaa oh, never gonna evah bring us down".

Being the best isn't a good thing all the time. Excellence, superlative adjectives, are not good things when they modify murder, deception, invasion, coveting, genocide, brashness, refusal, naivete, ignorance, over-consumption, zealotry, inferior products, lack of compassion, social cannibalism, arrogance, stupidity, obesity.

Honestly....can you really think of a positive adjective we can claim a superlative in? Honestly, I challenge you to think of one superlative positive adjective that describes America. Enduring spirit? No. Try Britain, or France, or Germany. Innovation? Try a Chinese dorm room. Educational pursuit? Try any country that isn't America. Personal freedom? Wrong again. Monetary stability? Try Europe. Transportation infrastructure? Europe.

You can't.

Piracy, 9/11, Hillary Clinton

2009-04-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,514039,00.html

Let me start off by saying that I believe the people on the left, or near the left of the middle, in the Libertarian or Democratic party or maybe even on the fence, are quite aware in their every day mental lives that Conservatives are among other demonstrable and derogatory qualities, completely bat shit insane.
Having said that allow me to point out what any person with a developed brain, even third graders, can explain more clearly to you than factual scientific concepts. Piracy and terrorism are the same fucking thing. There is NO difference. I wish I had the clairvoyance, the extra terrestrial knowledge, to understand the psychoses of the conservative mind. What do you honestly think makes piracy and terrorism two separate categories of criminal activity, of criminal lifestyle? Pirates INVENTED terrorism. There is no difference. NONE MICHAEL SAVAGE. NONE. In fact, it wasn't even Michael Savage that said it when I heard this putrid nonsense on the airwaves, it was some stand in, because like the great Americans, all the "popular" on-air media personalities are taking Good Friday off, though every real American worked their ass off today.
What makes me even more irate is the overall puzzle of how to poison America's mind and fuck the Democrats out of office, and how they attempt to fit all these little pieces into it. For example, Fox news, Savage, Limbaugh, all these morons, have the audacity to berate Hillary Clinton for laughing at the fact that there's piracy in Somalia. Do you know why she's laughing? Because she had the faith in humanity to believe that after three thousand years PIRACY HAD FINALLY STOPPED. You fucking IDIOTS. She's not laughing at "terrorism". She's not laughing because she finds criminal activity humorous. She's laughing at how god damn ridiculous is the fact that after three thousand years, we haven't managed to eliminate the threat of piracy not only on the high seas, but on land as well.
Yes, conservatives, that's right, I said 3000 years. That's why she's laughing. She thought the Barbary wars, and the destruction of the Carribbean sea pirate threat as well as around the coasts of Africa, Brazil, Argentina, the East Indies, and the Mediterranean sea had long come to pass as a solid fact in world history textbooks and SHOULD only exist in Hollywood and Disney World in the 21st century. Realistically she realized before and certainly realizes now piracy is still popular and dangerous, and she's ashamed at how ludicrous and retarded it is that there are pirates in an age of nuclear weapons and jet engines. However, I have digressed.
Any teenager, nay, any elementary school kid who cares about history or war or culture or the history of economics can elucidate the concept of piracy to you. It's been around as long as sailing. Julius Caesar built his early pre-political career upon eradicating the pirate threat of Cilicia. He spent over a month in the captivity of pirates and threatened regularly to crucify every last one of them when his ransom arrived from Miletus. Eventually it did, and he crucified every last pirate involved. Before Caesar and after Caesar pirates still sailed the Mediterranean sea, and dealing with pirates became a pre-occupation of every nation to bear a fleet.
We thought in the United States in the 18th and 19th century we had finally broken the back of pirates, with the aforementioned Barbary Wars and the "justice" administered to the pirates of the Carribbean sea as well as other vital colonial trade centers. They existed before the rise of Rome, they existed during, and they still exist centuries after not only they thought to have eliminated the problem, but centuries after America, after the United Provinces, Portugal, the British Empire, the French, the Moroccans, and countless other nations thought to have eradicated piracy from the world.
As I said before, it must be made painfully clear to you idiots that terrorism is not a new concept. Radical Islamists did not invent terrorism. Hussein, bin Laden, Iran, Iraq, Hamas, al Qaida, Somalia, South Africa, none of these people directly invented terrorism fresh out of the criminal laboratory in the 20th century.

ter⋅ror⋅ism

[ter-uh-riz-uhm]

–noun

1.	the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.

2.	the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.

3.	a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

Origin:
1785–95

pi⋅ra⋅cy

[pahy-ruh-see]

–noun, plural -cies.

1.	practice of a pirate; robbery or illegal violence at sea.

2.	the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.: The record industry is beset with piracy.

3.	Also called stream capture. Geology. diversion of the upper part of one stream by the headward growth of another.

Origin:
1545–55; earlier pyracie pīrātīa See pirate, -acy

The definitions are not exactly the same, according to the dictionary. Dictionaries do not accurately define words in a modern society and certainly do not take into account the reality of their defined members, such as pirates and terrorists. While a pirate may potentially only exhibit behavior only definable as general terrorism, they may only be doing it for fun, for plunder, for loot, and womens. Unfortunately for those that aren't aware, Disney pirates who seek women and booze and gold and a good time are not real. Pirates were brutal criminals. They murdered for no reason, they raped, they plundered, they destroyed property, they killed women and children unprovoked. They were the most violent people you could possibly imagine, and in fact, you couldn't imagine them, because you've never met a true 18th century pirate, and you've never met 21st century pirate. Niether have I.
Unfortunately for you conservatives, niether of us know terrorists either, not foreign ones at least, but it's well established that they are human beings. They have families, they are networked, and although they are violent and brutal and "insane", they exhibit the same normal behaviors we do. Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, bin Laden, all these people, they have families, they engage at times and maybe all the time as far as we know in every day life, albeit potentially removed from normal society in some cases. You don't hear about muslim extremists busting into a grocery store, murderign everyone, and then leaving and not even taking anything.
Get a clue and realize that terrorism is an extremely broad term. In reality, all crime is terrorism. There are no victimizing crimes that don't seek to scare, to terrify, to intimidate. Crimes with indirect or somewhat intangible victims like counterfeiting and file sharing are completely different. Rape, murder, theft, war, molestation, these crimes are all violent, they are all "terrifying" and their only purpose, regardless of motive, is to scare and intimidate the victims. There's no difference between a murderer who shoots someone in the head in brought daylight in an alley and a "terrorist" who helps his terrorist group take over an oil rig and hold it hostage for government money, or someone who flies a plane into a building. Absolutely no difference. The magnitude of the crime doesn't make the crime any different. An American who shoots his neighbor should receive the same punishment as the "terrorists" who "hijacked" planes and blew up part of New York City. They should sit in jail for the rest of their lives, and I won't go into that, because a discussion of capital punishment and the flawed American "justice" system is a whole grocery store full of worms that I'm not going to open up right now.

Pre and Post 9/11 World

It makes me just so happy to hear conservatives throwing around a term as insanely retarded as "post/pre 911 world". Yes, in some circumstances it is convenient, in a strictly textbook and pedagogical sense, to refer to things with temporal prefixes. For example, ante-bellum and post-bellum South in America, though it is highly arguable that in reality, there are very little distinguishable differences between any section of America before and after the second American revolution.
There is no such thing as post 9/11 and pre 9/11 world. These three words serve ONLY as a temporal distinction between the "time" before September 11, 2001 , and the "time" after September 11, 2001. In the big picture, nothing has changed. After 9/11, Ben Franklin would shoot himself in the face with a shotgun if he travelled forward in time to witness the monsterous shit the Bush administration took on the constitution. Other than that, the world is the same. We still have secret military operations involved with corrupt goverments. Our own government is still inept, corrupt, and disenfranchised from it's people. If you consider the blemish of the Bush administration and their perceivedly immense changes to the very fabric of the geo-political sphere and America, yes, some changes have occurred. The government can do whatever it wants now, more or less. Crazy fucking INSANE laws can be passed in , go figure, Bush territory, like in Florida, literally outlawing philanthropy. (A man was arrested and jailed for helping a homeless person.)
The only sense in that the world is any different than it was eight years ago is that now people are not going to take horse shit anymore, or so the conservative propaganda machine would have you believe. After their so coined terrible presidency of Barack Obama thus far, they have yet to accomplish any political achievements. The bill still passed, the administration is still in place. They can have their Tea Parties, they have not accomplished and will not accomplish anything.
If you honestly think 9/11 changed everything (as popularized on Family Guy), you're an idiot. You most likely are waking up in the same bedroom you did that morning, driving the same car, working the same job, living in the same town and country, doing the same shit you did that morning as you will this Easter weekend, and so is everyone else in a first world country. You conservative fascists make me fucking sick. If you gave a shit about anything in the world bigger than your own pocketbooks, you'd shut the fuck up and do something that matters. Dharfur, Somalia, deforestation, the countdown to extinction, humanitarian efforts, the somewhat recovering economy, global climate shifting, supporting personal freedoms, supporting local businesses, preventing the absolute possiblity of Enron, Tyco, AIG, Adelphia, your neighborhood watch, ANYTHING. Stop listening to facist morons like Huckabee, Savage, Hannity, Limbaugh, Pelosi, McCain, Palin, any of them, and think for your damn self. Seriously, try it, it might be liberating.

Stop arguing about science fiction

2009-03-18T11:34:00.001-07:00

I seriously hate when people try to have intelligent discussions about "mechs" as viable tools of warfare. Yes, you dolts have the basic arguments down: They are science fiction machinations, based on technology that is not entirely developed at this point in time. The rest of your arguements are not only moot but in the typical conservative fashion, pointless, irrelevant, misguided, and asinine.
Example:

"The M1 Abrahms 70 ton AFV has its mass distributed evenly amongst its tracks, that's why such a heavy vehicle is able to be successful."

Mecha are humanoid. Every last detail of mecha in a decent "mecha" universe (i.e Battletech) is thoroughly explained and dignified. Human beings are able to walk and not destroy things under them that are structurally stable, without falling over or imploding. Sorry, there's no counter argument for that. Increasing the variables on both sides does not change the math, it still comes out as viable.

Combat nowadays is urban? Does that matter at all? No, it really doesn't. If you are too damn stupid to realize, the combat in Battletech rarely takes place in urban environments and when it does it's dangerous and disasterous in the most realistic of ways. Additionally, if you were to presume combat even occurs in an urban environment, bringing with it all the intricacies of a city (sewers, plumbing, electrical wires, roadbed, bridge support, foundations) you have to use the common sense that the majority of 'mechs in the situation are going to be light, in the 20 - 40 ton range. Twenty to forty tons distributed over two humanoid legs will probably destroy a roadbed, yes, it's irrelevant. Building a city requires ground. The ground didn't disappear, it's still there. Trust me, I've seen it.

And just how is height a disadvantage? How retarded of a suggestion is that? This isn't Bag End, it's reality, it's outside. Being 40 feet tall isn't going to do anything but make it easier to see and kill everyone.

Rubicon Rising: Chapter 5

2009-01-03T12:41:00.001-08:00

-=5=-

Fountain Square, Gallen's Heights

Pergamus, Sheratan

Prefecture IV

April 14, 3133

Thin wisps of low hanging morning fog spiraled around the plaza, reaching out in the cool breeze to wrap around every object possible. The heavy clouds blocked out most of the ultraviolet rays from Sheratan's spectra-G V class star, casting a dim white light that combined with the cloud cover and fog generated a respectively dreary environment on the planet's secondary capital city. Each wisp of fog systematically reached out over everything, grasping and reaching out like a ghost.

As ghostly arms reached out towards him, MJ lost his focus and, perched high in the cockpit of his Corvis, momentarily lost touch with his current surroundings. He was relatively insulated from the noise of the outside, but the noise recorded by the audio sensors slowly and surely kicked him back into reality.

A cacophonous riot of shouts and clanging gradually tore away the sound barrier from the outside of his squat, bird-legged Corvis 'mech. He and a squad of infantry had been dispatched to Capital City to answer reinforcement requests of the local police precinct. Rather than spare more of the actual police force, the police commissioner had collaborated with Hasek to send one mech and a platoon of ground troops. He supposed if he were in the same situation that would be his decision as well.

Huxley didn't care about it though; being in a position of power was not his curse. Fortunately, he was just a simple 'mech jockey. What he did care about, remotely though, was his part in ruining a beautiful town square, and in what was in his opinion a beautiful city. 'Mechs did not belong in cities; they couldn't be piloted in urban situations without at least moderate, and extremely costly, damage. As far as he knew, he had definitely done more than enough damage to necessitate some extensive and costly repair work. Piloting a 20 – ton 'mech was bound to break something; even modern roads were not designed to withstand such an extreme amount of pressure in one specific spot.

He himself had been here for only an hour and the situation seemed to be getting out of hand at a startlingly exponential rate. As far as could be determined by the ground troops and his analysis, none of the civilians present were armed per se. Not in a military sense of the word, they did not have missile packs and portable ant-armor weaponry. They did however have what armament a mob could usually afford, mostly cheap and ineffective interspersed with some respectable equipment. When he arrived they were merely protesting, but now things were getting out of hand. A select few had begun to attack the infantry on the streets trying to keep them civil, in addition to their outright refusal to obey a direct edict from the head of their state.

The 'mech had been assigned to patrol capital city along with a few platoons of infantry and three other light and medium 'mechs by order of Adrian Hasek. No one was really sure why. Although the official mumbo jumbo stated something about heightened security in light of recent "terrorist" activity, most of which referred to the espionage alleged to have occurred at Sheratan's Class B Hyper Pulse Generator station, though in reality no other popularly elected public official had verified the story Hasek's propaganda machine had disseminated into the socio-cultural stew that Sheratan was quick becoming. It had only been a week or two since they had begun patrolling the streets and these people hated them more every day for it. He really wasn't sure why, it wasn't as if they were running around stepping on people and accidentally burning their houses and hangouts.

Huxley was scanning the crowd, watching the infantry and the local police with their riot shields struggling to maintain civility among these blood hungry urbanites without using violence. Suddenly, after it was already too late, he caught a gleam in a fourth floor window of one of Liberty Square's landmark buildings. The smoke trail raced out of the window and before he could finish yelling through his combat neuro-helmet's mic and out of the external speakers to the infantry, the projectiles had done their damage.

Six missiles systematically slammed into a few of the police cruisers assembled to his east, their dark grey smoke trails lingering in the air. A few mercenary infantry and police officers leaning against one of the vehicles instantly erupted in flames, the plasma covering their entire bodies. They were flung to the street bed, screaming in agony as the fuel clung to their burning flesh. Inferno SRMs, shit!

The first car burned briefly before the modern napalm reached its fuel tank and lit it asunder, the hover car exploding in a fireball carcass of the burning car crashing down closer to the crowd than it had been. Although some dispersed, most of the crowd continued their moderately aggressive pacifism. He scanned the window he had seen the missiles launched from, but there was no reading on any of his instruments to tell him anything helpful. The second car sat silently, flames crackling all over and inside, producing thick black smoke that rippled high into the air.

He could hear the screams and chaos ensuing down on the street, men and women fleeing in fear as the riot seemed to be turning into a massacre. Through the external microphones he couldn't hear what had happened, but it appeared as though one of the ground troops had been wounded by small arms fire from somewhere, whether within the crowd or without. The situation was fast slipping from their control.

"What the hell is going on out there!?" Huxley yelled into his communications link to the Sergeant in control of the infantry platoons.

"We're taking small arms and anti vehicular fire from all over the place, sir! Our scouts can't get a lock on them!" the man that answered was Abel Clark, a commissioned infantry officer in Sheratan's standing army whom he had come to be friends with in the short time he had been on the planet. They were frequently finding themselves in these local policing situations.

Finally, he caught sight of something through the mech's cockpit glass, ignoring all of his sensor equipment, which seemed to be inept at finding anything as ancient as the muzzle flash of an assault rifle going off in the crowd. He focused in on the spot he was certain he saw an assailant, guiding his right arm joystick slowly with his hand and peering deeper into what remained of the crowd. The flash danced across his vision again and he was certain he wasn't seeing things.

"Husker, we have wolves in the flock, you are weapons free. Repeat, you are free to engage hostiles at will." Huxley announced to Abel over their radio frequency. Civilians or not, he was not going to let any more of these men die on a bleak crappy morning at a damn civilian protest.

Abel and his two platoons seemed to be fleeing to the protection of his 'mechs legs as he stood his ground. They fired sporadically towards perceived targets, retaliating with laser rifles and heavy-duty taser weapons. A few infantry perched by his 'mechs foot, a few seconds passing before they both launched infantry-sized portable short range missiles across the street at the building from which the two hover cars had been destroyed earlier. The glass walls on the buildings fourth floor windows shattered into what may have been a million pieces, showering down upon the street as the steel frames of the room bent in a billowing fireball that eventually consumed the entire room.

They didn't seem to be having as much luck with the crowd of protestors however, which continued to hold its ground. Every few seconds he would see another muzzle flash, or something get tossed through the air. Most times, it ended up being a shoe or a rock, but now that the precedent for armed protest had been set, he was beginning to notice homemade explosives and Molotov cocktails being tossed towards his position. The majority of the projectiles bounced off of riot shields or fell hopelessly against the side of his 'mech, but more than enough of them hit their mark in his mind. On both of his sides, the Molotov cocktails had ruptured against the ground and set more infantry troops ablaze, who staggered hopelessly around before trying to extinguish themselves on the plaza ground, or jumping into the giant fountain in the middle of the square.

He had seen enough to make his decision.

"Abel, get these men out of here. I'll cover you to the APCs, just get the hell out." He spoke in a flat tinny voice, devoid of emotion. He was in strictly business mode now.

Out the corner of his cockpit glass, he saw the Sergeant salute him and start rallying his men towards the fountain, where they had parked their transports, or what remained of them

The two infantry platoons had come in a hovercraft variant of the old 3060 era heavy armored personnel carriers; twenty ton vehicles that were used to ferry infantry troops and their equipment to the front lines, used extensively by the armies of the Federated Suns. Although the APC lacked any mobility with its machine guns, it was a far safer place for unarmored men to be in this situation than in the open facing unknown aggressors with unknown abilities. Huxley just hoped these terrorists, or freedom fighters, or whatever they were, weren't hiding any bigger anti-armor weapons up their sleeves. There were plenty of places to allow the opportunity: it was a giant intersection and plaza on the west side of the planet's largest city. Every building around was tall and capable of completely occluding any dangerous weapon these aggressors could manage, short of an armored vehicle itself. All in all the situation was one of many flavors of nightmare any military personnel might experience in their career.

Huxley eyed the computer screens flashing all around him, watching through one of them as the last of the infantry squads clambered up the APC's loading ramp. Several of them stumbled terribly, even falling their way into the vehicles seating area. Still others leaned on their comrades, not too horribly injured but admittedly incapable of standing in their current predicaments. He wondered what it was all for. They hadn't done anything, they were simply doing what they had been ordered to do, and it wasn't as if they had been ordered to kill innocent people. We're just standing in for police, for Christ's sake, Huxley thought to himself.

Their targets taking cover in an armored vehicle didn't seem to deter the unidentified assailants in the slightest bit, much to Huxley's disappointment. Another window flashed to his right, an azure beam dancing off the glass side of its building as suddenly a charged beam of particles splashed against the APCs side armor. Caught in the process of starting up its engines, the vehicle lurched violently on its side. Molten splinters of Ferro-fibrous armor and gobs of liquefied concrete sprayed against the legs of his Corvis, as he fumbled with the right hand joystick again.

"Sergeant, I don't like to repeat myself!" Huxley barked over the radio transmitter built into his neurohelmet again.

"Yes, sir!" Abel grunted back into the microphone headset attached to the APCs passenger control panel.

Huxley couldn't hear it but outside the personnel carrier's giant fans kicked on, whirring and whining loudly as they the air cushion they produced shoved the vehicle a foot in the air. The vehicle had taken severe damage, the particle cannons projection literally melting a hole through its thin side armor. He could actually see through one side of the APC and out of the other, which assured him a fair amount of the men he was trying to save had just died. He was on the verge of rage, whatever the cause of this injustice, he assured himself none of his duties to anyone, not to himself, not to the dead, were fulfilled, until he at least was instrumental in the apprehension and downfall of whatever group was responsible for slaying military personnel through terrorist means.

He knew he would regret what he was about to do, that it was in all probability a career ender and the beginning of a war, but there was no choice in their current situation. Surely he would be at the mercy of military personnel if put on trial, they would understand. Huxley dragged his left arm joystick, sliding his thumb to the top and disengaging the safety switch on his lasers. As his thumb found its way back to the firing trigger built into the front of the joystick, he brought the targeting reticule on the machines Heads Up Display to bear over the location of what he confirmed was a Man-Pack Particle Projector Cannon. Even for a small infantry weapon, it had easily torn through the heavily armored personnel carrier that was now struggling to escape the scene. There was no need to wait for his targeting systems to confirm a lock, as there was nothing to lock on to: the target was entirely human. Huxley took no time to hesitate, instead taking a deep breath and furiously squeezing the trigger.

The laser weapons set on the bottom of his mech's left forearm buzzed, stabbing out towards the window with twin streams of rapid-fire light bursts. Like a frighteningly accurate machine gun the emerald lances drilled through the frame of the building, melting structural supports and lighting walls all throughout the specific room ablaze. What was once a beautiful building side was now ruined by a gaping, molten hole that used to be what looked like an office building, though it was too liquefied to determine. He couldn't tell what happened to the aggressors manning the bipod-mounted particle cannon, but from the few red stains that survived on the walls and carpet he was pretty certain he had hit his mark.

With all the pertinent threats eliminated, to the best of his knowledge, Huxley turned his attention to the gathering of armed and violently protesting civilians collected around the fountain and near his mech. With the infantry and police getting the hell out of dodge, the protestors had broken through the barricades and started to outright attack his 'mech. As he visually scoped out the situation through the tinted glass of his cockpit he even saw one brave civilian managed to be on the mech's right arm. Apparently he had climbed up the few ladder rungs he had kept on the mech's legs when he had chosen not to replace the ladder entirely with a rolled steel chain many MechWarriors kept in their machines cockpit. It was a young man, not too far from his own age it seemed, but to his mind the kid might as well have been an insect after what this crowd had chosen to do to good citizens that they didn't even know.

M.J Huxley intended to treat the kid as such: just an insect. His right arm tore frantically at the control stick, the neural connection in his helmet causing the mech's arm to do the same. The giant auto cannon that comprised the mech's right arm flailed around as much as he could allow it, but the kid kept a firm grip onto his 'mech, holding on for dear life. Repeatedly he tried, and repeatedly he failed to shake his uninvited guest. On his last try, whether out of frustration or negligence, he unintentionally squeezed the trigger on his right hand joystick, letting loose a high-speed stream of metal death upon the crowd.

Oh, fuck! Huxley cursed aloud in his cockpit.

The Ultra 10-class auto-cannon that made up half of the Corvis's right arm discharged and let loose ten rounds of terrifyingly huge and high-powered 120mm explosive shells.

They were almost the size of a person, in fact in ancient Terran tanks, even in modern tanks, the 120mm round was still used for anti-armor, the same purpose it served on modern 'mechs. Several of the shells smashed into the marble floor of the fountain square, kicking up chunks of building material and spraying fragmented metal all over the crowd. However, to his horror, some of the cartridges hit civilians. At least he was certain they were civilians, judging by the huge splash of blood that cascaded across the outside of his cockpit. The carnage before him was foreign to most people in the modern age, even with the frequency of so many insignificant battles and wars being fought in the 32^nd century. He guessed that something like this must have happened somewhere, the news just never got out. Those civilians who had been lucky enough not to get hit directly merely laid on the ground, screaming in agony at the shrapnel that was slowly draining all of their blood. The true victims of his auto-cannon were already gone though. Several bodies literally laid in pieces on the ground, hemorrhaging profusely at the massive wounds granted them by such a barbarous attack. He felt sure they weren't in any pain, they must have died from pure shock before any true consequences of losing their bodies could come to fruition. Huxley winced at the whole scene.

Jesus Christ, he whispered through clinched teeth, cursing at himself. If he had to guess it, his mech was probably bathed in blood in some spots.

It seemed the only person, other than those that fled immediately when he began shooting, that survived the massacre was his friendly 'mech insect. The kid didn't even seem to have any burns or bruises on his body, neither from the autocannon discharging beneath him and spraying gigantic spent casings all around his body nor from being tossed around his machine like a rag doll. He wondered if perhaps Mr. Bold could be of some more use to them, after getting the entire group of militant protestors killed with his antics.

Huxley spun the 'mech around, his legs finally getting a chance to stretch as he pumped the foot pedals. The Corvis broke into a jog, chasing after the APC at only sixty kilometers per hour. The vehicle seemed too severely damaged to manage its top speed though, and was no match for his fully functional 'mech.

"Abel open the rest of that sardine can up, I have a prisoner." He happily proclaimed to the APCs radio frequency.

There was no audio response, but the APC slowly came to a hovering halt in the middle of the street, and he mimicked the movement with his foot pedals, bring himself to a stop. A He watched a squad of infantry clamber up the ladders on both sides of his 'mechs legs, and through the cockpit saw them forcibly removing the man from his mech. They hit him with stun batons repeatedly until he loosened his grip, and after struggling to get him down the ladder, tossed the guy back in with the infantry in the dilapidated personnel carrier.

As the rear-loading ramp closed again, Huxley opened up a private line to his infantry Sergeant.

"Maybe that guy knows something?" M.J queried him.

"Yea…maybe he knows the size of our jail cell." Huxley chuckled, kicking the throttle back up and escorting the APC back to friendlier parts of town.

The Ultimate Media Player

2008-12-29T12:24:00.001-08:00

It's amazing to me that after a decade and more of competition in the PC/Portable media market, we are still left with such shitty programs to actually implement our media libraries on our home computer networks.

I've always been an iTunes guy, as much as I hate Apple with a passion, so far they have always had the best program, and because they know they have the best one, they don't do a damn thing to improve it. Ever. It's starting to get old. I've recently begun to use Zune just to experiment and give the program a chance to make me happy, and so far I must say I'm disappointed.

The integration of Zune software with your Windows Live profile is pretty cool – from a social networking standpoint, ignoring the fact that they seek to find copyright violators as well as to rape the public with ridiculous song prices. Additionally, the ways in which you can view your media library are far better than iTunes. iTunes features no customization whatsoever on PCs, which I hate to break It to Apple, are the vast majority of their demographic – both for iPods and iTunes downloads, although I'm assuming it is still moderately malleable on OSX. The Zune interface is simply better – implementing aesthetically pleasing social networking, a strong juxtaposition to iTunes honestly terrible store-based web profiles which no one even cares about unless you're just that much of an Apple fanboy, which is pretty much anyone who has an Apple account and actually uses it.

Zune has a much better looking and smoother interface as well as a better social networking system. iTunes has a much better CDDB system which is entirely automatic as opposed to the crappy and mostly manual Zune system, athough in reality they are both terrible missing a lot of information, despite that my library itself should single handedly have accounted for at least 20% of the new CDDB information added to the system in the past five years.

It would be great if Apple and Microsoft worked on a joint project to make a media library program that worked with both of their mobile players, with their home media players (Media Center computers and Apple TV), and actually made the process of listening to your music and watching your videos enjoyable.

Chapter Four

2008-12-28T14:11:00.001-08:00

-=4=-

Sheratan, Prefecture IV

Republic of the Sphere

April 7, 3133 00:34 Hours

Niobe had, for as long as she could remember, been a mischievous character, to state the least about her shenanigans. It wasn't her preference to partake in mischief, nor necessarily even her forte, although she excelled in it in either way, when a job enticed her adequately. Causing mischief was at best an occasional occupation for her until this point. However, she just like other attuned people in the Republic could feel a storm coming. No matter how normal things ever seemed in the current atmosphere, some had learned harder than others that change was disturbing in magnitude and speed when it involved armed force. Unfortunately, there was no reliable way of knowing how well intelligence could be gathered on any activities, by the supposed government of the Republic. She did not want to risk being a high profile target. Communication in the Republic was still somewhat intact, meaning her stealth activities were afforded no leeway.

Although Hans was the objective of her mission, in fact he was the mission; she felt great angst at the fact that its fulfillment might have unexpected ramifications. She knew already that he was adept, charismatic, as well as impressively adaptable, and had the potential to be what he might become if all things went well. Perhaps her recently developed emotions were threatening to get in the way of work. It would be a new experience for her, as it had never happened before.

Big deal, she thought. She had been given her assignment. No payment had occurred, no contact with the employer after the initialization. In fact, as far as she knew the only contact she did have wasn't even with the actual employer. She liked him, and she could do what she wanted. As far as she was concerned she had no standing obligation to anyone but herself at this point. Perhaps there was still the chance she could have things her way and change the course of Sheratan's modern history…slightly. It wasn't that she was self-centered, or greedy, or being a child. She believed the future could work out differently. There was no denying she hated the administration that devolved under Steiner and a blasphemous, murderous regime, here in a lightless nook of the Republic. Despite her disdain, she still sought to avoid expanding the conflict if it were still possible; although she knew subconsciously the only effective way to bring it to a close would be to involve the only stable power around. Whether or not the Republic became involved, she knew as well as any educated citizen did that Republican government was doomed by design to fail. It had always failed in reality, the countdown until the next failure had been ticking for a century. Niobe sighed as she unclipped the gore-tex strap meant to secure the weapon in her hip holster. A quick flip of the safety on her laser pistol and she shoved it in its holster, clicking the strap back together.

She much preferred working at night, for multiple reasons, the least of which was not her black apparel. Covered from head to toe in a modern rendition of the classic Terran ninja, she wore a high-tech sneak suit built upon the now-outdated but popular camo sneak suit of the Draconis Elite Strike Team, the highly efficient commando units fielded by the Great House armies of Kurita. The DEST suit was woven from synthetic fibers interlaced with Kevlar or gore-tex to protect against shrapnel and low-velocity weapons, although the suit was ideally intended to avoid damage entirely. In addition to the suit's protective measures, it also incorporated an intricate layer of thermo-conductive mesh designed to reduce the wearer's infrared silhouette by absorbing body heat and bleeding it into the surrounding atmosphere. Her own suit also bore the features of standard pre-Republican camo sneak suits, featuring an elaborate system of sensors which analyzed the light and color in the surrounding environment and through computer calculations mimicked the wearer's ambience, making them effectively invisible. It came with the downside, however, of much reduced mobility, if the wearer wanted to stay "invisible".

However, the most remarkable part of a standard DEST sneak suit was the faceplate. Featuring spectral and intensity range image modification as well as anti-glare polarization and anti-flare abilities, in addition to thermal imaging abilities, her faceplate was essentially an extremely intricate panoply of electronics and photo-sensors jammed into a pair of goggles not too big to cram into one of her suits pockets. Not that she ever would. The surprisingly lightweight goggles emitted a tiny green light, though she had them turned off and covered to avoid any possibility of detection because of them.

Due to the classification of her mission as merely reconnaissance, her armament was what she considered to be minimal. She carried three simple weapons with her, all of them essentially ancient and low profile technology. A Clan variation of a vibro-blade clung in a sheath to the rear of her left shoulder, essentially a ninjatō made of extremely rare "memory metal" that would hold shape against severe deformation, charged with an electrical current that caused the blade to vibrate at high frequency and thus increasing its slicing ability, Tucked into a holster midway down her thigh was a Nambu automatic pistol featuring selective fire modes, a silencer already threaded into the barrel and protruding from the holster almost to her knee pad. The Nambu was highly accurate and capacious, not to mention nearly impossible to get outside of the Draconis Combine, and was widely popular despite being twelve hundred year old technology. Her last weapon was one she didn't have the slightest expectation of using at the current moment, but came standard with the suit: a monowire. Monowires were just an updated version of the trusty garrote used throughout history, operating on the same principles as the vibro-blade. It was attached to her left glove, designed to be unspooled and attached to the opposite glove in one vicious and hasty moment.

Although being dressed up in an almost skintight ninja suit was her ticket to freedom and the seemingly infinite enjoyment it afforded, Niobe most appreciated the window to work at night time. The adversities faced by an agent trying not to be seen were much different at night than at daytime: no matter how good you were, assuming people were around, there was always a possibility of being watched. At night she was invisible, quite literally when the sophisticated chameleon abilities of her suit worked effectively. The blades mounted on her palms and the bottom of her feet scraped against the ferro-crete wall as she slipped a few inches, silently cursing herself. Pondering her personal involvement with an established actor in her mission, and her own idiosyncrasies was the last thing she needed. It certainly would not help her accomplish what she considered to be the moderate feat laid out before her. The suit was good, but she was no superhero. Furthermore with the state the world was in, it was extremely expensive and increasingly irreparable, not to mention volatile. If it got banged up, so would she.

Two more meters, she whispered to herself, reapplying her muscular strength to press herself up against the outside wall of the communications tower. Every second that she remained climbing she grew more agitated, fed up with Adrian Hasek. Whether or not he had any involvement with this buildings design was irrelevant. In fact, she doubted the man was intelligent enough to think of a hindrance such as exclusively concave walls. Regardless, she made him the focus of her frustration. Her right hand dug out of the wall and as she shifted her weight, she punctured her hands again into the buildings side, scaling the last few centimeters and sliding under the guard rails on top – this must be a sentry point for the guards. Oddly enough, she had only spotted a few of them. Surely she had calculated their shifting patrol patterns right, as there were no sentries at all on the roof.

Niobe left her chameleon camouflage active, slowly sneaking up to the open window that was to be her vantage point. Inside sat Adrian Hasek himself, who seemed to be involved in some sort of heated conversation over a very utilitarian computer desk. She furled her brow at him – wishing she had the simple luxury of killing him right here, right this moment. It would be no hassle – no effort at all right now to hop through this window and lob off his head with a searing hot sword blade.

The ambient hum of computers and electronics in the room made it difficult to discern the words Hasek was adamantly yelling into the microphone headset, but eventually the advanced electronics of her suit were able to help distinguish. She crouched down below the window sill, pressing her body against the building and remaining as still as possible. Eventually her sneak suit kicked in and painted her in a camouflage nearly impossible to discern with visual methods, and the advanced electronics allowed her to actually see behind her in the room.

Adrian was standing up now, pacing with growing furor back and forth between the window and the desk he was sitting at. Suddenly he broke his brief radio silence and calmly spoke into the microphone.

"I'm sorry I think I had something in my ear. Say that again?"

A second or two went by again before he spoke.

"You can't find him? You can't find him? What the hell are you talking about, you can't find him!?" He started calmly at first, pronouncing the words with increased vigor until he reached a crescendo, yelling into the microphone

"Check that slut's house, where else would he be?"

Her mouth and eyes went wide, her brain telling her to just shoot the guy right now and get the whole thing over with. "Slut?!" she thought. Oh how she loved men and their nonchalant capacity to say and do the most asinine things possible.

"She's gone too!?"

"No shit! Find them!!" he yelled into the microphone, and suddenly by the time she noticed it in her suit's heads up display, the headset smashed into the wall above her head, exploding in a rain of broken solder, shards of plastic, silicon, and wiring which cascaded down her chest. She heard him proclaim something to himself, like "I'm surrounded by idiots!", but focused on laughing in her head at his trouble.

That's odd, she thought to herself. I've seen him in the past hour, what's wrong with you guys? It was true, however, that he had been increasingly exploratory in the short twelve or so hours that he had been free from the hospital, so she didn't find it hard to believe he wasn't sitting still. On the other hand, he was no ninja. As smart as he may be he didn't have the training to simply disappear – especially not on this planet. It was no backwater world but it also wasn't a planet of megalopoli like New Avalon or the other key planets in the Republic. It just wasn't that easy to vanish in a small place.

Finally Adrian left the room, descending by an elevator away from the top floor of the communications building, meaning she could finish her espionage assignment. She slipped over the edge of the window, waiting well until the elevator had come back empty before checking for more occupants in the room. There were none, but she had bigger problems. Hasek had turned the lights off when he left the room, but even after switching on her suit's night vision, she couldn't find a decent place to plant the bugs her employer needed. The micro-communicators were easy enough, and she decided to place those inside the microphones that lined the communication desks. All together it took maybe ten minutes, they were small enough that she had brought more than enough, and simple enough to implement, but the video surveillance footage was proving harder to set up. Truthfully, she couldn't even find the buildings own security cameras, which was proving more disheartening every second.

Once she finished the last audio bug and set everything back into its original place, she began to truly concern: several voices could be heard coming from the stairwell right near where she came in. There was no way she had enough time. Niobe killed the power to her night vision, silently bolting back through the window and clinging to the little defilade the walls offered against the inside of the room. The sneak suit's chameleon camouflage was good, but she never trusted it to handle a dramatic shift of data input such as the lights coming on fast enough to readjust.

Screw it, she said to herself: The audio bugs had been planted; it would have to be enough for the contractor for a day or two. She had hidden the receiver well enough off the site that they wouldn't discover it, not to mention it would wirelessly transmit the encrypted data to a safer location for backups. Although the bugs she had planted were small, they were not perfect. It was ancient technology; used in conjunction with other people usually, meaning it required a radio to receive the data it would transmit. She scampered off as quietly and invisibly as she had come, getting the feeling she should probably find Hans before anyone else on this miserable rock did.

* * *

This was pathetic. Through the years of diminishing adversity and disorganized opposition against him, Adrian must have forgotten not all enemies can be purchased or murdered. Individuals of character, heroes as they used to be called, may now be few and far between but they surfaced when necessary. Hans chuckled heartily to himself. He was actually being imbursed, by his own cousin, in exchange for helping build his projects. In his mind, there wasn't really a better situation at the time. Being paid a highly respectable amount of money to operate the controls of the simplest 'mech possible, by someone that hated him, to do something he loved to do. So far, despite his royal upbringings, piloting a 'mech was the only thing he did, the only career he both excelled at and enjoyed thoroughly. Additionally, he may or may not gain valuable tactical information in the process.

Adrian had departed the scene much earlier on in the day, not very long after seeing the smile on his cousin's face as he did menial labor. Hans suspected that whatever this rouse, whatever had been Adrian's intentions for what he thought was this immensely demeaning act to blackmail his cousin into, had failed miserably and the man had stayed around long enough simply to mask his disappointment, but not appear conspicuous about it.

As far as tyrants went, Hans had no personal experience with them, but from what he could gather; Adrian was a small fry in the business. Surely he had the capacity to develop into a memorable one; already he had gotten off to a decent start. Murder your cousins parents, murder your uncle already in the seat of power, let your own parents settle into the position for a period of time, then murder them and take over. All while you're a young adult. Eventually, manipulate your own living blood relatives into helping you, as Hans was doing right now.

He kicked the throttle forward with the foot pedals, learning the ropes of this strangely familiar new machine. Technically, it was by absolutely no means new. WorkMechs were the original framework for the BattleMech, having been invented in the early half of the 24^th century as one of Michael Camerons contributions to technology during his reign as Director – General of the Terran Hegemony. It operated the same as any 'mech, but Hans had never been in the cockpit of a construction 'mech until now. It truly was an odd tool, and he pondered even what made it special: neither arm had any construction features, just humanoid hands for grasping building materials. Maybe the construction machines were used just to set up the framework of buildings.

There seemed to be very little functionality to the 'mech he was piloting otherwise. It contained no jump jets or mechanical boosters, no airborne capabilities whatsoever. Furthermore, it certainly wasn't any taller than any other mech, only standing at about fifteen meters tall.

Chapter 3

2008-12-28T09:29:00.001-08:00

-=3=-

Hanse Davion Memorial Hospital

Sheratan, Prefecture IV

April 6, 3133

Hans wasn't quite sure which contributed more to waking him up; the throbbing pain in the back of his head, or the merciless aching of his ribcage. With each new jolt of pain fresh memories of his plunge into Victory Square's fountain flooded his head, and he fought against it as he would fight against the neural feedback of his 'mech while it waged a battle against him to fall to the ground, simultaneously trying to figure out where he was. A look out the window revealed him to be near what he remembered as Main Street, but the bounty of light colors and stuffed animals threw him for a loop. He supposed it was Niobe's bedroom, but wasn't sure as he hadn't gotten so far into her apartment yet. Confirming his speculation, the glowing skinned beauty came into the room, sitting down practically on him, and he began to wonder what happened.

This girl had to be working for someone. She worked at Hasek's hotel, but Hasek wouldn't use so easy and unoriginal a method as a sniper to kill him. Besides, he had the knowledge that Adrian wanted him for something, alive at that. Walking in the park was remarkably well timed if she herself had planned it, but if she was trying to kill him, why would she wait so long and pass up opportunities? Why would she take him into her home? Maybe she was just a pawn and when her part was complete and the subsequence failed, she had a change of heart.

Regardless, she had provided him with a sense of security for as long as he'd known her. Of course, her beaming face often being on his helped a lot towards that direction. From what he knew it was difficult to paint her as sinister, and as he wrapped his fingers around hers he let the thought fade away, at least for the moment. Her face drew closer to his and as he closed his weary eyes, he felt lips press against his, soft at first but eventually he rolled her around, and pressed her against the bed frame, indulging upon her as she moaned into his lips. She had started it anyhow, as a child would say, and was astonishing to say the least. Being the next Kai Allard-Liao bore upon him many gifts and unpleasant surprises, many of which had involved encounters like this. Unfortunately, although he could tell she was different, he intended to parallel some of those more dangerous situations to find out the information he needed.

Hans kept his fingers entwined with hers, lowering her arms to her sides and pinning her completely under his weight against the bed as he brought his knees up to use them against her. She grinned up at him, either through enjoyment or through her misunderstanding of the situation. He forced her head, though not violently, against the headboard and loomed over her.

"You looked rather unsurprised at what happened." he snapped. "Were you paid to lure me into the open?"

Her excitement merely grew as she squirmed beneath him, straining to push against him and parsing her lips, if only because it was a natural reaction to try and defend oneself.

"No." she declared boldly, staring him dead in the eye. Hans liked it, she was assertive. He turned it over in his head as he kept in the same position, deciding whether or not the answer was real. Eventually he affirmed that it was, and he proceeded to squeeze her sides with his knees, until he thought that he might literally squeeze some answers out of her. Either way they both seemed to be having fun.

"Then who spotted me?" he snapped down at her, slowly releasing her from the grip of his legs.

"If you paid attention, two goons followed us out of the JavaPulse Generator." She made sure to emphasize as degradingly as possible on the right word.

"Even so, who hasn't spotted you yet?" This time her response was condescending, but it didn't offend him in the slightest.

He knew it was true, though he would like to ignore that fact. He had seen a guy floating around the edge of the park with a headset on his ear. He moved his knees, again pinning her hands to the mattress as he made a slow motion dive into her lips, like he was in zero gravity, although not that obscene.

As soon as the kiss had started, he denied her any more pleasure from it, skirting his hands along her sides and up into her shirt.

"Why save me?" he wondered to her.

She winked at him, pulling his shoulders and head closer.

"Why not save the Solaris champion?"

"Stop talking, soldier boy." She held a slender, elegant finger against his lips. At that his hands delved further into her cotton top, gently but passionately massaging her breasts, and as she bit her lip, she submerged them both in the covers of the bed.

It was turning out to be one peculiar vacation.

Upon the evenings arrival, which on Sheratan came at a slightly later time than on Terra, Hans awoke to, what he attributed it to at least, the half naked woman shuffling from the bedroom into the shower. Now that he was awake and she was preoccupied, he didn't take too kindly to the prospect of touring her apartment on his own and shuffling through her private things though he still had a lingering suspicion that there was more to her than she was telling. Niobe apparently knew this, guiding him by hand to the shower with her as she finished picking out her apparel for work; the same black and white outfit that he had met her in. Hans obliged and stepped onto the cold tile floor of the shower, immediately thankful for the hot water which beat upon him.

It was not a sexual encounter per se. Obviously she had a job to get to, and Hans didn't want to cause her any trouble with her superiors, especially considering who had ultimate power to terminate her for anything, if Hans caused any obstruction of Hasek's business affairs. Still, the chemistry could be sensed between them as the water cascaded off their bodies. Niobe drenched her hair, turning her back to him as she massaged her scalp, and he noted that as he often found to be the case, she was cute in this position. He offered his hands, helping her to work the shampoo into her scalp and closing the small gap between them. If their co mutual lust for the other were no excuse, he honestly became insatiable in regards to the water temperature in any shower. The water was never hot enough, but her body did the trick just as well.

Hans took his turn at hair-washing, thankful as he ran his fingers through it that he no longer had so much because it was a hassle to get clean, and he took note of how their attraction to the other seeped from their very flesh as they lathered. He was no weight-lifting champion but his career did require physical fitness, and although she clearly appreciated his build, today had been a fair match in physical activity against every other day in his life. They smiled at each other and for at least the moment if not any longer, Hans felt amorous. It was a given, in his case, considering they had just spent several hours fornicating, and then sleeping in the same bed, not to mention the current shower they were having together, which was her idea. Still, though he felt it was real, experience had taught him women were often fickle, if not outright deceitful creatures.

He'd not let his suspicion and inherent mistrust of everyone get in the way with this girl though, not yet. Passionate flames of agate reached out from her tear-drop eyes and tried to swallow him as he worked to massage the sanitizing gel against the smooth skin of her chest, showing him just why he trusted her. Hans pinned her against the shower tile with one of his beefy arms, using the other to continue his soap duty at her lower regions, and his lips hungrily engaged her own. His left hand lingered upon her bottom, and for once he truly wished he hadn't been born into a dangerous life, if only because he wasn't sure if indulging in her curves could become a routine reality. As he thought, Niobe pushed him back and with her head leaning up into his, she returned the kiss and finished their hygienic adventure.

Niobe suddenly found herself airborne, like in the coffee shop; as Hans pulled away from a kiss he swept her away, and carried her from the shower back to her clothes. He yearned for her still and wished he did not have to recognize her priorities, wishing they were still in the spacious shower in which they could have tons of fun. The two helped each other dry off and for once, in the presence of this beautiful woman and her nice outfit, he found himself wanting some very high-quality clothing. Though he acknowledged it was somewhat effeminate, he knew if everyone had the opportunity to dress well, there would be no reason to turn it down.

She seemed not to mind that he was wearing a shirt with a bullet hole in it and grass-stained jeans, but Hans had amended his attention to focus on his Kevlar cooling vest. The ancient thing was the only tangible memory he kept with him from Solaris. He was surprised that the hospital had given it back; much less that Niobe had made sure to bring it back with them. It fit snugly over his chest and he followed her out the front door, looking like a big white amoeba as he put his shirt on over top. Though the ancient device had saved his life the previous night, he feared it would bear him little assistance in the near future. The old vest only stayed in his possession because it was a family heirloom.

Cooling vests, although the galaxy was largely demilitarized, were relatively easy to come across, if not to simply manufacture altogether. Most consisted of a light anti-ballistic cloth wrapped around a sprawling maze of cooling tubes that criss-crossed the front and back of the vest. In a BattleMech, or any 'mech, the tubing hooked directly into the machine's cooling system, which utilized liquid nitrogen to help decrease the extreme waste heat created by the fusion engine and the other systems which depended on it's energy. In the same way, the vest supplied the same coolant to keep the pilot in a fighting condition. Unlike his specially created vest, most could not hope to stop the direct impact of a bullet. His great grandfather had worn it through nearly two decades of successful military service, before retiring to establish his own mercenary unit. Unfortunately, old age took him before he could actually command it, a responsibility which fell upon his eldest son.

Hans never wanted to pursue that path: he believed he would end up largely without money or the sort of exciting although somewhat unfavorable circumstances he was now enjoying on his home-world. Though he held Niobe's hand as they walked through the great hotel, his thoughts were pre-occupied with his future plans, and they ceded only to his dedication to chivalry when the opportunity arose to save her from being bumped by a baggage cart or to open a door for her. The hotel's elevator banks, numerous as they were, were busy and crowded by more people than he'd ever seen in the building, but it hardly impeded their progress by more than a few minutes. Hans assumed it was some sort of convention or business conference and didn't care, inconvenience never managed to actually be inconvenient with him. Her fingers clasped around his as she leaned against him to make room in the tight confines of the elevator, and the elevator began its quick ascent.

At last they arrived on the top floor, and stepped hand-in-hand out into the hallway near his suite. Though he wasn't sure why, Hans was somewhat excited to return to his own new "home". Niobe kissed him quickly but passionately, and she scampered off to the bar. It was a few staircases up from the 13th floor, only accessible from its single middle hallway. He smiled after her, catching her eye once as she looked back at him fiddling with his room key.

He had procured a very fancy suite, which was really an apartment the size of a nice one story house, intended for an almost permanent residence. It had two separate bathrooms, a full-sized kitchen, and a nice common room near the entrance. The latter featured a depressed floor, covered with nice French vanilla carpet, even sporting a very expensive big-screen tri-vid system, which just so happened to be on, loud enough that it was the first thing that he noticed. It was likely the intruder intended it that way, meaning either they didn't intend to harm him, or they were very proud of the fact that they did and had nothing to hide. Or they were just plain stupid. Regardless, he ducked into the front bathroom to snag the laser pistol he had hidden there. He was certainly no ninja, however, and his uninvited guests quickly came aware of his presence.

"Hansi, dear boy!" the first man yelled. It was none other than Baron Adrian Hasek himself. "How are you, cousin?" He demanded to know.

Hans was not a boy. He was twenty-four and Adrian was just shy of twenty-eight.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Hans stabbed the words at him as he lowered his laser pistol to his side. Cranston jumped from his seated position, ready to fight him and his accusatory tone.

"How dare you showcase your ins-" Cranston shouted but was immediately cut off by Hans.

"Stay your tongue, until your master tosses you a new bone!" he yelled, jousting his laser in Cranston's direction. Though the croney could not see, Adrian smiled warmly at Hans as he waved the croney away.

"What are you doing here Adrian?" again he pursued his answer.

"I heard of your injury. I wanted to welcome you home." Hasek said with a friendly smile.

"Your lapdogs already did that." Again Hans glared at Cranston, and his eyes looked ready to do the job for the pistol. "What?" he abbreviated his previous question.

"I felt since you are...staying here for free, I would make use of your room while it was vacant. You should really buy some groceries Hansi." Hans hated that name. He was not a substance-using artist, he was a soldier and his name was not Hansi.

"Thanks. I appreciate the gesture less than I would were you to get to the point." Hans flashed an evil and very much stoic smile at him.

The sound of a huge laser blast struck his ears from the TV and Hans immediately recognized it, so well that he did not want to look at it. The two intruders were watching a Tri-Vid recording of Hans' last battle before he left Solaris. His attention was captured eventually as the jarring sound of the lasers blasting from within his black Shadow Cat's chest and arm hit home hard. Twelve blue beams of light leapt out, striking the opposing Centurion, and Hans found himself back on the scene.

He gasped for air as his reckless combination of all his energy weapons threatened to turn his 'mech into a blossoming fireball. His machine carried far more heat-sinks than its designers had put in it, but even so they didn't completely combat the added heat of his lasers. Hans's senses threatened to shut him down, as did the threatening voice of the electronic female in his cockpit warned him of his machine's similar impending doom. A quick slap of his hand to the coolant flush button released a cloud of liquid, which effectively cooled his 'mech in a great hiss and he was fine again.

The Centurion on the receiving end of the barrage did not share as favorable a fate, however... The laser barrage dug into the humanoid machines center torso, melting straight through its armor to its interior components. Molten globs of armor sprayed en masse from the machine's chest, dancing in the air and falling to the densely packed snow which quickly melted under its heat. Steel bones from the machine's supportive skeleton spewed half-molten from the gaping hole in its chest, joined by twisted, singed bundles of artificial muscle which littered the snow at its feet, and pipes and tubing spewed green cooling fluid all over the ground as the giant metal man fell to its death. Snow sprayed from under the fifty ton machine into the air, and as the machines heat signal faded into a series of sparks all over its metal body, Hans could tell the engine was toast.

He shut down his mech and vaulted down the chain ladder to the ground, keeping his eyes on the man that effectively crawled and fell out of the fallen giant's cockpit. Even through the protective shielding that surrounded the Coliseum, Hans could hear the thousands of spectators as they booed and vocalized their disapproval of what he was doing, but he signaled a medical evacuation for his fallen opponent. His name was Augustus de Paul, and the fans had demanded the two of them duel. Augustus was a rising star on Solaris, and though he survived the ordeal with perfect health, Hans had killed his career. It was the true reason Hans had left Solaris behind.

Adrian embraced him in his arms as he was still coming back to reality.

"My dear cousin, I've missed you." Adrian said as he looked back to the screen, a sinister grin taking hold of his face.

"Doesn't it feel exhilarating to get rid of a rival?" he asked.

"Something you know all about I'm sure" Hans hissed "Regardless, I will teach you how it feels to be on the barrel end." he said hatefully as he shrugged his cousin off of him.

"Hans...you know, I did you a favor. The order of succession chose my side of the family next anyway. Besides, you're rich now, and cultured."...

"You stole power. Our family was losing its grip on the people and you murdered my father to usurp the power away from them."

Sheratan was much like 20th century Britain, in the terms that although there was a theocratic leader of the planet chosen by ancestry and order of succession, referred to as a "baron" or "baroness", the governments of the various countries were as close to a democratic republic as they could be. Unfortunately, in times deemed to be crises, law allowed for the ruling family to seize control and administer over the planet until such a time was determined by special council that there was no longer a need for a dictator. Clearly his cousin had grasped onto this loophole to further his own interests, although Hans sincerely doubted he had waited. Eight years passed since the teenager had murdered his uncles, and Hans was sure he had found a creative way to orchestrate the deaths of his own parents in such a way as to put himself next in line.

Traditionally the people of Sheratan could also vote for a new leader, under normal circumstances, if the incumbent lost sight of their best interests. They had retained the right of impeachment over thousands of years, and it always proved useful. Adrian had found a way to screw the system, not that he deserved credit; assassination was ancient and offered little room for pioneers and creativity.

"Get to the point." Hans grumbled, snapping out of his self-administered history lesson.

"You came here to get rid of me Hans, but you obviously need a good excuse to be here. Like a job." Adrian said, pressing the space between them and getting right in Johannes's face.

"I'm rich Adrian and I'm on vacation." Hans smiled to him, because it was true, although Adrian was exactly right about his true intentions.

"You have increased the vagrancy in my city and your Republic citizenship will be revoked soon. Tharkad and its prefect may be far away but you are on my planet now, and I am in charge here."

"I'm a vagrant now?" Hans asked curiously. It was news to him.

"When you increase the crime rate, yes."

Hans muttered something under his breath, to the effect of "That's nothing new.", but Adrian seemed to pretend as though he heard none of it.

"So, you have a job for me? What?" Hans had become genuinely interested. Adrian had turned away and prepared to leave.

"The only job that suits you, Mr. Mueller. You've seen the patrols on the streets?" He motioned to Cranston. "Halbert here will facilitate your needs. You start tomorrow."

The two self-proclaimed guests vacated his edifice and as he left, Hasek gave him an optimistic half-hug. As far as Hans was concerned, cousin or not, Hasek was still an asshole, and he didn't like the truths the man spoke, though they were indeed accurate. One piece of the baron's advice he did act upon however; he ordered groceries and waited for their delivery while flipping through the channels on the TV. Technology, in all its glory, after eleven hundred years had eliminated the trip to the grocery store, if one wished not to go. Han's supposed it was a better invention then laser weapons at least. After about half a standard hour, he was storing away the last of the food, at which time a thought occurred to him. Considering Hasek had his room covered, he had an intention to enlist Niobe's aid in destroying quite a bit of it….repeatedly.

He left his fantasy world and made himself some food, realizing he was anxious for a real meal. A simple sandwich sufficed, and after a short nap he slipped his laser pistol into its shoulder holster and slipped into a pair of khakis and a black dress shirt. He finished dressing, and afterwards vaulted up the staircases near his suite up to the bar. The same people from his last visit seemed to be occupying the place, but they were of no interest to him beyond the fact that they were there. Fortunately, he was able to accurately guess when Niobe would be leaving, and swept her away from the bar. Before the night was over, she was introduced to his excitement, as he gave her a thorough tour of the bathroom, and its spacious shower. Hans couldn't wait to be back in a 'mech again. It was going to be great.

Except that it wasn't.

Hans knew that Adrian was a dick, so he didn't find his situation as a complete surprise; Hasek had played on his naiveté and assumptions pretty well.

He awoke in the morning, Niobe's body cradled closely against his own. Cranston was perched upon the bar top counter in the kitchen, with a platter of generous proportions at his side.

Hans rubbed his eyes, sliding out of the hotel bed towards one of his former friends. He left some of his anger behind in the covers, shuffling alongside Cranston to take some of the breakfast food offered him. He took a bite of a scone, and made an acknowledging nod towards the crony.

"Am I to expect the baron's personal housecleaning service too? Since it seems I'm receiving the reserved echelon of room service." Hans inquired.

"If you expect to find me pushing a vacuum cleaner I think you'll find nothing but disappointment. I'm sure you will however." Cranston replied, mildly amused by his temerity.

"So you expect me to believe he needs me to pilot a 'mech up and down the streets. Anyone can avoid stepping on people and cars. What's the catch?" Hans again sought information. He got the feeling that, despite his allegiance, one of his old friends might provide him with some useful information.

"There's no catch, chief. Not yet anyhow. Look around you, you'll figure out the implications I'm sure." Cranston sarcastically retorted to him. Clearly he was annoyed, although whether it was in disappointment of Hans short sightedness or at dignifying him with a response altogether.

It wasn't the answer he was looking for, and he cursed himself for being open minded enough to ask about it, but it was information regardless, just information that he would have to figure out piece by piece.

Prologue : Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

2008-12-27T17:36:00.001-08:00

*this chapter isn't done

-=Prologue=-

New Avalon Spaceport

New Avalon, Prefecture III

Republic of the Sphere

December 14, 3127

"Mueller, J!" the voice announced in a strictly business fashion.

He stood up, struggling to shift the perceived maladjusted set of silk robes in order to look what he considered to be presentable. As he made the necessary precautions not to step on the robe, the garment to which he took no pleasure in wearing, the distance between his hand and the outstretched, pasty mandible of the New Avalon Institute of Science dean shrunk. A twinkle that belied her considerably disproportionate joy at his graduation above all else in his class shone in the old woman's hazel eyes, and from her unusually genuine smile, he could tell she was only too glad to get rid of him.

With a firm exchange of handshakes and a quick grab with his left hand, he made off with his loot in the speedy fashion accustomed to commencement ceremonies. The vacant seat awaiting him afforded not only an excellent view of the gathered spectators but not too shabby of an acoustic sweet spot either, from which he gazed upon the audience. He basked in the nearly overwhelming consortium of sounds that attacked his ears, and ultimately, with the look of a subservient puppy, ceased with dissatisfaction his scan of the audience. Immediately he scolded himself – there was no reason to be disappointed. As of this moment he had completed within four years the requirements, at the age of 21, for his Masters of Applied Science in Advanced Military Technology Applications, an impressive enough feat in his own opinion.

As effective as his attempts at self-esteem building might have turned out, he was interrupted by a squeeze on the shoulder. It was none other than his classmate Alex Visser, empirically the only best friend he possessed on this foreign world. Her grip was surprisingly firm for such a petite person, even though he knew it was all an act. She was certifiably the strongest person he had ever met, whether or not she made a habit of showing it. He offered a socially expected smile up at her as she plopped down next to him. He was trying to pretend with his facial expressions that the paramount question in his mind was how of all the master's candidates, the next graduates surname skipped ten letters in the alphabet. In reality, she knew better than to think he would jog his mind over something irrelevant, and he could see out of his periphery that she was staring at him, the same look she always had on her face when she knew he was full of it.

It made no difference to him. He was billions of kilometers from home, and he stared hopelessly into the crowd, looking for some relative. There was no one there for him. All Hans saw were bright lights and strangers. Not one comforting face.

He let out a groan, snapping back into reality as a heavy duffel bag encroached on his torso and into his stomach.

"Hey! What the hell!?" Hans shouted. He shoved the bag off, depositing it halfway into the empty seat next to him. The gate's seating was surprisingly luxurious; reducing what could have been a remotely painful experience of hard plastic digging into his back. After he finished, he gave her a transparent smile.

"You're doing it again." Alex scolded him, though the sternness of her voice and brown eyes was devoid of commitment.

"You're taking what was supposed to be a good memory and you're doing what you can to ruin it. You always do this." She continued to lecture him.

It didn't bother him in the slightest. He had palled around with her for almost a decade, and after four years of a committed relationship, the reciprocity of their pep talks and lectures had become a welcome part of his daily life. He never liked her more than when she was adamant.

"I'm trying. I am." He pleaded with her.

It was apparently enough, although he could tell easily that she wasn't harboring the slightest motivation to argue in public, or at all, over something minute. She placed a sandwich into his hand, returning from her foraging trip and cuddling against him in the adjacent seat. "Danke schön" he smiled the German to her, draping an arm around her shoulders and voraciously biting into his toasted sub sandwich.

They had waited one day and night after graduation to participate in the campus "ceremonies" and get their things ready, but finally they were at the New Avalon Spaceport awaiting their pending vacation to Solaris VII. Both had preferred to take a trip to Terra after their time at the institute had ended, but despite their efforts, two anonymous NAIS graduates did not have enough influence to change interplanetary ship schedules, and they really had no intent of hanging around a few more weeks until a core-ward traveling ship was in the system.

The desire to go to Terra was mostly hers, though Hans found no qualms with visiting the cradle of humanity. It was truly a beautiful vacation spot, and he believed every human in space held some ambition to return to their origin. Over the centuries, with the population shifting to other planets, Terra had regained some of its former splendor, and was touted as the highest quality of vacation options in the Inner Sphere. He felt that the appeal of the home-world wasn't entirely attributable in her case to it's history and beauty, however, as he suspected she had more than an academic interest in Terra's other feature: ComStar, and the Republic of the Sphere, whose nerve centers were both on the planet.

It was more than a suspicion, as she had made her interest well-known to him. Her curiosity didn't worry him terribly about the two organizations, not yet at least. She was a social scientist, interested in archaeology and books and facts. He discounted the possibility that she would ever find any place in the military aspects of either organization, although he acknowledged that she would easily fit in with their more public and bureaucratic sectors. Either way, whatever would happen was exactly that: in the future.

They were headed to Solaris, what might as well be more of a giant spinning casino in space rather than a planet. It was the home of the Solaris 'mech championships, and certainly the largest panoply of gaming and entertainment in the known stars. It was the modern day representation almost of Sodom and Gomorra., if there were one. He knew she was appeasing him and was only interested in the experience of going, as her interest In 'mechs and technology paled in comparison to his. Furthermore, her enjoyment of the trivialization of war and murder and destruction was, as a woman, stereotypically lower than his, he was sure..

Chapter One: You Can’t Go Home Again

2008-12-27T17:34:00.001-08:00

-= 1 =-

Sheratan

Prefecture IV

Republic of the Sphere

April 12 3132

"Hell!"
    The shouted word intrigued the young man sitting on his bar stool, enough for him to spin to face the individual from whence the exclamation had originated. It caught his attention not for being uncouth, hell as an exclamation was far from obscenity; but for its singularity. No one yells out hell in public. Yelling out hell doesn't make sense. The beer which proceeded to fuse with his trousers satiated his curiosity before the image of a distraught bar-tendress confirmed what had occurred.
    Terrible as it was, the thunder outside seemed to affect this woman alone, much less to the extent of spilling a freshly poured beer on its' potential new owner, in addition to the counter and her pants as well. Her green eyes struggled to build a firewall around the spreading plasmatic embarrassment at what she had done as she immediately set upon rectifying the situation. Within a short period of time she'd produced a bottle of wood cleaning solvent and a cloth to wipe off the bar. The subtlety with which her hand suddenly became pinned to the oak of the bar-top belied the potential of its owner: the victim of the great beer spilling accident.
    "Don't worry so much. It's too late in the evening for worries." He smiled as he spoke, watching the flame of embarrassment and concern in her eyes in its evolution into fearsome curiosity.

Given that he understood what an event it was to spill a beer, it was regardless too trivial a thing to get worked up over, even though it was beer. Anything that contained alcohol seemed to intensify the mess when it was spilled. Whether it was because of the color of different liquors and beers, or the smell, or the fact that it presented a possibly sticky and unpleasant cleaning task, spilling a beer was definitely worse than spilling a glass of water. He figured it was mostly the two reasons he hadn't considered: beer was expensive, and it was beloved.
"My name is Johannes." he announced in a very serene tone so that only she would hear, still lingering his hand upon hers, which she appeared to have no desire to move.
The girl used her free left hand to tuck rogue strands of jet black hair behind small, undecorated ears as she replied through a restrained grin.

"Niobe." she excitedly chirped back to him. He figured the clientele must not be too keen on associating with the bar employees, a lack of conversation which he decided was much to her chagrin.

The joint was rather well decorated as far as bars went, not featuring the cheap neon or contemporary decoration of a standard street bar. Walls on each side eventually gave way to a high vaulted ceiling, sparsely showcased with ancient but tried incandescent lights. Everything was finished wood, save for the metal supports of barstools and leather coverings in the booth seats. Johannes couldn't personally speak for millennia of drinking establishments both on and outside of Terra, but as far as he knew it was as traditional a Bier Haüs as possible thousands of years and billions of astronomical miles away from the origin of humanity.

He interrupted what he felt could be awkward silence with an attempt at humor.
"A friend of mine once claimed a German wouldn't know a good beer if it were spilled all over him." Hans, as he liked to be called, winked when he finished telling his humorous but cheesily appropriate story, and Niobe responded with a hearty giggle. Technically he wasn't German, his family was of Austrian descent, but for all intents and purposes he could be classified as Germanic and had no quips about it. As far as the beer was concerned, it was the Diamond Negro, the best brand of beer in all of the Republic and probably the galaxy.
"Do you always react to thunder like so?" He tried hard to make his question sound neutral, but he often came off as having some sort of bias behind his speech. She had practically leapt at the crack of thunder, but in her defense it was relatively frightening. Technically, the bar was on the top floor of a tower which did reach into the clouds. Provided they were low enough, anyway. Subsequently, anyone in the tower was in fact much closer to the source of thunder.

She frowned slightly and nodded to him.

"I do if it's of that magnitude."
   Hans wasn't sure if he had exposed her vulnerability or had outright offended her. He often wondered why the planets with the worst weather were also the planets that were harboring some of the most enjoyable characters.
    The distraction of the beer shower had diverted his attention from the big screen Tri-Vid built into the wall across from the bar, and the thoughts it sent racing through his head. It was a news report, focused around an update on the status of the Hyper-Pulse Generator network, which for all widespread operational intents and purposes had been decommissioned. The HPG network, for short, kept the thousands of star systems inside and outside of the Republic in quick touch for a nominal operational fee. Four months had passed since the entire network had ceased functionality, and without it Hans could sense an almost palpable worry from all the people he came into contact with. He didn't know why exactly, but it seemed humans had an infinite yearning for communication, even if the reality was that they took it for granted and didn't necessarily appreciate the ability to talk to anyone they wanted, anywhere. Perhaps it was more a matter of primal humanity – these people were cut off from the outside. There was no one within trillions of miles that could hear them scream. Fear was beginning to creep into their minds in several different ways.
   Conversation with a beautiful lady was in his reasoning, a superior and clearly preferable alternative to worrying about a situation he could not possibly solve on his own. Whether or not this planet would become permanently cut off didn't scare him, nor did he think it ever would. He didn't care very much. Thus, the beer which soaked his pants might as well not have existed to him, for it necessitated the simple human contact which he could, and did use to generate a conversation free of suspicion, instead of kibitzing.
    "I don't suppose being among the clouds insulates you from the characters native to a sketchier establishment?" Hans purported, letting his thoughts spill into his speech.
    She grinned, and in the sparkle of her eyes he discovered that she had probably figured him out. To prevent any further speculation on his part, she went ahead and vocalized it.
    "You're here, aren't you?" she put him in check.
    "So you spilled beer on a celebrity, but on accident?" he wondered aloud to her.
    His fame was hard-earned and well deserved half of it at least, though he neglected on most occasions to flaunt, within or without the company of beautiful (and often inherently susceptible) women. Johannes had certainly won his celebrity status on Solaris VII the hard, honest way, if it could be considered as one. Solaris VII had always been the premier gaming planet throughout the history of the Inner Sphere. It played host to what was essentially a very high-tech version of the Roman Coliseum. BattleMech pilots fought each other from the cockpits of their giant war machines, sometimes for life, but often for fame and glory and large amounts of money. Like any competition it gave birth to extremely high-stakes gambling both in and out of the arena, in addition to the other numerous races and casinos and other "viceful" establishments across the planet. Hans had never lost a match in his five-year career on Solaris, and was well on his way to becoming the next Kai Allard-Liao, the famed 31st century undefeated champion of Solaris. Fortunately, his genetically inherited claim to fame had as yet not warranted any notice.
   "I jump at the opportunity to spill beer on a MechWarrior, as rare a sight as they are."

She gave him a flirty smile and leaned closer to him over the bar top, her eyes announcing that she had made an exception for the Solaris champion. Hans pictured himself smirking rather than doing the real thing, as if there were such a thing anymore as a "MechWarrior", and began to notice, as he saw more of her, that she was very curvaceous, and her ugly green apron did little to obstruct her form from showing itself off.
   "How about drinking it with one?" Hans slyly proposed.
   Niobe winked, and despite the constant thunder outside she flawlessly poured two fresh bottles of the beer into frosty mugs for them.
   "So, what brings the Champion to Sheratan?" She rested her hands on her cheeks, leaning over the bar top on her elbows.
   At the sight of a celebrity charming the women, some faces diverted from the news coverage on the big screen TV and glanced over at the two of them, though Hans paid them little heed. Basking in his own glory could be saved for a time when everyone in the Inner Sphere could see it, if he actually wanted to do so. Assuming he was still alive at that point. He knew better than to consider himself so important as to deserve an assassination attempt, but stranger things did happen in the universe.
   "I was told the barkeeps are quite a spectacle." He smiled innocently up at her, peering straight into those green eyes. As innocently as a 'mech pilot who had killed a fair share of people could appear. He winked at her and straightened his posture.
    "I grew up here." he stated, in what he felt was far too naive a tone for even a naive person to speak in, in order to convince her that he wasn't all about joking around.
    She changed her face to one of intrigue as he announced that he'd grown up right here in town, and he could see her features perk up as the sounds of the violent thunderstorm outside subsided, if only for the moment.
    "What do you say we get out of here?" Hans put on his most charming set of muscular expressions, and she winked slyly at him. The two walked out of the hotel's penthouse pub sometime later, left and right elbows locked around each other.

"So you just suddenly decided to come back? Why?" she inquired.

"Well it kind of sucks not being able to find out what's going on back where you grew up." Hans began, nonchalantly lying to her as though it were nothing.

"The HPG network being down makes things kind of boring on a planet revolving entirely around it's ability to communicate with everyone else."

Again what he said wasn't necessarily the whole truth. Han's didn't know everything about the internal workings of Solaris. He tried to acquire as much business savvy and insight to the tourism and gambling business as possible in his deceptively short period of time on the world, but was a novice at best. On the same note, he didn't know much of anything about the HPG system, either. He did, however, study them while earning his Masters accreditation on New Avalon.

Hyper-pulse generators, known commonly as HPGs, were one of the two oldest "new" technologies of the third and fourth millennium, with the other being the Kearny – Fuchida jump drive. Both systems operated on the same scientific principle, although their individual implementations were drastically separated by degrees of difficulty.

Working together at Stanford University in the Terran pre-stellar era, Thomas Kearny and Takayoshi Fuchida published a series of papers that attacked the foundations of modern physics. However, despite being publicly ridiculed and ultimately failing to see their ideas come to life, eighty years brought a new generation of scientists ready to validate their theories.

The Kearny – Fuchida Principle, as it was coined, states that instantaneous transport of matter and/or energy can be accomplished by generating a field of precise characteristics around a quantity located at any point A and moving it through an alternate dimension, commonly referred to as hyper-space, thereby instantaneously transporting the mass or energy to any point B. This scientific principle simultaneously paved the way for both interstellar communications and modern space travel.

As far as HPGs were concerned, if the quantity to be transmitted is energy or an energy pattern, such as an electromagnetic wavelength containing a message, then the presence of gravity need not be taken into account when making the calculations. Applying the Kearny-Fuchida principle to generate the necessary field required at the applicative point A, Cassie DeBurke created a successful apparatus in 2630 which came to be known as the modern Hyoerpulse Generator.

The Hyperpulse Generator, since it's inception in the 27^th century was the standard medium of communication between the star-spanning empires of the Inner Sphere, although it obviously did not displace more ancient technologies such as modulation based radio transmitters. In six hundred years of both peace and warfare, the HPG network spawned it's own inter-stellar powerhouse known as ComStar.

ComStar and their communications net, composed of myriad powerful hyper-pulse generators capable of transmitting or receiving these instantaneous signals across enormous interstellar distances, has proved on multiple occasions vital not only to the conduct of peaceful relations among the four Successor states, but in the past century played a major and decisive role in both external and internal conflicts threatening them as well. The network was composed of two types of relay stations: Class A stations, and Class B stations. The larger stations, Class A stations, could transmit signals in a 50 light-year radius. Class A stations were sparsely located around the Inner Sphere, only on planets of major significance, with only around 50 in operation. Class B stations, the smaller of the two, could transmit and receive within a radius between 20 and 30 light-years. Virtually every inhabited planet in known space had a Class B station, maintained by it's respective ComStar staff.

Messages transmitted and received by both Class A and B stations were processed on a first – come, first – serve basis, and a Class A station generally transmitted to each subservient Class B station on a 12 – to 24- hour schedule. In contrast, the smaller Class B stations generally only transmitted two r three times a week. Although the communications themselves were instant, the volume of consumer traffic tended to slow things down to what occasionally seemed like a pre-Information Age level.

She seemed to be examining him curiously, so he bored her with a synopsis of what his thoughts on ComStar and their network and it's recently experienced plight.
Hans escorted the young lady home at the end of the night, to her apartment which seemed almost too conveniently located little more than a block or two from his hotel. Eventually the conversation had ended, and with a gentle brush of his lips against her cheek he parted ways with her rain-soaked doorstep. Hopefully he had warranted further involvement with her. Suspicion began to creep up on him, however. Never in his entire life on this planet had he met a girl like this, who just so happened to be right nearby. It felt weird, but at the same time it made him feel doubly weird for suspecting something just because she dwelled right near her job. People have historically lived near their jobs if it were at all possible to accomplish.

Shortly he was back within range of Der überplatz hotel, juggling the prospect of sleeping in enemy territory in his head as he moved his legs. Hans held a legitimate claim to the throne of Sheratan, by blood, and was staying in a hotel owned and run entirely by the political faction that had stolen his inheritance from him. Obviously it wasn't advisable, but he was a glutton for adventure and intriguing women. Prudence hardly served him nobly in his experience thus far.
Unfortunately, his presence on the planet had piqued the interest of more than just a bar tendress at his hotel, as he found himself having a rendezvous with the ferrocrete alleyway after a sharp blow to the knees. Before Hans knew it he had a brand new friend. His face became intimately acquainted with the grimy silt that coated the alleyway, a steel-toed combat boot crushing his head forcefully against the ground. Suddenly a thousand molten needles plunged into his knees and his head dove into a cold sea of what he imagined a magnetic rail gun might feel like after firing. His body crumpled like a rag doll. A block from safety and the young champion had been intercepted by three individuals whom he would never be able to describe after the ensuing debacle was over.

   "You were asked nicely to stay off of this planet, Mr. Mueller." the one standing directly in front of his head taunted him, accentuating the word mister.
    As much as it pissed him off to hear it out loud, the man wasn't telling lies. The planetary government had exiled him, setting up his new identity and even providing him with the Shadow-Cat 'mech he piloted all throughout his Solaris career. The truth was that they'd done a favor for him, probably in the hopes that he would get himself killed. Maybe they figured it would be better to indirectly absolve their relations with a political refugee, rather than keep his blood on the administration's hands. Hans hated to disappoint them so much, or so he would claim whenever he came into contact with the local government.
    "It must have slipped my mind." He snickered proudly to the speaker, whose face was still cast in shadow. He grinned and delivered a swift series of kicks to Han's chest, causing him to cough violently and spit blood onto the ground.
   "I'm sure it did Mr. Mueller. Baron Hasek wishes merely to welcome you home. He regrets that he cannot greet you in person at this time, but he wishes to inform you of a need for your...abilities."

Hans finally figured it out - the speaker's name was Cranston. There was a point in time, perhaps eight years ago, that he might have called this guy his friend. They palled around in those days, these three goons and the two rich Hasek kids. He always knew they were douche-bags, obviously he was right. Instead of making something of themselves they were still riding on Hasek's coat-tails.

Until now the conversation had been so enthralling that the physical pain and damage he suffered has temporarily slipped his mind, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized his body hurt badly enough to make him want to go the hospital. A warm and sticky trail of what he could only assume was his blood had trickled from his right temple to cheek, spilling onto his neck and the ground the whole time he spent talking to Hasek's goons. At least he could take solace in the fact that they had literally started the blood shed by spilling his own, if anything extreme were to begin happening in the planet.

"You will be contacted in the future." Cranston said abruptly.
The foot pressed against his skull let up and as the three left, he received another sharp kick, this time to the kidney, from what felt like a very well constructed high heel. Hans coughed violently once again as he struggled to push himself off of the dirty alleyway, and he gave his outfit a quick glance-over. For a downtown post-rainstorm alleyway, he made it out of the encounter with little more than some wet clothes and a bloodstain. Coughing the whole way, he hastily slipped through a rear-access door to some of the hotels parking garage elevators, and collapsed against the wall of the first elevator car to meet his needs. Thankfully, he was alone the entire way to his 13th floor suite, and he fell onto the bed and drifted to sleep remarkably fast.

All in all, as far as the potential combinations of events that eventually came together to construct a day in the Inner Sphere were concerned, this day had turned out to be among some of the more interesting and colorful days Hans had encountered in his time. Meet a beautiful woman, get the shit kicked out of you in an alley by masked banditos. It was all in a hard days work.

Chapter Two: I Can Has Bullet?

2008-12-27T17:33:00.001-08:00

-=2=-

Outbound Dropship Cimbri
Fletcher system
Prefecture IV
April 5 3133

Simulated dropship gravity never earned the praises of any person to have traveled on board a space vessel, but Alexandra supposed it was better to take advantage of fake gravity than to swim through the air, chasing after globules of her floating cappuccino. The massive , bulbous Union-C class dropship was several million kilometers away from the planet Fletcher, drinking down a sea of fuel as it traveled through space. It was headed to the nadir jump point, a location at the cardinal bottom of the solar system at which a transport waited to ferry it tens of light-years across the galaxy. The Kearny – Fuchida principle, as applied to the transportation of actual matter, dictated this point within the star system as copasetic towards inter-stellar travel as the gravity of the system was nullified at this area. There was no way to see the jump-ship from this distance, but she knew it was basking in the solar energy of the system's star, soaking it up with a fabric that stored the power known as a solar sail.

She gazed through the massive window of the observation deck, watching the identical dropship next to them in space, the Mauser, and listened in true boredom to the activity below her on the ship's bridge. Unfortunately as far as activity went, there was under normal circumstances a lack of it. Just a lot of blinking lights and occasional orders and some information reported to the captain. When people started getting excited and there were loud noises aboard a spaceship, it was pretty much a certainty that the shit had hit the fan, something that could very well spell disaster out in space. As far as she was concerned, if she never heard anything from the bridge, it was good.
   The sound she did hear, however, was not. The echoes of the man approaching her were like hammer blows to her head, shattering her silent world as each clicking metallic boot heel that rapped against the metal deck floor sounded far louder her to ears than it really was.
    "Yes, Jenkins?" She referred to him by surname; formality hardly appealed to her, not anymore. In a time of peace like the current she didn't expect many other people to care either; military tradition wasn't very well-attended to in this day and age, as much as military people tried.
    "You've a message from a jumpship in-system." The stocky communications officer crisply informed her. He looked rather intimidated in her presence. Surely she didn't deem herself attractive nor dangerous enough to be intimidating anyone, but as she pondered why he did she gave him a smile that would confuse and entertain him long enough to leave her alone. Alexandra nodded to him, and checked that there was no one around the observation deck's sound-proof communications room to determine that her privacy was to remain intact.

Once she was satisfied, she replaced the lid on her beverage and promptly strode over to the small cubicle, reminiscent of a phone booth.
"This is Captain Visser,"

"Begin transmission." She stated in as military a faction as she could so the microphones in the booth would pick up her voice.
    Without further conversation the message scrolled into the air in front of her, produced in midair by a holographic projector. It consisted merely of text; nothing else but three words.
    "Mueller is here." It read.
    Johannes Mueller was the rightful heir to the to the power seat of Sheratan by blood, the planet from which her mercenary unit had originated and lived on until a few years ago. In addition, he was also the only living pure blood relative of the mercenary band's founder and first commander. Coupled with his Solaris reputation, it was no surprise that at least someone had picked up his trail when he arrived on the planet. However, the only part of it that mattered to Alexandra was that he essentially represented a wild card, one which she and she alone would be able to play. She would make sure of it.
    Right now just didn't feel like the time to plot over it, and besides: It was more prudent to save the "work" for the unit's journey aboard the jumpship, during which they would all be conferencing together on dozens of different topics and situations regarding their assignment on Sheratan.

    As the days passed by from his arrival in his home town, Hans began more and more to notice the changes that had gripped his former stomping ground. When last Hans had lived here at the age of sixteen, everything seemed tolerable and harmonic. The city had a stable political environment and a compassionate, engaged populace composing almost entirely of Republic citizens. Perhaps his perception of home was attributable – excusably, in the case that it was incorrect - to the naiveté inherent with adolescence. Still, Hans felt something was amiss in his home city.
    Oddly enough, it seemed quite possible that a divine force was tuned in to his thoughts. At first he wasn't so sure, only feeling a slight tremble of the ground. It was a low growl on the horizon and he could easily pass it off as the beginnings of a storm, which could easily have been the truth on this planet. However with each pair of seconds that went by, the feeling grew in intensity, and he could see the tremors rippling through his cup of coffee. Before long they were constant and long lasting. Suddenly the muscles of his face contorted to fit with the flame of concern that lit up in each of his azure eyes.
   With a genuine air of reciprocity, Niobe's head slightly tilted towards him and the muscles in her face changed to mirror it. Silently he scolded his lack of self control, as his face bled with emotion. His transparency had made futile any potential attempt to lie to her, so he simply slid his rippling cup of coffee to occupy her newspaper's former resting place. A bartender tackling a newspaper crossword seemed odd to him, but he immediately dismissed his intrigue to ignorance. Again her face morphed expressions as she pursued the meaning of a rippling coffee cup, and Hans noted her perplexion to be astonishingly cute.
   A shriek from one of the coffee joint's female employees in conjunction with the loud crash outside the storefront window solidified Hans's growing unease. The huge metal foot of a Raven, a 35-ton scout 'mech, pounded into the road beneath it as the machine strode past the storefront and down the street. Niobe jolted out of her seat, being the closest person in the building to the window, and he hastily pulled her into his lap to stop her from falling. Clearly it was not the sort of event that made her day.

As quick as it had come, the white/red paint scheme and thunderous noise of the machine had subsided as it made its way down the street, leaving his new female friend and her face a few centimeters from his own. He found it humorous that so lethal and gargantuan of a machine had created so gentle and enjoyable of a scenario. Of all the mission parameters for a BattleMech, romantic acceleration was a new addition to Hans' resume of experience with the ancient machines. However, he presumed it was a very likely scenario – every person in the Inner Sphere wasn't intimately acquainted with these destroyers on a scale that they would feel comfortable with them encroaching upon their every day surroundings.
   Despite the easily won prize in his lap and the reciprocal enjoyment in her eyes, he found it hard to avoid stepping outside himself and worry about the ramifications of what had just happened. For almost two generations, the central area of the planets in the galaxy occupied by humans had been united as the Republic of the Sphere, to usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Subsequently, vehicles of war and their accompanying means of production and upkeep were decommissioned, and their rare occurrence was only in Republic armies and select planetary militias. His own 'mech he left on Solaris VII in the hands of people he knew he could trust. People whose pockets stood to profit very well from its staying in his possession. Hans left the planet when the HPG grid went down and was no longer able to broadcast neither his career nor his life all over the Inner Sphere, and brought a sizeable amount of money with him, which rivaled the fortune of some of the richest nobles he'd ever known of in the Republic.
    In truth, his profit on Solaris VII in conjunction with his inheritance from the Mueller family was more than enough to buy him a new and better 'mech, but it was the principle that mattered. Unfortunately the Republic and its "laws" to keep the people safe forbid him from sailing around the galaxy with a deadly machine as cargo, much less to merely own two of them privately.
    He felt reality welcome him back in the most generous manner as the chest of the petite woman on his lap brushed softly against his own. The feeling was more innocent than what usually happened to him on Solaris, and demanded his respect. Immediately upon contact he peered into her eyes, which were gleaming with enjoyment.
    "There's something you don't see every day." Hans said, grinning at her.
    "You are charming to the core." The golden skinned girl responded, a hint of blush leaking into her cheeks.
    "I meant the 'mech." Hans covered his tease with a sincere grin, letting his joviality show in his eyes as he gazed upon her. She responded the way any girl would, taking it personally and striking his shoulder to help enforce her facial expression.
    "Do you ever pick up any information working for Hasek?" he paused, and when he saw that she was forming a defensive expression, he quickly clarified his question.

"Like why there are 'mechs walking down the street?"
    "The feeling around here, from what I gather, is that the Republic can no longer guarantee our safety. It seems that plenty of mercenaries can solve that, or so he believes. Hasek is just doing what he can."
    She paused, deciding how much to divulge it seemed. Hans wondered who the security was really for.
   "So much for getting that job then." Hans sighed. He didn't consider himself to be a mercenary, nor had he ever done any mercenary work, but with no machine to use he pretty much couldn't be effective at anything. He was a nerd gone 'mech jockey, but a prestigious and laudable education didn't comfort him on this planet. As much as he loved his home, only insanity could convince him that an experimental military technologist would make any career on a planet with no 'mech factories or research institutes.    Niobe studied him as if she had known him her entire life. Maybe some people really did watch those documentaries that came out of Solaris, especially the ones about him.
   "Poor mech jockey. He doesn't know what to do without someone to shoot with lasers."

She pressed her face closer to his, trailing a slender finger over his cheek as she spoke the words in a teasing, baby-talk manner.
   Hans supposed it was in order for him to be teased. And with a wink and as dreamy a look as his eyes could manage, he poked back at her.
   "Sure I do." He winked, and in one swift motion he whisked her out of the coffee shop. Outside it was mid-day and citizens were flooding the streets. Far down the road to the east there were children chasing the Raven simply to gawk at it and bask in its presence which to them, was all but a fable at this point in history.
   It was still interesting to live as a civilian for the short time he had done so, although much of his time on Solaris was spent as a celebrity. He was constantly in a conference, or an interview, or helping to film a documentary or promote some product. On the other hand he did spend a good deal of time listening to threats from gamblers, and often times swindling their money away from them, among other more dangerous activities. He did yearn for his typical life of adventure but was beginning to appreciate the company of the same beautiful woman every day. With or without it he was doing what he could to maintain Republic citizenship because, despite how easy it had been for the government's goons to find him already, he would be in a world of hurt if he did not have constitutional rights.

They diverted their attention from the lumbering bird-legged battlemech and trotted a few blocks east to Davion Memorial Park, a medium sized plaza over which towered a to scale marble statue of former Prince Victor Ian Steiner Davion, standing opposite a full-scale statue of his Direwolf omnimech. Walking in the park with one of the Baron's employees wasn't a great way to avoid attention, but he doubted Hasek would be able to pull off anything detrimental to him and still manage to effectively skirt around the legal repercussions.
    Niobe battered his arm with a few girly punches; it seemed to be her developing solution to the times when he didn't pay attention.
"Whatever you're worrying about up there" she gently pressed her right index finger to his forehead "it'll all become clear if you let it run its course." She gave him another smile, and guided him by hand around the park until they were in a central, stone area with a very large fountain pool surrounded with statues of history's most famous. Devlin Stone, Victor Steiner-Davion to name a few, and most importantly to Hans there was a statue of his father, whose arm was wrapped around the shoulder of his most favored second cousin: Adrian Hasek. The man who had technically murdered his father, squandered the majority of his assets, and subsequently secured his own spot on the throne of Sheratan. Fortunately for Hasek, the amount of time that had passed since then had closed the case and there was no longer evidence against him. Still, Hans felt the governor had more crimes to commit, no matter how peaceful things currently seemed.
    "So, do you come here often?" Hans interrupted his own thoughts, though he was paying more attention to a tiny sliver of light which had been crawling its way toward him ever since they had entered the central area of the park, like a drunk driver trying to walk a straight line.
   "When the weather is right." Niobe replied, inspecting the statues as if she had been offended by his overactive mind. Hans couldn't help it; he was searching for the source of the little light circle. Suddenly it stopped just over his heart.
   "Get down!!" He yelled desperately as he dove onto his female company, tacking her through a thicket of bushes and ultimately plunging them both, wrapped around each other, into the fountain as he felt a crushing pain in his chest.

The impact stung through his body like he had been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer, and he tried with all his energy just to breath, sinking to the bottom of the shallow fountain. It all felt like a video drama, as his head bounced off the marble bed of the pool and he watched a second bullet push through the water, losing speed as it changed directory and ultimately just chipping into the marble. Niobe's head burst back up through the water and she cowered below the edge of the marble fountain, fearing for her life and bringing Hans out of his undersea nightmare. He couldn't help but moan in pain as he collapsed on the soaking wet cotton that clung to her shoulder, gasping violently for breath.
    The water and the sounds and the light all fused into the same hazy mess and the next time he was able to keep his eyes open long enough to comprehend his surroundings, they were naught but the utilitarian decor of a hospital emergency room. Fortunately, he had worn the Kevlar combat vest from his mech, a lesson he had learned from living on a world which seethed with danger. His ears worked well enough to take in the chatter about bruised ribs, and by his own analysis he was fine. It could have been far worse. A faint physical awareness of pressure crept into his mind, and as he struggled to lift his head he could make out the image of Niobe, wrapped in a towel, watching over him. His only complex thought was his gratitude that he had not brought a weapon with him - it would have stirred up a legal hassle that he had no desire to deal with. Hans Mueller smiled, and he drifted back into unconsciousness again.

    Adrian Hasek drummed his fingertips against the glass top of his office desk. Beneath it a computer monitor displayed multiple streams of data transmitted to the government from all over the planet. One such statistic was of particular interest to him; a line graph which charted his approval rating since the interstellar communication network had gone down some months ago. The number declined ever so slightly as the months went by without any concrete sign that the government was doing anything to fix the situation. In truth, he had sent a detailed analysis along with a sizeable team of bureaucrats to Terra to work out a solution to the problem. In the interest of efficiency their orders were not to return without the means or way to attain the means of fixing the problem. The investigation had taken a little over a week, and Terra wasn't much more than thirty light-years away.
   The plausibility of their transferring to a second ship that was ready to jump the rest of the way to Terra would only cut a few weeks from their journey at best. It had been four months and Adrian had lost his faith to the extent that he now had military BattleMechs patrolling the streets of his capital city. In contrast to his decision to do so, the prospects of conflict which would actually require the participation of such machines were not very high. However, Hasek did not want to risk appearing unable to protect his people, and was determined that familiarizing his people first-hand with the tools of war was an innocent event so long as they inspired awe instead of fear. In legal terms, BattleMechs were contraband not only for civilians but for just about everyone in the Republic. Despite the mandates, Adrian highly doubted the repercussions of infringing on that law were very solid, if the authorities even managed to stumble upon the infraction in the first place. Republic bureaucrats and military officials were not as ubiquitous as one would expect.
    Repercussions and rewards were a key part of the Republic of the Sphere, one that Hasek did not agree with but had come, through education, to respect for its efficiency. Republics were an ancient form of government that had never effectively administered their domain; the prime example, the Roman Republic, had torn itself apart with issues exacerbated by its own structure and thus, inherent shortcomings. It had only consisted of what was in the 21st century one percent of Terra's population, in comparison to the hundreds of solar systems administered by the Republic. Part of Hasek's concern was the fact that humans had flourished under more democratic forms of government that stemmed out of the lessons of failed governments like Republics, and in his mind this was a regression. The Republic was forged out of a disdain for warfare, and tempered with the blood spilt to establish its permanence. Devlin Stone and the people who followed him spread misconceptions about the limited extent of liberty in what they deigned to be the "serfdoms" of the Great Houses, the five star-spanning empires which made up the Inner Sphere, and it was a remarkable kindling to the pro-Republic fire. Hasek saw fit to change all that.
    While he schemed how, the knock at the door was the only thing in place to bring him back to reality.
    "Who is it?" he barked.
    "Cranston, sir." came the man's repugnant tone.
    "Come in." The heavy oak door swung open and his right-hand man slipped in, looking as though he had finally done enough honest work to merit exhaustion. He stopped on the opposite side of the desk and folded his hands behind his back.
    "Mueller has been shot." He stated in an informative tone. The governor's brow furled as he began to nibble at his fingernails in anxiety.
    "I never authorized that." Adrian growled from his seat.
    "The hospital released him early this morning with a set rib. The med techs said he was wearing a Kevlar vest when he got hit." the man continued to report.
    "And where is he now?"
    "A young woman was with him. It seems she took him back to her home. Her name is Niobe Conway; an employee at your downtown hotel."
    "We found two bullet casings in a warehouse near Victory Park. Local ballistics officials are still digging the other bullet out of the fountain. The cases match the bullet they pulled out his vest."
    "This merits a visit." the baron remarked as he started to grab his jacket.
    "I suggest we encounter him when he's alone." Hasek gave Cranston a look of confusion.
    "The governor visiting a stranger's house is slightly suspicious, to say the least. Hans has a suite of his own in the hotel. Just wait."

Steal this Article...Seriously

2008-12-21T00:08:00.001-08:00

Inspired by an article on Slashdot about PC Gaming piracy tonight, I feel but compelled to write my own experience and thoughts about the subject down, in public. I hate to say it but in today's entertainment industry there is very little reason to pay for absolutely anything that can be otherwise obtained without the often frustrating, time consuming, and occasionally dishonest direct exchange of funds.

Game developers and publishers alike, as well as record companies, Hollywood, and book publishers have lost the respect of Generation Y necessary to perpetuate the financial future of their industries. There is literally nothing worth buying in the entertainment industry at this point. The movies suck and at the best are half decent. We as a consumer base desire movies and television not because of their content, but because 1080p looks very pretty on our expensive televisions. One key element I'm trying to convey is the lack of motivation for us to buy these things. Twenty years ago electronic gaming was new and interesting and games were awesome because the game play was awesome. At this point in time, so many games made are following basic cookie cutter formulas, and rehashing the same experiences we as gamers have had in tens if not hundreds of games before, that they are no longer entertainment: they're a chore. I refer to this while playing a new game by making statements such as "Oh sweet I've reached the Super Mario level" or "Hey let's play Super Mario: The Warrior Within" for example. Surely you can figure out what this means: the coming level/part of the game is nothing but an exact rehash of Mario with some graphical updates and minor modifications.

In addition to these games actually being bad or reruns, the gaming industry is plagued by a ubiquitous, often misinformed and misguided gaming-specific media. My favorite two awful gaming media giants are IGN and Gamespot, a decision I hope other people can understand, at least other gamers, be they PC or console. Media have ruined PC gaming in so many ways I cannot count them at this point in time without literally searching through twenty years of global records. One common and, in my opinion, adorable route taken by the media to slay all that we love is the standard "Give this game a shitty review" routine. Gamespot rates a game with a 3.5 out of 10 score, abhorring it as horrible, cliché, glitchy, uninspired, or any of their other token phrases. Recently, in the past few years, Gamespot has added the ability for users to additionally rate and score the reviewed titles, even to review the games themselves. These reviews and scores are easily displayed on the web page for comparison by intelligent consumers and window shoppers alike, and to further prove my point, the user score is almost always higher than the score given by the Gamespot staff, anywhere between a decimal point and 5 points higher than Gamespot. Eventually, someone makes the mistake of reading Gamespot, despite their hesitancy learned through experience to take anything they say at more than face value, and the majority of the time, regardless of the potential conflicting editorials about the game, said person puts in absolutely no more effort to experience the game than to finish reading the review and say to themselves "You're right, fuck that game." The first infected mind spreads their opinion to their gamer friends and potential gaming colleagues, a fair amount of which will agree, also without trying the game, that it sucks, until it grows into a giant mass of eunuchs. Alternatively, perhaps some of these gamers do try the game, and they then decide it sucks, for whatever reason. The ending is identical.

Potentially worse than the effect of gaming networks attempting to do their jobs, albeit poorly because they are ultimately misinformed and out of touch with the gaming industry, is the tendency of the media to Judas the upcoming titles. Certain titles, sometimes the majority of upcoming games, are given entirely too much media attention, whether it be on the internet, television, radio, movie commercials, gaming conventions or press events. Despite my hatred for people like Michael "Savage" and Sean Hannity in the media, I have to acknowledge my frequent alignment with them and take a saying right from the Savage Nation:

The gaming media is worthless, in every aspect of the word. The media builds games up in perpetuum until they come out and either

a) The media, who gave this game so much attention and nurtured its potential consumer base over the edge of their seats waiting for its release, ends up giving the game a bad review

b) The game actually does end up sucking and is systematically crucified by the entire community, potentially ruining or setting back a developer.

c) The developers pay so much attention to the gaming masses in order to ultimately deliver what every developer hopes will be that incredible, genre-slaying Horseman of entertainment revolution that they end up re-examining the almost finished game they have made and deeming it unfit for production, thereafter going straight back to the drawing board for god knows how many years it takes. Regardless of these outcomes, they generally lead to the same problem: the gamers are disappointed in a game, a system, or a developer.

I can name several games to which this has happened only recently. Guitar Hero World Tour: GH4 was supposed to be awesome. How could it be anything less in consideration of the Guitar Hero track record? How could it suck when it was clear with the GH3 track list and DLC that this company was headed in the right direction? Gamespot (I say Gamespot more because I unfortunately trust them more than IGN, and hate them less) built the hell out of this game, convincing us , even AFTER knowing the track listing, it would be so much cooler than Rock Band that it would make the true champion of the rhythm game genre look like France in World War 2. It was guaranteed both by the media and by Blizzard Activision that the track list was badass and represented rock fans of all ages, that the song creator was rich and robust yet masterable by gamers, and that the game play would bring interesting new twists.

Rock Band 2 came out first, and everyone rushed to buy it the second the actual disc came out, giving zero shits about the new instruments yet. As the time between the release of GH and RB2 hastened to a close, it became clear that RB2 was the king of rhythm games and there was very little room left for Guitar Hero 4. Regardless, as is often the case, franchise and developer loyalties among the consumers run only skin deep, and many people, like my friends and I, made our journeys to obtain Guitar Hero 4 ( I'm aware it's not "4" but you as well as any other competent gamer knows it is ). At first the game was cool, the new open strum bass notes were a twist to the bass parts in Rock Band which were almost entirely easy (ignoring the fact that bass in real life is not necessarily hard anyway), but it became quickly apparent through multiple things in the game that it was for lack of any better terms, what we in the gaming world call "retarded". The star power activation for the drum-set is completely retarded as you have to hit the two middle pads at the same time, which screws up people who otherwise would 100% every song, the bass lines are in purple as opposed to rock bands bright orange, which is PROVEN to be hard for the human eye to discern, when put against the dark background in Guitar Hero. It is true the track background can be changed if you go into the intensely detailed and rich instrument customization option, which I and I hope others found to be extremely cool, although ultimately irrelevant to the experience of the game. Additionally, many of the DLC songs so far have made me, and I hope other people, consider the game almost worth purchasing (although I did not pay for it, friends did), especially the three Tool songs, although I personally would have immediately shot down Schism as an option and picked a song that was, in relative terms, good (This is to say that Schism is a good song, but, as with every radio single by every band, it obtains a whorish aura and falls from grace, whereas other songs from the album were already better, but are now immensely better). Ultimately, Guitar Hero 4 is a failure, because it has way too many songs from Rock Band 1 and 2 and the old Guitar Hero's, because the songs are, like always. ,mediocre choices, which I understand can be problematic in regards to choosing "better" songs as detailed in the magazine articles about how our songs come to be in these games. Regardless, this is now a rock game. No one, NO ONE, in America or the better parts of the globe, when they think the amazing world-changing instrument that is the guitar, is hearing Billy Ray Cyrus and Hannah Montana in their head. They're hearing Metallica, The Beatles, Hendrix, AC/DC, The Eagles, George Thurgood, etc. So dispense with the politically correct bullshit please and cater these games towards the audience that is playing them: people listening to Metal, to Hard Rock, to Ska, to real music, and perhaps the franchise will survive.

With the brutal but brief review of Guitar Hero 4 out of the way, it becomes apparent that the problem is not that people are "stealing" games, the problem is truly that the games are no longer worth dropping between sixty and three hundred dollars on. Three hundred dollars, even sixty dollars, can buy the discerning, experienced consumer infinitely more entertainment than some of the coaster's coming in these jewel-cases.

Now that the problem is out in the open, I'd prefer to change subjects to another element of the piracy issue. The events occurring every day all around the globe in this year and this century in regards to the illegal acquisition of copyright protected software are by no means defined under the collegiate parameters of the word pirate, or piracy. To illustrate this literally is a picture floating around the internet, although it is a little off the mark.

More accurately, Piracy is Not Theft, it's Copying, or sharing, whatever term you want to use to try and justify our actions. Piracy has only recently, in the lifetimes of our parents, been redefined to include this "dilemma" faced today:

Piracy:

–noun, plural -cies.

1.	practice of a pirate; robbery or illegal violence at sea.

the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.: The record industry is beset with piracy.

3.	Also called stream capture. Geology. Diversion of the upper part of one stream by the headward growth of another.

The United States Copyright Office as a functional, central and organized institution was not firmly established until 1870. What was copying referred as back then? Where were laws to protect authors, and artists, the only true communicators with an empirical claim, under best of circumstances, to their ideas, for the first four centuries of America? Even more recently, the VCR was not invented until 1971, and the Japanese did not sell the VHS in America until June of 1977. The Government didn't start bitching about file piracy until the internet became the most important thing in the world. Sure, every VHS tape had an FBI warning on it outlining the potential fees and legal repercussions of unauthorized copying and redistribution of copyright protected material, but they also approved the VHS copyright. The United States government authorized the sale of blank VHS tapes, which were a complementary good to VCR systems, to everyday consumers. The sole purpose of these VHS tapes was the unauthorized reproduction of copyright protected material by the average American consumer; they were explicitly informed of this product function when approached by the Victor Company for patent information. With history in mind, "file" piracy has been a comfort, a luxury, of the American lifestyle since before my generation was even conceived. Before your parents ever even met it was perfectly normal for people to record TV shows and records and 8-tracks that they missed on TV or had never heard before. We are an entire generation of college students raised with the ability to not miss radio broadcasts, TV shows, TV movies, access any movie we want any time we want for an irrelevant fee, because our parents started the trend when the Commies were still all over the place waiting to kill us, and the government and industries have waited until now, 30 + years after the fact, to raise hell about it. In fact, not only did the government personally oversee the legalization of a product intended solely to break the law, which was introduced by a foreign country, but they did it again. TiVo Inc. revolutionized the trend of television piracy when in September of 1999; they released another product, a VCR on steroids, to the American public. Not only could the TiVo record shows without you controlling it, it had a damn hard drive, meaning you could fit an entire shelf of VHS tapes and probably more on a hard drive inside of this TiVo that you couldn't even see and chances were, if you bought a TiVo, you were too technologically incompetent to even realize how the box was recording and storing shows, making it even worse that you were illegally recording shows and storing them without realizing it was, on principle, illegal.

TiVo continues to operate at this second and ultimately has set the trend for every digital television media corporation to provide its customers with the latest technology and abilities. Every company offers their own DVR with their service at this point: Dish network, AOL Time Warner, DirecTV, etc. The fact that these companies maintain a farcical control over the operation of their DVR systems by manipulating user access through the direct use of the company's GUI and hardware does not in any way change the reality of a DVR system: You are recording shows onto a hard drive, storing them for later use, and if you go the extra mile to actively participate in file piracy on the internet, redistributing the material through the torrent network to everyone else participating in file piracy on the other end(s).

However, because programmers go through years of college and work experience in what we claim is an "intricate and difficult field" in comparison to actors and producers and musical artists, whose pleads, often made solely by the publishers on the basis of profit loss, it's okay to copy an actor's life work but god forbid you steal that application: you're a cock if you do, and we'll put you in jail and your children if they're ever born. One thing must be clarified about software piracy. No one is walking into a Best Buy and literally shoplifting Windows Vista, or Spore, or NOD32. A few people may be, but the crusade is not against the people with the testicular fortitude and Sneak skill high enough to ninja software right in public. The crusade in this case is against the people sitting in their houses or their college dorms or in a Panera who are interested in playing Will Wright's new game because they have come, over the past 20 years, to trust absolutely in his ability to make an inexplicably entertaining piece of software, software which in this specific case people are likely stealing and then buying it later anyway, or have paid for previous titles and are waiting to determine the value of the new one. This leads to one very interesting and legitimate argument for and against piracy.

Many people, myself included on almost all bases, choose to preemptively "pirate" games, or software, in order to determine their value. Most games and programs come with a trial period, however they are gimped, crippled versions of the full product, which can in absolutely NO way or shape indicate to the rational and experienced computer user or gamer the efficiency and value of the full product. In lieu of a reasonable amount of time to try an application out, we as file pirates don our sabres, feed our parrots, and re-adjust our eye patches as we opt to steal this application and use it unabated until we have learned or come to appreciate it, at which point it is my firm belief every last gamer would be more than willing to pay for at least one copy of the aforementioned software. In many cases, these people do go out and buy the software, or the game, or the new album, or the movie, because they have determined through full prior and risk-free experience with the product that it is worth the ridiculous price tag attached to its packaging, in most scenarios. In general, the pirating community believes as a principle that if you own a physical, legally obtained copy of a product, it's perfectly acceptable to download another copy for backup or record keeping purposes. Thus, many computer users end up pirating first and buying it second. If someone asks for the receipt……"ehh, it must have gotten lost somewhere, I don't know when I bought it."

Unfortunately, the vast majority of file pirates really are just that: pirates. People who want something for free, are disrespectful enough to not even enjoy the product they just obtained effortlessly, without using gasoline, without exchanging any other money than to pay for the internet bill, assuming they even have an internet bill. It is these people, these people who benefit off of the work of others without so much as a thank you, and who even have the audacity in some circumstances to critique and openly talk trash about products they didn't even purchase the rights to be counted as a consumer of, who I adamantly agree upon referring to as pirates. I would go so far as to definitively label them thieves, crooks, douche bags, and asshats.

As for myself, I would fall in between categories. I've pirated an excessive amount of electronic entertainment: anyone who would be truly considered, in my opinion, to be a file pirate, is someone who has pirated an excessive amount. Unfortunately for the legal safety of all downloaders, the government does not share the same views of justice and reciprocity as I do on the subject of legal violations, specifically copyright violation. However, I also own as much of a percentage of what I've copied as I possibly can. For example, there was a point where I owned an electronic copy of every Megadeth CD ever made, but only three of their physical albums. When I finally had the opportunity to get on the internet and purchase things, which in all proven circumstances takes exponentially longer to do than download them, amidst working 70 hours a week, I found a great website and purchased every last damn CD they made at about six dollars apiece. It may not have been the usual twenty dollar rip-off you find at the mall, or thirteen dollars at a best buy, but I certainly paid for them and they certainly were not black market copies.

It seems absurd to me that in articles claiming to delve into the mind of the file pirate, to get to the core of PC gaming's rotten disease eating it from within, the culprit is never considered to be the gaming industry, the developer, the publisher, and the media. Activision and Blizzard and Microsoft and Id software and every other company are composed entirely of angels, of people who have never done anything wrong in their lives, and have made absolutely zero design oversights. People who have never once written a bad line of code, never once given the bounding box for a world object the stupidest fucking dimensions possible. Companies full of people who have never, not once, looked at a successful game made a decade ago and said to their development team "Take that, and put it in our game."

Games these days suck. It's not that hard of a concept to wrap your mind around whether you're a 27 year Blizzard employee or a veteran of Frogger who shakes your head in contempt at the nonsense the kids are playing. I'm not saying all games suck – In fact, I'm not even saying most games suck, or that many individual games suck in their entirety. Games in the 21^st century just collectively suck. Don't misunderstand me – I love almost all games. PC games especially. Oblivion, Fallout 3, Half-Life 1 & 2, the Total War series, Warcraft, Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Sim Anything, Doom – you name it, I probably love that game too. The problem is the PC market is just as guilty as the console market of falling into the pit of regurgitation and sequels. Game developers are awful about this – and after all, can you blame them? These are real life developers – their children and their families and their kittens are healthy based on how much money they make, which is based on how well their company fares. Developers in this market state are increasingly resistant to change, to straying too far from the pack. It's proven that risk yields profit, and in some cases, games which have taken giant leaps from the mainstream have been majorly successful. If you had asked anyone in the 90's what the best selling computer game in all of history would be, not one person, not even Will Wright himself would speak confidently about an incredibly complex version of Tamagotchi being the best selling game ever.

Regardless of proven results, game developers are not eager to take drastic steps away from the norms of PC gaming. Whereas many experiments such as the Sims have succeeded beyond imagination, there are a disproportionate amount of games that have failed miserably and been absolutely crucified by the electronic media for their attempt at being different. It's a very delicate balance which is very hard to achieve, even for the extremely talented developers working all across the field at companies like Square Enix and Blizzard and Bethesda, to name a few. Subsequently, the way Europe fell into fighting a 19^th century war with 20^th century weapons, the gaming industry is fighting a battle for control of 21^st century limbic systems with ideas that went stale in the 1990's, and unfortunately many of those limbic systems know those ideas went stale. It is for this reason that the vast majority of titles released continue to be sequels or alternative renditions of proven, ancient gaming franchises.

For example, Blizzard released Diablo II in 2000 and Warcraft 3 in 2002, games that remained for the most part unchanged from their predecessors, although it is imperative to note that Warcraft 3 forever changed the face of real-time strategy games with the introduction of true Hero units, and the proper implementation of technology levels, although this was already existent in games like Age of Empires. In 2004 Blizzard released the much anticipated "sequel" to Warcraft 3, the World of Warcraft, which transcended the franchise entirely from a strategy game to a tactical multiplayer RPG, a step which unexpectedly raped and pillaged the massively multiplayer online gaming world and assimilated it's dedicated fantasy nerds to fight for the Blizzard army, another risky event which ultimately landed Blizzard on the throne of the online gaming empire. However, despite this leap forward (although I have much criticism to pass out on this subject, I hardly consider WoW to be innovative or different from the games before it), Blizzard continues to work on Starcraft 2, which will be exactly like Starcraft with updated graphics, and Diablo III, another carbon copy of Diablo II with some very minor game play changes. Additionally, Blizzard is working on a "secret" project, which although many hope will be an entirely new gaming franchise, many others are convinced this game will be World of Starcraft, an idea that I, if no one else, think is absolutely horrible – but that's the risk they are taking to make something successful and different.

Just as Blizzard does, very few companies are trying anything different. I've mentioned the homogenous rhythm gaming genre, the PC real-time strategy gaming genre, and there's no need to even mention shooters. Every shooter has been the same since Doom and Wolfenstien; they will be the same until the Earth melts. That leaves very little room for the gaming industry to stretch their legs and take up what Meebo refers to as "Hack Week" – working on something else, something different. The only gaming genre that appears to have any room left for growth is Wright's own Simulation genre. As far as I'm concerned, the only cool thing I've heard all year came from the Sim genre. A game I eagerly looked forward to years and years ago when I installed SimCity 3000 is getting its second chance in the next rendition of The Sims. For those that don't know what I'm talking about, Maxis was working on a project in the SimCity 3 days called SimVille – it was to be SimCity on a small town scale, in which your Sims walked around and interacted with one another the way they do now in the Sims, but also providing you the elements of SimCity such as town building and management and ultimately, more godly powers than the Sims allows. I read in an article about the Sims 3 that the field will now be open – your Sims can wonder freely around the "neighborhood" and interact with the rest of the denizens without loading screens. That's one giant step for the Sims, and potentially one massive leap for the gaming industry. One thing that has always plagued games is the loading screen. As the years have gone by, loading times and locations and screens have gotten much better, although in some cases worse, but to play a game without ever having to wait for it to load – that would be the most important thing ever to happen to PC gaming, in fact the entire gaming industry as a whole. Unfortunately, in my expert opinion as a veteran gamer, a veteran file pirate, and an intermediate software programmer, I feel as if the PC Gaming industry has very, very little else going for it aside from the innovations of Will Wright and a few less popular creative celebrities.

As if the lacking inspiration on the software development side of PC Gaming wasn't enough of a deterrent to legitimately paying for software, PC Gaming also carries with it the burden of the PC hardware industry. The unfortunate truth, for the pockets of hardware CEOs at least, lies in the reality that PC hardware is expensive. There are points at which, in the latter half of the year, every year since I have started building computers, the price of computer hardware decreases drastically. Terabyte Western Digital hard drives were $69.99 a piece on Tiger Direct not more than 2 months ago, for example. Starting in the summer and fluctuating up and down until the New Year, the price of hardware does drop to affordable prices. However, the nature of the gaming business makes it hard to keep up with the latest games, assuming you tolerate nothing less than insane performance out of your gaming rig. As a consequence, people have less money to spend on games because they just paid a thousand dollars for a processor, for example. True, these games can now run on relatively shitty hardware, but they do not run at a frame rate or with an image quality that is remotely enjoyable by people who could play games on a console for less money with comparably better performance.

It is for these reasons that PC gaming piracy runs rampant. Even with the knowledge that torrenting a game prevents you 9 out of 10 times from ever being able to play it online and kill people who are actually sitting somewhere at a computer just like you are thousands of miles away, which is the real appeal of PC gaming, there are little to no incentives for people to pay for games that they are not 100% sure will be worth the fifty or sixty dollars they will spend on them. On top of the monetary issue, the negative externalities of paying for the games are potentially more disastrous than losing sixty dollars. Sleep, girlfriends, sex, food, studying, and real life all have the potential to fall prey to PC gaming, and on a bright side, considering that pirating frequently prevents you from fully enjoying the game, not paying for the game potentially preserves what could be labeled as responsible citizens of our society. Regardless, game piracy will not stop until the gaming industry presents a respectable front to its consumers, and speaking as a pirate gamer, I don't believe it will happen sooner than later. As a gamer and a pirate, I must state that I look forward to only two games next year : Resident Evil 5 and Empire : Total War, and as a pirate, I will definitely pay $100 for both of those games, not to mention the console, and the hardware, to be able to play them. I think I'll torrent the rest.

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ter⋅ror⋅ism

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pi⋅ra⋅cy

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Chapter Four

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Chapter 3

Prologue : Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

Chapter One: You Can’t Go Home Again

Chapter Two: I Can Has Bullet?

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Steal this Article...Seriously

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