Congratulations Mutton Chops McGee!

Some people try to make their mark on the world through art.  Some people do it through charity or good deeds.  Some people try to do it through producing fantastic amounts of wealth and then paying other people to do one of those things we already mentioned for them.

You, unfortunately, are an unexceptional man of unexceptional means.  You fuck up everything whenever you try to help people, you’re kind of a racist, you’re terrible with money and you have absolutely no artistic, literary or cinematic acumen.  In days of old, that would mean that there’s absolutely nothing you can do with yourself that anyone will ever notice ever.

But this isn’t days of old.  We have Youtube and shit now.  And you, wise little fox you are, are going to figure out how to use Youtube to your advantage.   Because one thing you do have is frighteningly weird facial hair and another thing you have is a webcam.  And in this era that’s all you need to change the world forever.

Today you’re going to start a series of video diaries where you haphazardly address your webcam and tell it about your day.  Your ups, your far more numerous downs, the rejections that have befallen you, the trials and tribulations that royally fucked up your vain attempts at maintaining a positive worldview.  All of these things will be recorded on the Youtube channel “Mutton Chops McGee.”

And the world will love it.

Your affable patheticness, the cluelessness you bring to the most rudimentary activities and exchanges, the terrible facial hair you’ll insist on wearing.  It’ll all combine to form a perfect storm of awfulness that people will take to like crack addicts to crack.  They’ll watch your shit all day every day and fall deeper and deeper in love with you with each sad, lonely confessional moment.

It won’t help your personal life much, but within a decade people will recognize you as “Mutton Chops McGee” at random in public.  And while that won’t help you woo the girl you like at the coffee shop, or make your dad finally love you, it will allow you to live on as future generations watch your videos and wonder why you were so very, very sad.

Congratulations Mutton Chops McGee!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Mo' Problems with Mechwarrior Online Unrelated to Money!

I’ve spent more time with Mechwarrior Online now, enough time to actually buy a second Mech and max out two pilot trees, and at this point, I’m a little less concerned than I was about the impact of real world money on Mechwarrior Online’s play.  Not that it isn’t really, really obvious.  People with Founder’s Mechs, specifically Founders’ Atlases, have a tremendous advantage on the battlefield, and easily railroad smaller, less equipped Mechs.  But the time required to get these Mechs isn’t actually as severe as I saw it initially.  While it’s a pain in the ass to grind C-Bills, the game is paced so quickly, with fights rarely lasting over ten minutes, usually ending within seven, that in an hour with a little luck or skill you can rack up half a million C-Bills easily.  That means an Atlas can, at least in theory, be purchased with only 18 hours of play.  Which, when I see it written out, still seems pretty extreme, but is far from unattainable.

The impact of MC is alleviated to a greater extent by the power of Light Mechs.  Because while it takes eighteen hours to get an Atlas, a Jenner, Raven or Commando is just six hours, tops, away.  And those annoying little fuckers have been ripping me up on the battlefield in a way that Atlases could only dream of.

See, there are a few ways to go in Mechwarrior.  You can select a reasonably agile brawler, a heavy hitting slow Mech, an indirect fire medium Mech that moves in and out of the edges of the fight, or a tiny, annoying as shit light Mech that runs in and out of combat, narrowly evading damage and slowly shredding your enemies.   The most successful players, thanks to an incredibly powerful ECM system present in the game now, are the quickest, the smartest and the swiftest.  The last left alive, the ones with the highest kill count and damage count, the ones who seem to decide a fight or lose it, all seem to be light Mech players.

See, there’s a function called ECM which makes it impossible to target enemies.  That’s an issue if you’re trying to get information on where to focus fire, or if you’re trying to get a missile lock (which is arguably the easiest way to take down a light Mech on open ground – the little fuckers are quick, but their light armor gets ripped to shreds by missile volleys quickly).  That means that small Mechs that approach their targets quickly with ECMs can disrupt targeting and make missiles useless as a weapon.  The biggest weakness that light Mechs have is one of the aspects of the game they excel at countering.  And the heavier Mechs turn more sluggishly, making it tougher for them to land hits on tiny targets like Ravens and Commandos.  That means that, theoretically, a skilled light Mech pilot in a one on one fight could take down an assault Mech without taking any damage.  If they’re lucky, and quick.

This should seem a bit insane to anyone reading, since the cost of these lighter Mechs is next to nothing, and their armament is, when you come down to it, pretty unimpressive.  In fact, the way that ECM currently works is a bit of a balance issue: one or two Mechs with ECM suites can render entire portions of the enemy team useless and, thanks for their agility, evade damage for a long, long time, long enough to trash the entire fight.  A Mech that costs a fifth of another Mech shouldn’t be capable of fucking up an entire fight just by staying parked next to a set of heavier Mechs.

Thus the issue of monetary creep has been replaced by the issue of design imbalance: right now light Mechs with ECMs can make up an entire combat force and pull off a pretty solid action against an enemy team.  In fact, in a point capture mission they could end up winning easily.  The Mechs that are meant to be the combat mainstays of the game have trouble catching and killing these nimble little fuckers, as their speed makes ballistic weapons less useful and their countermeasures prevent missile targeting.  So we’re left with energy weapons, lasers, used to shred light Mechs that make missteps at close range and long range fights between blinds Mechwarriors using heavier direct-fire weapons.

I have a feeling this will form a sort of trend in Mechwarrior Online as it continues: a design balance issue will present itself and, eventually, be replaced by another issue.  In this case the issue of potential feature creep that favors “whales,” the customers who spend tremendous amounts of money in free to play games, are being overshadowed by the very real design issues brought up by ECM.  While strategies exist to counter ECM (including a literal setting for ECM called “COUNTER” which shuts down the intensely annoying feature) a few minutes on a battlefield makes it clear that a number of players either don’t know or don’t care to figure out just how to utilize these features to help their teammates.  The end result is frustrating.

But at least it isn’t an issue that represents an endemic trend favoring players who use real world money to purchase in game benefits.  These players nearly all use shitty little low maintenance Mechs with at most moderately customized loadouts.  Even if the game is in tatters, it’s not because of some perfidious influx of capital: it’s because feature creep is still sorting itself out in this build.

Congratulations on Getting Over Your Issues with Dominican People!

We get it.  You don’t like anyone, really.  But you REALLY dislike Dominican people.

We can’t really say why.  Maybe it was your upbringing.  Maybe it was your sense of nationalism.  Maybe it’s that you don’t trust anyone in general.

Anyhow, today you’re going to actually look into how Dominican and Haitian cultures overlap.  You’ll note that they’re both wildly corrupt and insanely self-destructive systems of top-down exploitation that have all but devastated their own economies.  Tremendous inequity of wealth, a rich cultural heritage perpetually at odds with an oligarchic government and a history of oppression and shortages of even the most basic amenities.  You’ll realize you aren’t that different at all!

You’ll rush out into the street and shout at people as they enter the Dominican restaurant in your neighborhood.

“WE’RE NOT SO DIFFERENT YOU AND I!” you’ll mean to say.

Instead you’ll shout, “FUCKING BURN IN HELL YOU DEVIL!”

You’ll have a good laugh at your misstep, then go home and gibber at a television as if the people in it can hear you for an hour and a half.  Later you’ll make a puppet out of a chicken, then chase you concerned mother out of your apartment when she comes in to check on you.  All in all, a pretty normal day, but with a little less hate and a little more cultural awareness in your heart.

Congratulations on Getting Over Your Issues with Dominican People!

Congratulations Chim Chim Chipper!

The life of an Australian person is a tough one.  You’ve really only got four occupations available to you from birth.  You can hang out around incredibly dangerous animals and hope they don’t kill you while you film yourself near them.  You can fight crime using the help of aborigines you’ve befriended and then move to New York and then immediately leave New York after you’re tired of it there. You can survive a nuclear apocalypse and then drive around the outback, searching for gasoline or water or whatever or potentially helping people you come across as some sort of futuristic “man with no name.”  Or you can play rugby, which is slightly more dangerous than all of the activities we’ve described previously.

You chose a different road.  You decided to move to old London town and become a chimney sweep.  It stood to reason that your accent would come across as quaint and folksy and hell, maybe even a little wise to the people who live in London.  And, wouldn’t you know it, it worked!

You’ve spent the last twenty years drinking on the job, cursing at children and singing mournful songs as you cram devices up chimneys to get them clean.  Sometimes you’ve fallen asleep inside of one of the chimneys you were cleaning and woke up hours later when one of your clients lit their fire place.  You’d tumble out cursing and everyone would have a good laugh.  You got the best tips on those jobs.

Unfortunately, no good thing can last forever.  Today you’re going to die of chimney lung.

“Cor,” you’ll tell your daughter as you lay dying.  “I’d take quite a bit’o me life back if I weren’t to be getting’ chimney lung,” you’ll ham at her while tears well in her eyes.

Then you’ll say “vegemite” and die with a frown on your face.

Your daughter, who was originally a waifish young woman who dressed like a boy and cleaned chimneys, will decide then and there that she doesn’t want to die from inhaling chimney fumes all day every day and will resolve to sell your business to some German investors, who will in turn hire Turkish people to clean chimneys.  These Turkish people will be forcibly deported every few years, so they won’t die of the foul disease that claimed your life.

So in an obtuse way, you’ve improved the lifespan of every chimney sweep in London.

Congratulations Chim Chim Chipper!

Congratulations New Sandals Sampson!

Winter is a great time to find bargains on shit that should’ve been sold months ago and is just being sold now.  Like, say, sandals.  Terrible looking sandals that you find at J-Crew in a bargain bin and pick up and try on over your socks that make you feel amazing.  Sandals that you walk out of the store wearing with a whistle on your lips and a bounce in your step.

As you bound out of the store, swinging your J-Crew tote filled with sweet sweet clothes a man will spot you, notice the J-Crew bag and the sandals over socks and immediately pull a knife on you.

“Gimme ya wallet!” he’ll shout at you, spittle flecking from his lips on to your face. 

You’ll spaz out, drawing your wallet from your cargo shorts and, in your effort to throw it at him your normal spasticness and the magic of your sandals will combine and make you hurl your wallet into him in a way that also makes you punch him in the face.  Your blow will shatter the mugger’s jaw and render him unconscious, putting him into a coma that he will never awake from.

You’ll look at your unscathed fist, amazed, then look down at your sandals.  You’ll put two and two together and nod to yourself.

“Time to do this right,” you’ll say under your breath before running off to start fighting crime with your sandals on.

After incidentally injuring several additional muggers as your pussy reflexes, spasming movements and sandal enhanced strength combine to make you a whirling, thrashing human danger zone, you’ll decide to cross the street without looking to get a Jamba Juice.  While you’re about halfway across the road you’ll notice a bus bearing down on you.  You’ll chuckle to yourself.

“I got this,” you’ll say to no one in particular, as you prepare to thrash wildly in order to “defeat” the bus.

Unfortunately, your sandals will simply enhance your usually girlish strength.  They won’t make you unbreakable and, as such, you’ll die when the bus strikes you, knocking those sandals (and socks) right off you and into the hands of a terrified young boy who will see the entire thing from the side of the road and, after years of wondering just what happened, put on the sandals and socks and go on to become an actual, functional crime fighter.

Congratulations New Sandals Sampson!