Yearly Archives: 2003

The Fly Vacuum

I have a fly vac­u­um named Dolores.

For some rea­son, flies have been com­ing into the apart­ment through some mag­i­cal ple­copter­an gate­way, the loca­tion of which I haven’t been able to deter­mine yet. Since Dolly is an indoor cat, the flies have been the only live thing that she’s even pounced on, aside from my toes under the cov­ers.

She’s quite an effi­cient fly hunter, able to swat one with­out much trou­ble, although she con­sis­tent­ly lets them get away when she takes an inspec­tion under her paw by lift­ing it up. Once she actu­al­ly catch­es one and is able to get her tongue on it, she’ll gob­ble it hap­pi­ly, and then look as if she had­n’t eat­en her play­mate. Sometimes the fly will soar to my ceil­ing, and she’ll meow at me with frus­tra­tion, nev­er look­ing away from the buzzing black dot.

Getting Into TFC Again

I’ve decid­ed to take a break from The Frozen Throne because the game has become no fun for me. The only thing that I could real­ly sit down and play for hours with­out sleep or rest was TFC for Half-Life. I woke up rest­less some­time this morn­ing and decid­ed to give TFC anoth­er shot, from a two year hia­tus. After join­ing a ran­dom 2Fort serv­er, I sniped for about an hour, and every­thing felt so com­fort­able. Sniping was the only thing from any game that I was ever actu­al­ly good at, and although I was pret­ty rusty, I still man­aged a decent kill/death ratio. All the the­o­ry behind good snip­ing has become sec­ond nature to me, but my untrained hand-eye co-ordi­na­tion lim­it­ed my skills con­sid­er­ably. Someone did accuse me of cheat­ing though, so my expe­ri­ence has­n’t com­plete­ly left me.

I might con­sid­er set­ting up a ded­i­cat­ed serv­er run­ning 24/7, so that I can join some­thing quick­ly with a low ping, although such a thing would be a vio­la­tion of the con­tract of my ISP. Running a serv­er would allow me to con­trol exact­ly what maps I want to play and who I can kick or ban. I also would­n’t be scared of being kicked myself by peo­ple who think I’m cheat­ing.