Modern Warfare Weekend

STEAM had Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer available for free this weekend and I thought I would check out the newest installment of a series I hadn't played in a while.  The last games in the Call of Duty series I played were Modern Warfare and World at War a few years ago.  My son plays MW2 online with his friends and likes it, so I bought that this weekend ( $4.99 on Amazon) and decided to try out the MW3 free weekend with him as well.  It was really fun and contradicted a lot of things that I had heard about it that had kept me away for so long. First I played MW2 with my son running some of the Spec Ops missions.  Then I did one myself, the gameplay is a bit different than S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ( the only other FPS series that I play) but in the end they are actually quite similar.

                                            

Literary Term

I listened, I learned, but something just wasn't right, something was missing.  What seemed, on the surface, to be a complete list of literary terms had me thinking.  Although I was sure of it, I didn't want to ask in class.  That feeling I had incessantly nagged at me, even after arriving home. At that point I knew what had to be done.  Asinine as it may seem, I took it upon myself to make this my very own, somewhat comedic English 111 vision quest. Lesser men (and women) may have wavered, but realizing that a peaceful night's sleep was at stake I pressed on against incredibly ominous, insurmountable odds.  The specter of impending doom washed over me as I slumped into my chair.  It was now or never, at least for this night's sleep.  My mind totally blank, I stared at the incandescent glow of the LCD.  A coherent description of it in layman's terms escaped me and my focus went by the wayside.  My thoughts and concentration wandered, a myriad of bookmarks beckoned, this was becoming another in a long line of lost causes.  Not even five minutes in and I needed a break, lifting myself from my seat I retrieved my backpack and produced 20 ounces of immortality, Coke Zero.  My thirst quenched, I headed back to complete what seemed to be an impossible task just a few minutes before.  The tedious task of encoding erratic thoughts into a stream of keystrokes that can produce a plethora of recursive results from everyone's best friend, Google. It is starting to become very clear to me as I type that I have found the words necessary to sleep tonight, to put an end to this real life Grammarian vision quest.  It's late, class has been over for three hours now, yet I'm still struggling to literally put this topic to bed.  Finally, the exhausting  trials and tribulations of my crude Google search bear fruit with pages upon pages of results.  Every fiber of my being is rife with anticipation as I scan the first, then second page of results.  I'm not disappointed, I've found it and would be remiss to not readily admit that my Google-Fu skills are strong, very strong indeed.  Acrostic, read it (again) and weep.

Is an acrostic a literary term?

Stress Management

Stress is just simply a part of life.  There's no way to totally eliminate it, at least not that I'm aware of.  Because of this, my key to being happy and content is how I manage the stress that I can control, and to find an outlet for stress that I can't.  My method of stress relief is to take all the frustration, aggression, and bad intentions built up throughout the day/week and channels it into a release with no catastrophic real world consequences...gaming.  You may be asking yourself, "aren't you, as a 40 something year old adult, too old for such childish indulgences?  Isn't gaming just for kids?"  As prevalent as that assumption is, there are a great many of us older (I actually prefer to use the term "mature") gamers out there, especially in the PC gaming world.  So when I refer to myself gaming to relieve stress, I don't necessarily mean the infinitely more popular and publicized console wars waged between the countless gaggles of feckless teens, flocking obsessively to the game du jour, but I digress.  I could go on for days about the demographic differences between PC and console gamers, but that will have to be for another blog.