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Someone had the idea of getting some people together to try to record the early history of my TF2 team and record our first impressions of some things and I had a wonderful exchange.

Other Dude: So what was it like meeting FlameDemon?
Me: He was… gayer than I thought he’d be.
Other Dude: What’s that mean?
Me: I’d seen his facebook field and he seemed generic, but in person he had cultural calling cards like pink shoes, except in this case is was a faux hawk, capri pants and an Armani Exchange shirt.

I expressed my sentiment poorly and this got back to me quickly but through a bit of a filter.

Flamed: I know you were using it as a fake example, but I do have pink shoes.
Person 2: Flamed is mad you talked bad about his pink shoes.
Person 3: Why are you picking on men with pink shoes?

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Team Interrobang does periodic field trips where members rename themselves based on a theme and visit other servers to see how they do things.  I’ve been on a few but never before ran one until tonight where our theme was the elements and I picked thorium.  Not only does it have “Thor” in its name but I’m an advocate of alternate nuclear technologies of which fast thorium reactors are one of the more promising ones.  None of the gals joined us so Curium, Vanadium, Meitnerium, and Hydrogen (hydrogen’s a bitch) were present.

We gathered at a common spot and after determining that picking an isotope was putting a too fine a point on the matter, we were off.  Quickly, Tungsten got a little tipsy and a little cocky and started smacktalk entirely in the 3rd person.  Like always, Carbon tried to be everyone’s friend but without Oxygen, Hydrogen, or even copious Nitrogen he remained in his graphite form.  Neodymium was just a dick and pointed out that no one said his name correctly, Phosphorus kept having outbursts and I was getting schooled by Titanium.  But then, something magical happened; I realized I was no longer in charge of the server and got to perform the rare luxury of picking a fight with a person of power I’d never see again over something trivial.  I love field trips.

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I purchased 1000 stickers for my TF2 team’s second anniversary.  I received a note from the printer that the stickers would be printed as soon as I paid the amount on the invoice.  Here’s a screen cap of the attached invoice.

That’s the easiest invoice I’ve ever been asked to pay.

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The Team Interrobang Holiday cards went out today after a bit of a printing snafu.  I wanted to send one to each member who’d donated twice during the year and purchased some delightful TF2-themed ones.  Printing was… onerous as the card stock felt like butter coated Teflon and would only print if I tenderly rubbed the printer while whispering dirty things to its electrostatic head.  I had 20 cards to send out and three muffed up impressively, two even had burn marks on them, so I had to create inserts with cardstock and spray adhesive.  The automated postal station at the post office was actually run by a postal worker that manned that sucker like Data rockin’ the Enterprise’s LCARS.  I had some weird stamps to get so I took the regular line and purchased my stamps to send stuff to North North Dakota (Canada).  Turns out the current 75 cent stamp is Harriet Beecher Stowe.  I’m sure sending an enduring symbol of the Civil War will endear us to the Canadians.  I also needed to get three two cent stamps to finish up a roll of stamps I had lying around.  I purchased a sheet of 25 and after using 3 such stamps will make an attempt to use the remaining 22 to send something somewhere.  I wonder if I can spell out a PO box in stamps.

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The mapping competition my TF2 team is rebooting has involved a lot more community involvement this time around.  I was looking for partners and got the creators of  PropHunt, a mod I quite fancy, to get on board as PropHunt is the theme.  This plugin changes the functionality of the game in some interesting ways.  I was somewhat impressed when I found that the creators of the mod were 14 and 16 (sure, they’re programming beyond their age, but I was lighting my house on fire at a collegiate level around that age.)  The savantism of the creators came into sharp focus when I asked them about the next revision to the plugin:

Me: So when’s the next iteration of the plugin due out?
Him: I don’t know.  The last few changes I wanted to make have been very time consuming.
Me: Are you familiar with Cargill’s law?  The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the remaining 90% of the time.
Him: Makes sense, so what happens to the other 1%?

The children are our future; unless we stop them now.

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My Team Fortress 2 team has recent run a PropHunt server and it’s attracted some non-standard players.   One was a Scottish man in his mid-fifties playing the mod for the first time that sounded identical to James Doohan and I giggled every time he talked.  I started trying to engineer lines but was only able to muster the following:

Him: We’re on a new map.
Me: Are there bales of hay here? *giggle*
Him: Thar be bales here!

Me: You’re the last prop alive, you have a gun.
Him: I do!?
Me: Yes, take her around and give ’em what she’s got!
Moments later
Me: Give ’em more!
Him: I’m givin’ ’em all she’s got.

Giggle.

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I was on my treadmill talking in Team Interrobang’s VoIP client when another member said they had a favor to ask of me.  We move to another channel and he asks me to order him a pizza from a place down the street from him which is still 900 miles from as he lives in a college town in Kentucky.  Apparently, his girlfriend took their mobile phone to work and with no landline I, walking on a treadmill 900 miles away, was the only impediment to him dying of starvation.  So he gives me his order, address, and his credit card number.  All goes swimmingly, the delightful accent of the sorostitute that answered the phone, the country/western hold music and the order itself, until she asks the following:

Pizza Shop Employee: Ok, so that’s one Baldie’s Special no olives.  What’s the phone number for this order.
Me: I don’t know.
Pizza Shop Employee: Uh…

-Contemporaneously with yokel confusion-

My Brain: Fool! You’re using a phone give her that number!
Me: Yes.  I just got a new Google voice number, I’ll use that.
My Brain: Now you’re thinking.  Good thing you didn’t give her the number for the phone you’re currently using that you could respond to immediately, that would make sense.

Me: *gives Google voice number to which I only get messages as a mp3 in my inbox until I setup forwarding*
My Brain: You’re a genius!

I later found out that his orders can be practically delivered on foot and he probably could have ordered by opening his appartment window and yelling.  I guess in his imaciated state he lacked the energy to do such.  I was miffed until I realized something: I still have his credit card number, expiration date, and card verification code in a text file on my desktop that’s been recently renamed “Blitz_Blackmail.txt”.

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We departed Banks splendid hospitality Saturday morning and again took Rt. 30 west.  I started the day with a positive portent where I thought myself tricky by grabbing literally a handful of ice to recharge my car cup.  Ice is cold.  We arrived at the zoo at 9:30 and we were quickly met by TheChief/Jim German.

The Cast

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Jim German/TheChief

His children already knew all of us by game name (which was creepy) and also accosted Tardbagel for not going to enough Steelers’ games.  The rest of of the party arrived including the following:

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Peter Jerde/Pants

My first meeting was odd as I was used to seeing him in pictures with more beard.  He was also usually sitting so his 6’3″ness was more…vertical than I anticipated.  He has a perpetual sparkle in his eye requiring “gee golly, mister” to be prepended to all statements of incredulity.

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Clinton Haymen/Jazzysax

I made at least 2000 references during the weekend to Clinton being short.  At a mighty 5’4″ he’s apparently tall in his family although I was perpetually afraid of backing up suddenly and crushing him.  He has an asymmetrical face which makes him look like he’s been pulled from a Picasso painting or was hit with a 2×4 during his formative years.

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Mike Weber/VirginBride

He has cuffed jeans.  I also correctly guessed he had granite countertops.  I don’t know why, I just saw him as having granite countertops.  I was partly expecting him to meet us at his door in a velvet bathrobe and direct us to his leopard print couch.  He took public transit home so I had no opportunity to verify this image.  After meeting him, I’m glad I had no such occasion.

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Will Gattis/FlamedDemon

I have better portraits of Will elsewhere in the Flickr feed but thought this summed up much his time at the zoo.  He’s a chronic texter on his iPhone in the way I’m a chronic searcher on my iPhone.  The faux-hawk with red highlights was excessive in my opinion but I’m told this is a method among his people to court someone during the Illinois mating season.

/OnaZ”]IMG_1146-20090613-ZooDespite having the “Douchebag” appogiatora added to his forum account, the fact that he apologized for being in the way of a 5 year-old charging through a display dispelled that.  He’s training to be a piano tuner which I think is getting to him as per his shock of gray hair.  During the day after getting bored at one point he yelled for us to “change the map”.  Oh, topical humor.

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Lea Dekker/littlekitty

This isn’t the most representative picture of Lea I have but the others made her either look fat or like she was about to eat someone so I thought this was a nice compromise.  Lea’s education has proven… lacking in some areas which I documented throughout the weekend.

List of Things to Which Lea Claimed Ignorance

  • Beaver as synonym for vagina
  • Cornbread
  • John Stewart and Stephen Colbert
  • Exit Only as a statement of opposition to anal sex
  • What a “b-boy” is
  • Mr. T
  • Porn on DVD
  • Understatement
  • Chuck Norris (added 30 Jun 09)
  • Religion of the Pope (added 30 Jun 09)

This is not mocking her ignorances merely that it was an interesting collection.  Most people would fake knowledge, Lea refuses to, which I think is to be valued.  The last note “understatement” requires a bit of explanation.

Peter: Bluthium thinks we harsh on hackers too much.
Me: I think that’s a spot of an understatement.  We exterminate them with extreme prejudice.
Lea: Well, what’s wrong with “harsh”?
Me: I don’t think “harshing” is strong enough.  That’s like saying the Nazi’s “harshed” on the Jews, Roma, and gays.
Lea: But they did.

The Meerkats

The best portion of the zoo trip was the meerkat pen where Peter and I proved extremely popular with the lil’ bastards.

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Turns out they really liked my camera/monopod combination, to the point where spent about 30 minutes staring at them staring at us.  We were eventually yelled at by a park docent for scaring them despite doing nothing besides standing and staring at them staring at us for about 30 minutes.

We took a constitutional on the false promise of coffee.  The bathroom had a profoundly powerful (I say diesel powered) hand dryer which may have served as inspiration for the pyro’s compression blast.

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Will approved.

The search for coffee involved an 8-block walk to get sufficient caffeine to have the energy to walk 8 blocks back.  Caribou coffee appeared to be more descriminatory than Starbucks or my more familiar kitchen coffee pot as none of carried sufficient Apple products to sit inside.  I could have walked back to my car to grab my iPod and iPhone thinking that’d be effectively a MacBook Air but decided against it.

We had dinner at a restaurant that found a way to hid an entire tossed salad into the hamburger.  The ribs blew and I left a measly 28% tip.  Tard and I returned to Pants’ appartment where Tard fell asleep.  I learned a vital lesson: Pants can hold his liquor like a f*ing champ.  Peter and Audrey make their own soda to avoid the 10% Chicago “pop tax” and over the evening he downed two 1-liter bottles of grapefruit soda.  Except instead of using water as his base he used vodka.  The only indication that there was a trace of blood in his alcohol level was when I challenged his sobriety and he said “my sleech doesn’t splur”.   I met Ivan, his 16 lb cat who sports a crappy Russian accent in which he largely says “I am sooo fat”.  I really wish I had a recording.

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Gregg and Marcus came over to build decks for Friday Night Magic when I was talking with some people over Mumble, the voice chat utility Team Interrobang uses when they heard one of the female team members talking.

Gregg: Is that a girl?
Me: Yes.  Team Interrobang is slightly above a total sausagefest, possibly at the simply awkward level of female participation.
Gregg: Wow, does she shoot people?
Female Member over Mumble: Guess what, Terry?
Me: What?
Female Member over Mumble: I’m going to the gun range tomorrow.
Gregg: You have the greatest team in the history of the planet.

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A charismatic Team Interrobang member proposed we change our names to AFI top 100 villians and raid other servers and try to make friends. So, 16 of us gathered and I as Auric Goldfinger raided some servers. The first server had 10 people or so in it, and after joining all but 2 of them left leaving a 9 to 1 ratio of Team Interrobang members to pubs. The second server called me for mic spamming for asking what stats package they used. Finally, we found a 32 person server with 18 slots and we piled in only to be greeted as some sort of TF2 savior for filling their server. One admin changed his name to “OMG Our Server’s Full” another wondered aloud if they could handle so many people. It was quite sad.

So, what started out as a recruiting expedition turned into some sort of bizarre deliverance for a failing servers. But it wasn’t a total bust, we’re thinking for a small fee a server that has trouble filling could rent us to create some sort of gaming Potemkin village. We could throw the same softball questions each time like to make them look good like “Is your server always this awesome?” and “do you have a program where I can pay money to you for guaranteed placement?” and for a little more, we’d even engineer it so the side of the renter’s choosing would win. Direct all paypal payments to teaminterrobangpayments@gmail.com at a rate of $3.00 per shill/hour.