Rant 1145 / More Ice Packs Needed!

Been playing some Spec Ops: The Line. Pretty good game, although it's nothing fantastic. Pretty good for a game I play while waiting for better games to be released.

It also reminded me of this conversation about FPS games during my ICT. It felt kinda awkward talking about the finesse involved in making headshots in the presence of an actual marksman. We were all killing time in the office and there was this platoon commander who was done with his admin stuff and decided to sit with us office admin people while we were chatting as we waited for bed time.

Among those present, only I knew he was a marksman because I was next to him at the range in the previous days where I saw his perfect scores and the small spread of all his shots. I checked everyone around me and some after me, and no one had a spread as small as his. He never missed a single shot throughout the practices, so after the last I asked him if he was a marksman before, to which he replied yes.

A marksman here refers to someone who has gotten the marksman award at the range, in case anyone confuses the term with a sniper.

So at one point we spoke about FPS and I turned out to be the only FPS player there. It got pretty silly when someone brought up the point that FPS makes people more violent but that was shot down by someone else who argued that being a fan of FPS is a sign of a violent person, therefore FPS games are not a cause but a symptom.

Regardless I just threw in the weak defence that it was about instant gratification and it takes finesse to make headshots frequently. In fact, to be able to get headshots all the time requires a kind of inner peace and gentle clicks (too much pressure will shift the mouse and every pixel matters when it comes to headshots), and this is exactly the same with real guns - one needs to be calm and press the trigger gently to avoid moving the gun.

And it felt weird saying that as if I was an expert because there he was, the marksman who never missed a shot, sitting next to me while we both knew I was actually pretty bad at the night firing. In daylight, I missed one shot each on both days, but I really sucked at night firing because on the second day, only 40% of my shots hit. Plus my spread was bigger than his, and spread's the most important statistic IMO. If your shots' spread is tiny, the only reason you're missing can only be that your gun hasn't been zeroed properly.

I really need to train up my arms so that they get less tired when I fire in prone position.

I'm pretty sure that if he played FPS games and got the hang of the controls, he would be a much better player than me.

























Checked out P90X. Looks tough. I wonder if I can go through the entire 90 days of the Lean version.

As for the food, I don't think it will be too hard. I already have the brown rice ready and it's actually not as bad as some say. It's more al dente and kinda spongy while normal white rice is soft.

Will be starting this tomorrow and include this with the RT sessions. The plan is to do this in the morning and have the RTs in the evenings, except for two Sundays during which I think I will skip this in lieu of the morning RTs.




















We should not settle for "just enough" whenever we can. It is this philosophy of being satisfied with "just enough" that makes life bad.

Plenty of people believe that the status quo is fine and does not need to be changed. They can stick with the old and there is no reason to fix that which is not broken.

The problem there is that they have merely adapted to the issues that the old have, whatever they may be. For example, my crappy N8 operates with terrible hardware and the ancient Symbian OS, making it unbearably slow sometimes compared to the iPad especially when it comes to rotating the screen.

None of the issues ever went away; they have simply built up a tolerance for them.

Except all tolerance can be worn down, be it by a bad day, a once-in-a-lifetime tragedy or just a tiny bump in one's daily routines. Recall how tiny little issues that you had never really noticed really pissed you off that one time although you know they were not the real reason you were angry?

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

It's the same with taking buses and trains. There are lots of commuters who think there's no reason to drive to work or take a cab, but tiny problems like a late train, some kind of little incident while squeezing in a packed train for half an hour, these things can give what could have been a normal day a bad start, thus possibly turning the day into a bad day.

If you take a cab to work or drive to the office in the morning, you get there still feeling awesome (unless you hate your job) and it's likelier that your day will continue to be good.

What I'm saying is that we should make our days better than "just enough" through our daily routines so that there is always that emotional buffer to handle the inevitable bad events.