Perks Response 2

Dear Friend

Being kind of on break, watching my brother play Halo, joining in every now and then, is an interesting time to think. Halo is a pretty interesting mindset on its own. Being stupidly trigger happy is rewarded as often as it goes punished. You're usually okay if the idiots on your side outnumber the idiots on the other side, but only if everybody on both sides is an idiot. Four idiots are going to lose to three idiots and one person that's on top of things. A whole team of people that know what they're doing is just unfair, but it doesn't happen too often. Something like 50% of Americans play videogames in one form or another, and it feels like 80% of Americans that play blockbuster hits are too stupid or too rude to have enough friends to become coordinated.

It's a riot when you get a team of idiots that look like they know what they're doing, though. It takes a lot of luck, too. None of the idiots can be competing with each other, doing the same thing, or you get just enough confusion to metaphorically shoot yourselves in the foot. My friends and I were pretty lucky. Most of the time, each of us was just adventurous enough to have options when our favourites were taken, to take a gamble when it might be rewarding or at least funny, to remember what we were supposed to be doing in the middle of everything.

We had a habit of piling into a friend's basement, with a TV or two, an XBox or two, a copy or two of a few games. Halo happened the most, because it was the most fun and the least one-sided. Every now and then, one of us that sucked occasionally pulled a miracle out of nowhere. My favourite miracle happened in a game that didn't revolve entirely around kills, which was pretty good for me because my aim sucks. I still don't know exactly how it happened. We were all in the same room, and lucky on top of that. Ambitious in all the right ways, everywhere that we needed to be. Out of 25 points to go around the entire match (territories on Snowbound, before they took out some of the shield-doors), we had over 20. That IS most rounds being complete shut-outs. On top of that colossal victory, our worst player ended up taking MVP. It's probably never going to happen again, but it was great while it lasted.

Later on that same day, too. I don't remember anything else about the round except it was CTF on Zanzibar's bastard child of a map. One huge thing went wrong, and so many little things went right to fix it. We'd let one of them take the flag. I was right there in a Warthog. Fighting was going on just close enough that he probably didn't notice the little red dot on my name. I was signed in as a guest, so if he was paying attention, he didn't care that I was talking. The most important thing, though, was a brilliant, ridiculous, proven strategy from Halo 2. "EphY, go up to him and honk." It was perfect. I honked to get his attention as soon as I was headed in his direction, I turned to let him in as soon as I was close enough. A perfect sitting target. We the pinnacle of teamwork and luck. were boundless, infinite. A group of inspired idiots that could take over the world. I wish we still had time for that.

Write you again some time,
EphY

EDIT: Something is just screwed with my time settings. The first one was posted at like 10AM, this one was posted around 5:26. It's set at GMT-7 every time I check, maybe daylight savings has something to do with that, but the time is still all over the place.