Left 4 Disappointment 2

I've been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead 2 lately. A lot. Purchasing this game in no way helped calm my preexisting addiction to all things zombie; since its arrival, my dependency on the living dead has only grown stronger. Like some kind of super villain or something.

I finally got around to installing my drawing program on my netbook, hence this drawing and my fucking awesome new banner.

I was playing earlier today(no surprise, to be honest), and my parents were conveniently not home. See, since my netbook can barely handle Minesweeper, I'm unable to play games on here; this means I'm using my parent's desktop to play L4D2. If you're not familiar with my gripes over the desktop, either because your memory is horrible and you should be ashamed or because you haven't been reading my blog very long(which is also horrible and worthy of shame), then let me rehash this topic.

It's roughly three, three and a half years old. It hardly has anything installed, something like 80% of its original memory is still intact. The processor is somewhat above average, I can't remember exactly what it is, but I know it's around 2.6ghz or so. There is no reason for this computer to run slowly. The reality of this situation? It behaves like we've had it for 10+ years. So you might see where my frustrations lie when I try to play my wonderfully modern zombie game.

The game runs, you see; the desktop meets at least the minimum requirements to play it. I checked before I bought it. The problem is that, for some inexplicable reason, the computer decided it would be fun one day to give us the middle finger and run as slowly as it damn well pleases.

So as I was saying before I got sidetracked, I was playing by myself with the volume turned up relatively high because, if you're not familiar with zombie games, it's fun to scare the shit out of yourself when a screaming zombie comes running around a corner and then you begin to wildly fire your gun in any direction. I transition from shrieks of terror to maniacal laughter on a very consistent basis, and I'm sure any person within earshot of my cackles is under the assumption that my family is housing some kind of disturbed mental patient.

Up until this point, I've somehow managed to avoid my parents discovering the sheer brutality within the game, such as when you start throwing your chainsaw around and blood and zombie limbs fly everywhere; I kind of screwed up today in that regard. My parents walked in the house to the sound of the dying screams of zombies, which sent my mother into a state of sheer panic. Before I have a chance to react, they're both standing in the doorway, mouths agape at the on-screen carnage, with my mom asking an eerily calm tone when I decided to become evil.


Now, I've never considered myself to be evil, and in my mind, ridding the world of flesh-craved zombies is anything but evil; I'm pretty sure the Boy Scouts of America give a badge for zombie extermination. And if they don't, they should, because it's nothing short of an exemplary public service. My parents will be happy one day when the world is thrust into a zombie apocalypse and the extensive time I spent sitting behind a screen, hacking at would-be zombies, is what saves our lives. 


I think behind his shock, my dad thought the game looked fun. He kind of stood there and watched me play for a little bit, asking questions about what gun I was using or what the bile jars do(makes one zombie the target of the others, just in case you were wondering), sometimes cringing when my axe(Uh, spellcheck is telling me that 'axe' is not a word. What the hell.) managed to behead the occasional unlucky zombie. Maybe I can convince him to play.


My mom, on the other hand, will continue to wonder where she went wrong with me; a question that started around the time I bit my sister in the stomach. My question to her is, since when is wanting to kill zombies a bad thing? I would understand if the game was called Puppies and Kitties: Total Destruction and consisted of murdering innocent baby animals. That's pretty sadistic. But zombies? Really? Maybe she's infected, and as a zombie, is against the slaughter of her kind.


I'll be keeping my eye on her.

My bite is worse than my roar.

When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to watch that much TV, which was a good thing; it forced me to actually go outside and play, something I loved to do. Nowadays, I sit in my room with my curtains drawn, swaddled in blankets and a hoodie regardless of the weather. Not nearly as healthy as my childhood activities.


My family was also in a much different situation: we only had one television in the house, much simpler than our current three. So if I wanted to watch something, not only did I need to have "TV time" left for the day, but the TV itself needed to be free. Being the youngest member of the family, I was at the bottom of the food chain, so to speak; if my sister wanted to watch something, she had the power to take over the living room by force. We never really fought when we were younger, and we're as close as a brother and sister can be to this day, but I choose to believe that she enjoyed tormenting me as a child. The major weapon that was employed against me was tickling, but she sometimes branched out into the classic physically-move-me-to-another-room-and-lock-me-in-there-despite-my-constant-blood-curdling-screams-and-begging-for-mercy technique. I tried to fight back as best I could, but it's hard to defend yourself when you're five and a 13-year-old's tickling is bringing your bladder closer and closer to emergency release.


So my tiny, single-digit-year-old self wasn't strong enough to outright overpower her. Maybe this is how I became more of an introverted, planning-type person; my attacks needed to be covert and unexpected. After what was probably a couple days, but what felt like years, I had created some semblance of a plan in my underdeveloped mind. What I was specifically going to do, I wasn't sure; but I knew I needed to strike when she wasn't expecting it. One day, the opportunity presented itself. 


She was lying on the couch on her back, and since it was the 90s, she was wearing some form of a belly shirt; this was exacerbated by the fact that her arms were behind her head, pulling it up a little bit farther. I was off in a corner playing with my dinosaurs, silently watching, waiting for her attention to shift from how annoying my guttural growls and roars were to the new Boyz II Men video playing on MTV. I thought to myself how ironic it was that she was the one watching TV this time around, unaware of my imminent attack. Except MTV was way more boring than The Busy World of Richard Scarry, so her multiple affronts on me were worse than my simple plot for revenge. I was more than justified.


Noticing her revealed stomach, the plan that had been floating around in my mind suddenly became grounded; I knew what I had to do. With a devious smile on my face and a charging shout that would put Braveheart to shame, I ran forward and bit down on her stomach with such vigor that my attack was more effective than I ever thought it would be; almost immediately upon contact, the skin of her stomach broke open, creating a sizable wound that I was sure my dinosaurs would be proud of. Her screams of pain brought me back to reality and out of my state of euphoria, followed by a quick flurry of arms hitting me in retaliation. Minutes later, she was on the way to the hospital with my dad while my mom spent a gratuitous chunk of time explaining to me that it was not okay to bite people on the stomach, something that I did not understand or agree with, followed by cries of wondering where she had gone wrong with me.


I don't really know when or how I decided it would be fun to start biting people, but this is my best guess as to when it began. After having broken the skin of my sister's stomach and subjecting her to a very painful tetanus shot, I got the taste for blood and began to seek out any opportunity to strike again. More than convinced my razor sharp fangs were more than a match for my sister' brute strength, I spent hours stalking her, pretending I was a velociraptor hunting down my wounded prey. I pounced only when I was sure her guard was down and I had a chance to rip a generous portion of flesh from my unsuspecting victim. Much to her benefit, the same opportunity never presented itself and a short decade later, I realized that biting people was not a socially accepted behavior and decided to grow out of my "LOL I'M SO RANDOM AND WEIRD" phase, something that I have come to loathe and pretend never existed. 


But it was all worth it. After my mom was done lecturing me about how I can't bite people and that, for the thousandth time, I'm not a dinosaur, the living room was empty; the television was mine. My sister has forgotten the lesson I taught her that day, or maybe she never understood why I thought it was a good idea to bite her stomach and send her to the hospital, but I knew. You don't get between me and something I want. And five year old me wanted to watch Sesame Street.