Bulbagarden Forums - Blogs - Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/ Bulbagarden - The original Pokémon Community en Sun, 26 May 2013 04:57:20 GMT vBulletin 60 http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/images/styles/Millenium/misc/rss.jpg Bulbagarden Forums - Blogs - Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/ <![CDATA[Servin' it up Starfleet Style]]> http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/servin-up-starfleet-style-55387/ Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:17:38 GMT Those who know me know that I'm a massive Star Trek nerd. In fact, I was even writing a fanfic which I may be returning to soon. Those who also know me know that I love to kick ass in multiplayer player vs. player (PvP) scenarios.

Which brings me to today, where I did just that. Star Trek: Online is a relatively obscure MMO that has a lot of internal structure problems. Buggy missions, poor quality cutscenes, lots of controversial decisions by the developers and a whole host of other problems keep it from being amazing. But at its core, it's pretty good, especially ground PvP.


That's me, Ameena Blackmoore, captain of the U.S.S. Purity, engaged in some very lopsided warfare against three Klingons. It was literally 3v1 from the start of the match and I almost gave up when the rest of my team deserted on me.

I told myself, 'No. You've learned a lot when training to become an effective ground fighter. Give it a go.' So I charged head on into the opposing team, keeping in mind that it was just me alone against three players. They wiped the floor with me. I was up against some decently skilled opponents. They knew how to distribute their damage accordingly to counter my healing abilities and get me when my defenses were dried up.

I think I was taken out twelve or thirteen times before I scored my first kill against S'Rreg. Accusations of cheating flew through the air. There's no way a single person could have faced a team of three, killed one and made their escape! Impossible! I identified S'Rreg as the weak link and focused my attacks on him. I killed him again, but I wasn't able to get away that second time.

The following 40 minutes, I was running back and forth, dodging lasers, scanning with my tricorder to find cloaked opponents, running my fucking legs off so I could get some breathing room to heal myself and regroup. I kept targeting and killing S'Rreg until he stopped respawning. My weak link took himself out of the game so that the other two could finish the game without me racking up the kills against him.

I'm amazed I did so well to be honest. I often struggle with skilled opponents, but I was in the zone today. I was watching the reckless and aggressive playstyles the other two were using against me. I was analyzing their movements and their tactics and switching up my own to counter them. Instead of allowing them to take the fight to me, I took the fight to them. I pulled my shotgun out of my inventory and sat at corners, waiting to ambush them for maximum damage, even oneshotting them a few times.

In the end, I turned the tide. I was about to give up when I managed to kill one of them. This separated them, as they started respawning in different areas of the map, completely alone. I was a vulture, picking them apart one by one, and eventually my "team" score passed theirs and carried on to victory.

I displayed a high level of skill, I'd say. I managed my healing abilities (unlike most MMOs, Star Trek Online features reactive healing rather than proactive healing; your healing abilities are put on relatively long cooldowns once you use them rather than being spammable), used hard cover properly to avoid extended periods of taking laser blasts, timed my offensive capabilities to burst my opponents down with overwhelming force, etc.

Instead of congratulating me for bravely taking three people on and giving them the first tough target to take down they've probably ever had, they accused me of hacking. Apparently because I was running around so much to avoid taking too much fire, I was speed hacking. Apparently because I was using my big boy gun after awhile and coupling them with an item to increase my damage briefly, I was cheating by boosting my damage. Apparently because I'm a scientist and I can heal myself (just look at those numbers!), that made me a cheater too! Apparently my victory wasn't achieved through skill, dedication to learning the ins and outs of combat or proper tactics. I didn't know what I was doing, nope, it was all cheating!

I'm not sure why I wrote so much other than I'm excited for having faced such a terrifying situation and coming out on top for once. I've been in 3v1 situations before that have all ended in disaster. It gave me quite a workout too, I think. My heartbeat was going crazy, I broke out into a cold sweat and I spent a lot of time thinking of how to win. It was the only cardio exercise I've gotten in the past six months, and I didn't have to lift an arm or move my legs. :P

I've no doubt been reported for my "supposed" cheating. I'll be really surprised if I don't get some sort of notification that my account is being investigated, cause honestly, those numbers are pretty hard to believe. Most games end with people getting around 10k damage and 7k healing if they've got healing abilities. But then again, most games don't last 40 minutes, don't have one target doing all of the fighting and one target taking all of the damage.

Eh, what can I say? I'm proud of my accomplishment. It's taken almost a year (and three months taking a break) to develop the ins and outs, and I finally got to put them to the test. If only my opponents could understand honour and integrity, they may have fought harder and actually won. ]]> Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/servin-up-starfleet-style-55387/ Very suspicious! http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/very-suspicious-53844/ Sat, 10 Nov 2012 20:32:46 GMT Last night, I turned on my radio as I do every weekday night to listen to a little talk radio. I generally don't take what I hear to heart, I just like to hear the hosts and guests get angry at each other. Can't argue with free entertainment! However, I noticed something strange...

My usual AM station I listen to at night hosts the conservative talk show, the Savage Nation (those who also listen to him will understand what I mean when I say the host frequently becomes enraged). He's an entertaining guy to listen to because he brings up some interesting points that nobody else really does, he talks about his dog, chats with guests and callers about random topics, etc.

But I couldn't listen last night. There was an unusual amount of radio interference. The channel was practically static with some barely understandable talking. I flipped through the stations, all of them on the AM band. As far as I'm aware, only one other radio station in my area hosts a partisan talk show; that was fuzz and static. But it goes deeper. The economic-focused talk show? Static. The AM Jazz station? Static. Only two of the seven AM radio stations I found were working properly.

I thought it was strange, so I decided to do a little investigating. I got in my car and pulled out, driving around the area. It seemed the interference was local, as the further I drove from my house, the weaker it got. The stations were coming in crystal clear about 7 blocks away. So I went back home and started checking out the opposite direction. The further I went, the louder and more interfering the static became. Even the two AM radio stations I mentioned earlier were being affected.

Eventually, the static died down on my main station. No static, no talk radio, just silence. The same was true for every other station except for those two, which were now completely covered in static and couldn't be listened to. I switched to FM. Most of the stations had heavy static, but I could identify the songs still. I kept driving around, trying to figure out what was going on when I noticed a new fence had been put up around an old industrial building that had been abandoned since 1998. I couldn't see much more because it was pitch fucking black outside, so I slept on it.

Fast forward to today, I returned. About 200 feet out from the building, my radio completely dies. My GPS goes screwy. I'm pretty sure that this is the source of the interference, but it didn't make sense. I got out of my car and walked around a bit. The fence was indeed brand new. The old rusty, bent poles were replaced with shiny new ones, the holes in the chain link fence were gone, and at the top, barbed wire been installed. It's obvious they wanted to keep someone out, especially when I saw the assortment of locks on the newly installed gate.

I'm not much of a law breaker, so I stayed out of the fenced in area. I looked up at the building and noticed a radio antenna on it that I'd never seen before. It looked at least 50 feet tall, but I can't measure things by just looking at them. I saw surveillance cameras along the building. They looked fairly similar to a fairly expensive 2010 model that I used to set up a security system for a job site I was working on last spring... I didn't see any vehicles on the property, but it is a weekend, so who knows if it's a job site for something.

I'm not sure what's going on in that building, but I don't like it. I'm going to talk to neighbours next, to see what they know about it, to see who put this technology up and hopefully get to the bottom of it. Whatever's going on in that building is completely blacking out the surrounding neighbourhood about half a mile out. Or maybe I'll just go to the city about it instead of getting tangled up in it, that seems like the wiser thing to do here. ]]> Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/very-suspicious-53844/ So I went driving... (GTA4) http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/so-i-went-driving-gta4-51522/ Mon, 27 Aug 2012 21:28:11 GMT


Needless to say, I'm pretty bad (or awesome?) at driving. That's supposed to be a minivan, but it looked like a compact by the time I got through with it. ]]> Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/so-i-went-driving-gta4-51522/ Where do I go from here? http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/where-do-i-go-here-43886/ Mon, 05 Mar 2012 03:25:34 GMT This blog is mostly related to my (mostly) dead fanfic located here. If you're not much of a follower or not interested, feel free to turn back.

So a few nights ago, I was going through my old files related to this fanfic. I have tons of chapter snippets, quotes, alternate endings, character biographies/analysiseseses, concepts, even pointless backstory that nobody will ever know about. I got to reading my ideas for the final chapter, which I even started writing a little bit. Then I read the section 1 and 2 finales, or at least the concepts behind them.

They're pretty good, if I do say so myself.

But the problem is, I don't know how to get to them. I have a general idea of how the story progresses, since I have that all planned out, but I ended chapter 7 (the last one that my partner and I finished) in a weird place that I don't know how to escape from properly.

Chapter 8 has gone through several rewrites, but the beginning has stayed the same. The main character, Andrea, catches a Pokemon before sending her current travelling partner home so he can finally enjoy his vacation from his own adventure. Currently, I've had the main character almost becoming a Gyarados' lunch while crossing a river, a random "NPC", so to say, actually becoming a Gyarados' lunch and her witnessing it, and a different approach, the main character accompanying her father to his place of work, the Storm Island Police Headquarters.

All of these have been pretty terrible. While the police headquarters route sets up a subplot that will surface much later on, it turns into a boring early 90s Law and Order-like chapter. The plot goes nowhere, there's too much wordy dialogue, etc. But apart from those three ideas, I can't figure anything out. I thought about making a throw-away plot to attach to the end of the capture of the Pokemon and the sendoff of the friend. But I am literally without ideas.

Catching the Pokemon is a major point that needs to happen, as it later goes on to become a cornerstone in her team. Same with the way she sends her friend home, that'll feed into emotional/personality development later on. So I can't just warp to the next area without that stuff happening. But I'd also feel weird cutting an entire route out between the city the character is leaving and the forest she's travelling to, especially in the middle of a chapter.

So, anyone else have anything? This little issue right here is the reason this fanfic has been cancelled, but I don't want it to end like that. I've been looking through the weekly prompts in the Writer's Workshop, but nothing has really worked out. ]]> Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/where-do-i-go-here-43886/ <![CDATA[I think I just changed my dad's mind on same sex marriage]]> http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/i-think-i-just-changed-my-dads-mind-same-sex-marriage-37805/ Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:57:01 GMT My dad's an old school guy. Born in the late 40s, raised in the McCarthy anti-soviet era, devout catholic background, critical of the free love hippie movement. One of his biggest beliefs (until today, hopefully?) was in the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, something he was very unwilling to change his stance on.

This morning, I received a wedding invitation in the mail. Two of my high school friends, both men, are getting married some time in December. I left the invitation on the kitchen table and went on about my day. My dad came home from breakfast with his former coworkers and saw the invitation sitting on the table. The next time I'm around him, he brings it up. At first I thought he was going to be all "Hey, don't go. It's not right what they're doing." But surprisingly, he was alright with me going (probably because I would anyways), he just didn't agree with the marriage in question. We proceeded to debate a bit about it, when he brought up the whole "A marriage is a sanctimonious union between a man and a woman." thing. "Two men or two women, or two whatevers can't get married! It's a sacred rite passed down from God!"

I shot his argument down pretty quick. My ammo? Kim Kardashian. Yeah, that sham of a marriage that only lasted, what, 2 months? That was quite the sacred union. Then I pointed out the various hollywood marriages that end in disaster weeks or even days later. Or the drunk couple who met in a Las Vegas casino and said "I do!" 3 hours later. They step all over the traditional values of marriage that my father holds so high. Now, it's true. Same sex marriage will step on his personal beliefs. Marriage through history wasn't defined with that in mind, I can see that point.

After I brought all of that up, he paused for a minute, thinking probably. And he's all "You know what? You're right. Marriage isn't sacred anymore. Fuck those movie star bastards, they ruined the last good religious thing we fuckin' had." (Did I mention my dad swears more than that movie, Scarface?)

I'm not much of a religious person, but don't get me wrong. I wish marriage meant something other than you lose half of your net worth when you can't decide which movie to watch together. I wish it was more than a business contract.

Anyways, It'll be awhile before I see if he really has changed his opinion, but from our conversation afterward, I'm just hoping he has. If so, score one for me. I've done the impossible. ]]> Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/i-think-i-just-changed-my-dads-mind-same-sex-marriage-37805/ Well that was terrifying. http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/well-terrifying-37044/ Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:59:59 GMT I was driving down the highway back home from dinner. The sun went down, so it was kinda dark as I was returning home, and it was raining too. I don't like driving in those conditions, but whatever, I had to.

But anyways, as I was heading down a stretch of the highway, three cars ahead of me had a little disagreement and got tangled up as I was coming at them at about 65 mph. I'm surprised I was able to so quickly, but I swerved out of the way just barely missing them, but I'd lost control at that point. So here I was, going back and forth on the slippery highway trying to regain control of my car, when my car decided to slide sideways.

I thought I was done for when I turned that way, but to my surprise I didn't roll over. Instead, I slammed right into the curb that holds the guardrail on the side of the road, thumping my rear driver's side wheel into it. After I caught my breath, I got out and took a look at the damage but didn't see any, so I continued home. The drive didn't feel right, so when I got home I crawled under my car and looked around.

Long story short, I think I need a new car. I cracked the axle on the rear driver's side and bent the frame of the car. I'm surprised I was able to get it home in that condition. I must have hit that guard rail pretty hard to have done that.

This is not what I needed right now... I'm busting my ass as it is at work to get some extra money so I can pay for some medication that my insurance isn't able to cover in full, I don't see myself having the money to spend on a new car (or even to fix this one, which doesn't look like it's going to happen) for a few months, maybe even a year. Unless I can fix it myself, at least... My dad might actually have the right equipment for setting car frames straight. o_o

Oh well, at least I walked away from that. Since I drive a soft-top convertible, if that thing rolled over like I thought it would, oooh man I'd have been fucked. So there's that to look at, on the bright side of things. ]]> Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/well-terrifying-37044/ <![CDATA[I'm confused]]> http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/im-confused-35828/ Fri, 23 Sep 2011 03:51:42 GMT So earlier tonight I was visiting another forum and there was a topic about the legalisation of marijuana in the US and a petition on the White House's own webpage that has nearly doubled the goal it set for signatures in just the first day.

That forum is generally very liberal when it comes to drug use, legalisation, etc. So naturally, people flocked to the thread to pour out their support for the movement, pushing forward their own aspirations of how they want it legalised, regulated and taxed.

Then I started reading the names of the people posting how this will be the greatest thing to have happened in the past 50 years for the US government. Of everyone who posted showing their undying support for the government regulated legalisation of marijuana, 90% of them bitch and moan about how the government shouldn't be regulating health care, they shouldn't be taxing us, they shouldn't blah blah blah...

So, I'm a bit confused. There are these people who are violently anti-establishment who cheer on every ill conceived notion of people rising up against "government oppression" saying it's a victory for the common man when nothing really happens. Then they turn around and say "Aww yeah, the government should totally do this for us!" Why? Why sell your own views about your own government short just because it might get marijuana legalised?

I don't get it. I typically view these kind of people as a little... out of their mind to begin with, but then... bleh I don't even know. It just seems so strange, and I'm wondering if anyone else is confused at stuff like this as well. ]]> Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/im-confused-35828/ <![CDATA[It's official, I'm gonna be a mom again!]]> http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/its-official-im-gonna-mom-again-16089/ Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:22:33 GMT So I was at the doctor's a few weeks back getting some blood work done. My doctor thinks it's cute to stab me with a gigantic needle every 6 to 12 months, because I've always had low amounts of iron in my blood ever since I was a kid (which is no good, if you didn't know). The test results came back and said I had normal blood-iron levels for the first time in 15 years, but there was also something else floating around in my system once more... this stuff! My doctor told me that the tests to find this stuff aren't the most reliable, as she's tested positive for high amounts of it herself once, but hasn't had any kids.

So, unless my, erm... "time of the month" decides that a week of being fashionably late is a nice prank to pull on me, I think that it's pretty much confirmed that I'm pregnant with my second kid, already... It came out of left field at me to be totally honest, but hey! I'm still psyched. I'd always thought I wouldn't need children to complete my life, but now with my daughter Ameena I can't imagine life without her. And soon, if all goes to plan, I'll have another to live my life with...

Anyways, I figured I'd let you guys know.


(PS: please try not to criticize me for having two children at my age, I really don't care about your personal/religious morals. I've already had this issue elsewhere and I won't deal with it again.) ]]> Caitlin http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/blogs/38738/its-official-im-gonna-mom-again-16089/