I have three things to discuss today: Hard Contact & hiking, my impressions of Triple Zero the second time through, and some of my thoughts on the "clone wars".

Warning: this entry possibly breaks some world records on length. I ramble, what can I say! And maybe this makes up for my lack-of updating lately. I probably should have split this into three entries, but meh...

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Last week I went hiking with my parents. Just a relatively short day hike - only 12km - but it was still fun, and the shortness was good because I hadn't gone hiking for a long time (our family used to hike a lot, but nowadays we only do when camping - once a year). Anyways, I felt like such a kid because I was totally pretending that it was Qiilura (forests and fields!) and I was one of the Omegas going to blow up Sep stuff. Well, except for the lack of weapons, armour (I was wearing camo though!), bad guys, and gdans. And I was hardly 'tabbing'... 6-10 km/h is really really fast (and I had to pause and wait for the parents every once in a while) and didn't have a 25 kg pack (maybe 2 kg, max - just some food and water). But I had my MP3 player with me and for part of it I was listening to RepCom music, and it was awesome. And then guess what... about halfway through, we came to a quarry!! It was such a coincidence, and I had the biggest urge to go down and 'liberate' some explosives from it. Haha. Fantasy is awesome. I can't play with other people anymore - because I'm old - but I can still do it by myself. And in a way, it's more fun now, because not only am I pretending, but I can simultaneously compare my fantasy world with the real world and analyze how they're related (or not). It's very interesting.

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I recently finished reading Republic Commando: Triple Zero for the second time, and it was quite interesting. I still love the book, but almost for different reasons than I did the first time. When I originally read the book, at the start of March, I finished the whole thing in about a day and a half (and I don't skim-read!) so everything happened fast. This time I took a couple weeks to read the book (I was reading 1984 at the same time) and I think I was able to absorb the detail a bit more. Anyways, here's a short list of things I noticed the second time through:
- pg. 221: "The civilians around him could have no idea what was happening right in the middle of their safe, daily lives. A few meters from them, a mercenary and a soldier who had no official orders were planning to unload enough explosives on the black market to destroy whole quadrants. But it was a fair trade. Because Fi had no idea of what their lives were about, either." That was a really interesting perspective, and makes me wonder about the things that go on in our world that no one has any idea about. And it was interesting to see that as much as the clones have learned about "real life" in the year since Geonosis, they're still not part of the civilian world and really never could be.
- pg. 221: "Fi wondered if [Darman] realized that everyone knew what was going on with him and [Etain]." This made me smile because there's so many times that you think something is a secret, yet it's really so obvious and everyone around you knows.
- pg. 245 - Fi is considering Darman and Etain's relationship and he thinks, Why is this hurting so much? Why do I feel I've been cheated? And wow, all I can say is I empathise with Fi so much there - I've asked those exact questions so many times. *wants to give Fi a big hug*
- There were two parts in the book where I found myself doing things along with the characters as I was reading. (Yes, huge geek alert.) One was with the Dha Werda Verda... whenever the lyrics were written in the book, I would whisper them out loud to myself in the correct rhythm. And the other time, oddly enough, was when Fi and Scorch were tagging the baddies with Dust, and the book explained how they'd exhale slowly and then pause their breathing while they fired. I would do the same thing while reading. I also tried it out when I was practicing sniping in Battlefield 2, though it's really not all that important in games because it's only your mouse hand that needs to stay steady when you're firing. I feel like a huge geek, but oh well.
- pg. 253 - Ordo notices that "females of all species employed in the center seemed to spend a lot of time in the 'freshers rearranging their appearance". *giggle* Females are so silly sometimes.
- This time through, I didn't like Ordo quite so much... in fact, he kinda creeps me out now. pg. 262 - Ordo was looking into Etain's eyes and he realised that "[e]xcept for Skirata, the only eyes so unlike his own that he'd ever studied at that range were alien, and shortly before he killed their owner". pg. 282 - Ordo to Jinart: "You can cooperate or not, but I might as well execute you now if you're not going to be useful. We can't handle any more prisoners." And Etain thinking that it was "always hard to tell if Ordo was playing the interrogation game or simply stating his intentions". pg. 308 - When Ordo assassinates the traitor Hela Madiry. "Hello, aruetii"... Eeep, creepy. I still like Ordo somewhat and feel sorry for him, but boy, I would not like to be within a few km of him!
- pg. 300 - "... until Mustafar freezes over." *grin* That's a rather nerdy expression I've used myself, so it was awesome seeing Kal use it! LOL. That and I'm slightly obsessed with the Star Wars versions of common Earth expressions... I had a list of some of them once, don't know what happened to it. (Hehe, "lift tube music"!)
- I have to say, I loved the final assault on the Sep cell 100% more this time through. Probably because the first time I read it, my brain was somewhat wasted from reading for so many hours straight. But the second time, I noticed all the cool things about the way the battle was described. It wasn't a cool and calmly thought out and described battle... it was more a disjointed description: "this happened", "whoever was doing this", "there was a sound coming from there", "that happened", etc. It made the battle seem so confusing and fast. And you know what? I loved that. It made it seem real. I've never been in combat, obviously, but from gaming I know that when people are shooting at you, you don't have time to stop and think and notice everything about what's going on around you. You act, or you die. (And sometimes both.) Mistakes can happen, you definitely can't keep track of what all your teammates are doing, and a lot of time you can't actually reconstruct what happened until the battle is over. That's the same kind of feel I got from reading that part of the book. Even the little things, like Kal not knowing who ran over - Fi or Niner? - or spoke on the comlink - Sev or Scorch? - were reminiscent... in Battlefield 2, the two 'teams' have different clothing, but I'm not practiced enough to identify friend from foe by that so I don't even notice. The way it works for me is with the nametags above the other person's head - if it's blue or green, they're friendly and I won't fire (unless they appear quickly and it's a reflex); if it's red or they have no nametag, I fire. I notice nothing about the other person until I see their nametag colour because that's really the important thing... are they friendly or not. Everything else I see on the screen or hear is meaningless until I know that, and thus it's not retained... I would not be able to tell you the name of the person I was in a firefight with until after one of us died and I read the "who killed who with what weapon" message, even though the person's name is written right there above their head! But I don't ever really read it, unless it's a friendly and someone I'm supposed to be following (like my squad leader). Now maybe as I get better at the game, I'll learn to notice more with a glance (it can be helpful to know if a specific enemy is dead or still hanging around, or to recall information about surrounding terrain or vehicles). But one's focus naturally narrows to the absolute basics for those vital split seconds.
- pg. 378 - "All ARCs were crazy. Sometimes Fi was grateful that he'd had the most volatile bits of Jango removed from his genes." Hehe. I love seeing the differences between clone types, and how they view eachother!

One other thing: I marked all the pages of things I wanted to talk about here, thought were cool generally, or had good quotes I wanted for clonecommandos.net. And by the end, it really seemed like more pages were marked than not.

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Regarding the internet version of the "clone wars" (aka the 3 million clones debate)... well, I wrote an entry about that already which you can read if you wish. It not so much about the debate itself as how the two sides act and how I'm trying to stay out of it now. But at one point I would have said that nothing good has come out of those wars. I can't quite say that anymore, after reading this post by sidious618:
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Y'know I didn't really care about the number of clones until I played Battlefront 2. I realized that there had to be more than 3 million clones to help compensate for the number of times that I've died.
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LOL! I can relate to that so much. Then again, if the way I play games is canon, then RC-1138 is a confused and incompetent leader who dies way too much and as Fixer says, "needs to go back to basic training". So yeah, maybe I shouldn't go there. Anyways, I was happy to see that about 5 seconds of amusement has come out of these debates. At least it's not a total loss.

It is a little weird though... I'm never sure if I'm supposed to laugh about these things. Because people take stuff so seriously and I feel that if I laugh at something, it'll be like I'm coming down on the 'side' being made fun of and involving myself in an argument when I really don't want to. I read a post a few days ago that was essentially "Triple Zero in Five Minutes", and I found it hilarious. But I don't want to share it, because all the silly people who didn't like TZ and whine about it incessantly... a lot of their "arguments" are built into the parody. I don't think the fact that something can be parodied makes it any less of a masterpiece, but some people may think that, so I feel I need to be careful. *sigh*

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If you read all of that, you deserve a medal!