Tag Archives: TWIT

Play like a TWIT

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Playing as a clan makes FPS games so much more enjoyable. If you play CoD and you like Team Tactical then the chances are that at some point the TWIT clan has kicked your ass. ;)

As the name suggests, Team Tactical is all about playing tactically as a team, if you’re all running around like headless chickens, kill streaking, camping, playing split screen even though you’re just one person or doing jumpy spinny shit with a sniper rifle – just don’t be surprised when we chalk up a win. But hey, if you play us and win because your straight up better, we’ll gladly congratulate you… and then proceed to kick your ass in the next round. ;)

Things you need to know about us:

  • We practice quite a lot, by which I mean we play all the time.
  • We know each other really well – we have skill sets and load outs that complement each other.
  • We all have good quality headsets, Turtle Beaches – if you’re stomping around like an elephant then we will hear you.
  • We communicate constantly whilst we are playing, calling out tactics and enemy locations on the fly – we respond to situations super quick.
  • We don’t play cheap.

That last point is very important to us and really the motivation for this post. We don’t use n00btubes or heartbeat sensors unless we pick them up from fallen enemies, we don’t spawn trap, we don’t corner trap, we don’t glitch, we don’t boost and we don’t camp.

Guarding the flag, bombsite or bomb (think S&D) is not camping, that’s called Protecting The Fucking Objective. Ignoring the objective entirely and sitting in a corner racking up kills whilst the rest of your team valiantly tries to PTFO, that’s camping.

Killstreaking is for people who would camp, but have ADHD, running around the map racking up kills and ignoring the objectives. This is particularly evident in game modes like Kill Confirmed, seriously, the number of times I’ve died and seen people just walk away from a whole mess of tags is staggering.

Boosting and glitching are self explanatory. I was genuinely amazed this weekend that despite how easy if is to watch a game back and to report people and have them banned for 5000 days, we still managed to find ourselves in a game where two idiots boosted to an MOAB. Really guys, you didn’t think that having one of you at 25-0 and the other at 0-25 was going to give the game away!

So come on people, put down your RPGs and come play like men, you’ll probably still lose, but at least we’ll respect you. Unless you’re 12 and whine like a little bitch and threaten to “merk us”, in which case we’ll probably just laugh at you.

This is Cornwall

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November was a busy month, the highlight of which was attending my bro Wayne’s wedding. The drive down to Cornwall was fun, my bro SMX is hilarious, we talked about some truly random things and solved several of the worlds problems during the 10 hours we spent in the Millennium Falcon. Only problem is we forgot how we solved them because we were distracted by the ridiculous names of the places in Cornwall that we drove past. As fun as the weekend was (carrot cake and Gatorade ftw!), it was also quite scary. New place, new people (everybody was lovely, but new is still scary), new food… and the small task of performing a bible reading at the wedding. I was so proud when Wayne and Em asked me to do it, really chuffed that they trusted me, but scared shitless all the same. I practiced for ages! Day of the wedding and inside the church I was attempting to hide my nerves by joking with SMX, “Imagine if I have to stand behind that massive gold eagle thing! Hahaha!”, a few minutes later I *was* standing behind that massive gold eagle thing. I know I didn’t look up once during the reading, I was just attempting to get the words out, eye contact at that point would have rendered me mute. But hey, I did it and I was pleased with myself. I wish my bro and his beautiful wife eternal happiness. Wayne has the coolest wife ever, she’s letting his bros join them for the end of the honeymoon. Technically, we are her bros now too (haha, I hope she reads that). Still, what could be better than sharing my favourite place in the world with some of my favourite people. The only thing that could make it more perfect would be if my sis Hev was able to come too. I have promised myself that one day we will all ride “It’s a small world” together.

Go hard or go home

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Oh man. What a couple of weeks. Bat. Shit. Crazy.

Last weekend my bro SMX came to stay (sup’ negro!). I learned several things:
1. He mumbles in his sleep.
2. Split screen CoD is harder than it looks.
3. I should have a pass code on my iPhone.
4. The number of hot girls walking past my window increased when he was in my room*.

As much as I missed SMX when he went back, at least he was available online. My other bro Wayne is about to drop off the map for an entire month. That’s like 30 sleeps. I can only imagine how many thousands of trophies he will be uploading to PSN when he gets back online. 79 days until Cornwall, 115 days until Christmas, 131 days until Florida. Bring on the winter! I know it’s kinda sad, but every time I open my wardrobe I look at my hoodies and think it won’t be long until I can wear them again. Yep, it’s sad, but true.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for various reasons, and yeah, it got me down a bit, but even if I’m not smiling, it doesn’t mean I’m not happy. If I’m struggling to understand something then I might not be smiling, but I’m learning. I live for the thrill of the chase, it’s what I spend all day doing! As I’ve said before, when things get hard you can either give up or go harder and faster. When the music stops playing in my head, then it’s time to worry, but as long as I’m cruising through life to the accompaniment of my own soundtrack then everything is fine. Sometimes the most difficult things can be the most exciting, even if they terrify the shit outta me. Not planes though, they aren’t exciting, just scary. And moomins, they’re some scary shit too!

Haha! Later gators!

* I genuinely thought you were asking the name of the cat and not the girl.

Jedis drink milk #SMXFact

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My last post ended up being almost a Dear Diary kind of deal, but that’s okay with me. I started this blog to chronicle my journey “to infinity and beyond” and that applies just as much to my personal life as it does to my professional one. And no, this post isn’t going to make much sense to most of my readership, but it will to the people that matter.

I don’t think I’ve actually gone to sleep before midnight a single day this week. I know, this is very unusual for me, but I guess when you’re having fun you don’t notice you’re tired. And I am having fun. I don’t enjoy change, but I know that it is necessary for me to push myself to try new things, to do things that make me feel uncomfortable, especially if the prize at the other end is… pretty awesome. Sometimes I want the ground to open up and swallow me, but pushing past that point makes me ROAR!

I was reminded this week just why I am so hard on myself: because it is so easy to settle, to find a neat little rut and stay there forever. I don’t think Obi Wan will ever realise how I grateful I am that he showed me the way of the Force. Thanks dude.

I can’t believe how much I’m missing my bro SMX. It wasn’t until he went away that I realised how much time we spend communicating (bro, we talk every day). Don’t get me wrong, the stand in SMX is doing an amazing job and my other bro has had more evenings off than usual, but it’s not the same. Sup’ Negro! When you get back I want you to FaceTime me immediately so we can shoot the breeze and marvel at the amazing power of milk. :)

Maybe I _am_ mad. ;)

The week that was.

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Wow what a week. This isn’t a particularly well thought out post, more a collection of thoughts for me to come back to in the future, but you’ll have to forgive me as I haven’t had more than about six hours sleep since Thursday.

So much stuff has happened. Not all of it good, but all of it exciting and new. Yep, that’s right, I’m doing stuff that’s exciting… and new. I’m trying not to mess things up, but as lot of it is new to me, I’m learning as I go along.

I know I can always be 100% honest with my friends without fear of reprisal. Just when I’m expecting to be told to stop being daft, they encourage me to keep finding my way in life. This week they really came through for me when I needed them. They know stuff that I haven’t shared with any other living creature – not even Beaver ;D. My poor iPhone has taken a real beating this week too, but I guess that’s what happens when you refresh your tweets ten times a second. Free advice: a watched phone never bleeps.

I was totally honoured this week to be asked to speak at my friends wedding, I don’t think they even realised how much it meant to me that they would ask and I know they’ll love it when I lay down Corinthians over SMX beat boxing. I’m kidding guys… or am I! 125 days until Cornwall, 161 days until Christmas and 177 days until Florida. I’m super nervous and super excited.

I’ve spent the week with Gold Cobra on repeat (seventy spins in a week) and wearing my red Yankees cap. As my bro so aptly pointed out, I’m stuck in the 90s. Actually said cap has disintegrated so I’ve got to get a new one.

I’ve spent the week being a proper a grown up and a little kid at the same time, but I’ve traveled this emotional roller coaster of a week Bizkit style: headphones, red hat, baggy jeans and middle fingers up.

Random conversations I’ve had this week: the different noises made by bees, birds, flies and fish; New Era ball caps and fitted hat sizing; video hoe therapy; working in a pharmacy and selling people condoms (the secret is not to make eye contact).

Anyway, I leave you with this footage of my bro’s 21st birthday. I’ve missed ya bud. Tuesday night is game night!

#WWWYKI

Post tune: Mann, Buzzin

TWIT for life

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I feel like I owe Jason Bradbury a massive thank you. I have just had the most amazing weekend and it really is all thanks to him.

I joined twitter in September 2008. I knew some other people who had joined and thought I should grab myself a decent username in case I decided to start using the service, but I really didn’t take it any further than that. Around this same time I started reading Jase’s blog on his newly relaunched website (coinciding with the release of his first novel) and at some point after that he started tweeting and added a link to his twitter feed from his website. I discovered the link to Jase’s twitter feed one Friday lunch time and remembering the account I had created for myself decided to log in and take a closer look. I was amazed to see that Jason was exchanging messages with normal people and confused by the strange #ff that accompanied so many of the messages that were flying back and forth. I quickly discovered that #ff was short for follow friday and that this meant that people were recommending other people to follow. I was quite taken a back by this, after all, my previous experiences with social media were fairly limited and the tools I had used had a nasty habit of sustaining relationships that I would happily have left behind, but here was a tool with the power to connect me to new and exciting people. I followed three people on that day, Jason Bradbury, Becky Kingston and Wayne Thompson, at the time the thing that stuck in my mind was that Jase followed me back, if I had only known what was to come!

Over the next few weeks I began to check twitter more and more regularly, following more and more people, although tending to read far more than I posted, I couldn’t believe that anybody who didn’t know me would be interested in reading my thoughts. I began to follow one of my favourite wrestlers, Chris Jericho, and was enjoying reading the tweets that Chris was retweeting, they were like Chuckisms, but Jericho themed. I tried to think of something funny to tweet in the hope that Chris might retweet it and then I nailed it “@IAmJericho Chris Jericho future endeavoured Vince McMahon”. If you don’t know much about wrestling then you will just have to trust me that I nailed it. Chris did retweet my message and I was ecstatic… and then a strange thing happened, other people started retweeting it… and following me. For several days after my original tweet I received RTs and new followers. This gave me a new confidence to start conversing with people rather than just consuming the tweets of others. One of the people that I began talking to was Wayne, he seemed to be kind of like me, we talked about PlayStation games and the Gadget Show (some things never change bro ;) and Wayne added me on PSN.

Tweeting along to the Gadget Show has become something of a ritual for me and I thoroughly recommend it, I’ve met so many cool people in this way including a badger from outer space!

 

 

One day I was playing MW2 when Wayne invited me to join his party. I did and we had a few good games, I wasn’t as good as he was (some things never change bro ;), but I had fun. A few weeks later I was online again and Wayne invited me to join his party again, I did and was slightly surprised by the two other people also in the party, veedubhev and supermarioex. Wayne introduced us and explained to the others that I didn’t have a mic. We had some great games and exchanged some banter (I tended to be on the receiving end due to the lack of a mic) and this became such a regular occurrence that they invited me to join their TWIT clan and pushed me both to get a mic and to follow the rest of the clan. The rest is history, if it wasn’t for the fact that we all live so far apart, we would be inseparable, but modern technology means that we are all only a tweet/text/email away and can normally be found shoulder to shoulder, slaughtering the competition on CoD Black Ops.

This weekend was the first weekend that we were all in the same place at the same time. It was awesome. I spent the weekend with SMX, Wayne and his lovely fiance, we went to Gadget Show Live 2011 at the NEC on Friday (where we met up with a bunch of our other twitter friends) and traveled down to meet up with Hev and her beautiful daughter on the Saturday. So you see, it is all thanks to Jason and The Gadget Show that I met my three best friends and that is why I owe him a massive thank you. Thank you Jase, see you at the NEC in 2012!

Shameless plug: Jason Bradbury’s third novel is available now from all good book retailers. ;)