Last night I paid our first bills for our new house. We’ve been in this house for one full month, now, and we’ve received our first examples of what a bigger house costs in the way of utilities.

Aggravatingly, none of these “first examples” are actually useful to accurately judge the true monthly costs. They’re either charges for just a partial month (like December 16 to December 31), or they’re a partial month plus projected next month (December 16 to January 30), or they’re some form of these plus various installation or origination charges.

Nothing says, “we love our customers,” like charging customers extra money to set up an account. If most of these utility companies were not virtual monopolies with their services in this area, they wouldn’t charge set up fees. Yeah, this bugs me.

And then there’s going through the numbers and finding something wrong — a rate different than what we were quoted, a charge not mentioned during our setting up, and/or a service added or missing from what we agreed to. Dammit. Yeah, utility companies in general bug me.

And mixed in with this stack of bills are half a dozen mortgage refinancing or insurance offers. We haven’t paid our first installment on our current loan, and here are offers to change our mortgage, already. Plus, our real estate agents (selling and buying) have sent us the forms we need for our taxes.

Taxes! Oh that’s going to be a joy this year. <- I don’t know if this is sarcasm or honesty. I’ve never sold a house and bought a house in the same year. I’ll be satisfied if it all just breaks even and we don’t owe anything extra because of the transactions.

Between monopoly utility companies and government taxes, owning a home is frickin’ expensive. Yeah, I paid these same bills and taxes in our old home, but I had gotten used to it after several years. And then going four months with no direct utility bills spoiled me.

Well, I’m back in the home owner’s saddle, now. And I have to get reaccustomed to the sores and blisters, again.

But they seem to put the horn right in the middle of the seat.

Bullgrit

I’ve watched people play Guitar Hero (and Rock Band) a few times, here and there, over the past year or so. It’s a lot of fun to watch — the graphics, the animation, the music (especially the music). I love just about every song I’ve heard and watched played.

But I’ve never felt the interest to try and play the game, myself. The whole interface of the fake guitar (and the other instruments for the other game) just looks unwieldy. It doesn’t look like really playing a guitar (which I can’t do, anyway), and it doesn’t look like playing a game controller (which I, at least, used to could do). So I’ve never even tried to play the game.

During Calfgrit9’s recent birthday party, I gave it a try. Adventure Landing (where we had the party) has a big game area with all kinds of arcade games, including a two-player Guitar Hero game. I had a pocket full of extra tokens for the games, and so I thought I’d finally give GH a play.

Since it was my first time with the game — I’ve never even held the guitar/controller — I chose the “Beginner” level. It said Beginner level doesn’t require pushing the color buttons, only strumming. And I chose “Rock You Like a Hurricane” by Scorpions.

Strumming to the visual cues of the game felt nothing at all like playing anything like the song. I couldn’t even get the rhythm by following the visual cues. After only about 30 seconds into the song, I had lost all interest in the game. I was scoring with my strumming to the visual cues, but it felt like just touching a button while an unrelated rock song played.

After about a minute, a 30-something man walked up beside me and suggested I tilt the guitar to really rock it out. I commented back, without taking my eyes from the screen, “This is my first time, and it’s taking all my concentration to strum.”

The man beside me was a fan of the game, and explained, after I complained about the strumming not following the song, that the Beginner level skips notes. This seemed to make sense in one way: not having to hit every note on time should be easier. But it made the game harder in the same way: I couldn’t play the controller to the rhythm of the music I was listening to.

Had the visual cues, and my strumming, matched what I was hearing over the speakers, I could have kept the rhythm, and it would have more felt like actually playing the song.

I gave up. I took off the guitar strap from around my neck, and handed the controller over to the man beside me. He said, “No, you finish it,” but I told him I wasn’t interested.

“I’m just going to let it play out on its own if you don’t take over.”

So he took the guitar from me, put the strap around his neck, and rocked out. He seemed to thoroughly enjoy the last half a minute of the song. More power to him.

At least now I can say I’ve tried Guitar Hero. I didn’t like it, at all, but I did try it. It’s kind of ironic that maybe playing at the Beginner level is what actually turned me off of the game. Maybe if I had tried it at a higher level, and been able to strum with the actual song I was hearing (rather than seemingly random visual cues), I might have liked it Ok.

Bullgrit

I purchased and installed Modern Warfare 2 this past weekend. I just got around to playing a little of it one night this week.

First off, the graphics are amazing; everything looks almost photo realistic. And to go with the great graphics, the artificial intelligence and animation are superb. The soldiers (allies and enemies) move realistically, react realistically, kill realistically, and die realistically. It’s a total package of amazing.

When I play a computer game, I like to really get into it. I turn off the lights in the room, put on my headset, and have no distractions so I can fully immerse myself in the game environment. The graphics and animation of this game really helps the immersion factor.

The main story of this game has the player (me) as a British and/or American soldier fighting enemies in war (standard practice for the Call of Duty series). But there’s one battle scene in this game that some find offensive. I had heard of it before purchasing it, but I didn’t think the concept offensive.

At one point, for one “battle,” you play on the side of a terrorist group. You play as a member of the bad guys when they assault a crowded civilian airport. Although I wasn’t offended by this idea, I was a bit unnerved by playing it.

Again, I knew this battle scene was in the game — I even chose the option in the game to allow me to play through this level instead of automatically skipping it. But the realistic graphics, the realistic animation, and the realistic artificial intelligence reactions startled me, here.

It’s one thing to play as a soldier in battle, fighting and killing enemies fighting back at you. Even when the graphics and all look realistic. But this scene of gunning down civilians who scream in terror and pain, bleed all over the terminal floors, fall, crawl, and die in very realistic ways, is stunning. The scene is gory and gruesome. Disturbing, even.

When the terrorists started shooting the civilians (and I was standing with the terrorists), I soon turned on my “allies” to kill them. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t let you kill your own side. This makes sense, as doing so would completely derail the story line.

As the terrorists continued shooting, and moved forward, I slowly came to accept that I was supposed to be role playing a terrorist right then. But I couldn’t bring myself to gun down the civilians. I eventually started firing my gun, but I shot high, intentionally missing all targets.

It took me a few minutes to convince myself, Come on Bullgrit, this is just a computer game. These are not real people no matter how eerily realistic they look and act.

When the civilian police forces showed up at the scene, and started shooting at us, it started to feel more like the standard army versus army game I was used to. I eventually took on the role play of the terrorist side.

After about 10 minutes, the scene ended. I was rather glad for it to end, too; I didn’t like playing that scene.

I was not offended by it, but I was somewhat shocked. I don’t think what is shown is anything worse than what has been shown in some movies. The only thing different, really, is that I was playing the part of the bad guy. I wasn’t just supposed to watch bad guys killing a bunch of people, I was supposed to actually do the killing personally.

And I really don’t think it was the playing the role of the bad guy that got to me so much. It was the realistic graphics and animations and sounds and reactions of the people. It’s so real-looking that it’s downright disturbing.

Bullgrit