2.29.2008

Balloon Animals

I have an Asian Civilization Midterm this Tuesday, so naturally I've been playing Half-Life 2 nonstop.
There might be some people out there, MAYBE, who have never heard of Half-Life 2 or even known there was a Half-Life 1. (I know there are, I've met them.) There also might be a lot of other people out there that definitely, most certainly, have heard about Half-Life and talk about it incessantly. I used to be in the former category. I was the kind of person who heard about the video-game Half-Life and said, "Ha! A gravity gun?! Absurd! Preposterous! How dare you insinuate that I need to play such mindless drivel! Now if you'd excuse me, I have a desktop tower I need to defend!" I'd exclaim while adjusting my monocle.
Well, I gave in. I literally traded up for The Orange Box. And I must say, it is worth every second of my life wasted.

Obviously, there are drawbacks to such a video-game addiction. This of course being paranoia, acute schizophrenia, and mild seizures. The game can get pretty intense. There's a lot of monsters that need some killing and after fighting off these mutant-insect-crimesagainstnature-beasties, I can be a little bit easy to scare.
This became clear to me last night.
You see, there are these monsters in the game called barnacles. They look like this:

What they do is latch onto you with their long slimy tongues and pull you up into their gaping mouths where their razor sharp teeth bore into your flesh.
I had just finished playing and was thirsty after such an incredibly intense gaming session (I'm really intense), so I walked into the kitchen to grab a cup.
Suddenly, I stopped.
There was something on my shoulder, caught on my sleeve. Out of the corner of my eye I saw it, long and vertically extended up to the ceiling. Looking up, I saw a black mass above me, looking back with a fiery intensity I thought I had only seen in my nightmares.
Bravely, I exclaimed, "Oh Frick! HOLY FRICK!" And jumped back.
Getting a better view I saw the demon for what it truly was:

Needless to say, I gave that balloon a crowbar bashing like no other.

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