It's Hard To Blog While Killing People

In fact, I found it next to impossible to even follow the reading Vicki was doing out of the Resistance handbook, while I was playing. She was trying to help, but meanwhile I was getting my ass wiped - and not in a good way! - by dozens of pseudonym-wearing, 15 year old masters-at-arms. Having said that, I did make some educational headway today in the online war arena:

1) I figured out how to sprint! Anyone who's familiar with the game is almost certainly laughing their ass off right now at the thought of me playing for nearly a month before unlocking that little non-mystery. Yes, it's true: I'm a loser! I had read that it was L2, but missed the part about tapping it! So I'd pressed L2 a couple times in earlier matches, resulting in a nice little crouching action, and promptly got blasted to Kingdom Come while hunkered down. Thus I was reluctant to try it again anytime soon, but tonight I felt like experimenting, since I was doing so poorly anyway. A quick tap put me into Sprint Mode, and opened up new worlds of opportunity to me! Once I started sprinting, my luck began to change for the better, ever so slightly. Nice new trick to have in my bag of them.

2) I also started switching which weapons I use a little more. I looked at my stats and realized that I had over 600 kills with the default (Carbine?) machine gun and over 100 with my frag grenade, and then my next best total was something like 30! So I consciously tried using the shotgun, rocket launcher, and the fuel grenade, a lot more, to see if I could up my kill totals on them a little bit. Again, I felt like experimenting. The one move I totally haven't gotten right yet is the "melee attack", where you kill someone by hitting them with the butt of your weapon. I'm always getting killed that way by others, if they get in close enough to me before I can kill them, but because of my re-mapping of keys - to compensate for the inadvertant pressing of the right thumbstick - I don't have a conveniently located button for this at the moment. I've tried to make the necessary contortion of my fingers necessary to hit it at the right moment, and every time I just get whacked by the other player long before I've completed the operation.

3) I also finally realized why I get three promotion System Messages each time: there are 'pips' included with each military rank, and you advance through 1, 2, and then 3 pips before moving up to the next one. I hadn't noticed the little dots beside my rank insignia each time, until tonight. I'm now a Sgt Major of the Army, with 3 pips.

And all of that is why I'm just now posting my first entry here. I guess you could say I got into a groove, in a pathetically-slow-learner sort of way!