Surviving The Y2K Rapture & Other Nonsense

May 25, 2011 2011

A radio evangelist predicted the Rapture would come this past Saturday and nothing happened. Not surprising. Several major conditions weren’t meant: the Bible haven’t been preached to every living person in the world (about seven billion or so) and Christians had to be feared, hated and put to death for who they are (except for China and the Middle East, this isn’t happening at all). Then the rapture will happen—or maybe not. Having survived the Y2K Rapture in 2000 and 2001, I’m skeptical whenever a religious authority or some other nut job proclaims the end of the world.

I was part of a church that spent nearly 30 years putting a church in every major city in every country of the world by the year 2000, which it did by planting over a hundred international churches during that time. Now everyone in the fellowship assumed that the Rapture would happen. The founder of the church made no Monty Python-esque ass trumpeting announcements of what would happen on January 1, 2000. What did happen? Nothing. Everything came and went as it usually does after the disco ball drops on Time Square in New York City. Not even the Y2K bug turned out to be that much of a big deal. Perhaps it was the wrong date since the new millennium didn’t start until January 1, 2001. A year later, nothing happened.

I noticed that the church message went from “being faithful to the end” to “being faithful to the end of your lifetime” a few months later. After 30 years of sacrificing to put a church in every major city of the world, the new message meant that the fellowship would have to continue sacrificing for another 30 or 40 years until they die. Some members didn’t like that. If the Rapture didn’t happen at the Millennium, it would never happen in their lifetime.

Wasn’t long before the church founder was tossed out by the narcissistic baby boomers who made up the church leadership. If he couldn’t deliver the Rapture (never mind that he never promised anyone the Rapture), he had no business leading the church. These 100 church plantings were soon torn apart by the infighting as the leadership couldn’t decide who among themselves was worthy enough to be the anointed one to lead God’s people, forming regional churches that no longer wanted to associate with each other and take up the cause to preach the Gospel to the world.

After 13 years of being in the church, and nearly six years of being out of the church, I have grown cynical about organized religion. Too often the leadership becomes committed to serving itself rather than meeting the needs of the fellowship. As one young minister told me on my last day with the church, the leadership had far more important priorities then helping me do well spiritually and left in a hurry to fetch a video projector for the lead evangelist. God knows that the salvation of that video projector was far more important. I had always considered the Rapture and/or Judgment Day to to be something of a crapshoot: you either roll a 7 or 11, or pull up snake-eyes. That never did sat well with the leadership. Then again, they never did like people who could make lemonade out of the lemons that God handed out in life with surprising regularity.

Being A Working Stiff Again

Published: May 23, 2011 2011

After two years of being unemployed, five months of on-and-off-but-mostly-off contract work, and a Chapter 7 bankruptcy still in progress, I’m a working stiff again with two PC technician jobs. The first job is at a local Fortune 500 company that I had previously worked at in the past, and the other job is for a moving company in San Mateo county that does business with other Fortune 500 companies on the weekends. Both of these jobs are $7/hr less than what I was making in my last full time job before Wall Street cratered the economy in the Great Recession. With bankruptcy eliminating my credit card debt, I’m making enough money from both jobs to cover my living expenses and rebuild my savings. I’m hoping to work six to seven days a week from now through the summer.

I’m not kidding about being a working stiff. These are not comfortable jobs where I’m sitting down to stare at a computer all day. These are jobs where I’m running around, crawling underneath desks and hauling new/old computer systems. I haven’t worked this hard since I did construction work with my father for two years after my 18th birthday. I’ve been soaking in epsom salt baths—sometimes before and after work—to relieve my stiff muscles.

Not surprisingly, writing blog posts and short stories have taken a hit from my new work schedule. During two years of unemployment and five months of underemployment, I had 25+ short stories published in eight anthologies and published 14 ebooks with 32 short stories (new and reprints), poems and essays. That pace will slow down as turn my attention from creating new short stories to revising my first novel during the summer. My goal is to write/edit/revise for 90 minutes per day and do admin tasks in whatever free time that I can find. I’m already missing being an unemployed writer and looking forward to the day where I can write full time without having to crawl under someone else’s desk.

Putting A Headshot Into That Old Monitor Cable

May 1, 2011 2011

Whenever my friend comes over to my place to watch a DVD, we sometimes end up playing Unreal Tournament 3 multiplayer. This year we been playing team deathmatch with six bots and low gravity enabled to make the game crazy enough to actually enjoy. (Unlike the perfect gameplay of UT 2003/2004, the gameplay for UT3 was compromised for better eye candy and stopped being fun for enough players that the developer decided not to put another UT game in the near future.) The one thing I was always disappointed with when I played on my multiplayer machine because  the LCD monitor had a 15-year-old unshielded SVGA monitor cable that produced a fuzzy picture. A cable designed for 800 x 600 screen resolution doesn’t handle 1280 x 1024 that well. I finally switched the cable out. I told my friend to expect my headshot count with the sniper rifle to increase dramatically.

Headshot!

Headshot!

Headshot!

Headshot!

“Oh, come on!” my friend cried from the other computer as the game kept announcing my kills.

Headshot!

Headshot!

Headshot!

A sharp screen makes it possible for me to be extremely accurate with the sniper rifle. At one point, the announcer screamed “Head hunter!” (15 headshots). The bots were somewhat stupid when someone is shooting the sniper rifle at them. (The bot AI setting is one notch below the “hand your ass back on a silver platter” mode.) They stop and turn before firing their weapons. Within that brief moment I can score a headshot. I’m vulnerable if someone is charging me head on or at an angle with guns blazing while I’m zoomed in on the scope. Something my friend knows all too well.

I tend to be a defensive player who enjoys hanging back from the heat of battle to pick off my targets and striking forward only when I have a significant advantage. The game becomes longer as I take the time to rack up my headshots. If I can’t play with the sniper rifle or flushed out of my hiding spot, I switch back to the rocket launcher and go on the offensive. The game then becomes much shorter as my body count stacks up. Either way, I get my kills in deathmatch.