Sunday, October 19, 2014

Cell Hell

So I switched cell phone providers. I had one service, I won't say which one, but let's just say that the trip to the poor house was the closest I ever came to a sprint with my previous provider. There were so many fees and taxes, it was ridiculous. My $45 a month cell phone plan cost me $187 a month. They were like "calls after 7 PM? OK, you're going to need to pay extra for the 'Unlimited Nights and Weekends' package." As opposed to the ever-popular 'Only Make Personal Calls While You're Supposed to Be Working' package.

 So I switched. I won’t tell you who I switched to, because they suck just as bad, although I will say their name rhymes with Pee-Global. My sister had told me that their service was great, and that their prices were better, and I lack a cerebral cortex when it comes to phones, so I followed along like Frankenstein’s monster, shambling towards a new provider.

 For those of you who don't know, I hate phones. They suck. First of all, I have a mild stutter. It’s not bad, I’m not like Porky Pig or Austin Pendleton in My Cousin Vinny. But when I get nervous, it’s more apparent. Now add in the fact that I’m a little hard of hearing from years spent ignoring stupid people. And it doesn’t help that half of the people who call my phone are lazy mouth breathing jag-offs who can’t be bothered to move their lips when they speak. It’s like a Jeff Dunham show without the puppets or casual racism. So every mumbling bastard I talk to on the phone sounds like Helen Keller’s imitation of Charlie Brown’s teacher.

 So I can either say “what? I can’t hear you” a hundred times, or I can just answer as if everything they’ve just said is a yes or no question, in which case they get pissed and think I’m not paying attention. Which trust me, I’m not. I hate talking on the phone. My goal, when you call me, is to get off of that phone as quickly as is humanly possible. I will fake a home invasion to get off the phone. "I gotta go, there's someone breaking down my door with an axe." "Oh my God, should I call the police?" "No, it'll be fine. It's not a big axe, more of a hatchet. I'll text you after I fight them off." I end up using fewer minutes per month than there is commercial time during an FX Channel movie. My list of outgoing phone calls is shorter than a list of character witnesses for Casey Anthony.

 So I switch over, and because I hate loose ends, I switch over on the exact day of the end of my billing cycle. That way, I can just pay my final bill and be done with it. Except the brain trust at my last provider decides for some reason that I still I used $2.33 worth of their airwaves, or bandwidth, or whatever bullshit term they use on that day. So I got a bill a month later for $2.33. I gave it its due attention, which means I used it to clean up after I watched Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams kiss in American Hustle. I am still receiving bills from them. I'm going to wait until they've printed and mailed enough of them for me to construct a twenty pound paper-mache orb surrounding 233 pennies and then mail it to them C.O.D.

 Meanwhile, my new provider can't just use my old cellphone, because of course they can't. No, I had to buy a new phone, which I couldn't afford to pay for up-front, because if I had $350 just laying around I wouldn't have trouble paying my cellphone bill. The new phone is the worst piece of technology invented. I've owned products by Fisher-Price that were more tech-savvy than this thing. It can't ever find a signal. I drop a call on the road and they call back and ask "what, did you go through a tunnel?" I'm like "no, a mosquito landed on my roof. Completely blocked the signal." And because it can't ever find a signal, it's always looking for a signal, which wastes battery life, which means that the battery is constantly being run down, and I have to recharge it, but I'm told that running it down and recharging it repeatedly kills the battery quicker, and something's wrong with the power port, because the phone keeps telling me the charger is disconnected even when it's plugged in, ​and I have to try and replace the battery before they'll replace the phone, and of course the store doesn't carry the battery by itself, so I have to order one online from a 3rd party.

 So I ordered two new batteries, so I could charge both and then when the first one dies I can switch them out rather than be tethered to a charger like someone on life support. Whenever I disconnect one battery and replace it with another, my phone's internal clock resets until it can find a signal from a tower and update the date and time. So every day, my phone dies, and I have to transplant a new fucking battery into it and fire it back up like a doctor in some prime time TV drama. "No one dies on my watch! You're going to live! Clear! BZZZZT!"

 My phone, oblivious, wakes up, and the internal clock is always reset to 7:00 pm, Saturday, December 31. Every time I see that it makes me really sad for my phone. It's like it's just waking up from a nap, on New Year's Eve, ready to party until it looks around and realized what day it actually is. My phone's like "YAWN... man, I needed that, tonight's going to be a wild New Year's Eve, it's time to party- wait, what? 10:16 AM? You're saying it's only Wednesday? October 8th? And we're at work... Fuck... So, no party? SIGH..."

 It's like a dismal, twisted remake of Fifty First Dates. Awaking thinking it's the same awesome day of the year only to find out it's some other crappy day. Even sadder, I did the math and figured out that the last time December 31 was a Saturday was 2011. So now I have to watch as my phone comes to the false realization that it's been in a coma for almost three years. "My God... 2014?! But I was just... it can't be... three years? Oh, God, what about my wife and kids? OH, GOD!" Mine is the first fucking cell-phone to be diagnosed with anterograde amnesia. And I'm there to pick up the pieces, like Teddy the cop in Memento. Suddenly my phone's background says "John G. raped and killed your wife" and the camera part starts taking pictures of people and labeling if it can trust them or not. 

Poor bastard.

Monday, May 26, 2014

My X-Love...

It is the movie I have been waiting three quarters of my life for. It is the ultimate storyline of my favorite comic book, and it finally has its day in the sun.

Please, allow me just a small digression.

It started in 1983. I was in 4th grade, and my best friend at the time was Robert Voss (we had met in 2nd grade, were best friends until 5th grade, inexplicably hated each other in 6th grade, and were friends again in 7th grade until we both graduated High School and somehow never saw each other again; if you're reading this, Rob, hey, and sorry about 1985-1986). Rob and I were part of the uncool group, the kids who routinely got picked on for being different. We both liked Star Wars, and we both liked similar cartoons, and we both liked drawing. One day in the fall of 1983, he brought a comic book into school. It was Uncanny X-Men #175, and it was my first time ever reading a comic book.

You always remember your first.
I knew what a super hero was; I had watched the Super Friends, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, and some of those terrible Marvel Super Heroes cartoons ("When Captain America throws his mighty shiiiieeeeld..."). But I had yet to see them in their original medium.

Uncanny X-Men #175 was the start of something big for me. In the comic, Cyclops is tricked into believing that Madelyne Pryor was the reincarnation of Dark Phoenix, who had died a few years prior. The rest of the X-Men end up being deceived that Cyclops himself is actually Dark Phoenix, and they do their best to take him down. Turns out Mastermind was the one pulling their strings. Storm takes Mastermind out, Cyclops marries Madelyne, and all is well in the universe.

I read a few more of Rob's issues, and then started reading some of his other comics, many of which were DC, where I discovered my love of Green Lantern. But the X-Men were first, and best. It wasn't until Christmas of 1984 that I was given my very first comics; one was an issue of Tales of the Legion of SuperHeroes (#320, The Magpie Complex, an utterly forgettable story in a comic that held zero interest for me) but the other was Uncanny X-Men #195. It told the tale of the child-team Power Pack fighting in the Morlock tunnels, and the X-Men came to help them. It wasn't the strongest tale, but I will always remember it.
This is what Wertham was worried about!
I was hooked. I began to go to a local comic book shop, then another, and another, each one further and further out, expanding my radius as I expanded my collection, which grew in two directions; as I picked up the new ones at the local shop, I would also scour the back issue bins for the ones from before I began collecting. I was able to get every issue from #150 onward, with the previous issues being substituted by the reprint series Classic X-Men. Including Classic X-Men Issues, I had almost the entire run from #93 (the introduction of the All New, All Different X-Men) to the current issue at the time, with four exceptions in the issues that the creators of the Classic series chose not to reprint; #106, #110, and #'s 141-142: Days of Future Past.

I managed to pick up #106 and #110 at a later date. As far as Days goes, I read most of the story in flashbacks, but they were high priced rarity as far as back issues go, and I couldn't afford to buy them. It was the Holy Grail of X-Men stories for me; something legendary that was sought after with a longing that could not be described with mere words. It wasn't until 1989 that Marvel decided to print the trade paperback, and you better believe I pounced on it like a starving man on a Christmas ham.

My white whale.
Holy GOD, what a story. Well before Frank Miller launched the whole gritty reboot thing in Batman, before Alan Moore turned comics on its head with Watchmen, Claremont and Byrne told the dystopian clusterfuck for all mutants that was Days of Future Past. This was a dark comic in a time where dark comics were not really all that commonplace. It became a cultural touchstone for me. Whenever I see a story where there is a dystopian future affected by events in the past, I think of DOFP.

When I first heard there was going to be an X-Men movie, it was 2000. The last three superhero movies I had seen were Batman & Robin, Blade, and Mystery Men, so you could imagine how starved for quality I was (although Mystery Men DID have certain charms to it). I went to North Carolina to see X-Men on opening day with my best bud, Bill, who was living there at the time. We saw it twice that day. Right from the beginning, Bryan Singer captivated me with his take on Magneto's powers emerging in the camps. I was like, GOD DAMN, so THIS is what a comic book movie can be like?

The second one was even better. Then Singer and James Marsden had to go and sign on to that damned Superman Returns movie and ruin the trilogy by leaving it in the hands of Brett Ratner. It was not great. Disappointing, to say the least. A solo Wolverine offering did little to sate my palette, although the casting of Liev Schriber as Sabretooth was genius.

Then Matthew Vaughn gave us the fresh look of X-Men: First Class. I was intrigued by this movie, which seemed to separate itself from the previous entries. It is set in 1962. Professor Xavier is paralyzed, but he was previously shown standing as an older man in 1979 in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Moira MacTaggart was now an American Operative for the C.I.A., when she had formerly been shown as a middle aged Scottish scientist in X-Men: The Last Stand, set in "the not too distant future." So naturally, I figured this to be a reboot set in an earlier time frame, despite the fact that they used the opening of X-Men for the origin of Magneto.

When I first heard that Bryan Singer was interested in directing the sequel to First Class, I was a bit ambivalent about it. He had his chance, and chose that dud of a Superman movie (OK, maybe it wasn't that bad, but boy, was it LONG and anti-climactic). Then I heard he was bringing back the original cast, I was actually pissed. I felt bad for the new cast, as I felt this would be Singer shunting them aside to relive his glory days with his old pals. But when they revealed that this was to be Days of Future Past, all the pieces fell into place. Time travel. Old meets New. And at last, and long last, the story I have waited thirty years to see on the big screen.

The comic and the movie have a bevy of differences. If I had to write a summary that could apply to both, it would read: In the dystopian future, Sentinels rule with an iron fist; the few X-Men that still survive stage a last-ditch effort to send a traveler back in time to prevent an assassination that began the world's decline. That's about where the similarities end. In the comics, it's Scott and Jean's daughter who sends someone back in time. In the comics, that someone is Kitty Pride, and the X-Men she meets in the past are the ones she knew in the future. In the comics, it's Senator Robert Kelly and Charles Xavier who are assassinated. In the comics, it's 1980, and the dystopian future is 2013.

None of it matters. This is the best X-Men movie of them all. My 30 year dream has come true.

The future scenes, featuring much of the original cast, are a balls out display of carnage and power. The interplay between the prequel cast is crisp and invigorating. Jennifer Lawrence is rapidly becoming one of the strongest leading ladies in Hollywood at such a young age, and she gives real gravitas to the character she plays, a second stringer in the comics universe that has become a real focal point of the cinematic one. It's exciting, emotional, powerful, and at times hilarious (I'll never hear "Time in a Bottle" the same ever again).

It is a solid offering that entertains even those who missed First Class (we went to another showing with my sister and her kids, only one of which has seen First Class). Highly recommended. Still not the PERFECT super hero movie (a few continuity questions arise, though NOTHING may ever unseat Avengers for the title, in my opinion), but the best X-Men movie we've seen to date.




A few notes about continuity as a whole struck me.

1.) Wolverine and Sabretooth were tried, convicted and they tried to execute them in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Their crime was Victor killing a superior officer while they were serving in Vietnam in 1973 (as noted in Origins). William Stryker (played by Danny Huston) recruited them right from the cell they were sitting in, getting them to join Team X. Wolverine then serves with the team as they search for Adamantium. Six years later (1979), Logan has left the team and is living a simpler life as a lumberjack. He then gets his adamantium and is rendered amnesiac. However, DOFP shows him in 1973 sleeping with "the boss' daughter," rather than guarding her, implying he is working for a criminal mob boss or something similar. The movie takes place at the end of the Vietnam war. So Logan should be, according to Origins, within in a cell, or working with Stryker's team, not working as a Mob Boss' enforcer in New York City. Either way, the Stryker who recruited him in Origins (Danny Huston) was an older man with a son who was frozen solid. The Stryker in DOFP (played by Josh Helman) was a younger man with a son that was just turning ten. Previously, Brian Cox played Stryker in X2 and stated that he was running black ops missions while (Bruce Davidson's Senator Robert Kelly) was sucking on his momma's tit at Woodstock (1969)." The Stryker played by Helman does not appear to have been old enough to be running black ops missions since 1969.

2.) The Charles Xavier that rescues the children at the end of Origins is standing. We see as of DOFP that the treatment that allows him to stand robs him of his telepathy, yet he displays both in that one Origins scene. Sure, maybe he could have adapted the formula, perfected it to allow both, but then why does he spend most of the time in the movies in a wheelchair?

3.) Speaking of which, it looks like we have an answer as to why Hank McCoy's first appearance (a television interview in the original X-Men) shows him as a normal looking human while we see his transformation into the Blue Furry Hank we know and love in First Class, some forty years earlier. That's some serum.

4.) The Emma Frost that is featured in First Class (played by the scrumptious January Jones) is dead by 1973, as reported by Magneto. Dead or alive, she is an older woman than Kayla Silverfox's sister who can transform into diamond and is suspiciously named Emma (played by Tahyna Tozzi) in the 1979 set Origins. Granted, they may be entirely different characters, but c'mon. Really?

5.) Wasn't that Quicksilver we saw ricocheting off the walls of his cell in Origins? Or is that another white-haired child speedster, not the Quicksilver portrayed by Evan Peters in DOFP?

6.) Wouldn't the kids remember the guy who liberated them from Stryker's prison camp? I guess that adamantium bullet wiped ALL their memories. LOL

7.) What happened between the end of The Wolverine (2013), which showed Wolverine being greeted by Charles Xavier and Magneto in the airport after having his adamantium removed from his claws, and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) in which he has his claws again? More importantly...

8.) HOW THE HELL IS CHARLES XAVIER ALIVE? Last we saw of him in X-Men: The Last Stand, he was being disintegrated by Jean Grey. Yes, he was able to transfer his consciousness to the comatose patient in Moira MacTaggart's lab (the Scottish scientist Moira, not the American CIA spy Moira) but shouldn't he look like some random dude, not Charles Xavier? Did he happen to transfer his consciousness to a his exact twin who also happened to be paralyzed? This is the biggest and most vexing of the questions that went unanswered.

Despite all this, I LOVED this movie! It was good enough for three showings, and probably a fourth and fifth.

The end credits scene shows us a young En Sabah Nur building the pyramids (complete with his four horsemen in the background) and promises the next installment to feature everybody's favorite ancient mutant: APOCALYPSE! 2016 cannot get here soon enough!

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Rust Warning

"Hell is other people." - Jean-Paul Sartre

After 40 + hours of gameplay, I must regretfully retract my endorsement for the game Rust.

The game itself is still a marvel. But the community, dear reader. The community, by and large, is deplorable. If you enjoy pillaging, murdering the innocent, theft, terrorizing, bullying and just being an all around douche, then please, by all means, go lay down your $20. If you manage to get to a position where you can do all of that, I will be amazed.

Given that the game is still in it's Alpha stage of development, there is a chance that changes will be made that will allow the more social, non-homicidal people to enjoy the game for what it is. But I will show you what you can expect.

When I started the game, I was one of the first people to settle a relatively isolated part of the main corner of the map. Not too populated, but close enough that there were still resources within walking distance of my base. If you go further out, there are no resources, and you are doomed to starve to death endlessly. I tried to keep to myself, and for the first few days, I succeeded. Oh, there were occasional attacks, but I just shrugged and said "ah, well. I shouldn't have had all that loot on me." Within three days, the game has become unplayable. Every time I spawned, I was killed within minutes, even though it was clear that I had nothing of value on me. Every attempt to gather any kind of resources to continue to improve my base were met with unprovoked attacks.

My base is pretty well stocked with weapons, supplies, and materials. It is also out of the way of main traffic, up in a deserted and resourceless part of the map. I was on my way back to my home with a few pieces of stone and a hatchet when I was ambushed by a running man with a rifle. I opened my outer metal door (my foyer has TWO metal doors, an inner and an outer), and before I could close it, the hoodlum dashed in. SLENDERMAN, his name was. The beauty of my system is that no one can open doors in Rust except the person who placed them. So when I was able to quickly close the outer door, my attacker was faced with the prospect of being trapped inside with no way out.

He asked me to open the door. I said no, he shouldn't have tried to attack me.

He demanded that I open the door. I said no, he should think twice about entering other people's houses uninvited.

He offered to give me all of his stuff. I knew from the moment he said it that it was a lie. Because he could have simply killed himself with a key command and all of his stuff would have been left behind anyway. No, the fact that he wanted to be let out meant he did not intend to give me ANYTHING. He dropped a bunch of stuff on the floor (not his rifle, I noticed) and stood by the door, begging me to open it so he could leave. After a few minutes of telling him that I was a friendly player who didn't want trouble, I just wanted to be left alone, and that I objected to his attack on me, I explained exactly what was going to happen.

"I am going to ask you nicely to never come back to my house, and to please not attack me should you encounter me again. You are going to pick up your possessions. I am going to open the door to let you go, and you are going to turn around and kill me. I guarantee it."

I was 100% right.

He even tried to claim that he was shooting at someone else who ran into the room when I opened the door, that he was not with them. Well, when I spawned back in, naked, and with nothing but my default rock/torch/bandage kit, I was in the middle of nowhere for some reason (the game's respawning mechanics sometimes ignore when you have a spawn magnet in your house, like a bed or a sleeping bag (it's Alpha, what can I say)). Miracle of miracles, the first person I encountered didn't kill me on sight, until I said "you'd be helping me out if you just killed me, actually." So he said "Good luck, buddy" and shot me in the head.

I respawned in my bedroom. With three people waiting to ambush me in my house when I opened my third, innermost metal door. I saw them through the cracks in the walls, but we couldn't do anything to each other so long as those walls remained. Then they starting hacking at the walls.

Eventually, I knew that they'd outlast me. I would either sign out, and when I came back I would find my base destroyed, or I would watch as they continually brought a supply of food from the outside world and stayed alive while I starved to death, and they'd eventually get in by hacking away at my last wall. I equipped my shotgun, opened the door and took my chances.

I spawned once in the bedroom again, and was immediately killed by the prick who had helped the guy. A later spawn put me back in the field again, at which point I resigned from the server. I may sign in again in a few days, just to keep my account access (I've heard stories about inactive accounts being deleted, despite the fact that people have PAID for access), but if I do play this game again, any trip I take to that server will simply be to denounce the bandits, describe what they did, and warn others to avoid them at all costs. I have a buddy who purchased the game just as all this was going down. We may try another server. But until Facepunch Studios (should the studio name have been the first red flag about what type of player I would encounter?) enables some sort of protocol that prevents random murdering just for the fuck of it, I cannot let anyone waste their money on it.

Unless you are a violent sociopath who wants to meet new douchebags but you can't make it to the next Cannibal Corpse concert, then I say sign up today while the douche still flows freely.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Food For Thought:

Here's food for thought: in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, when we first meet the Ewoks, they hold Luke, Han, Chewie at spearpoint, tie them up, and prepare to cook them for a feast. (Spoilers for those in a 30 year coma:) It is only through Luke using Jedi shenanigans on C3PO that he puts the fear of God in them and they let them go.

These little furry bastards are cannibals.

NOW go back and watch the movie again, paying special attention to the fact that they have several Imperial Stormtrooper helmets assembled as trophies (and an admittedly bitchin' drum kit), and ponder this: are there heads inside those helmets? What exactly are they serving at the celebration feast? They never, to the best of my memory, show any other animals in the forests of Endor, which would seem to suggest that these creatures tend to hunt other species to near (or total) extinction, and are not shy about frying up anyone they manage to trap (even if they are not so distant relatives, genetically speaking, as the Ewok must be to the Wookie).

All I'm saying is that the Rebels feasted on the flesh of fallen Stormtroopers, which were basically genetically modified and cloned organisms held in bondage against their will and trained to murder. If the noblest heroes of our generation's fantasy lore are okay with this, I think we can survive eating a genetically modified tomato and a cloned beef burger.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014


Do you like Minecraft? Was your favorite part of Minecraft those first few nights, huddled against a cliff face in a primitive structure praying the zombies and wolves wouldn't eat you, and that you'd be able to find a pig the next morning to get some food?  Did you enjoy that feeling when you first met another player, not knowing if they were friend or foe, being careful to not be too aggressive while not letting your guard down? Did you ever wish that it was scarier, bleaker, and more beautiful?

Welcome to Rust.

Rust is a new first-person Survival game from Facepunch Studios, and it is guaranteed to drive you crazy. Still in its Alpha stage of development (and containing all the bugs that condition implies), Rust is a nightmare. You awake naked in a field surrounded by green trees, only to have this seeming utopia disturbed by the growl of wolves, or the groan of the walking undead. Hungry? Go hunt. But don't run blindly after that pig, or you may run right into the jaws of a nearby wolf. And don't forget to gather some wood and make a fire to cook your food, or it may make you sick. Cold? Butcher your kill and you MAY get some cloth that you can use to make some pants. Dead? Congrats, you get to spawn somewhere else, naked, and with only a slim chance to find your corpse and the meager possessions you worked so hard for.

You get almost nothing in the way of guidance. Running naked across a field, I was hailed by another player from a nearby structure. After ascertaining that I was no threat, he dropped some cooked meat at my feet out of pity. I didn't even know how to pick it up. So I ended up having to check out the Wiki, and learning all the little nuances that make the game a little easier.

So here, for your benefit, are 15 tips about Rust to help you adapt, and hopefully… SURVIVE.

1. You will NOT SURVIVE. The Rust experience has been likened to Hell, and it's not far off. When you die, your corpse falls to the ground, the screen goes dark… and then you are back where you started. Not geographically, (that would be too helpful), but you lose everything that was on your person and spawn in a random spot. The best thing you can do is embrace that and adapt to that concept as soon as possible. If you are running from danger, or starving to death, or bleeding out, look for distinctive landmarks, and run towards a tree or a rock. If you manage to find that spot again, you'll have a better shot of remembering where your corpse (and its spawned backpack of your goodies) fell rather than the middle of a grassy field.

2. Know thy E key. The E key is your friend. It will allow you to interact with any item that is interactable. It opens your doors, searches storage boxes and backpacks, and picks up items. If you see white text and don't know what to do, hit E. Also, when attempting to interact with items like a campfire, or a furnace, HOLD DOWN E to bring up a tiny sub menu. It took me a while to realize how to actually interface with a campfire to cook my food rather than just ignite and douse it.

3. Say 'No' to grass. Everybody is doing it. The developers think it's a performance issue, and maybe it is for others. But I turned off grass because it took me 12 hours to even realize there were rabbits in this game. The tall grass obscures EVERYTHING that lies low on the ground, ESPECIALLY your corpse's backpack full of goodies. Turning off the grass makes all those rocks, woodpiles and backpacks pop. Hit F1 and type - grass.on false (period between grass and on, space, then false) - in the text bar. You may need to do it twice. And helpful tip: on a Mac Keyboard, you may need to hold the 'fn' key to activate the F1 without simply dimming your monitor (I didn't know this, so maybe you didn't either).

4. That clicking is not your hard drive. Whatever calamity befell this island, it involved radioactivity, because there are areas of the landscape where you will be bombarded with radiation. You can recognize this by the clicking noise and the fact that your monitor will actually start to show mild speckling. You will see your rad count begin to rise, and this will lead to a drop in health. Leaving the area will allow your rad levels to drop down again, and food will promote healing. Some supplies available in game may actually counter radioactivity.

5. Gatherer/Hunter, not Hunter/Gatherer. You can't hunt with nothing but a stone (except Pigs, if you have a TON of patience). Your first priority should be to find a tree (or better yet, a woodpile) and bash it with your rock. You will gather wood, and this will eventually be your primary mission in life. Wood means shelter, tools, fire, defense. Then find a rock outcropping. These stand apart from the various stone cliffs you will doubtless encounter. Bash these as well to get stones, ore and carpal tunnel. With wood and stones, you can make a stone hatchet, which will replace your rock as your primary tool and weapon for the first little bit. The TAB key brings up your inventory, and clicking on the CRAFTING tab will bring up your crafting interface. It tells you what you need to craft an individual item, and what you have. Once you are able to create a stone hatchet, you are then ready to hunt. But you won't yet.

6. Hell is other people. Because why bother gathering food and trying to stay alive if you will be devoured by wolves in the middle of the night, or (more likely) murdered by another player and have your meager possessions stolen? This game is PvP in many servers, and players have become notoriously wicked in this game. If you see another human and you doubt your ability to kill them, be ready to have your stuff ripped from your corpse. Sure, you may get lucky and find some other friendlies (hit ENTER and type "friendly" if you are, you may save your life) but always be wary. If you keep a weapon equipped, you may draw aggression when interacting with other people. Put away that weapon unless you feel hostility is imminent. Even if you feel you are better equipped, don't invite a fight you might not be able to win. The player may have allies and come back looking for revenge. As Sun Tsu tells us in the Art of War, "Appear weak when you are strong." A guy running around naked with a stone will draw less interest than a guy in pants with a stone hatchet.

7. Find your place in the world. It is recommended that you explore the environment and find a safe hiding place before "settling down." I managed to find a deep overhang on a coast facing the ocean, which means people would have to actively be looking for me to have a chance of finding me. But location is key when deciding when to make your stand. With no compass or map, you will get lost. Many times. You may think you know where you are, and then realize that the nice field you were gathering in is nowhere to be found. The only constant in the game is where the sun comes up and where it goes down. I decided to orient myself by putting the sunset to my right and heading toward the water. Once I found a nice somewhat defensible clearing near the rocks, I found my seaside overhang, built a storage box, and called it home. Leave as much stuff in this box as possible, because until you construct a sleeping bag, when you die, you will respawn at a random location without any possessions, and you can save yourself a big headache by keeping most of your stash in your bolt-hole. Be aware though that ANYONE can search this box, so if they find it, be ready to lose all your stuff.

8. Home Sweet Home. Once you have enough wood to build enough planks to create a foundation, pillars, walls and a door, you can consider building a home. But if you are even a little short, you run the risk of completing MOST of a structure and having someone else jumping on it. Doors are designed to open ONLY for the one who placed them (wooden doors CAN be broken through with enough time and patience, but no system is perfect) so once you place that door, the completed structure can only be entered by you. But stay flexible. I recommend building a two foundation wide structure with doors on two sides and a door in its one interior wall. This will create a sort of airlock, so in the event of an ambush (say another player waiting for you outside your outer door), the ambushing player will only get as far as your outer room. This will keep your inner room as a safer place to keep your valuables.

9. The Hunt is on. Start small. Take out some swine. Deer are too fast, rabbits and chickens are too small, wolves will mess you up, and if you encounter a bear this early in your experience… die and hope you spawn far away to start over. To hunt a pig, try creeping up on it (hold control to crouch) and get as close as possible with your hunting tool (rock, hatchet) in hand. Hit it once, and then sprint after it. Pigs run in a relatively straight line, so get behind it and pull even. Bash it on the head, and as your character slows when you strike, the pig will slowly start to pull away. You can use this opportunity to get in two or three more shots, and hopefully bring it down. Once it is down, skin it by hatcheting its corpse. You will gain cloth, animal fat, blood and raw chicken breasts (the only food item you can get from an animal at the moment). Cook these over a fire before eating them (Hold E to interact with a campfire to cook food) or you will get sick. Using cloth to create clothing is a natural instinct, but that cloth is better used creating a hunting bow. With a bow you have a better chance of hunting deer and defending yourself from wolves (don't forget to craft arrows, too). But your absolute FIRST priority once you obtain enough cloth is construction of a sleeping bag. This anchors your spawn point, and once you know you will spawn in the same place upon death, you are finally ready to start seriously gathering resources and creating your stronghold.

10. He who Smelts it, dealt it. Once you have enough cloth and animal fat to craft low grade fuel, combine it with stone and wood to create a furnace. This will allow you to turn your metal ore into metal fragments, which is what you need to upgrade your stone hatchet to a regular hatchet. The regular hatchet does more damage and increases the yield when gathering resources. The fragments can also be crafted into a variety of next level objects, like foundations and walls to make better structures, guns, weapon accessories, and the all important metal door (which can only be removed by explosives). Again, hold E to interact with the furnace, drag wood and ore into it, and then ignite it to create fragments, charcoal, and sulfur. Campfires and furnaces will continue to burn so long as they are fueled, so don't stock it full of wood if you only have a few ore to smelt.

11. Bigger Game. You have a bow. You have a hatchet. You have clothing. You have cooked food and bandages. You have a decent home. Now what? You step up your game, and go after the BIG game. There are pigs, deer, chickens, rabbits, wolves, and even bears to hunt out there. Deer require a few shots from a bow, and you can't really catch them once they run. You can only follow them until they stop and hit them again for the kill (again, watch out for wolves). Hunting aggressive predators like wolves and bears is tougher. In general, if you snipe a wolf from a distance, it will charge at you, and a well placed second shot will usually take it down. Bears require multiple hits and if you go after them it is advised that you do so from an elevated position at a distance. If you kill one, you can get leather which can be crafted into better armor once you know how.

12. The Walking Dead. There are zombies. They come in two kinds; black and red. The black ones are slower, but they kill in only a few hits and are tough to kill. The red ones are weaker, but they can close quickly, and if they spot you, they don't go down easy. You can snipe them out from a distance in one shot if you are good. Their corpses offer loot you cannot find elsewhere in the game, like food which counteracts radioactivity, and blueprints. If you find new blueprints, equip and use them IMMEDIATELY. If you die with them in your inventory, you risk losing them. But if you die having already read them, the knowledge of how to build what they detail stays with you. Most importantly, don't get greedy! Killing two zombies is cool; killing seven and getting killed by the eighth and losing everything really, really sucks.

13. Do unto others. Once you get to the point where you have a comfortable stockpile of goods, consider giving to other players. You can earn some good will and potential allies just by giving food, wood, stone, metals, or even weapons to players in need. But be ready to get backstabbed, especially if that's how you yourself do business. I have created a public access crate on the steps of my fortress where anyone can take the stuff I decide to put in there. I am hoping it will slake the thirst of any wandering bandits as well.

14. You will lose everything. Even if you take all the precautions to protect your stuff and tread carefully around others, this is an ALPHA version. There are frequent bug-driven wipes that occur that will decimate your inventory. The latest one left me with nothing but my structure (minus the wooden doors) and charcoal. But the fact that I simply couldn't walk away and just dove right back into the resource gathering side serves to emphasize how addictive this experience is.

15. Read up. There are other things going on in this game that I have not yet experienced. There are apparently airdrops which give you blueprints and other high value items, but I have yet to brave exploring them. You can find a lot of information at the Rust Wiki ( 

Rust is available for PC, Mac and Linux at (REDACTED) for $19.99 USD. Get early access and get a leg up when the BETA drops!