Ok, Let's get my fanfic update out of the way here first. I have to say that I'm ashamed of myself right now. I can't seem to get myself to start this last chapter of Legend of Lucario. I do want to say, however, that I am really upset that people in my C2 community about TF stories, all you seem to do is Pokémon. ENOUGH! It's Pokémon down the entire page, do we have anything else at all we can add? Half the Pokémon stuff is crap, and almost all of the Digimon stuff is. We have one story from the realm of Hamtaro, although I refuse to read it, I saw the show and wanted to puke. We have maybe 2 stories about Transformers, and 2 or 3 from the Sonic universe. I want something DIFFERENT! Sonic, Transformers, Digimon, they all have potential too, so can we please stop with the massive amounts of Pokémon stuff? In fact, in protest to all of this, I'm putting my story, Pony-taur on hold until after I write a few other stories whose ideas came to me recently, and guess what? You won't see a single Pokémon in any of them. At least I certainly hope not.

Now on to life outside of FanFiction.net...

So, guess who's in town? No really, I don't expect you to. My cousins from England are here visiting. They generally, and are now, hang with my Grandparents over in D.C. but hey, that's close enough to go see them, as opposed to them being all the way in England. My aunt isn't actually from England. She went to go study abroad, and pretty much never came home.

It's really just now starting to sink in that I'm going to college. I mean, really sink in. Just now I'm thinking, "Oh sh!t, this is actually happening. I'm going to college." I will be free of Mom and Dad, mostly. Actually I'm a bit ticked off with them right now. They won't let me take my xBox to school with me and I JUST bought the one year subscription to xBox Live. Thankfully, I resolve this by purchasing a Memory Unit for my xBox. This lets me put my gamer-tag on the MU and port it around with me. I can take it to a friend's house, and rock out on XBL using my data online. And I can keep achievements I earn playing my friend's games. How cool is that? They sell them two different ways now. One is actually the Memory Unit that plugs into a special slot on the xBox. That's what I got. My friend, epresses, has the other kind, which is a USB based device. I like mine better because it doesn't take up that USB port, which can be used for so many other things. Microphones for singing games, wired controllers, some specialty controllers, some play-and-charge systems. You lose that stuff if you have to take up a USB port to use your gamer-tag.

Speaking of school though, I just started reading the Summer Reading book, it's called The Freedom Writers Diary. It's actually pretty interesting. The funny part is I was expecting boring stuff, but I get to the 3rd student entry, and the first word is the F-bomb (which I will not repeat here, so I don't get in trouble for "Adult Content"). I'm only on the second round of entries, as determined by the presence of an entry by the teacher, but it's pretty interesting.

OH! D@mn!t. I also wanted to mention something else. I am dead tiered right now, and I have nothing to show for it. I was up all night trying to earn the weekly challenge on Reach for last week (Weekly challenges change at 5 AM my time on Mondays), which was "Like a Record, Baby": Complete 75 rounds in Firefight Matchmaking. Now, before you go all "HOLY SH!T!" on me, let me explain something real quick. For those of you who don't know, a game of Firefight is NOT equivalent to one round. Firefight games are composed of sets, in matchmaking, games are generally no more than one set. In addition, there is a 20 minute cap on the game time in matchmaking for most game types. Each set is composed of 3 rounds and a bonus round. The bonus round is a bit different, and I'll get to that in a sec. Each round is composed of 5 waves. Each wave, up to 3 squads are sent out to try and kill you, or blow up your generators, depending on game type. Now, the game sends the next wave when you kill about 90% of the enemies in the current wave. Yup, no breaks. The exception being the last wave in a round. Then it will tell you you're one the last few enemies. When a round ends, the skulls change. Those of you who play any Halo game know what I mean. For those of you who don't, a skull is a difficulty modifier. They make the game harder. Each skull has a different effect.

• Tough Luck: "The enemies always make every saving throw." Translation: Don't expect your grenades to be very effective. Anything they can get out of the way of, they probably will.
• Tilt: "What was once resistance is now immunity." Translation: Bullets are basically useless against enemy shielding. Energy weapons should be used to remove enemy shields, then use bullets to finish the job,
• Thunderstorm: "Field promotions for everybody!" Translation: No more infantry. Every enemy will now be carrying the next highest gear, weapons, and armor. Yeah, get out the big guns.
• Cloud: "You'll miss those eyes in the back of your head." Translation: No motion tracker for you. Or your team.
• Black Eye: "Bash your way to better health." Translation: Your shields will NOT recharge until you perform a successful melee attack. I mean, you have to hit a live enemy. Not a dead one.
• Mythic: "Coverage under the Covenant health plan." Translation: Enemies have double health.
• Catch: "Pull pin. Count to three. Throw." Translation: Enemies will throw all the grenades they have. And then some. Constantly.
• Famine: "Bring a spare clip." Translation: Enemy weapons lose half the remaining ammo when they are dropped because of death. Don't rely on picking up their guns, unless you can use ANY weapon effectively.
• Iron: "Death carries a heavy price." Translation: Death is permanent. Yeah, re-spawning is disabled. Don't worry, this one only turns on during bonus rounds, and turns back off afterwards.

Those are the "Gold" skulls, the ones that are actually worth extra, in fact, for each skull active, your score multiplier goes up. There are four other skulls that are really just there for fun, and don't affect score.

• Grunt Birthday Party: "Light a match, make a wish." Translation: Earn a headshot on a grunt, and it will explode with a "Hooray!" and confetti. Good times.
• Cowbell: "Physics impulses increased." Basically, the momentum behind shots and explosions is multiplied by about 3. NO this will NOT increase damage, it just sends things flying.
• IWBYD: "But a dog beat me over the fence..." Translation: Rare dialogue from Firefight voices is now common, and vice versa. In campaign it uses an alternate set of dialogue. Just so you know, "IWBYD" stands for "I would've been your daddy".
• Blind: "Shoot from the hip." Translation: No HUD. At all. You can't even see the gun you are holding. This one almost never rears it's ugly head.

The combination of skulls used for each round changes based on the game mode. By default, the skull combos get harder and harder as you go along. For example, in the game type "Arcadefight" the skulls are as follows:

• Round 1: Tough Luck, Catch, Cowbell, IWBYD, Grunt Birthday Party
• Round 2: Tough Luck, Catch, Cowbell, IWBYD, Grunt Birthday Party, Mythic
• Round 3: Tough Luck, Catch, Cowbell, IWBYD, Grunt Birthday Party, Mythic, Cloud
• Bonus Round: Tough Luck, Catch, Cowbell, IWBYD, Grunt Birthday Party, Mythic, Cloud, Black Eye, Thunderstorm, Famine, Tilt, Iron

The bonus round, like I said before, is different. All skulls, almost, turn on, and you have anywhere from 15 seconds to 3 minutes depending on game (Normally, 90 seconds) to slaughter as many enemies as you can without dying. They will spawn at a rate of 1 for every kill you make. And there are a lot of them on the field at once. In most gametypes, you will only see grunts in a bonus round, but in some cases, like Rocketfight, where all players have a rocket launcher with an unlimited supply of clips, you will see stronger enemies, such as Elites, or even the dreaded Hunters.

Basically what I was trying to get at was that each game of Firefight set up through matchmaking, has the potential to give 3 rounds towards this challenge. Non-Matchmaking created games can go on forever, but don't count towards the challenge, due to the infinite customization potential.

I should probably go and do something useful with my life now... Nah, that sounds boring. See you all around either way.