The echoes of gunshots are ringing in my ears.

[randomness]

Fortunately, it's only Counter-Strike, the well-known first person shooter game. Boy, there's a lot of gunfire here in this internet cafe.

What's surreal about this is that I'm surrounded by native Mandarin-speakers, who seem to make up most of the players. There are also some local Botswanans here. I don't know if they're playing, too, but if they are they're wildly outnumbered by the Chinese? Singaporeans? Taiwanese? Who knows.

Counter-Strike seems to be pretty popular in Southern Africa. The first internet cafe I walked into in Cape Town sounded like a firefight, too, also because of Counter-Strike.

The game always brings back memories of Chris, Julian, et. al. in a network games arcade in Singapore trying a Counter-Strike knife fight, and Julian reverting to reflexes in the heat of battle, pulling a pistol and opening fire. Everyone else screamed "Hey! No guns!" but he'd already shot his opponent. Alas.

Comments

[foldedfish.livejournal.com]

In the words of a Looking Glass co-worker, "The cheater guys is the ones what win."

[monkeygod.livejournal.com]

ah yes, i remember that day well - I bleive it was you, me, Julian and Dex rounding out the party at the giant games-lan in the Cineleisure complex. They did have comfy chairs though. Looking back on it, I think its just another good reason that Julian was 'allowed' to leave the Singaporean Army ;P Though if Julian was allowed in actual combat, I'd fear for our safety more than the enemies ;P

and as for cyber sounds - when I was in Siem Reap (Cambodia) last year, it seemed as if every other building was a cyber cafe of some sort. And while the majority were aimed at all the tourists visiting the temples, the ones in the neighborhood of the cheap (er) hotel I was staying was filled with the obviously more affluent locals. Downloading Japanese Porn. Try composing email with *that* in the background ... and I wondered why the Japanese speaking tour guide was so much more fluent than the ENglish speaker - though one wonders just how much voab is involved in one of those productions ?

-chris-
who has an lj just 'cause all the cool kids do