The Midnight Hour

Update: the new xbox experience (NXE), aka the new dashboard interface with the cool little cartoon characters, has made this guide somewhat obsolete. You can no longer view NAT settings while testing your XBL connection. I recommend that anyone experiencing problems still tweak his router settings according to the methods in this article. If that [...]

I watched the film Scarface for the first time this weekend. Throughout the movie I kept telling Christina, “Grand Theft Auto has got to be the video game version of this movie.” The similarities were amazing. I can remember almost every song on the soundtrack from the radio in GTA 3/ Vice [...]

Found this while browsing digg. It’s a short piece about the horror of finding out your child has an incurable disease. It should hit close to home for many of us, including my own parents.

Interesting news from bungie.net on the new Halo 3 spike grenade:
Excerpt from long-term, in-field interview with the soldiers of E2-BAG/1/7.
Type-2 Antipersonnel Fragmentation Grenade
Official designation: Type-2 Antipersonnel Fragmentation Grenade
Length (o/a): 91.4 cm (36 in.)
Weight: 1.93 kg (4.25 lbs)
Filler: Unknown
Killing radius: 3 meters (10 ft)
Casualty radius¹: 11 meters (36 ft)
Unit Replacement cost: N/A
Description:
The Type-2 is the standard [...]

For a small sliver of time during the monstrous JANLAN 2007 (click here for a synopsis of JANLAN 2007 by rapture), eight THXers committed sacrilege and cranked up Gears of War in the middle of a perfectly good Halo 1 LAN. Yeah, it was risky. It turned out to be a nice change [...]

The wife and I have spent the last nine days in and around Huntsville, Alabama, visiting family and friends. Tomorrow brings our trip to a close and takes us back to sunny San Diego County. Actually, people tell me that Los Angeles and San Diego received snow while we were gone. I’m [...]

I’ll just admit it: I don’t understand the big deal when people “fall.”  I mostly hear the term used in reference to elderly people and children.
“Did you hear?  Aunt Margaret fell last week.”
Quotes such as the above are usually met with oohs, ahhs, sighs, and most often followed by “Are they OK?”  My usual mental [...]

I wrote the following for the “about” page at hushedcasket.com [linked here]. Rapture added links, made some edits, and expounded on portions applicable to him, so I cannot take 100% credit for it.
What is The Hushed Casket (THX)? The Hushed Casket is a group of people from all over the United States, [...]

On December 30th THX faced its most difficult Team Warfare League [TWL] opponent yet, The A-Team of Doom [ATOD].  ATOD gave us quite a fight, forcing two rounds to a draw and beating us at Gridlock 6-1.  However, THX was victorious in two of the three matches, leading to another THX win on the TWL [...]