Say Thank You

by shirolusagi

Every other Christmas Eve my mom and me go to my uncle's for a family and friends party. On the way going there we we usually pick up my aunty (my mom's oldest sister.) My mom tried calling her in the morning to tell her we are gonna pick her up before going to my uncle's, but she didn't pick up so she left a message. As we left my mother tried again, no answer. Concerns raised for my mom. We ended up having to go to her condo door finding a pile of mail against the door, no answer to the door bell or knocking. The ads in the mail bundle was dating from the 12th. And last time we saw or her from her was Thanksgiving. My mom being very concerned at this point called my uncle about the situation and called 911 for help. Later on the police came knocking on the door themselves, still no answer. My mom also called her cell phone and the police officer said he heard the cellphone inside. They went on trying to find information of the manager to contact and calling their supervisor to check up the situation. When the supervisor came he said they could kick the door down, but after that we are held responsible to fix it, and knowing it was Christmas Eve he really didn't want to kick it down having us to deal with it. Later on they were able to get in contact with some emergency number, but we found out no extra keys were available since these were condos and the owners have the key(s.) The supervisor still being very on the edge about kicking the door down, they try to use the credit card trick, but they said because of a deadbolt(?) cannot get through. My aunty's place did have a balcony, so they called up the fire department for a ladder so they could scan inside the place (which is really just on big room split into a kitchen, dining room, and bed area. Later on the firetruck came and they I heard loud hellos through the other side of the door. Shortly after the police came back up and said for us to wait at the chairs near the elevator while they check inside. Few minutes later the police came back and came with bad news. She passed away laying in bed. My mom started to burst into tears, while I just sat there with a dead face can't really take in what has happened that she is no longer here. I am usually a person who tries to hold back their tears as hard as I can till if the right tick happens can make me really cry or funny enough my feelings are hurt really bad I'll cry (lol.) So after the news the police and firefighters had to collect some information for the case and the firefighters and the police that came with the supervise left. Two police officers stayed behind and said they can stay and guard the room till a mortuary picks my aunty up. Since my aunty was a very private person we didn't really know much anything personal. So she called my uncle with the update of the situation and he came down to talk to the police himself and my brother came down as well. We decided on a mortuary and then waited for them to take her away. After her body was recovered the police gave their consolidations and said we were able to go into her condo and left. Before they left we asked what her body was like, they said the air conditioning was on, but she didn't look like she was laying there for a long time. So we went into the room and it was semi messy. The kitchen had a lot of teabag wrappers. We also came to a basket full of tissue paper which looked like blood on it (but we can't really tell for sure.) She had no medication, but there was Advil near her bed. We can never be 100% sure how she passed away but she most probably closed her eyes to go to sleep and never woke up again. But it seemed like she was sick with something. She was a healthy person far as we knew, with no medical problems. She walked everyday (and that's how she got around town along with the bus if it was super long. She was 70, but she pretty much had a very stress free retirement life. Even till this moment it is hard to accept she is gone. She was my closest aunty. Knowing she won't be at the things we go together as a family. So many relatives has passed over the past few years, I am considered myself for my mom that it's too much. My grandma passed away a few years ago, then my dad passed 2 years ago, then two uncles passed this year, Everyone is passing on and I cannot really think about anymore passing on. This is pretty much shocking news to the family. And still this is very odd to me. The concept of the person never returning is very surreal to me. I didn't really cry at my dad's funeral, but almost did. But I have cried to myself realizing I will never get to do the things I wanted to do with my dad. I'm still pretty shocked myself, not sure how long it will take me to realize she won't be around anymore.

I just hope everyone has a good Christmas day weather you like Christmas or not enjoying your day. I will try enjoy my day as well baking the rest of my Christmas cookies and cook the prime rib and deliver some to my other relatives who were gonna come to the dinner that was supposed to happen today.My wish is for everyone just to take care of yourselves into the next year I am gonna try to take better care of my health as well to lose weight (like I should have been doing for the past years ^^;; ). And if something is horribly wrong please do contact someone for assistance.

Ales and Lagers - An Introduction to Beer

by bangsecks

I think you'd benefit from a quick run down of the ingredients of beer and what each does and how it affects the taste and character of beer. First is water, obviously, which should be clean and more or less balanced in terms of pH; water can be the simplest thing or very involved when we get into mash temps., residual pH, relative mineral concentrations and other chemical considerations and so on. For now lets leave it as being simple and not pay it any more attention.

The next ingredient, really at the other end of the dial, is the yeast. This is a galaxy on its own and really, like the intricacies of water chemistry, best left alone for now. Just keep in mind that much of the flavor of beer comes from the yeast, which ferment the sugars into alcohol and CO2 and there are two major classes of beer depending on the yeast, lagers and ales.

The other two ingredients, barley and hops, are where we should really concentrate for someone like you. What are they and what do they do? Barley is a grain, like wheat or rice or corn or oats, and it's the traditional grain for making beer although others can be used like those just mentioned. Barley grains are subjected to a few processes to get them to a stage where they can turn all the starch or endosperm into sugar for the yeast to eventually eat and ferment into alcohol. There are two major types of barley, 2-row and 6-row, quite similar to one another, each of which can be subjected to additional processes to develop flavor characteristics. This is where I think you might benefit from learning something about the process as it relates to your ability to select a beer you will be likely to enjoy.

First, after barley is malted, that is germinated and then kilned just enough to halt further germination and sprouting, it can be roasted to varying degrees. Think of a piece of bread; if you eat it straight out of the oven a bit undercooked it will be a bit bland and will taste more like the wheat itself than if you take a slice and then toast it a while. Once it's toasted it will have that wheat taste but it will also have other tastes, those we associate with toasting, nuttiness, caramel, a little burned and so on. What if we really toasted the bread to where it was nearly blackened? That would be quite a different taste, bitter and less like wheat. We can do the same with barley for beer; roast it, like coffee beans, to varying degrees to bring out those different flavors. The more we do this the darker the grain and the darker the resulting beer. We can also mix grains of varying degrees of roast together for one beer, a bit of light and bit or dark and so on, to further complicate things.

Once we have our grain, whether not roasted at all and just plain, or roasted to the point of being black, we then have to basically soak the grain in water for some period of time, this is before we actually brew the beer, at some temperature to get the enzymes within each kernel to convert the starches into small sugars the yeast can metabolize. The different temperatures at which we do this give us different sugar and carbohydrate profiles; the overall temp. window is about 145F to 165F in terms of extremes, the best ranges are about 148F-152F for one type of conversion and about 156F-160F for another type of conversion. The first type breaks down the starch molecules in such a way so as to give us a very dry beer, in other words it gives us a lot of simple sugars which the yeast can totally convert into ethanol leaving little else behind, while the other type breaks down enough to still give us alcohol but leaves a lot of longer chain sugars which the yeast can't eat but our tongue can still detect slightly as a sugar. This means that if we do this, mash the barley, at a lower temperature we get a dryer beer and the higher we do it the more sweet and malty a beer we get.

Now, it's important to note that we don't usually do one or the other, we can try to reach a compromise so we get something in between, we might for instance mash somewhere in the middle, say 154F, or we might start low for a while then raise the temperature half way through. Basically, the point I'm trying to make, is that there are two major barley characteristics, dry and alcoholic and often a bit thin, or sweet, thicker and full of body. Light beers are often dry and dark beers a bit sweet.

A quick note here returning to yeast; there are two major types of beer which I mentioned before and with which I am sure you're already familiar, lagers and ales. These are basically the same type of yeast but different strains, although there are some different species altogether in some cases, and these different strains ferment best at different temperatures. The Bud and Coors and Miller and Michelob you reference are examples of lagers; there's a whole story behind why American macrobeers were and are lagers and where that came from and why ales were the default face of microbrews thereafter, but that's a different story which could take up a lot more room than I'm already doing here, but, basically, these beers are lagers and lagers are beers that ferment at low temperatures and give light, clean flavors. Ales are more versatile and ferment higher and can be light but can also be dark, like the Guinness you like. The point here is that there are two major branches of beer depending on the yeast, lager and ale, and a good ale is a dime a dozen, they're easier to make, and a good lager is a bit more difficult, plenty of cheap bad ones out there. An example of a quality lager is the Sam Adams you mentioned.

Now, on to bitterness, the last ingredient, hops. Hops are the oil and resin laden glandular buds of Humulus lupulus, a plant not too distantly related to the Cannabis genus and similarly containing many pungent alkaloids. These compounds give beer its bitter taste and if treated properly its spicyand often citrus nose and bouquet. These compounds are called collectively alpha acids and part of the reason beer needs to be brewed, boiled, is to cause a reaction with these acids wherein they change shape slightly and they thereafter gain shelf life and bitter the beer. Depending on when hops are added to the boil, this well after the barley has been mashed and sugars converted, they give varying degrees of bitterness. Just as when cooking where you can add your herbs at the beginning and by the end they're all cooked down and not vibrant or add them at the end right before you're done so they stay green and pungent so too do hops retain their flavor the less they're cooked. So there are two factors where, boiling longer and getting them to bitter the beer or adding them later so they keep the higher notes and aromas, and so we add hops in stages, a bit early on and then a bit later to get the full range of their flavors and aromas.

What the North Koreans are taught about the second world war

by Cenodoxus

We actually don't have to speculate too much about it. While we don't have access to everything that's been written or published within North Korea, South Korea has a ministry that collects North Korean publications and media, and both Korean and Western scholars have been able to establish what the dominant narrative in North Korean culture has become. While it's frustrating not to have every detail, it's fairly obvious how and why that narrative has come to exist.

What the North Koreans are told: Kim il-Sung and his band of freedom fighters bravely forced the Japanese to relinquish the Korean peninsula, conducting brilliant attacks from a secret base on the sacred Mount Paektu. During the struggle, the future Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il was born, and he fired at retreating Japanese as early as age three. Sometime in the middle of all this, the freedom fighters also found the time to carve predictions of Kim il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il's eventual greatness into 13,000 trees in the forest surrounding Paektu. The secret base, chairs, cups, and trenches used by Kim il-Sung were miraculously preserved and are available for tour by appointment. When he had time off from slaughtering the Japanese, Kim also wrote several revolutionary operas that are performed in North Korean theaters to this day.

Foreign visitors tend to have problems keeping a straight face on the rare occasions when they're taken to these sites. Some of the more obvious "slogan trees" referenced above were also quietly removed in the late 1990s when a visiting Japanese arborist asked how it was possible for 60-year old carvings to exist on 30-year old trees.

What actually happened: This narrative is really only accurate in the sense that Kim il-Sung fought against the Japanese, but I have yet to find any historian -- Korean, Russian, Chinese, or otherwise -- who's argued that he was anything other than a fairly minor figure in a widespread anti-colonial struggle. In fact, he didn't fight in Korea at all, but rather Jiandao province in Manchuria (the northeast portion of China that has a sizable Korean-speaking minority), leading companies and battalions of the Second Corps in what became known as the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. While not the highest-ranked officer in the Corps, he seems to have been competent, and by 1935 the Japanese had put a price on this head. At that point he'd been harassing them for about 4-5 years, and he lasted another 4-5 before things got too hot and he had to run for it. He sat out World War II and the rest of the fight against the Japanese occupation in a Red Army camp in Siberia. Kim Jong-Il was actually born there in 1942, and not in Korea at all.

Small interjection: Most of what we know of this period has been constructed from old Soviet, Chinese, and Japanese records, and Kim wasn't sufficiently important to merit mention at every turn. By necessity, there's some guesswork involved, and we don't have as much information as we'd like about Kim's actual record in (X) battle, or when Kim left Manchuria, etc.

By the time Kim returned to Korea with the Red Army in 1945, he'd been out of the country for something like 20 years and spoke Chinese much better than Korean. He was tasked with giving a speech in Pyongyang -- the Soviets were on the lookout for someone they could install in local government to help control the peninsula, and he seemed like a good prospect because he took orders well and had credibility as an anti-Japanese fighter -- and Soviet Koreans not only wrote the speech for him but had to coach him on pronunciation. This was only the first of many speeches he gave, and both these and the initial run of propaganda (again, largely written by other Soviet Koreans) were heavy on gratitude to the Soviets for their assistance in driving the Japanese off the peninsula and the Chinese for having supported the anti-colonial movement.

How and when this changed (i.e., we have always been at war with Eurasia): Now, the most interesting thing about North Korean propaganda is tracing how and when it changes (subtly or otherwise) to reflect contemporary political needs. As far as the NK government is concerned, their history is flexible and can be made to serve whatever ideology they need to push at a given time. This has even extended to archaeologists going on the hunt for ancient tombs in central Pyongyang in order to prove the city's classical importance. But that's not really what you're asking about.

Anyway:

• During the early 1960s and Khrushchev's tenure in Moscow, references to Soviet aid before and during World War II start to vanish from both North Korean history books and records of Kim's speeches. Why? Because Khrushchev was trying to reform both the Soviet Union and its client states away from the Stalinist model (something to which North Korea was heavily wedded), and he also ridiculed both Mao and Kim's personality cults. While Kim had always been the figure of primary importance in the North Korean narrative concerning World War II, he changed from being the beneficiary of Soviet generosity who used resources wisely to being someone who struggled without any serious help from other nations.
• References to Chinese aid wax and wane too. To the best of my knowledge, they, too, have largely vanished from the North Korean narrative of World War II, and they are definitely not acknowledged as the people who were really running the army in which Kim was an officer.
• Nothing is said of American or Allied involvement in the fight against Japan in the Pacific. Unfortunately, I don't know what, if anything, is said about the European theater.
• References to the juche doctrine start appearing in Kim il-Sung's speeches about 15-20 years after they were actually given. IIRC, Kim's actual mention of the doctrine dates to 1961 at the earliest, but juche starts showing up everywhere in the mid-1960s to early 1970s. Why? Because Kim Jong-Il was starting to build a power base for himself in the government, and needed a concrete contribution with which to be identified; they couldn't really pass him off as a major freedom fighter when he'd been all of 3 as the war ended. So juche was it. The actual architect of the policy was Hwang Jang-Yop, who defected to South Korea in 1997, but Kim Jong-Il expanded on it, wrote papers, essays, and books (or, just as likely, had someone write them for him), and juchemysteriously started being peppered in speeches Kim il-Sung had given two decades earlier in order to establish an unbroken line of thought concerning North Korea's need for economic self-reliance.Juche is not the only idea to have been given this treatment; in fact, scholars "mined" Kim il-Sung's speeches for pro-capitalist sentiments when the government needed a way to justify its tolerance of private markets in the 1990s and 2000s.

I'm trying and failing to remember if there's anything else that jumps out about North Korean education on World War II, but I think that addresses the most important stuff.

How to keep a conversation going

by NoAttentionAtWrk

You need to understand that to keep a converstaion going, you need to be a good listener. That word is thrown around a LOT but what I mean by a good listener is NOT that you just sit there and listen to whatever anyone has to say but what you need to do is really listen!

Let me explain the difference : the difference being that when someone says a line you make mental notes of different things.(very very important - I'll get back to this point) Then from within those things, pick up one and ask something about that. Repeat the same thing with whatever reply you get from the person.

Every now and then add to the conversation. Share your own related story/thought/experience related to what you are talking about. That keeps the conversation from becoming an interview.

Almost everyone does this naturally (yes, even most of the socailly awkward), but what you need to do to keep conversation from dying out are just 3 simple things :

• Avoid simple yes/no questions, one word reply questions or questions you reply with ok. Avoid them as much as you can ! these are conversation killers ! specially when the other person is not as talkative. Dont ask them unless you have something else you can go on about even with a one
• Never EVER reply with a one word reply when asked something. Those are conversation killers. Since the other person doesnt have much to go on about, they might not be able to reply (remember : they have probably not read this wall of text that I am typing, they might not conciously know what they are doing when they are having a conversation with you/anybody). Eventually what happens is even though they are as interested in carrying on the conversation, it turns into an awkward sielnce. If you are asked something that can only be answered in a one word reply, follow up with a question / statement.

Example:

ABC : Are you still friends with XYyou : no.

end of conversation because you didnt add anything here

ABC : Are you still friends with XYZ

ou : No. We fell out of touch when we started different colleges; I went to <some place> and he went <somewhere else>. Facebook is where we mainly keep in touch. I heard he married recently

you added something to the conversation and bam! you have something new to talk about!. like "you know who else got married?"

• remember those mental notes that I was talking about? Those are THE MOST important tool for keeping any conversation alive. If nothing else, read this! When a person says something you have to pick up on the important phrases that they mention. Keep those in mind and pick one of those to continue on the conversation. DO NOT FORGET the other points that the person mentions. These are your go back to points when you dont have conversation flowing with your previous point.

So, for example, if someone mentions they went to college in a different state, you now have 2 things that you can take your conversation forward on. One that they lived in that state and second that they went to college.

Say, you pick up on the state You can talk about how it was like living in that state, if the person worked there or how did they handle their finances without work. etc etc etc. 5 mins into this conversation (where you are still picking up more phrases the entire time) you find that you are approaching that awkward silence phrase (we all can tell if it is coming in, even though if you start to follow this, you'll probably avoid this phase for a long time). When you are about to get to that phase, look at your list. You now know that this person went to college in a state, worked for a bit managed mostly on his parents money. All the things you haven't talked about ! ask him which subjects did he take? were the professors any good? what was the craziest thing that he did in college ? where did he work? what was it working like over there? you'll start a completely different thread of that conversation. Add a few of your own thoughts/ opinions / (occasional) jokes into the mix. Tell them where you lived all your life. How it was like growning up there etc.

Dont make the convesation about yourself too much, concentrate on the other person. Everyone loves talking about themselves - specially the ladies. No guy or girl, young or old, ever complained that they had a boring conversation with someone cos they only talked about themselves.

Another example :

You : So where are you from ?

Person A : <XYZ City> 

You : Born and brought up there?

you avoided a potantially conversation killer, a one word answer, by asking a related open ended answer.

Person A : No, I was born in ABC town but then moved to <DEF> for college

    and then moved here after working in <RST> city for a while.

That one line was a potential goldmine! you know ABC town, college, DEF city, first jobin RST city, RST city, XYZ city. What was the person doing there, how was the place, what made them move, etc etc etc. pick one of these and start! then come back to this and continue a different thread. Throw a few non offensive jokes in the mix and the other person would have a fun time and they'll try to make sure the convo doesnt die out too!

People LOVE talking about themselves. It gives thier experiences a third party validation. It puts them back in the good times mode or reduces their stress. End result is always the same. The person would want to talk to you more.

Additional Notes :

• Fake enthusiasm in wanting to hear the other person. If the other person senses that you are interested in knowing about something they'll talk more. If they sense you are just asking for the sake of asking they are going to stop talking.
• Body language and expressions - read up on body language and figure out how to fake interest (things like slightly lean in, smile, nod occasionally). Laugh with the other person as hard as they are laughing even if you didnt find the joke as funny as the story teller.
• Always remember : Sometimes it is okay not to say anything. There is the awkward silence and then there are the perfectly acceptable, sometimes short, sometimes long non-awkward silence which is like a break you both would need in between conversations. For example : if you are both travelling in a car for say 4-5 hours. It can be okay to just take a few minutes every now and then and observe the view around you. Point something interesting out and you can continue the conversation.
• This is amazingly effective in one on one conversations but a variation can be applied when talking to a group of people. You need to be able to dail it back a notch with asking questions (let othes chip in) and you need to get better at keeping track of different things that different people are talking about. When find out similarities between 2 thigns that 2 people said, point it out (not abruptly) with a joke/question say something like

Person A : blah blah blah "so after that I lived in LA for about 2 years"

random convo

Person B : blah blah "I went to college in UCLA" blah blah

You : oh you went to UCLA ? is that how you two met ? while person A was living in LA and you went to college there?

• By the way you cannot have a script for a conversation with anyone. You can start every other conversation with a few selected lines ("interesting weather" "where are you from" "funny thing that happened today") and you can try to stear the conversation into a direction but you cannot have the exact same conversation with everyone because no 2 people would reply with the exact same thing every time.

Dealing with the past

by MrMentallo

I was 15 and moved to Philly from Texas. I had a pretty strong accent and had never been out of the state before so I didn't know what to expect socially. On my first day of school I had the bad judgement to wear a Dallas Cowboys jersey thinking people will just laugh. Throughout the day, I got a few dirty looks and a few "you've got balls" comments. Last period goes by and I'm waiting for my bus out front when this huge guido comes up and starts talking shit. I tell him to piss up a rope and he knocks me out in one punch. He gets suspended and I'm told not to antagonize things.

Time goes by and he's a constant pain in my life bullying me around on a weekly basis. He outweighed me by about 75 pounds thanks to his steroid use and had a temper to match. I got my ass kicked many times thanks to him and his manipulations. We graduate and I don't see him for a few years.

I had always been into cooking and decided that's what I wanted to do with my life so I went to culinary school and started working in the industry. I worked my way up the ladder quickly thanks to focus, a willingness to sacrifice a social life and hard work. A few years later I was the executive chef of a small bistro and we had a policy of taking a prisoner on work release from the county jail as part of a rehabilitation program. The owner was a great guy who grew up without guidance and made some bad decisions early in life that got him thrown in jail for a few years. He got out, got a job as a dishwasher where the owner of that place saw some promise and took him under his wing giving him the life lessons he never got from his family and so on. This was his way of paying forward what he got. We had gone through a few guys that seemed to do well and so far the program was working out well. One day we were slated to get a new guy and guess who walks in the door... He doesn't notice me at first but then is introduced to me as his direct boss. The owner starts to introduce me but I interrupt saying that we already know each other quite well and need no introductions. I told the owner about our history not leaving any details out and he asks me what I want to do. I tell him give me a few minutes in the walk in (large walk in refrigerator that is soundproof) with him and it's all good. I take him in there and ask him why he was in jail and where he was in his head. I also told him how I would treat him was up to him and that this could go well or he could turn right around and go right back to jail. He ended up breaking down and spilling his heart out. Between drugs, an abusive household and having no real friends in school due to a total lack of social skills, he had no idea how to have a real relationship. He told me that the days he would kick my ass were the days after his old man would beat him when he got drunk. His life just went downhill after school and he ended up getting busted for dealing. I told him to clean himself up and I'd do my best to show him how to get his shit together. He ended up being one of the hardest workers I have ever seen. Five years later he ended up being my sous chef. He has his own restaurant now and we guest chef at each other's place all the time. I wouldn't trade his friendship for the world.

I Am A Father

by pubbanana

Our family sofa, from what I remember, was a disgusting shade of blue. This particular shade of blue was on the offensive, ready to be interpreted by my body in ways other colors couldn't. Tasting and swallowing a color isn't possible, but I'm positive that couch gave me a punch to the tonsils more than once. And between the cushions, there was a thick layer of crumbs and food particles that solidified together and sat just beneath the surface. My feet would sometimes itch while lying there and to get it scratched, I would shove my foot between the back of the cushion and just scrape it against shards of Doritos, dried-out cookie crumbs, and other decayed carbohydrates. It felt so good.

My father would sit beside me in his green arm chair with no arms on it and drink Old Milwaukee and watch TV. This was our nightly ritual. He would watch re-runs of MASH and Cheers and get drunk and I would doze off on the sofa, periodically scraping my foot against the crumb-laden scratching post until he decided it was time to eat. He would saunter over to our stove which had a permanent brown burn mark that stretched from one end of the panel all the way over to the other. It didn't all happen at once, it accumulated after so many nights of my father's midnight drunk cooking choreography.

The food was always prepared perfectly and was always served in under one hour. He may have burned the shit out of the actual stove several times, but never the food. It's beyond confusing as to how he managed that. It's as if the universe was watching him and had every intention to make him ruin, burn, or drop something, but then just decided "Fuck it, let him succeed. What's one more paradox?"

After we ate, I would doze back off, periodically scraping my foot against the crumb confetti under the cushion until he would say "Alright, time for bed" and he would carry me back to my parent's room where we would sleep until morning. I slept in my parent's bed, with my actual parents in it, until I was about thirteen or fourteen. That may seem strange and that's because it is.

Years later, as a spritely young college student, I met a French exchange girl. She was ethnic Armenian and had every bit of that Levantine merchant (as Hitler called them) mystique about her. Her frame was small, her body was thin, and she dressed like a hipster. I'm not really sure what a hipster is, but I assume it's someone who denies themselves the pleasure of food in order to wear clothes meant for 11 year old orphans in Kosovo. And that's what she looked like. So tiny, so brown, such bizarre clothes, I imagined her sitting on a dirt road in an Indian market, sitting next to a giant pile of some kind of red spices. That's how exotic she seemed to my extraordinarily white eyes.

Because I'm the type of person who likes to get way too personal way too fast and also because I have a very poor concept of acceptable social behavior, I walked up to her after class one day and said "Hey! Where are you from?" as I extended my hand like a vacuum salesman.

Her eyes widened and then she looked down at the floor and zipped her bag and muttered "France ..." and she said it with absolutely no confidence, as if she expected me to mock her for being French. I said "Oh, where exactly? Paris? Lyon?" and then scanned my memory banks for more French cities that I had skimmed on Wikipedia once. Nope. That's all I had. I remembered Strasbourg, but it was too late as she had already began answering and said she was from Paris and then rattled off the Blah-de-blah-Blah town from where she specifically came. Then my eyes widened because I realized that now I am completely in love with her. By the time we walked out that door together, I already had our wedding location and our first adopted puppy's name already picked out.

That first day was a complete blur. She asked if I had to go to another class and I said no even though I had a lot of classes left for the day. I ended up not going to any of them and sitting with her outside the cafeteria and talking nervously while heart-attack sweat piled on under my armpits. I can't remember anything I said except for one instance when I made her laugh. I seriously saw the roof of her mouth because her head slid back so far from giggling. At one point, I slipped and made a comment about how I was supposed to be sitting in Philosophy class and she said "I thought you said you didn't have class?"

My heart immediately took the wheel and sent a surge of "cute" to my brain and I used it to craft the most charming sentence ever said to any woman anywhere ever: "I lied because I wanted to spend time with you." She stared at me for a second and I smiled and widened my eyes and she started laughing and said "You don't have to do that! We can text!" and by the end of that first day, I had her number. Feeling high from the first step towards an exclusive, committed, monogamous relationship with her, I resigned myself from the table and said I was actually going to class. In reality, I was going home to take a shower. Humans are 95% water and at that moment, 94% of it was soaked into my shirt. Before I left, I held up my hand for a high-five, but for some reason, when she touched my hand, I clasped my fingers between her's and just held it like that for a second. Then I said "Byeeeee" and she said "Byeeee" in an equally high-pitched tone and we parted ways.

While I was at home that night, I had thoughts running back and forth about what I should do next. I have her number, so should I text her? Every ten minutes, I would pick up the phone, type a text, delete it, and then put the phone down. I did that all night until I finally decided that we would have no contact until we saw each other in class the next day. However, even that seemed like it wasn't enough, so I used every ounce of my overly-observant, borderline-stalker instincts and thought about every possibility that I could use to be closer to her. Then the perfect plan emerged: I would intentionally show up late. Sounds strange, but the desks were split into two and she sat directly behind me and the girl who sits next to me has a BFF in the same class. If I show up late, her BFF will take my seat and I'll be "forced" to take the one right behind it which just so HAPPENS to be next to her. With the confidence that my psychotic obsession with her had made a plan come together, I shut my eyes and went to sleep.

The plan worked. There was an awkward silence at first and I thought about how I was going to kill myself once I got home because of it, but then the professor gave us a group assignment. Group assignments are carte-blanche to interact with other students with every intention EXCEPT the group assignment. I can't remember exactly what it entailed, but I intentionally tried act serious about completing it just to see if she would follow along. Thankfully, she didn't and even tried to be cute and lighten the mood. Everything was falling into the place. I wanted to greedily rub my palms together like Scrooge McDuck.

This period of awkward silences and no-texting lasted longer than I would have liked, but it's because I was over-thinking every single ounce of intention which went behind every action. Then Charlie St. Cloud was released in theatres and that was our first date. We didn't actually go to the theatre, we stayed in her apartment and told stories and drank blueberry vodka (which I detest) and then decided to just not even attend. Part of me was elated because that meant we could be alone the entire night. The entire rest of me was feeling sick and my eyes were blood-shot red. Despite my wretched human body in which I was obliged to keep alive, I've never had a more fulfilling experience before. We told each other everything about our families. I told her everything about my crazy German parents, about growing up in Suriname with no electricity before we moved to Texas when I was a kid, how my mother always screams "You kids make me so nervous, I could just shit!" and all the rest. In turn, she told me about how her mother tries to treat every illness with Armenian folk remedies, like putting a wad of garlic in your ear for a headache and wrapping a hot stone in a towel and putting it on top of your stomach for a belly ache and then she told me her father died when she was about four years old. She started to cry and I told her that I couldn't feel what she was feeling because my father was a chronic alcoholic and chain-smoker and was still alive well into his early seventies. Nothing seemed as small as her existence when it was inside of my big bodied embrace at that point in time.

Of course, you can see where this leads. The usual pattern ensued: We spend time together, we become a couple, we only spend time with each other, and with time comes obligations and with obligations comes a commitment and with commitment comes a relationship and with a relationship comes sacrifice. My greedy plan was being fulfilled faster than I could have expected, but I wasn't ready. I just simply was not ready for the stares other men would give to her, almost graciously ignorant of how it might affect me, the fights we would have because of my insecurity, the days without speaking because I was stubborn enough to wait for her to come to me instead of the other way around ... but there was never anything through which we couldn't push. We made it through each, individual, hurtful phase.

Really, we did. My previous girlfriends, whom I still love and wish nothing but happiness upon, couldn't do what she did or tolerate what she tolerated. I even appealed to TeamLiquid for help several times regarding my attempts to learn her language and once to help write an apology letter (albeit deceptively) to show my proficiency. By the way, if anyone is wondering how that turned out, she read it and just said "You didn't write this." and the kissed me. That had a very Taylor Swift ending. It sounds like it couldn't be true, but with what was about to come before us, it almost seems insignificant.

My father passed away almost a year into our relationship. I say "my father" and "passed away" because this is the normal, distant language I'm expected to use. I accept it and will follow the protocol, but I will say this: My father passed away, but my daddy died. I can accept my father passing away and I will never accept my daddy dying. The negativity which this event unleashed on our relationship is what lead to its complete and utter Soviet-style collapse. I starved her of honest interaction and she responded accordingly. After my daddy died, I became completely demented. I became a cancer-phobe (since he died at 72 from cancer) and a hypochondriac. I was running to doctor after doctor, psychiatrist after psychiatrist and I wouldn't discuss a single aspect of it with her. The final nail in the coffin, straw on the camel's back, and mound on the grave was when I packed up and moved back in with my mother. And even THIS she was willing to tolerate. She loved my mother and my mother loved her and she understood that as a mother of four children who has never lived alone, she wants the youngest, the baby, me, to be back home with her in this time of my father's death. In her mind, it was a cultural obligation and as a good German boy, I will come back to my mother.

Except that I only became more distant. The idea of speaking with her on the phone would make my back erupt into this rash which felt like it would be with me seven weeks after my death. My embarrassment, shame, and above all, my complacency with my pathetic mental situation was defeating me. Utterly and hopelessly defeating me. There were nights when I would be in bed with my phone next to my hand and periodically I would turn over to see how many of her missed calls would rack up ... I think her record was over thirty calls. Thirty calls in one night. But I just could not bring myself to reciprocate. I just wanted to die.

My mother sprang to my rescue and arranged for me to go on a short holiday in Austria with my father's family, but this wasn't my first set of goodbyes to put into motion. Marie texted me and told me she was going back to France and this was my last chance to see or speak to her. I called her immediately after reading that text, but she didn't answer. I called again later that night, no answer. I tried to Skype her, no answer. Ready to just sink my head into my pillow for yet another night of hypochondria and loneliness, I turned out the lamp.

Then the phone rang.

It was her.

Her voice ... I could have fainted at the sound of it and not even the strongest smelling salts or most convincing Voodoo ritual could have brought me back to life ... her voice ...

Somewhere, out of my thick-tongued, dry-mouthed, hypochondria-ridden brain, I made the sincere promise of seeing her before she left for France. It was absolutely sincere. I remember when I said "I love you" before I hung up, she said "You should .... because I love you."

Thankfully, my sister was visiting from Austin at that time and she was going home regardless, so I rode with her with plans to stay for the weekend and that was how I found myself in her apartment that night. Every bit of my distance, neurosis, psychosis, every last scintilla of it vanished that very night. I kissed her, her mouth, her cheeks, her forehead, her eye-lids and then promised to kiss every part of her before she left. She even came back to my sister's house with me. I felt like a twelve old sneaking my girlfriend into my parent's house. What happiness I felt! We slept together on the couch, sleeping soundly to the Dirty Dancing DVD on repeat.

The next day, as my sister drove Marie and myself to the airport, my heart was completely steady, my mind was clear, and I felt normal. Not sad, not anything. Just completely normal. But somewhere along the line inside of that airport, around those people, I just couldn't say goodbye to her. I did what, in my mind, was keeping a theme alive. Kissing every part of her before she leaves seems like a theme, right? So, I lifted up her left elbow and kissed it. Without a moment's hesitation, I said "I'm gonna kiss the other one when you come back" and then she said "When you come here!!"

Her voice ... the excitement ... every single one of you would kill me if you knew that I never spoke with her after moment. Never sent her any Skype messages, any Facebook messages, no emails, nothing. You guys would tear me apart and you have every right to do so ... but Taylor Swift had a point. Sometimes, you have to believe in love stories.

"Remember that woman from work who bought all our furniture when we moved?" my mother asked on one awkward summer Wednesday morning

"Yeah ... Sandra, right?"

"Yes, well, her and her husband are moving to Montreal, their son is a doctor up there, and since daddy died, they want to leave that furniture with us."

"What are we gonna do with it?"

"Well ... let's just put it in the living room and then we'll have a big garage sale."

It seemed like a normal proposal, I had no ulterior or subconscious feelings towards the decision, so I welcomed that disgusting blue sofa back into our home. After all, it was the structure which hosted, comforted, and soothed me during my boyhood years. During this time of furniture transplantation, I tried sending emails to Marie, short and sweet, nothing too serious, and she responded in the equivalent tone. Knowing that it was over between us, I felt I had nothing to lose. One night, after becoming completely dogshit drunk, I wrote her a message which could carry every dead man's memories from the Civil War. That's how long and obnoxious it was. And, somehow, through the great unknown cosmic forces of physics and probability, she gave a favorable response. One thing lead into another, a different tone, a different medium of conversation, a different feeling ... but somehow, it wasn't different. It's what we are.

It is what we are. To put it into humane sentiments, I had even broken up with my current (at the time) girlfriend Emma, just on the off-chance that this could lead into something which would make me happy.

When I signed into Skype that night because she wanted to tell me the "big news" (which I knew was her returning to Austin, but to retain the mood, I played ignorant), I could not believe the image I saw. When that webcam flicked on, I just saw her sitting on her bed and holding up her right elbow and said "Are you gonna kiss this one, too?"

I nodded. I couldn't speak.

To skip past a few boring and minor details, we ended up embracing each other in person in a way which would make the Columbine shooters put aside their plans and think about sticking around on Earth for the possibility of having something similar to that. It was absolutely incredible. After deciding on being hosted by my mother for the rest of the holiday, she found herself in our home. Welcomed to the smell of roast beef and slightly raw potatoes (typical German odors), she collapsed into my mother's arms. I was shocked to see that she was so happy to be within the confines of the family which raised me, my mother's little baby. Not knowing what to do, I ran away to my bathroom and turned on the faucet and waited for those two to settle down.

They never did. When I walked outside to the patio, I heard my mother's dialogue and realized that she was explaining every detail of our family to Marie. Not every detail, but every single particle from the Austro-Hungarian Empire until that very moment. Trying to brush my mother off of Marie's back, trying to get Marie to pay attention to me, trying to get BOTH of them to settle down and call it a night ... absolutely futile. That first night turned into an all-night family revisionist history session. And the fault was on both parties, to be clear.

However, it wasn't always that boring. One night, while in bed with her, I told her the story of that disgusting blue sofa and how it is the EXACT same sofa we have in our living room right now. I told her how clean it is now, how different it feels now, but in my heart, that will always be MY sofa. She laughed so hard when I described my foot-scraping ritual. And how my dad always cooked when he was drunk. She couldn't contain herself. She would giggle so hard and then peer at me with these wifely eyes, that I could just FEEL the oxytocin building up inside of her membranes. All of these family history" shticks wore off very quickly. This is when things became a little ... aggressive. I had pushed her away, lost my mind, then kind of regained my good sense, then kind of lost it again, then suddenly I have her in my home with our old furniture, which provides MANY stories to make her laugh. But ... having her .... all good sense is absent. One night, we had sex with each other. It was my first time, it was her first time, and everything else is irrelevant.

She left, became settled back in Austin, had her first semester at U.T. right ahead of her. I'm still with my mother, doing what I can to help around the house. I re-painted the entire house, cut down all the cedar trees, even took some of the leftover cedar and had a beautiful plant-bed made for my mother ... just things like that. However, I couldn't live this life without any amount of sacrifice. I couldn't live this amount of happiness with having her back in my life without some form of responsibility ... I just couldn't.

In one very distant part of my mind, I knew this was coming.

When I received the call, I was wearing work-gloves and had just turned off a chain-saw.

"I'm pregnant."

I threw off my gloves and ran inside to make sure I heard that correctly? Did I hear really hear that?

At that point, I was almost delirious. I had tunnel vision.

I took off my gloves and gave them to my brother. I was going inside. How could I EVER TELL MY MOTHER? How could I ever tell my mother I made a girl pregnant before I was married?

I wanted to kill myself.

As I entered that house ... my mother comes RUNNING at me, SOBBING and says, verbatim "I just got off the phone with Marie ..." and then started sobbing again and saying how proud she is. How proud she is? Of me? For what?

My mother always wanted grandbabies and she wanted them from me and she wanted them from her. In her mind, this is the greatest gift she could have ever received.

In my mind, it's .... I don't know what it is. To be honest, I cannot comprehend what it actually is. Last night, I slept on that disgusting blue sofa in our living room. At one point, I woke up and turned over. I dug my foot between the backs of the cushions, but they're clean now. There is no crumb confetti to comfort me.

Slowly descending into this spiral of responsibility to which I have voluntarily assigned myself, I drifted off into a deep sleep.

At one point, I woke up because I heard the typical voice from my father:

"Alright, it's time for bed."

I was so groggy and tired, but I got up and lifted my arms up, waiting to be picked up by my father.

The reality seeped into my pores like an air-borne illness. My father is dead. He is not going to pick me up and take me to bed. His days of taking care of his children are over. They're over.

However, mine are just beginning.

The Themes of Dexter

by EnormousHatred

ATTENTION: SPOILERS!

Season 1: Individualism. In the beginning Dexter followed Harry's code to the letter and never really let his own feelings get in the way. He never really questioned a way of life that came from within. Brian represented the antithesis of Harry's code; he was a free spirit with no rules. By the end of the season, Dexter's strict adherence to Harry's teachings ended up costing him his brother, "the only one he ever wanted to let go".

Season 2: Possession. Lila was the embodiment of dependence, she coveted Dexter to the point that it nearly brought down everyone around her. The opposite action is to let go, to free oneself of the bindings, the vices that sustain yet also chain us. Dexter struggled with this when he had to make his toughest decision yet regarding Doakes: "Kill me now or set me free!" It was either give in to his greatest weakness, the need to kill, or set him free and ultimately risk losing everything. Doakes brought up suicide, and even planted seeds of regret and shame in Dexter's mind, causing him to consider turning himself in—other ways of letting go. (Addiction lies in this same sphere so you were pretty much on the money here.)

Season 3: Trust. This mostly goes hand-in-hand with friendship, but it extends beyond that somewhat. There were parallels drawn between Dexter's relationships with Miguel and Rita. Friendship and marriage are ultimately built on the same foundation of trust.

Season 4: Responsibility. With family comes a great need for responsibility and priority (see also care, neglect, nurturing). Dexter eventually learned the hard way that you can't just make perfunctory appearances and not expect things that have been built up to degrade. (On a side note I think this was eventually illustrated in a clumsy way with the twist ending, but at least the point was clear.)

Season 5: Altruism. Story-wise it was sort of an extension of the last season because Dexter was dealing with guilt over his brief and neglectful marriage. The things he did for Lumen were essentially an act of contrition. He couldn't make things right with Rita, so he took in a battered and broken individual and selflessly took on her own darkness. He might have hunted these same individuals had he not met Lumen, but in the end he took his hands off the steering wheel and let her solve her own brief taking-on of the "Dark Passenger".

Season 6: Faith. Dexter never really takes on a spiritual side, but he gains a respect for the concept of faith. He didn't start to question whether there was a "God" per se, but Brother Sam was able to help him discover a capacity to trust that things will work out when they lie outside your control. Control is important to Dexter, so when Harrison was in the hospital, he felt helpless because there was literally nothing he could do but wait. Travis represented the dark side of faith by taking his Lord's name in vain. He was a person who chose to interpret mere words in a radical, concrete fashion, absolving himself of responsibility by saying this is "how it's supposed to be", while missing the bigger picture unlike Sam. Ironically, Dexter found himself hoisted by own petard when he decided to faithfully disregard the minute possibility that Debra would visit him at the church.

Season 7: Love. Pretty obvious so far, though I don't mean that in a bad way. The dangers of love make good and bad people alike suspend rationality and integrity; Debra's love for Dexter is great enough that it drives her to cover for his heinous crimes; Dexter can't bring himself to take out Hannah despite fitting his code quite well; Isaak chooses to pursue a frivolous vendetta, ignoring the fact that Viktor, objectively, committed some terrible acts. More on this one as the season churns on...

A Long Way Home

by Wartoad

I was day tripping to Vancouver from Seattle and stopped in for lunch at a little cafe. From my window I saw a young teenage girl out in the cold, squatted down in a closed up businesses doorway, holding a small bundle in her arms. She was panhandling, people were mostly walking by ignoring her. She looked just broken.

I finished up my meal and went outside, went through my wallet and thought I'd give her $5 for some food. I got up to her and she was sobbing, she looked like she was 14-15. And that bundle in her arms was a baby wrapped up. I felt like I just got punched in the chest. She looked up putting on a game face and asked for any change, I asked her if she's like some lunch. Right next door was a small quick-Trip type grocery store, I got a can of formula for the baby (very young, maybe 2-3 months old.), and took her back to the cafe though I'd just eaten. She was very thankful, got a burger and just inhaled it. Got her some pie and ice cream. She opened up and we talked. She was 15, got pregnant, parents were angry and she was fighting with them. She ran away. She's been gone almost 1 full year.

I asked her if she's like to go home and she got silent. I coaxed her, she said her parents wouldn't want her back. I coaxed further, she admitted she stole 5k in cash from her Dad. Turns out 5k doesn't last long at all and the streets are tough on a 15 year old. Very tough. She did want to go back, but she was afraid no one wanted her back after what she did.

We talked more, I wanted her to use my phone to call home but she wouldn't. I told her I'd call and see if her folks wanted to talk to her, she hesitated and gave bad excuses but eventually agreed. She dialed the number and I took the phone, her Mom picked up and I said hello. Awkwardly introduced myself and said her daughter would like to speak to her, silence, and I heard crying. Gave the phone to the girl and she was just quiet listening to her Mom cry, and then said hello. And she cried. They talked, she gave the phone back to me, I talked to her Mom some more.

I drove her down to the bus station and bought her a bus ticket home. Gave her $100 cash for incidentals, and some formula, diapers, wipes, snacks for the road.

Got to the bus, and she just cried saying thank you over and over. I gave her a kiss on the forehead and a hug, kissed her baby, and she got on the bus.

I get a chistmas card every year from her. She's 21 now and in college.

Her name is Makayla and her baby was Joe.

I've never really told anyone about this. I just feel good knowing I did something good in this world. Maybe it'll make up for the things I've f-ed up.

Realistic Body Armor as an Example for Managing Design Space in Games

by Reddit4Play

A lot of creative disciplines share a very important aspect, which is the management of space. Napoleon was known to say that strategy is about management of space and time (he was also known to have said he was more keen about the latter, since space could always be recovered), and in a lot of ways that's what creative design is about. I'm a lot more amateur at music than I am at games as a field, but one of the first things you learn in digital music creation is that you only have a few dimensions to work in and once they're filled you are just adding what amounts to useless white noise that makes your sound bad, especially in a song (other audio may vary).

Here's what I mean, and forgive the tangent into music but trust me it'll make sense in a minute. In music you have three spatial dimensions you can fill, basically, until your track is "full". You have the in-out direction, or volume, which represents how close something is to you (louder is closer). A special thing about volume is that in digital recordings (and to an extent in analog recordings unless you're willing to go the extra mile and invent custom formats for getting crazy with) once you hit a certain threshold of volume, you're completely done. Above +-0dB? Nobody's going to hear it unless they're listening in an audio workstation that has a higher bit depth; to the normal man listening to the .mp3 at home that's just going to clip completely off and be a bad sounding noise. So, you always have to consider the volume dimension. The left-right axis is represented by panning, which quite literally moves the sound more left or more right. The up down axis is a little metaphorical, because we say a sound is high or low in pitch, but it helps to think of it as a third dimensional axis to go with in-and-out and left-to-right.

Just like in film (I swear that although this gets farther a-field it'll come back to games) if you place any element at the same intersection of these three points in space the more difficult it will be to resolve to the senses, so the same for music - if you have an actor behind another actor relative to the camera, the other actor may as well not be there because he is effectively invisible since the first actor is in the way of the shot, and this also works for sounds in music that share the same pitch, panning, and relative volume (although usually two of the three is enough to make it kind of muddy). Basically what I'm saying here is that in film and music, you need to manage space to make sure each thing has its place, and also that, just like in volume, you can't overload something with too much stuff, otherwise it gets bad (in the case of music it clips, in the case of film... well... I'd imagine it'd be distracting, but I'm not even a hobbyist when it comes to films so I won't pretend to be able to talk there).

ANYWAY, back to games. You say you want a more realistic damage model? Great, so do I. For ages I've wanted to see a completely realistic implementation of modern body armor. You get shot? Does the armor catch the bullet? Broken rib at the worst; you're not going to be out of the fight if your life is at stake but you won't have a good couple weeks after that because of the bruising. You want evidence of that? Go check out the North Hollywood shootout, where the bank robbers were shot dozens of times in their body armor with nary a pause noted. Were they bruised to hell and back? Definitely yes. Did the body armor keep them in the fight? Also definitely yes (until the big guns arrived, at least). I'd give quite a lot of money to see a game that takes body armor beyond Counterstrike's primitive "damage ablater" model, but I am quite aware that this would end up a very niche game. Why?

Here's the connection you've read what is probably far too much text for me to get to. Just like in films and music, and even the strategy of war, in game design you need to manage space. Design space. That is to say, you need to manage the amount of crap in your game. Now I'm not just talking about budgetary and man-hour concerns, which are entirely valid meta-reasons to be concerned about how much stuff you put in your game to be fair, but that if you put too much stuff in a game it becomes a bad game.

Now I know /r/games is primarily devoted to digital games - ones that involve keyboards, mice, joysticks, CPUs, whatever, but this is actually a trend most evident in tabletop gaming. A lot of the biggest tabletop games, like war games or roleplaying games, generally tend to suffer from a condition known generally as "bloat", or perhaps "rules bloat", or "product bloat", or whatever is getting bloated but the point is it expands a lot. The single best example I know of this is in fact the archetypical Dungeons & Dragons, which beginning in its 2nd edition (a good clue here is that it even had two editions or more to begin with - you don't see Monopoly with more editions) began to release tooooooooooooooons of supplementary rules-based products. In part this was originally because the company that published the game, TSR, was going horribly horribly bankrupt and was clutching at straws at stay financially afloat (there's that meta-concern again!), ... but this process continued in the game's third edition (in fact the "d20 system" on which 3rd edition D&D was based became so prolific that it's hard to find a game that wasn't given an attempted conversion into d20, sort of like if somehow Crysis 3 would be a smash hit and everybody starts hopping on the CryEngine for their sequels instead of whatever engine they were using before) ... and the fourth edition ... and in fact is known to be such a problem that the game's designers are specifically trying to address "reducing rules bloat" in the fifth revision of the game all these years later.

So, what does this have to do with walking with a limp? Basically, walking with a limp takes space. Getting more damage when you're shot in the head takes space. More realistic damage models, by virtue of being more complicated, take more space. If you want to make a game that doesn't overflow into bloated land, and thus remains in the territory of "good", you need to cut other things to make space for this complex realism. This is why a game like ARMA II really doesn't appeal to most people, because even though it made some compromises (for instance its flight and vehicle models aren't particularly simulationist even compared to something like Battlefield 3, which is known to be an arcade style shooter not unlike Call of Duty, just with bigger maps and vehicles and some other fancy widgets tacked on) its core gameplay is still fairly dense and complicated because reality is fairly dense and complicated and that's what it is attempting to portray, a fictitious reality simulator.

Even in the realm of simulation games, then, there is no "everything simulator". There's a train simulator, there's a plane simulator, there's even a "mostly infantry combat with some vehicles and stuff thrown in there" simulator (the aforementioned ARMA II), but there's no "everything simulator" because there isn't enough room in a design paradigm to simulate everything.

So, and this is the end I promise, back to your question. Why are there no games that use injuries instead of a health system? Because stripping injuries from the game leaves the design space less cluttered and makes room for other more important core features that would be distracted (and thus after a fashion detracted) from if you included realistic injury models. Your given Call of Duty clone isn't concerned with the slow methodical gameplay that injury modelling is a large part of, and therefore they have no reason to clutter up their game by including it. They could, make no mistake. Call of Duty has an enormous budget and some of the most talented game designers on the planet working on it... which is precisely why they don't even though they could.

So, back to me. I, like you, would love to see a more realistic injury model in a game. I'd love "Realistic Body Armor: The Game". But... that's exactly what it would be, and make no mistake. The game would be about having realistic body armor because that eats so much of the design space, especially since it's ground nobody's really trod on before so it'd take more effort (thus opening us back up to those meta-concerns again). It wouldn't be about a lot of other things because, again, there's no space for that. In my head I'm having a hard time taking the concept beyond "well, it's like Counterstrike, but the guns are like in Receiver and the body armor is realistic". So, basically, the reason that more games don't have more realistic damage models, even though they could, is because it unnecessarily clutters a design space that has no use for such a mechanism. Unless those injuries further the archetype the game is trying to promote? Basically wasted space.