At a nearby library, some of my photos are on display. They are $85 accross the board for the framing and matting, with the print, of course. They cost about $60 to $70 to make. Someone bought one. I don't know which one, but it was one of the ones shown below. Not all of the ones shown below are on display, and not all of the ones on display are shown below. It's been so long since I got the prints made, and the frames and matti
ng done, that I've forgotten which specifically are on display.
Note the arrow next to Your Score, indicating which is yours, making it independant from who is in the lead. If you were the Leader (the player winning), your score bar would be at the top, and the player in second place or who was tied with you would be below your score bar.
Your Shields are very simple: when you get hit with a weapon, your shield meter goes down. If you keep getting hit, depending on what weapon you're being hit with, and where you're being hit on your body, and from how far away you're being hit from, your sheilds will drop completely, and the outline of the now-empty bar will blink red, and beeping sounds can be heard in the game. They will only recharge if you go without being damaged, either by a Melee (I'll get to that later), a grenade (also later) or a hand-held weapon of some kind (see above for example) for a sufficient amount of time. If you keep taking damage after your shields are brought down, you will be killed.
The Default Controls in Halo 2 are as seen below. As seen above, there are two kinds of grenades in Halo 2, the plasma grenade and the frag[mentation] grenade (known and displayed as the frag grenade). The frag grenade is very bouncy. It will explode only after bouncing off of something (anything, including your face) at least once. It takes about 2 to 3 seconds to explode if you throw it at eye-height. Depending on how much time it has been since the grenade was thrown, it will explode almost immediately after its first contact with an object. The plasma grenade is completely different. A frag grenade, if it explodes right at your feet, will take down your shields. A plasma grenade, however, if it explodes at such a close range, will instantly kill you. Also, it sticks to you. No, that was not some kind of typo. If you throw a plasma grenade at someone and it comes into contact with them before it is right about to explode, you will get what is commonly called a "Stick" but is officially named a "Stick It" medal (see bottom for information about medals and an image of the "Stick It" medal).
What you'll also see below and may be confused about is the "Melee Attack", more commonly referred to as the "Melee". This involves taking the weapon that you are holding and hitting whatever may be in front of you. The damage that this deals is dependant on where you are meleeing your opponent from. A melee to the back is known as an Assassination (see bottom), which is an instant kill. Someone who is jumping down from a height and melees someone on the ground as they are falling will deal much more damage than a simple ground-level melee, which usually (depending on what weapon that you are using to melee with) kills in 2 to 3 melees. A midair melee, which is a melee that occurs when both the target player and the player who is meleeing are in the air, deals almost twice as much damage as that of a ground-level melee. If you kill someone using a melee, you get a medal known but almost never referred to as the "Bonecracker" (see bottom).
If you look at the bottom-left hand frame, you'll see that the Y button is illuminated and is labled "Dual Wield". See the image below for an explaination. If you press the Y button or melee while dual-wielding a weapon, you will drop the dual-wielded weapon.
Dual Wielding weapons is extremely strategic, in that there are dozens of combinations, and choosing the right one for each battle situation can mean the difference between victory and defeat. For example, a close-quarters weapon combination like dual-wielded SMGs (SubMachine Guns) won't be effective at all against someone with a Sniper Rifle on the other side of the map.
As you look at the image above, you're probably wondering what the red X's with the arrows underneath mean. Those are known as Waypoints. (See below)
Waypoints are extremely important for teamwork, since running into a room (like I was doing in the image above) filled with several Red X's may not be the best choice of action, as it probably means that your opponent[s] have a firm hold on that area of the map.
The icon that you see inside the waypoint (the white astrick-like symbol on the red and purple background) is what is known as a player's Emblem. See the image directly below for some more examples of player emblems in Halo 2.
There are dozens of medals. The three below were mentioned above. Medals are awarded when certiain events occur. Most of these events require quite a bit of skill and more than a little luck to have happen.
The "Bonecracker " medal is awarded when you get a "beat down", or kill someone using a melee. It is referred to as the "beat down" medal because when it occurs, the notification on the screen says "You beat down Player" (Player would be the name of the player that you beat down)
The "Stick It" medal, most often referred to as getting a "Stick" is awarded when you throw a plasma grenade and kill the player that you are throwing it at by getting it stuck to them by the time that the grenade explodes. 
The Assassination medal is awarded when you kill someone be meleeing them in the back, causing immediate death.
One of the most common ways to compare performance after a game of Halo 2 on Xbox Live is to measure up who was awarded the most medals. It is just one of the many ways that Halo 2 is so competetive and fun.
gor For those of you who don't know, I like in New Hampshire, center-southern. (By Londonderry) 
I made this myself :)
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space I don't know where to begin. I'm thinking that I should start at the beginning, but I'm worried that it might be too much of a cliché, since so many stories start at the beginning.
Whatever; here's how it went.
Seen above is an interior view of the Acela Express, an Amtrak train. To get to New York from New Hampshire, we (my family) went down to Westwood, MA to Route 128 Station and rode the Acela roughly 3 hours to Penn Station in New York.
The whole 3 hours I knew that I was perfectly safe and fine, because the Advanced Laminated Safety Glass was there to protect me if any malicious raindrops were to attack the train while it was going at its top speed of 155 mph.
Before the actual Thanksgiving dinner, the majority of my relatives on my dad's side met up with us and made lots of noise and got some funny looks and didn't care, because when you see someone close to you for the first time since the last holiday season, you don't tend to care.
My dad and uncle took me for a walk around the city since it was my first time in New York city (as well as my first time in the state of New York), and there were still several hours until the actual Thanksgiving dinner was to take place.
What you're seeing above is a a shot taken in a method which I've dubbed "Faith Shooting". (Sounds like something you would hear on the news about the war in Iraq, doesn't it) This method is a mixture of stupidity and greed, two things that, while they are not difficult to find in New York (especially New York city), have nothing to do with what you would typically think of when you hear or read the words "stupidity" and "greed". "Faith Shooting" (I'm going a little quote crazy here) is done when you are crossing a busy city street (specifically in New York city) and you need to get across before the light turns green or you *will* get killed, either by a yellow cab or a yellow cab going the speed limit. There are several factors at work: There is usually a group of about 10-20 people on both sides waiting to cross. Another factor is that in New York city, everyone is always in a hurry. Always. Also, in order to avoid A) Bumping into the people in front of you, B) Going too slow and causing the people behind you to bump into you, and C) Taking a picture that is 40% covered by the head of a stranger, "Faith Shooting" requires that you hold your hand up as high as you can while holding your camera, and snapping off the shutter in the general direction of what you're trying to take a photo of, while walking at 8 mph across a windy, 30° busy city street surrounded by 2 dozen people while facing forward. That was the "stupidity" part. The "greed" part is not caring, if only about how awesome, at times, the photos turn out if you get lucky, like I did above.
Thanksgiving dinner finally arrived, and I was too busy eating my High Score of 5 pieces of Pumpkin Pie (1 of which was approved by my mom, 3 of which she was certain would make me sick, and the last of which was grabbed as we were leaving) to take a picture of anything accept this bowl of spinach. Enjoy the view.
Since my Aunt's partment was so small (a.k.a.: Übercozy), the neighbors (where they were, I didn't ask or care, I was too busy eating at the time) that my Aunt was good friends with let her use tapartmenttment as a food storage facility. All the while, Barry White (yes, that is the cat's name, and yes, that is the best name ever) watched people come and go. Each time I came in he was in a different spot in the room.
The next day I woke up to the sound of my dad telling me that if I wanted food, I had to get up and leave for breakfast at Zabars, and since (somehow) I was starving beyond belief, I was up in 53 seconds and out the door. Afterwards we walked around for 2-3 hours. I came back and attempted to get the extreinconsistentstant shower to work. By "work", I mean spout out water that maintains a temperature or water within 10 degrees of a given temperature that is equal to or greater than 32°F.
I failed to get the shower to "work".
After my "shower", we went and rejoined the rest of my relatives for what it seemed to be what my 1-2 hour walk with my dad and uncle had been an appetizer for; what my uncle called a "walking tour". This was (although I don't know why this was surprising, but it was) a tour, that consisted of the group (you guessed it) walking around New York city.
I need to make sure that this is made clear before I go any further: The reason that there is a photo of a bakery is becuase that was one of the 2 times that I deemed it safe enough to take out my camera during the first 4 hours of the walking tour. It is of what my uncle called "one of the last old-fashioned traditional Italian bakeries left". It was in (you guessed it again) Little Italy.
The first couple hours of the walking tour were spent in ChinaTown, which was so unbelievably packed with people that it would have almost been deserving of me to have my camera stolen if I had been foolish enough to take it out.
I passed a black guy who offered to sell me a 14-karat-gold ring. My dad just said "No thanks".
aswe As we were walking, there were a lot of billboards, but one of them caught my eye. We were in a rush, and it was across the street, which is why I only could get as close as I did. I'm almost proud that I managed to notice it, as at a glance it looks like just another billboard. Keep in mind also that this photo was taken with my camera at full 2.0x optical zoom, and I only had about 3-5 seconds to snap it and run.
We~We went into this diner that was so packed, there was a line to get in and a line to get out. The sandwiches were so big that to make them (which they did when you ordered, what a concept), the person behind the counter took a huge (what appeared to be) 40-50 pound chunk of meat and sliced every half-inch or so along an edge.
What you're seeing above is an escalator view of (OMG) Macy's. There were so many people (the photo doesn't do justice to the scale of how crowded it really was) that there was actually an extremely organized form of a Crowd-Control service operating in the store, involving megaphones and velvet ropes.
As we were walking out of Macy's, I couldn't help but notice something shiny out of the corner of my eye...No, it couldn't be...holy crap! (My reaction, an ellipsis representing approximately 1-1 ½ seconds). It was pretty cool, especially since my dad told me that we were (yet again, along with the rest of New York city) in a hurry and couldn't stay but a few seconds.
About an hour to two hours later (after Macy's), we came into Time's Square. Epilepsy. 'Nuff Said.
Partially due to the fact that it was getting cold (-er, it was already a windy 33° outside, and the sun was going down), we went inside of the "NBC Observation Center". There we observed that the temperature was a good 40-50° warmer inside than outside what I had dubbed "The snowless blizzard". Thinking of remembering being so near to NBC studios, I went up to one of the two walls that had the logo that you see so polished and gleaming in the photo above.
As I leaned forwards to take the picture, the security guard said "$200 per picture". I looked at him, at first not hearing him, or at least hearing him and hoping that I had heard him incorrectly. "It's $200 to take a picture." I stared at him, "You're serious, aren't you." I said, "You're serious." but he just laughed and said that he was just kidding and to go ahead.
Welcome to New York.
I'm glad to be home.
Google Earth is a free program from Google that uses satellite imagery to display a three-dimensional map of the Earth.
