- GameJunkieJim
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- Exalted Mythic Member
Here's most of that story LOL
The guy paints her as an anti-terrorism tool.
She appears to just be a tool.
Reese Witherspoon is still standing in the foyer of Julia Roberts' suite, awkwardly shifting the gift-wrapped box of Jimmy Choos from hand to hand. Coming over, Reese decided that this little get-together was going to be some kind of A-list, big-sister/little-sister chat: you know, a passing of, like, the mantle. She tries to squint over Julia Roberts' shoulder, who's sitting on the raw silk carpet with a titanium Powerbook propped between her long legs.
Reese Witherspoon coughs chirpily. "So, is this like that 'Hee-low' thing again?" she asks, with a bit more edge than she intended.
Julia Roberts shushes her, and unpauses the QuickTime viewer. Onscreen, a military jeep goes twirling end over end while Sinatra sings on the soundtrack. Julia Roberts laughs the horsey, Southern girl laugh that gets her gross points. "Ain't that Warthog jump just about the funniest dang thing you ever seen? Wait wait wait, have you watched 'Red vs. Blue' yet?"
No, thinks Reese Witherspoon, she has not watched "Red vs. Blue" yet.
For somehow, she imagined they'd be propped on the edge of the bed by now, cotton balls wedged between their toes, as they did each other's nails and talked about boys they loved. But what Reese Witherspoon does not know is, even if that had been the subject, Julia Roberts would still inevitably steer the topic back to Bungie games. She'd talk about the times Lyle would stumble out of the bedroom at 3 a.m. because she was still there at her Power Mac, plowing through once last level of "Marathon." ("You comin' to bed, darlin?") Or how Benjamin would grumble whenever he'd haul the CPU into the Lexus so he could drive it and her to yet one more LAN party in some China Basin warehouse, so she could retain her Emperor crown in "Myth II" multiplayer. ("Ah, Julia... again?")
Once Reese Witherspoon is gone, Julia Roberts takes a "Halo" respite, so she can log into Xbox Live for a few rounds of "Unreal Championship." "UC" isn't exactly her thing, just a bit too macho Camacho for her taste. On the other hand, Julia Roberts has devised a strategy where she primes up three shells in her rocket launcher, then makes a flying leap off an elevated platform, because anyone below her when she lets rip is fricking toast.
In a suburban basement in outer Duluth, a guy in a White Wolf T-shirt screams, and smacks his forehead into the brick and plywood coffee table. It's the fifth time in as many minutes that this same asshat with a totally -blam!- online name has cold-cocked him. While bloody chunks of his torso fly every which way onscreen, he kicks his Xbox onto the orange plush carpet. "Damn you, 'Brocko-blam!-,'" he seethes at the screen. "Damn you!"
In her Beverly Hills hotel, Julia Roberts sends the taunt "Don't h8 me cuz I rool!!!" (her standard online smackdown), then snags up a link gun to take after her next quarry, a chronic -blam!-or playing in tube socks from his dorm room in Champaign-Urbana.
"And how does it feel, Julia," Oprah Winfrey soon purrs, "when you... what was that again? When you 'frag' someone?" (Rosie O'Donnell is more effusive when Julia walks her through a single-player level. "Omigawd, didja see what I did?" Rosie yells, as she waves her game pad in the air. "That was a perfect head shot!") The half-embarrassed giggles of 50 million soccer moms answer the airing of both shows, and one by one, they sneak into their sons' rooms, fire up the Xbox, and try the cheat code they just heard about during Oprah's Video Game of the Month tea chat.
Word spreads everywhere: to a game cafe in a high-rise above the neon canyons of downtown Seoul, where Tack-Jin Song hosts multiplayer "Team Fortress" and types in "DM gibfest, Julia Roberts style!!!!" for the match title. To a Moscow basement, where Sergei Ivanov, a hacker working for the Russian mob, churns out a black-market knockoff of "Halo," in which the Master Chief's anonymous, shielded faceplate has been replaced by a skin of Julia Roberts' head, taken from "Sleeping With the Enemy." (She has a half-scared, half-fierce expression, because it's scanned from the scene where she's right about to cap Patrick Bergin's wife-beater character with a Beretta 9 mm.)
And to a Karachi Internet cafe, where Sayyid Rahmin is ducking a salvo of Israeli bullets in the virtual Gaza, now in his sixth consecutive hour playing "Special Force," the first-person shooter created by the jihadi gamers in the Party of God. He is still a new recruit to The Base, so they tell him nothing, but he believes this audiotape in the back pocket of his acid-wash 501s contains the next fatwa from the great Sheik himself. He will deliver it as ordered to the Karachi contact to Al-Jazeera, and when it is broadcast, the infidels will once again shudder in their homes.
But for now, he's trying to score his 10th head shot in a row. He is about to kill his next IDF commando, when a bizarre thought occurs to him.
"Miss Julia Roberts would not like this game." She would not like how one wages intifada on the bastard soldiers and the settlers of Israel -- and besides, he realizes, you do not get any power-ups.
He scoffs to himself. Of course she would not like it, lackey that she is to the Zionist propagandists of Hollywood. And he has heard of that woman's great love of "Halo," a product of the high-tech infidel Mr. Bill Gates, whose "Windows" product has already consumed the computers of the entire Muslim world. (Windows for watching what? he snorts. His unholy software crusade?)
Once again, though, the voice in his head comes:
"Miss Julia Roberts would not like this game."
But this time, he feels a sharp pang, for he also pictures his beloved late sister Yasmeen, clapping her hands before the family television.
"Look, Sayyid!" Yasmeen laughs. "Is she not quite pretty?" On the blurry screen, above a jumble of Pakistani, Urdu, and Pashto subtitles, Miss Julia Roberts stands next to the Asiatic infidel Mr. Richard Gere, and she is punching her slim fist in the air, saying "Woof! Woof! Woof!"... and she is, indeed, a pretty woman. And she would not like this Hezbollah game he is playing now, for she likes Bungie's "Halo," and all it represents.
And at that very moment, the hatred just slips away. He hits Escape, and stands; "Special Force" exits to desktop. He will not, he decides right then, deliver this audiotape. He hands it to a passing beggar and makes his way to his friend Mir's place, where an Xbox awaits him, and Miss Julia Roberts is out there somewhere too, preparing for his arrival with love, forgiveness, and an air-cooled minigun.
The influence of deathmatch, Julia Roberts-style, spreads and takes new forms with each country it enters. "To Julia" becomes a verb, and the word means carnage. Within years, international disputes are resolved in multiplayer. (After some training by Dennis "Thresh" Fong -- who's also quite good at tearful reconciliations, as it turns out -- Bush and Chirac bring back the old clan and become agile enough to best the remaining members in the Axis of Evil clan.) And it is as CAA had foreseen (for CAA is always right), but then it grows far beyond what even they had imagined. Millions crowd into the game servers of all the nations, waiting their turn to be slain by Her. For the reach of Julia Roberts will encompass the entire world (which is Covenant), and She will become Shiva, gibber of worlds, and we Her willing frag victims.
Bless us, O Julia Roberts. Bless us in bloody benediction, O bearer of mystic pizza, O flatliner, O briefer of pelicans, O lover of trouble. Lay your thumbs upon the game-pad button of mortality, to let your SSM missiles seek us out, their cloud-white contrails erasing all our sins. Let the rockets find us, and launch us skyward, twirling and flailing into your waiting arms.