I'm looking forward to seeing the heroic haze that is "300" today. Here is a little somethng for you:



----------------------------------------"How I Killed Leonidas"-----------------------------------------

I have entered my 500 Euros by card into the First Person Shooter/Holochronicle today.

I need diversion.

The first option is the Turtledove scenario where I play the Persians with the Battleship Missouri (as if the battle were not one-sided enough). The 'atomic annie' shell bursting upon Athens isn't satisfying enough for me...nor are the Harriers. The Spartans are still taunting me as they die.

I try to play as a one man mass of Zombies, hoping to hear them yell "They are still coming!" but they oblige me not. My point of view shifts from one beheaded shambler to the next. The Running Zombies aren't much better.

I try an army of instant clones, (not the real kind---delayed twins--but the movie kind). I instruct my other selves to keep pushing forward--to not actually engage--to use sheer mass numbers to force the Lacedaimonians back--to not give in to hand to hand combat.

No change....the bodies still pile up.

So I do a Jim Kirk with this no-win...and cheat. With my mind link.

The Spartans advance on me--but I have the video quality reduced. The sepia tones are gone. No HDTV/70 MM quality--but 35, and then 16. (I don't use the 8MM yet, as it makes them more bloody, grainy...)

The haze of history fades, and they stare at one another in shock--abdominal muscle definition vanishing as I replace their body types with Endomorph mesh's by the score...

--then the video quality moves to the hyperreal videotape. The armor of the Spartans I replace with wife-beater shirts, as police cars drive like ghosts out of the cliffs. I have a politician behind a podium call them "illegal combatants," and the choke point of Thermopylae dissolves into a street filled with needles and trash.

Welcome to MY battlefield.

The men are in Paddy Wagons now, and I've reduced King Leonidas to a flabby shirtless drunk being shoved into a police cruiser.

"WHERE ARE MY MEN?!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME???!!"

I cackle with glee as I reduce him further--to a super low-res digital computer-camera image of a small, low figure in a corner of a drunk tank.

Now I even take his screams from him.

He was able to sneak aboard the Iowa and kill me. He slew me as a zombie, and as a clone.

But he was no match for my depression, and the age I live in now.

But I am merciful. I left him some familiar elastic bands in the cell before the holochron chirped off.

I go outside into my own nightmare, to go to my cell of an apartment...to join King Leonidas.

I hope he can forgive me...