Guess I Now Have the Title of "Official (Semi-obscure) Anime/Manga Reviewer".

Today's review is about a Japanese comic with a German name (That's where the oddness starts). The title is Elfen Lied, i.e. "Elf's Song" or something like that, if my memory serves me right.

General opinion: interesting at first and most of the way through, but a heavy dose of weirdness and a humongous disappointment. As those of you who already know me already should know, I dislike tragedies, and this being one of them I don't really like it. However, I am doing a review anyway so you guys  will at least know about it and can take a look at it so the poor author doesn't end up being poor and getting killed by Excel. (I'll review her anime later.)

Synopsis: In what was at the time the present (I'm guessing the 80s or something like that), a childhood condition started popping up all over Japan in which girls would be born with horns that resembled cat ears. Symptoms included having extra invisible arms and being prone to extreme violence. The arms, known as "vectors," could move faster than bullets and slice right through human flesh, so these people turned out to be pretty dangerous. Anyway, the story starts with one such girl escaping from the research facility where some government people are doing experiments on her. Of course they're really bad shots and fail to kill her, although she does suffer a major concussion and washes up on shore with the only word in her vocabulary being "nyu" (apparently she's a cat now). She is fortunate that a stereotypical Japanese teenage boy finds her and "temporarily" takes her in. Soon the researchers dispatch a team to look for her, since of course they think she is still very dangerous, and action ensues. It turns out that the human brain has a remarkable ability to heal itself and she occasionally reverts to her previous personality and rampages about. Basically a cool sci-fi/fantasy theme here.
However, after several chapters of intense anime blood and gore, the manga heads off straight into the Uncanny Valley, with giant deformed fetuses, limbs being ripped off, Bandit Keith (again, will cover later) showing up in the role of the overly passionate killer guy who seems to not care about America so much anymore (whew!), and finally something involving entropy and lots of explosions. Not to give away the ending, but basically all the cool main characters either die horrible deaths or are scarred for life by the other characters dying horrible deaths, and all the mediocre minor villain characters end up living happily-ish ever after as normal people.

And so ends my surprisingly crappy review. At least someone posted something.

If you can't figure it out by reading the note, I'm still in high school! Now use the traffic map and my IP address to narrow down where I live and try to abduct me. I dare you. lol

Three years ago, I think, I remember feeling all disappointed in the FRC team because they'd procrastinated all season and were still building the robot at Peachtree (the name of the regional competition). So this year we ended up doing the same thing.
It gets better though; this year they scheduled us for the very first match, the first match after lunch, AND the very last [qualifying] match! So we went up for the first match having had absolutely no driver practice whatsoever. Plus the robot wasn't done, and because it was possible for balls to roll under the robot, which is illegal, we had a permanent "yellow card" penalty right off the bat.
Nevertheless, we ended up winning the first match, and because it was the first match we were able to say we were in first place for the first time in like six years! By the end of the qualifiers, we had finally finished the robot, painted it for the first time in like six years, and managed to get ourselves into I think 13th place. What that meant was that after the finalists were selected, we were only two spots away from being in the finals. :[ For some reason nobody in the top 8 picked us for their team even though we and Kell (who was only one place away from getting in) both set all-time records for performance for the state of Georgia at the world Championships. WTF?
So began the suspense! We knew that if two robots were to break, we could be called in as a backup team and play our way to Championships. One actually did and Kell was called up, so now we were first in line. Eventually it got to where the final match was in overtime, and if there were two ties and a robot broke on the red alliance we could get in. Imagine the suspense! Especially when there was a tie and the match went into double overtime!
Well, another tie didn't happen. So our only remaining shots at Championships were to win either the Chairman's Award (probability about 1.5%) or the Engineering Inspiration Award (probability maybe 3%). But then we did win the Engineering Inspiration Award! And - screw breathing a huge sigh of relief - I actually screamed in happiness.
Next on the list: printing more buttons, making trading cards, making a cape, redoing the bumper skirt, maybe building an arm, constructing a blimp, buying another sword at MomoCon, acquiring new shoes that look like Link's boots, making a couple new feet, building a display with a recycle bin, fixing the controls, actually learning to drive the robot, and probably something else that I forgot about.

Natha daged dhaer!

Anyone who can give me the source of the title without searching it is awesome.
So, Calculus again. We had a test that, for one reason or another, was easy and thus cmpleted quickly. Having nothing to do, I sat there while Jaclyn fooishly got out paper and penccils and tried to think about drawing something. Being the nice person I am, I showed her that the odds of her drawing more than one thing were very slim. I did this by stealing her pink eraser. Laughing to myself, I sat and gloated. A few minutes later, I turned to find a second eraser on her desk with her laughing at me.

Somehow or another, I found a way to steal the second eraser. She then reached into her backpack andpulled out two more. I don't quite remember how it changed, but soon we were wielding an eraser in each hand and slashing each other's arms and hands with them. You may think it sounds stupid, but you are definitely missing out. So for the last 30 to 45 minutes of class, we fought an epic duel..... while sitting down.... quietly..... however, we were able to whisper Princess Bride, LOTR, and a few Monty Python references as we fought, increasing the epicness. All the while, one person would turn o make sure the teacher wasn't glaring at us.... unfortunately, to do so, you had to turn your back on the other person, thus getting slashd on the hand.

All in all, I think that was the best use of the last 45 minutes of any class I have ever had..... I love school.... ish

This is a short post

I'm not feeling long winded right now but felt I should add something else before I get kicked from admin privileges or posting privileges or whatever kinda power I hold over the layman. I don't like driving anymore. 5 hours of driving does that to me. It probably does that to a lot of people. I hate savannah. Having to spend 5 hours reaching a place makes that place terrible. I bet it does that to a lot of places. EXCEPTION: if sleep is heavily involved in the transmigration process, the diminishment of the location is in itself diminished to a sickly log graph. IDEAL SOLUTION: TELEPORTATION. MORE IDEAL SOLUTION: TELEPORTATION BY THOUGHT.
there's this remote: Harmony 700 remote control. Look it up. IE is sucking right now to the point where copy paste SUCKS. it's pretty useful for stuff. all kinds of stuff. including this laptop my aunt has. Who needs a remote for a portable device? that is, like, double lazy.
I'm going to invent a laptop that has a built in, retractable, completely hidden-when-not-being-used mouse so that I may never have to use a mousepad where I click in random places as I type, creating

sttyporange errors. hehe. orange. oh look. my aunt was planning to plan a party at 12AM on 3/4/2010. She is asleep. I don't think this party is gonna be ready in time. Hey you know what I found out? about 20% of internet use is still being direted by IE6. Not completely terrifying, until you learn that, when IE6 came out, microsoft was the sole browser competitor, and so it set up ridiculous, nonsensical, uncontested standards that made all web pages need special programming just for IE6. Now, programmers say that must still spend about 20% of their time on websites just making the darn things still compatible with this ancient behemoth of clumsy design. neat, huh. Makes me wanna make new standards for something that will cause countless hours of pain years after my decision was ruled foolish on every regard.
Wait, this isn't that short. Dang. Bye
I-Forgot_My-Name-On-This_Blog == myNewName

Nerdology 101: Impeccable Lexicon

Okay, so I've been wanted to do this Nerdology post for a while now, but Nerdology posts require a lot more work on my part, so it was delayed (multiple times). Anyway, let's continue with the post.

If you didn't figure it out from the title, this post is about using aureate language to buffalo or galvanize the people around you. True nerds will envisage the preponderance of this business. So, without further impediment, let's instigate this post!

The paramount thing that one must necessitate is to utilize the most wordage in a eloquent fashion. This is cardinal if one fancies having a sumptuous embrace of language. Here are a few paradigms to elucidate this:

Case 1: "I'm doing well."

This sentence is incalculably hackneyed and monotonous. In lieu of this, say: "I am in very emphatic mood currently!"

Case 2: "Have a nice day."

This sentence is marred with cliche and trite word usage. Say "Have a stupendous diurnal course! Adieu!"

Now that you have annexed a intrinsic acumen of diction, try to assimilate some of the vocabulary below to further embellish your knowledge(NOTE: The definitions below may not be shown in their entireties [i.e. multiple definitions may not be shown] ):

Abditive: (adj) Having the quality of hiding

Abraid: (v) To awaken or arouse

Alible: (adj) Nourishing

Aristarch: (n) A severe critic

Ataraxia: (adj) Tranquility

Axilla: (n) Armpit

Balderdash (n): Nonsense

Bete Noire: (n) A person or thing strongly detested or avoided

B**** Godness: (n) material or worldly success [Censored to prevent internet filters from blocking the site]

Bon viviant: (n) A person having cultivated, refined, and sociable tastes

Brickle: (adj) Brittle

Burg: (n) Town/City

Buxom: (adj) Obedient, Tractable

Caitiff: (adj) Cowardly, or despicable

Calcify: (v) To make inflexible or unchangeable

Chuff: (n) Boor, Churl

Cognitive Dissonance: (n) Physiological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously

Crwth: (n) Crowd

Datum: (n) Something given or admitted especially as a basis for reasoning or inference

Demur: (n) Hesitation

Dirdum: (n) blame

Dotage: (n) State or period of senile decay marked by mental poise and alertness

Dotard: (n) A person in his dotage

Dynamo: (n) Generator; A forceful energetic individual

Eclat: (n) Dazzling effect, Brilliance

Eft: (n) Newt

Epaulet: (n) Something that ornaments or protects the shoulder

Fag: (n) Cigarette

Feirie: (adj) Nimble, Strong

Foment: (v) To promote the growth or development of

Frijol: (n) Bean

Gaiety: (n) Merrymaking

Germane: (adj) Being at once relevant or appropriate

Gey: (adv) Very, Quite

Grisette: (n) A young women combining part-time prostitution with some other occupation; A working class French women

Gyve: (n) Fetter, Shackle

Haberdasher: (n) A dealer in small wares

Hebdomad: (n) A group of seven

Hidrosis: (n) Excretion of sweat

Homoscedastic: (adj) Having equal statistical variances

Ice: (n) An undercover premium payed to a theater employee for choice tickets

Imprimis: (adv) In the first place [used to introduce a list of items or considerations]

Inviscid: (adj) Having zero viscosity

Iwis: (adv) Certainly

Jabiru: (n) Any of several large tropical storks

Jobbery: (n) The act or practice of jobbing [especially corruption in public office]

Juxta: (adj) Situated near

Kay: (n) The letter 'k'

Kink: (n) A clever or unusual way of doing something

Koine: (n) Dialect or language of a region that has become the common or standard language of a larger area.

Kyte: (n) Stomach, Belly

Lakh: (n) A great number

Lily: (adj) Resembling a lily in fairness, purity, or fragility

Loquacious: (adj) Garrulous

Lusty: (adj) Robust

Okay, screw this. I was going to do A-Z, but this is taking way too long.

Now, remember these 2 things about using higher vocabulary:

1. Use more obscure nouns in lieu of common nouns

2. Use more obscure definitions of common words

That's all for now,
ACRONYM of the Blog

Thlenthaktu the Thakfully Thelmenerous.

Irrelevant titles FTW!

So I was rudely awakened this morning by my brother shouting up the stairs, "AARON! Come down immediately - it's really important!"
"Mehhh, what is it."
"There's a BAT in the house!"
"A what?"
Turned out there was a bat in the house. He points over into the room we don't really have a name for other than "green room" because it's green, and there's this little tarantula-looking thing running along the floor. I approached closer and it really was a live bat. Of course, when my dad saw it he had to ask how I was sure it was a bat and not a tarantula.
"How are you sure that' sa bat and not a tarantula or something?"
"'Cuz it has ridiculously long front limbs... actually, because it's shaped like a bat."
After all, bats do have a distinctive bat shape, as this one demonstrated when it unfolded its wings a bit and showed how very bat-shaped it was. So I stood there puzzling what I was going to do about it. I was handed a bucket and a piece of cardboard, apparently because since I've made a reputation for myself as the family bug-catching expert, by extension I must also be the bat-catching expert. So I catchified it with the bucket. It wasn't quite like a bug though, because bugs don't start squeaking when you corner them.
Why it didn't fly away, I'm not so sure. Either it was injured, or I think I might have learned somewhere that bats can't take off from the ground and need to climb up something first. At least I think it was bats... Either bats or ladybugs, one of those two.
Anyway, I left the bat on the porch and hoped it found a nice cozy shelter before the snow started falling. Yeah, that was the other weird thing about today, was that it was snowing for some reason IN MARCH. My literature class had a snowball fight, in the classroom. Someone had run outside and grabgbed a hunk of snow and people were throwing snow across the room at each other.
What a weird day.

Exploding Penguin on the Blog Post

As you are about to witness, the title of this post has, simultaneously, everything and nothing to do with the actual subject of the post. The subject of my post is.....[dramatic pause]....[dramatic background music]....CALCULUS! Now, before you run away either to get away from the horrid subject of calculus or to go get your TI-89 for any math problems I might include, I should tell you that this is a rather unconventional view on the subject. Many people, including a few of my fellow bloggers, either love or hate calculus for the basic reason that it is math and, therefore, requires some sort of brain function that does not come easily to all. I enjoy calculus because it is an absolutely wonderful class for doodling.

Math is a very example-/problem-intensive class. Often times, the majority of the class is spent doing practice problems or watching the teacher go through examples. Initially, everyone who is not already aware of the concept in question must pay strict attention as it is presented and justified. It may take anywhere from 1 to 100 examples for the idea to really sink in. However, there will come a point when you understand the concept so well that you could not possibly understand it any better unless the brain of the man who invented it was transplanted into your skull. When you reach this point, there is little left to do. The examples are helpful, but tedious once the concept is properly grasped. It takes a supreme effort to pay attention and force the repetition. That is the point when the mind begins to wander. That is the point that Dominic and I found yesterday (again).

As you might guess, the answer to the almost certain boredom of calculus and a variety of other classes is doodling. This can be either productive or decidedly unproductive. Productive doodling is most often seen in history classes or similar literature-/story-intensive classes where it is possible to illustrate concepts. Calculus is not one of those classes, but it does have one advantage: worksheets. Worksheets always mean time in class to work on said worksheets and, most times, collaboration is encouraged so that students can check each other. In the common tongue of students, this translates to "type A free time." This is where the doodling comes in.

*Type A free time is essentially the kind in which you appear to be working diligently while getting no significant amount of work done. Note in the above picture that only about 1/3 of the worksheet is finished - the amount of possible work that can be done in the average time that the teacher spends at your desk watching you do it.

The latest calc masterpiece began with the rather pointless labels at the top. All those who are amused by it should thank Dominic for starting that. Surprisingly, most of the drawings do have some connection to our class. Gandalf's staff came from the dark mark made by the staple on the worksheet this was copied from, in case you were wondering. Two Gandalfs and one marshmallow Balrog were drawn on the powerpoint notes as well (thank you to verydemotivational.com for the ideas on asymptotes). The rest of the drawings should be fairly self explanatory - in this case meaning that you will understand it or understand that we were bored and we don't need reasons for it looking like that. The Sparta jokes are there courtesies of inspiration by epicwinftw.com and the deliriously bored state we were in.

By far, the best picture on there is Davy Jones Crocket. I can't honestly say why Davy Jones was relevant to writing the proof for the chain rule, but a classmate of ours was attempting to reference Davy Jones and couldn't remember his name. He, apparently, confuses Davy Jones and Davy Crockett. However, due to our sudden genius (or insanity), there is now Davy Jones Crocket, King of the Wild West of the Carribean, and no one need ever reference either one separately. Before you mention it, I do realize that "Carribean" is supposed to be "Caribbean," but someone who shall remain nameless told me to spell it wrong. I am now in the process of creating the mystical land of the Carribean. Feel free to add your ideas to the comments. The laws of physics need not apply.

And now an earlier masterpiece: All Your Donut (so named by Dom).

I was attempting to do lit homework in calc, but obviously that didn't happen. Dr. Who references and donut impersonations are much more fun.

I hope you enjoyed the fruits of our delirium.

~Minister of Silly Posts

Silence of the Readers

oI've noticed that there are around 30 people in the Blog of Crazy Random Happenstances Facebook grouop, and several others who read this, but the only comments seem to come from us bloggers (excluding that one from my sister, and the one from The Sleeping Blogger before he had been deemed a blogger). You guys should know that we need your input. It also tells us where to go with this blog. We seem to have hit a standstill ith what to post. I would be very glad to hear your thoughts about what we should talk about more and what we should never talk about again. So! Please, tell us stuff, accouns(if you need them), are free and spam-free. Well.... mostly spam-free. Well.... kinda spam-free. Well.... I'm gonna go check, see if it's spam-free.... (someone tell me where this adaptation of a quote is from and I will love you forever.... but not in that way, in the other way, dude(also a good quote)) But yeah, it's fun and we need your comments! please!

C&C 4: The Beta

Change...it can be good, it can be bad. Command and Conquer as a whole has always stayed to the tried and true classic RTS style, well as a conclusion to the tiberium universe C&C4 decided to change things up.

Lets start with some backstory, command and conquer(excluding Renegade) has been the mold for RTS games sense RTS games were created, being the first big hit following up Westwood's introduction of the RTS genre with Dune II C&C 1 was a basic model for all RTS games to come. Three major ideas: manage your base, manage your economy, and manage your troops; whoever did this best would win.

Command and Conquer takes those three ideas and simplifies them in an attempt to widen the market for RTS games which have traditionally had rather steep learning curves. Your whole base is condensed into Mobile Construction Vehicle(MCV) or a Crawler. From this you can build units, defenses, structures, and call for support depending on your class. The game lets you choose if you want to play offence, with powerful land based vehicles; defense, with turrets backed by swarms of infantry and artillery; or support, with aircraft back by support powers.

Your crawler can move across the map and deploy to let out any units it's built and create a repair field.

In order to improve past the beginning or tier I units and defenses you must gather Tiberium at centralized nodes and return it to your deploy zone. Unlike previous iterations of C&C any unit can pick up the tiberium and all players on the team benefit from it. Rather than defending harvesters it becomes a capture the flag game. Speaking of ctf to win now rather than destroy the enemy you gain victory points and the first team to 2500 wins. There are two ways to do this, kill enemy units or control more VP nodes than the enemy netting you a steady stream of points.

The game is very different from standard C&C and that's kind of disappointing however it has it's own fair share of enjoyment.

RANT ABOUT LEVELS(pure opinion)

EA, in their stupidity said "hey, look at that really popular game CoD:MW, lets steal their ideas and put it into our game! Oh wait it's an RTS not an FPS, w/e" They added a system where you level up and unlock more units and tech the more you play. This means that at lvl 1 when you forst get the game you only have 4 units and one research available on each crawler until you play enough games. So if you pit a lvl 1 vs a lvl 20 there is about an 80% chance the lvl 20 will win! Great job EA!

Pros: fun, easy to play, more lenient with mistakes than other RTSs, some really fun unit mechanics.

Cons: level system, bad matchmaking, unbalanced(i know, what should I expect from a beta), terrible community, lack of game diversity(1 game is just like the next)

Blah, should have written more but I'm too lazy

Got a little present for ya

If any of you got that reference in the title, you have suddenly become awesome. Congratulations. xD

The 'Real-Time Strategy' game has only been in existence for 15 years, but it has become one of the most popular genres of all time, second only to First Person Shooters, if my sources are accurate (MMOs get a lot of publicity, but there are simply more good RTS games than MMO. It also helps that several MMOs began as RTS games. :P). You've probably heard a lot about them, you've probably even played some of them. But what do you really know about them?


Age of Empires A-
Commonly reputed to be one of the oldest RTS game series' in history. You battle your way through history by taking control of various armies and beating your oppenents to a pixelated pulp. It's a good game: fairly imaginative, yet reasonably historically accurate (assuming you don't activate any of the cheatcodes this game is full of). However, it has a fairly shallow learning curve, I didn't really have much difficulty beating it at all when I first played it. AoE is a great game to start with, if you're testing the waters to see if you like RTS games.

Battle for Middle Earth A
One of the most widely-known and widely-played RTS series' ever created. Based off of Tolkien's Middle Earth, and inspired somewhat by the movies (more of the former than the latter, thankfully), BfME walks you through various portions of Lord of the Rings history. The first game, I must say, did not impress me that much. The units were rather unimaginative, the base construction format was quite restrictive, and the storyline was simply a rehash of the movies. The second, though, more than made up for the first's blunders. While the main battle system stayed the same, the units, upgrades, and base construction options were redone much more to my satisfaction. And finally, we have the BfME II expansion pack... Rise of the Witch King. This is personally one of my favorite RTS games of all time. It takes you through the Witch King's rise to power (the Witch King, for those of you who don't know, is the Lord of the Nazgul, aka the guy with the spiky helmet in Return of the King). While I don't really like a lot of the Angmarian units, they are certainly more thought-out and well planed than most of the other races in BfME.

Universe at War B+
Universe at War is basically your generic RTS. It starts off with Earth being invaded (like that's never happened in any other games :P) by an advanced alien race called the Hierarchy. The Hierarchy is actually an alliance of several conquering alien races who decided they needed more elbow room, so they invaded the Solar system. Using a combination of biotechnology and plasma weaponry, as well as ships that resemble Covenant technology even more than the concept of the Hierarchy itself does, they attack and pretty much wipe out every country except, you guessed it, America. As the Hierarchy is closing in on the White House, and about to take it, random blue portals appear in the middle of the air and start spitting out robots. These robots, led by a Gundam named Viktor piloted by a girl named Mirabel (ok, so it's not actually a Gundam, but it looks... nevermind), storm across the White House's front lawn and whup some alien patooie. At this point your control switches from the humans to the Novus civilization. Some unspecified number of millenia ago, the Hierarchy destroyed the homeworld of Novus. While all biological life on Novus died, their robots lived on, vowing to fight the Hierarchy in any way they can. The Founder, which definitely does not look like Optimus Prime with capacitors where tires should be, founded the Novus army and found a piece of Novus DNA, from which they cloned Mirabel, the last surviving biological lifeform. Many battles ensue, and eventually your control switches automatically over to the Hierarchy, where you discover that an aging robotic general is becoming discontent with his eternal lot in life. After he was killed on the battlefield, his consciousness was transferred to a robotic shell so he could keep living, and he's getting rather tired of constant war (as would tend to happen after hundreds of years of it). Your first mission with him is to invade Egypt, where one of your walkers (a la War of the Worlds) accidentally shoots a pyramid, which sends out a distress beacon which awakens the last alien race in the game: the Masari. The Masari are basically a race of... race builders. They created the Hierarchy untold eons ago, and the Hierarchy eventually fought and defeated the Masari. The surviving Masari, in their city-ship Atlatea, came to Earth, where they started humanity and acted as our gods for who-knows-how-long. Somehow after sleeping for hundreds of years on the bottom of the Atlantic they can speak our language perfectly with British accents, but that's another story. Anyway, the game itself is interesting, but it's not exactly original intellectual property. Interesting gameplay, well-developed factions... lousy storyline. :P

Empire at War A
Note: I can't comment on the expansion pack (Forces of Corruption) because I haven't played it :P
Empire at War filled pretty much the only game niche that Star Wars hadn't yet touched: RTS. When you start the game, you pick your side (Rebel or Empire), and fight your way from the events leading up to A New Hope through the end of the movie. As the Rebels, you start by following Captain Raymus Antilles (no relation to Wedge Antilles) around, and end by hunting down and blowing up the Death Star (you can wait for it to come to you at Yavin IV, but it'll blow up every other planet in the galaxy first. Believe me, I tried :P). As the Empire, you start by following Darth Vader around, and end by... blowing up every planet in the galaxy (at least those occupied by Rebels). The gameplay and the units are VERY well thought out, they exemplify the individual quirks and strengths of the two factions extraordinarily well. The learning curve is enough to keep you from winning every time on Easy, but it'll always keep victory close enough that you want to keep trying. This game comes to me very highly recommended, and I return it to you the same way.

Command and Conquer A++
Ah, the mother of all RTS'... literally. The first ever RTS was Command and Conquer (the original), made in 1995 by Westwood studios (later absorbed by Electronic Arts). The Brotherhood of Nod wants to take over the world, the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) wants to keep that from happening. Throughout the whole game, the resource they're fighting over is Tiberium, this magic green crystal that's randomly started popping up that can be made into pretty much anything. When Command and Conquer II: Tiberian Sun comes out, things have gotten a bit worse. Tiberium is spreading rapidly, and no one knows how to stop it. Nod wants it to keep going, saying it's the catalyst for the next stage in human evolution, GDI recognizes it as the environmental threat that it is. The leader of Nod, Kane, suddenly comes forth with two aces in the hole: the Tacitus, a magical orb of extraterrestrial origin that tells him how to utilize Tiberium for various military measures, and CABAL, a supercomputer he uses to help run the war. You can probably guess the story; Nod is defeated (again), CABAL turns against Kane (and the rest of humanity, but that's a different story), and the Tacitus is captured by GDI. Fast forward 30 years to Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Tiberium is still spreading, having covered approximately 80% of the Earth's habitable surface in varying densities. Nod rises again, still under Kane, and tries to get the Tacitus (or at least info gleaned from it) back. They succeed and start World War V. While they're fighting, an alien race called the Scrin comes out of nowhere and starts beating on both Nod and GDI. The Scrin initially seeded Earth with Tiberium 50 years ago to terraform (Scrin-form... whatever), and now they're back to finish the job. Whooo. They get beat off, GDI saves the day once again, Nod once again goes into hiding, beaten but not broken. I would say something about the next game, Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight, but I don't really know much about it. Ask John Hicks, he's in the beta for it.
As for the gameplay in C&C, it's outstanding. Each game has a different innovative battle system, each one better than the one before it. I don't really have the time or energy to write about each one, so I'll just say you should play it. This game series gets my highest possible recommendation.

That's all I got for now.

Regards,
Spam