Category: IRL

Just killed a man

You know what’s ridiculous? Paying money for things. Don’t get me wrong, I buy stuff all the time. Or when I get the opportunity anyway. Money is a little tight right now so spending on unnecessary goods is last on the priority list. Especially when things are so way overpriced. Like the DVD/Blu-ray sets of Fringe.

I want to watch this series because it seems like a show that I’d enjoy. But everything in the world is stopping me from doing that legally. Netflix, which has been my go-to place for TV, does not carry it yet. Because stupid Canadian Netflix is stupid and has a considerably smaller library than American Netflix. Best Buy will sell me the more desirable Blu-ray set, but for $80 a pop. I make bad financial decisions, but I am surely not paying that much for a single season of a show I’m not totally sure I’m into yet. They have the DVD version available for $65, which is closer to what I’d be willing to pay for the BD set, but not for DVD. Wal-Mart will supply me with the DVD sets for $30 each, only not a single Wal-Mart in the city has season one in stock. Ever.

Also, Wal-Mart doesn’t sell TV Blu-rays? WTF?

So I guess for now I’m illegally downloading the series. Yeah, ya heard me. That’s what I did with the first episode, which is all I’ve watched so far. It’s good stuff though! At least, I enjoyed it. I always find serious TV shows very hard to start watching, and if there isn’t a hook that caters to my interests, I will pass them by without a second thought not matter how good a reputation they have. CSI? Not interested. The Sopranos? Pass. Game of Thrones? Oh God it looks so boring. Actually, I don’t think there’s ever been an HBO series that I’ve even been marginally interested in.

The ones I do like always have a specific little something that pulls me in. For example, I probably would have let LOST go, if not for that scary thing that was roaring in the jungle and uprooting trees at the end of episode one. What is it? A dinosaur? A monster? Something more sinister? There were plenty of reasons for me to stick with LOST (NB: Hurley), but that spooky thing in the jungle was the number one thing that caught my interest and made me watch the second episode immediately afterwards. I wanted to know what that thing was, dammit! And I would watch as many episodes as it took to find out.

Fringe doesn’t benefit from something so blatantly mysterious and intriguing, but rather the promise of many such things in smaller, episode-sized doses. From what I understand, the show is about a bunch of misfits solving mysteries and battling evil with “fringe science.” Already in episode one we’ve seen a creepy virus that makes skin invisible and mental linkage through copious amounts of drugs, so I have a feeling things will get pretty crazy pretty quickly.

The show also seems to be going in the opposite direction of Dollhouse when it comes to the subject of maintaining a running plot. As I explained yesterday, Dollhouse is working things together very slowly, while in the first episode, Fringe has already established basic character backgrounds, a huge corporation that may or may not have evil intentions, a possible secret society, and countless other plot threads that are clearly leading into something bigger. In short, it’s the sci-fi cop drama version of LOST. Which is almost exactly what I want to be watching. Really, my ideal TV situation would be watching LOST for a third time. Alas, I need to branch out a bit.

Hopefully the rest of Fringe continues to tickle my fancy as well as the first episode did. Judging by the little bits I’ve read about it on Wikipedia, I don’t think I’m going to end up disappointed. The fact that it’s a Bad Robot production also leaves me greatly optimistic, as other TV shows by said company include LOST and Alias, not to mention my 2011 Movie of the Year, Super 8. So yeah, I’ve got a pretty good feeling about this one. Just wish it wasn’t so danged expensive to watch it legitimately.

It started somewhere in my chest

Hmmm… Updates are coming fairly often these last couple weeks, aren’t they? This could be trouble. But at least I’m getting my thoughts out of my head and onto paper, unimportant though they may be. I mean, almost everything I’ve blogged over the last few months has been about video games. What happened to my ability to blog about slightly less stupid things? Not that Marshmallow Mateys or girls with fake blue eyes are much more interesting. So I’ll try to come up with more random/entertaining things to post. In the meantime, vidja games!

I bought the Bit.Trip Runner soundtrack on iTunes a while back (like… January?), and the game itself before that, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned them here. Which is a shame, because they’re just the best.

Well, that’s a mouthful, but Runner is definitely a solid game, and it’s a real shame that I don’t really play it. I guess that might have something to do with the steep difficulty curve, but that in and of itself might only be a problem because I have a big stupid ape brain. The game is about learning button cues and having the reflexes to execute them in different orders at different speeds. It’s laid out as a man running across various terrain, with a multitude of objects that will impede his progress. Every object requires a different action. For example, you simply jump over small obstacles like rocks and elevated ground, but there are two coloured balls that fly at you in a wave pattern. One will always end up high, which you have to slide under, and one will always go low, which requires a jump. It’s your job to remember which colour goes high and which goes low.

Really, the game is essentially a guitar (or any other kind of rhythm game, for that matter) game, except your notes are obstacles instead of a cue that literally tells you which button to press. And the rhythm game comparison goes even farther than that, because every action makes sound effect that mesh in with the music. There are two types of collectibles scattered throughout each stage: gold and powerups. The gold is just a “try to get them all” thing, so it can be safely ignored. The powerups mostly just boost your score, but they also carry the much cooler benefit of altering the background music, layering on additional melodies and instruments every time you pick one up, which is a super cool effect.

As I mentioned before, the failing here is that the game is hard. Like, I was “stuck partway through world one” hard. Only after playing that particular stage for hours did I manage to memorize it well enough to make it through. Now I’m almost to the end of the third world and hit another brick wall. It’s still a fun game, but you can only fail the same stage so many times before you move onto something you can be more successful at. The nice thing is that while even a nudge from an obstacle will halt your progress, it really only rewinds you. Commander Video is sent back very quickly to the beginning of the stage, and you’re back up and running after a short countdown. No “you lose” screens, no waiting for the level to re-load. It’s all very snappy in pace, and I love that.

Did I mention how much I love the music? I think I might have, but it bears repeating. Man I love the music in this game.

I highly recommend giving Bit.Trip Runner a shot. It’s the only Bit.Trip game that I’ve found compelling enough to try, and I’m glad I did. Even Stephanie had trouble putting it down the one time I made her play it. It’s available on WiiWare ($8) and Steam ($??), and if those are too expensive, there’s a game on the App Store called Action Hero which is a very simplified version of the same game style. I’m sure there are other ones too, but Bit.Trip Runner stands head and shoulders above the rest, if only because its music meshes in with the gameplay so nicely and transparently. Plus the bonus stages are based on Pitfall!, so that’s pretty rad.

Just sleep

I was going to write a post yesterday ranting about my lack of sleep and how I hate being tired all the time. It’s good that I didn’t get it finished though, because it was really stupid and I spent most of it blaming everyone else for sucking up all my free time. And that would make me a dick. What it really boiled down to was that if I want to watch FullMetal Alchemist or play Half-Minute Hero, I have to do it in the time I should be using to sleep. This causes problems for me in the way of me being exhausted all day long, but it’s still my choice, and I consistently choose leisure over a proper rest.

In actual news, I played the Duke Nukem Forever demo. Glad I did too, because I don’t see anything there worth picking up the full version for. Firstly, the gameplay is not Duke Nukem. Maybe the full version is different, but in the demo the levels are pretty linear. No exploring or backtracking necessary. I suppose that kind of game design is outdated, but I’d really prefer if you kept your Halo out of my Duke Nukem, please. It would have been much better if Gearbox had just dressed up Borderlands in a Duke skin. Everybody likes Borderlands.

The other -and possibly more important- thing that threw me off was the difficulty level. Maybe the demo stage is at the end of the game or something, but I chose easy mode and still died every time I encountered enemies. I’m pretty sure I don’t suck at FPSes, because I don’t die all the time in Borderlands or… okay, so that’s the only real FPS I’ve played in recent memory, but I don’t suck at it!

The good things about it were… nothing. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there surely wasn’t anything that impressed me. I kind of liked that you can see Duke’s body when he falls down or you look where his feet should be, as opposed to other FPSes where you’re a disembodied hand. That little detail is something I want to see in every FPS from now on. It really should have been standardized years ago. Other than that, I suppose the full version promises boobies, but that’s not a good reason to buy a game. Last time I bought a game because of boobies, I ended up with God of War, which I found so incredibly boring that I didn’t even suffer through half the game before I traded it in. So yeah, Duke demo did not impress me, and I’m glad that I wasn’t one of those people hyped up for the game enough to buy it blind on launch day. I’ll stick to Duke Nukem 3D, thank you very much. Or even better, one of the old side-scrolling Duke games.

Feeling downtime

So you may have noticed that the site was down for the last couple of days. Oops! Looks like I forgot to pay my hosting fees. Anyway, back in business and back to posting. I’ll probably get that article up tomorrow. By Saturday, at the latest. Actually there are two to post, and only one of them is even sort of good. But whatever, need to get back on the content-creation train! Anyway, that’s all I had to say for today. Must Ocarina of Time 3D now.

Get on your bikes and ride!

First thing to mention today, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I’m working on a new little side project for this summer. The, uh, “field research” is going quite well, and it should be ready to launch on the first of July. I’m thinking that since it’s a wannabe-professional writing project that I should probably hire an editor, but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe it’ll work, maybe not. We’ll see come the end of the summer.

Also, how great is Link’s Awakening DX? I think it’s pretty awesome, though it is probably the single most obvious piece of evidence that I’m not nearly as patient with my games as I used to be. See, right at the beginning of the game, you can buy a bow from the shop. But it’s 980(?) rupees, which is way more than you can afford at the outset of the quest. But there is a crane minigame that, for the cost of 10 rupees and a little professional insight, you can grind and have that money much faster than you’d acquire it normally. Each play costs 10 rupees and there are two thirty-rupee prizes, so you have a net gain of 40 rupees a run, which means it takes 25 rounds to secure the necessary funds. It takes roughly a minute to grab both rupee prizes, which doesn’t sound so bad, but who wants to grind a crane game for half an hour? So for the first time ever, I’m skipping the bow for now. I’ll wait to come back once I’ve got the cash or the need for the weapon. I seem to remember having more rupees than I’d ever need by the third dungeon, and I don’t recall the bow ever being required to advance. As far as I can remember it’s more of a convenience, which is a far cry from modern Zelda games that have you use it all the time.

Lastly, where my recent Final Fantasy addiction is involved, I think I need to take a break from Dissidia and focus on Final Fantasy XIII. The game (Dissidia, that is) informs me that I’ve played it for forty-something days in a row now. That’s great and all, but at this point I’m mostly just grinding up my characters so that they’re overpowered when I start up Dissidia 012. FFXIII, on the other hand, I am crazy about and need to spend more time with. Over the last few weeks I’ve been powering my way through the “slow” part to the game, but it’s been slow going, getting in maybe one play session a week that lasts more than an hour. I really have no qualms with what I’ve played so far though. Yes, it’s running through enemy-filled hallways to the next cutscene, but I like it that way! Plus, the battles are dynamic enough that I don’t care if I’m just mashing the auto-battle command over and over. Not to mention that the game rewards you for ending battles as quickly as possible, and I love that the game doesn’t keep an average of your battle results. I would hate to open my menu and see a less-than perfect four-star rating there every time, spitting on my pride. Really, I could talk about FFXIII all day long, but this post is long enough already and I’ll save it for another time.

Gun it coming off of the line

You know what’s more impressive than my inability to stick with a game until I’ve beaten it? The fact that I’m engaged now! Ha. Yeah, so that happened. Actually, putting those two things side by side doesn’t sound so good. I don’t have a problem with commitment!

To set the record straight, it’s been a while now since I proposed, I just figured I should log it in here for posterity’s sake. Because, you know, the site isn’t much cared for now so obviously it’s going to be the next sliced bread once I die. All jokes aside, despite the September Incident, things between us have been just as good if not better than ever. Right now we’re in a place where we feel genuinely excited about our relationship, like back when we’d only been dating for a few months. Not that either of us were ever taking the relationship for granted or anything, we had just settled down and gotten used to how everything was.

Wedding preparations are going swimmingly! And I’ve been taking plenty of responsibility in making reservations and meeting with people and stuff! That’s exciting because I usually like to let someone else sort my affairs out for me, and I’m very proud of myself. I’m growing up! Finally! Though truth be told, I think my future mother-in-law is a little jealous, because (and I mean no ill by this) she really loves to be in control, and less-than-secretly wants to be in charge of planning and booking everything. I really do appreciate that, but I think it’s more important that I learn to do things like this on my own. Obviously I don’t want to do everything, but I like being able to come home and say that I’ve gotten that thing (whatever it my be at the time) all taken care of.

So now the big deal is getting us a house. Which is not going to be quite as big an expenditure as I originally thought, but still big enough that donations are more than welcome! You can just drop off a bundle of money at my house, thank you. Now I just need a way to justify paying for the webspace to keep my very expensive diary running…

Now I’m fine

Huh, it turns out that I almost get more hits when I don’t post. Take a look at this graph of site traffic over the last four months.

Crazy stuff, there. Anyway, back to the task at hand. Remember last June, when I posted links to a handful of my favourite articles on the site? No? Refresh your memory then. I had planned on making a second list of favorites, but it never really panned out. Like most of the things I try to do. But here I am, almost a year later, come to finally post the rest of my choices. Of course, I’d long since lost the list I had selected, but I think these ones are particularly memorable, even if I’m the only one who does.

Cap’n Crunch’s Choco Donuts – Present me loves the Cap’n cereals more than anything, but for some reason back in the day I guess I was inferring that he was a pedophile? Regardless, this was the first article that a lot of my friends complimented me on, so it sticks out pretty prominently in my memory.

Top 12 Reasons MegaMan Rules – My goodness, was I really this bad? I realize now that basically every word I typed here makes me look like a retarded fanboy now, but I suppose at that point I was. Oh well. I remember working really hard on this one, especially on the (now obviously) shitty, shitty banners.

The Squirrel Game – Board game fan fiction. For most people that’s enough reason to leave the site entirely, but I refute that that’s exactly why you should read this article. If only to get a good grasp on why I spend most of my writing time blogging and reviewing as opposed to creative fiction.

The Cup – It’s not about bras, or their contents, sadly. It is about a drinking cup, which is adorable. And speaking of adorable, look at 18-year-old me! He’s pretty hot! And young. Oh, how I wish I could be so young and carefree again…

Hachiemon – I really don’t know how to explain this one. There’s a huge language and cultural gap separating me and the understanding of this game. But I like the article! It kind of makes me want to go back and actually play Hachiemon. At least for a couple levels.

I Hate Socks – Sho ’nuff.

The Ramen Fiasco – It’s hardly a fiasco, but I have a soft spot for any articles I’d written about food. This one is short, but I think it chronicles my cooking prowess pretty well. On an interesting side note, said cooking skills have not developed at all in the 5 years since I wrote this!

It’s been such a long time

*ACHOO*

Augh, this place is absolutely covered in dust! I know I kind of abandoned it, but the maid’s been on payroll all this time. Did she think I wouldn’t pop in every now and again to see if it’s keeping up? Oh, she is so getting fired!

Poor housekeeping aside, I’m not sure what I’m doing here. I’ve been getting all nostalgic about how I used to love this site back in the day, and I’ve been considering coming back to it, if only for myself. Well of course it would be for myself. I mean, why would anyone still be checking for updates? I miss writing. I miss being creative. I miss having an outlet to bitch about all the things I dislike without anyone to make me feel bad about my opinions. Maybe I should blog again.

I also have a lot (well, a couple hours a week) more free time on my hands these days, and once I’ve caught up on my video game backlog (which has grown to an epic size) there will be nothing to do but blog. And play old games again. Because I have no more money for games. But that’s another story.

Anyway, yeah, I think I’m gonna come back to blogging. I just hate not having a written record of what’s going on in my life and my mind, and diaries are for little girls. So blog I shall!

Money’s not an issue

So I got me a new compy, and it’s quite slick. Not a a top-of-the-line model, mind you, but more than good enough to suit my needs. Those needs being running a crap-ass blog and playing Borderlands. Also Portal sometimes, but mostly Borderlands.

The (very temporary) downside to all this is that not everything is quite in place yet and I currently do not have access to my old hard drive. This means it’s gonna be about a week or so until I’m back at peak efficiency. Of course peak efficiency isn’t much more than what I’ve got going now, it basically just means I have my entire music library to listen to whilst I blog, as opposed to the… (let me see here)… three CDs I’ve bothered to rip again.

In any case, here’s a picture of the new beast. Though really, it’s less than half the size of the last machine, so “beast” probably isn’t the right word. Also it’s a jillion times quieter too, so I can leave it on and stuff downloading overnight. Uh, nothing that I’m not supposed to be downloading, of course.

Look at all that space! I actually have a desk now! Also I can move my mouse! Hooray!

But cheering aside, I was going to go to work on moving more old articles over from the Angelfire mess, but then realized I no longer had access to the files! Silly me. Oh well, I’ll be uploading flashy new versions of stuff in less than a week’s time, so stay tuned. Also, that Dove deodorant is totally not mine. I use the manly stuff. For men.