Little Old Me, As Usual

Routines are good. Cool, even. Sometimes I think, I want to be the odd lady down the street that always eats a cheeseburger on Saturdays and waters her plants on Thursday. You know, the regular, the unchanging point in other people's lives. That thing people on first dates always point to in romantic movies and bond over, and then at the end they'll see it again and smile and kiss. It also seems to be a way to be effective. If you always do laundry on Mondays, then laundry will always be done. And it minimizes effort. You'll just do it, because you always do it, and no brain activity is required, no motivation.

Then of course, if you make yourself a creature of habit, you'll be in deep shit if something disturbs those habits. But I have this deep-rooted belief that whatever happens everything will be okay, or it won't but you'll just have to live with it; a type of "fuck-all" attitude that would probably help. I'd get thrown off by breaking habits but would always somehow self-right like one of those toys with round, weighted bottoms.

The issue is that habits are so hard to create. And the world itself seems to work against you. Just when you've decided on a great schedule, someone or something decides to break it. Maybe that's the thing; to make habits, you have to have the stoicism to stick to your habits, even when it's almost impossible. Well damn, I guess my clever plan isn't so clever. It appears you need motivation, to get rid of the need for motivation. Who would've guessed.

Classic Fantasy Puzzle Adventure RPG

So far my new shiny Nintendo DS Lite has done what all good game systems with good games should do: keep me from doing what I should be doing. Nintendo have almost equal respect in my eyes as Disney, in both cases strongly affected by their modern developments (*cough* Wii), and my inability to look past the classy piano black exterior of the competing power machine from the land of the Rising Sun. Despite this the DS sports a fancy number of decent games and if I am to say from the games I've tried so far, the royal family of these are well worth the money. If it's worth failing my courses, we'll find out in just a week or so.

As for the title that gave a title to this post, Might & Magic - Clash of Heroes, it kept me occupied today until my batteries ran out. Among the many games I've just tested for fifteen minutes or so, those I most vigorously wasted away time on were Professor Layton, Final Fantasy 3, Shin Megami Tensei and Picross DS, all of which positively surprised me in different ways. Most surprised probably with Shin Megami Tensei's story that seems awesome for now at least, and most positively with FF3 which has nice updated graphics but kept the style and feeling of the original very well. I've tried The World Ends With You before on a friend's and know that I'll probably want that too. And KH 356/2 has pretty decent reviews actually so I might try it, same friend has that too. And... yeah. I suddenly need a week or three. Dear ___ what I want for my birthday is some time outside of time so I can play all these games...

Whoa

Because I keep missing people posting on their blogs because my current way of keeping track of them is very 2000 and ineffective, I just found out that I could get a singing person in my living room. Most of you already know this, because you're probably keeping track of blogs in some sensible way. Whoa. I dunno how big a deal this is to other people, some people seem to look at the whole "artist" deal, or more like "famous person" deal very differently from me, but to me it's sort of... nuts. Nuts. I mean, I know that, if you know a famous person it's just a dude/tte, and yada yada. If I think about, like, would I work for one of the people I greatly like or admire like that, then yea that would be awesome. Even like, personal assistant. Would I want to be friends with one of them? Yea sure, depending on how it happened, awesome. But that, to just invite one randomly into your living room to play... O.O imagining doing that with one of the bands I really like makes me feel like I'd want to die. I'd open the door and shake all their hands and then fall down dead :p I swear! And I'd want to! I don't want to talk to authors I like, and I don't want to meet people who draw awesome drawings... it's like through art you can get a special connection to people and I feel like it'd break or morph into something else if you met them for real. But I'd still work for them... I dunno. But I already knew my attitude to fame is a little odd. Can't quite make sense of it.

Lately I've had this odd thing that when I listen to music and am outside, I imagine the surroundings as a music video for the song, so I'd imagine dancers in hip-hop gear dancing on top of the cars of the parking lot, or the singer on giant holo screens on top of the tall apartment buildings in Flogsta with neon lights playing over the trees. It makes it even more hard to not dance as I walk. And it's not intentional, it happened all of itself a few days ago when I walked home late with JYJ in my ears. Usually my imagination is a lot more... theoretical. I can have huge problems visualizing things that I "know" very well, but this came so easily. Now I can't get rid of it. But it's too cool to get rid of anyway.

A new superhero is born!

Hm.
Static electricity cat fears: Bikes (moving), Joggers, Plastic Trash Cans (this may be the effect of traumatizing treatment by housekeepers)
Static electricity cat is not afraid of: Other Cats, Collars, Yelling, Static Electricity
Static electricity cat likes: Cat Carrying Bag, Food, Sticking Nose In Streaming Water, Lollipop Sticks, Biting Human Hands (play), Sleeping On Humans, Talking Back (probably witty comments but since I don't speak cat...)
Defining traits: Static electricity cat has the vaguely disturbing but welcome habit of NOT clawing people in that cat-characteristic way when feeling good. So scratching behind ears is safe. Aside from getting play-bitten.
Place of Power: The Chair. However continually stolen by the housekeeper, it is really because Static electricity cat is so nice and lets her borrow it, generously wanting to share its awesomeness and mystic powers.
Tactics: Static electricity cat will sneak up on you, slap you in the face and give you a static electricity jolt for good measure. This tactic is mainly employed on other cats. It is not aggressively used upon humans, but rather in a defensive way giving you a jolt when you touch him. Static electricity cat appears resistant to his own powers.
Weakness: Static electricity cat need to recharge his static electricity by running back and crawling all over the sofa in between.
Nemesis: Coca Cola

Dragon Age 2

38 hours over three days later, I was done with my first playthrough of Dragon Age 2 and could begin on the two other necessary to explore how much freedom of choice you actually have and how much is set in stone with the illusion of choice. My impression is that it's a very well thought-out game with an engaging story and very fun game mechanics. If a little... overzealous at times.

There are a few questions. With the perceived size of the city, where the hell do they get the one hundred raiders and bandits and hunters and thieves that your group murders every night? Admittedly only a dozen nights every three years, but still. Considering the Blight, the common conflicts, and supposedly the victims of these raiders and bandits and hunters and thieves, one wonders just how large a population would be necessary to sustain them, and to breed new ones quickly enough to sate the next three years. And the same can be said of mages, somehow. There are very many mages. So many I'm wondering why they don't prance off and claim a little country of their own instead. Oh yeah, maybe because if they're all as crazy as the ones you get joining you, they'd be gnawing each others toes off within a year. No but seriously, in a normal encounter the game would throw around twenty people at you, ten of which are only there as cannon fodder, but usually there's even more. Fun maybe, but... where the hell do they all come from? And why do they keep running at you after fifteen of their sturdier friends have already tried and died?

But overall the story is good, and have successfully made its point; humans are complicated, dirty, easily breakable things that are right in many things and wrong in others, unfortunately about different things so they insist on fighting over everything.

I do miss the dialogue of the first DA, because this is Mass Effect style and a little too short-hand; I feel more like I'm playing 1-X-2 than having a conversation. Also the elves look like tiny non-blue Avatars. Do they have bones in those skinny little bodies, or just twigs? There are talents that are so obviously, incredibly much better than others that you wonder why you'd ever use a different build. The Exiled Prince DLC gives you another friend that isn't mind-numbingly crazy, contributes to a more complex choice of combat tactics, and that I'd rather have had in the base game. If you set your mind to it, every melee boss can be soloed by ranged characters running about, because melee can't hit and move at the same time and have three-second hit-animations, which feels a little silly when a dwarf with a crossbow run around a pole for fifteen minutes killing a dragon bolt-by-bolt. Or when a mage has an "honorable" duel with a badass warrior by pewing him with his staff, then running away, then pewing him again, (because sensible spells have too long cast animation) in front of an awed public. And again the Spirit Healer rocks the boots off of everything else, but that doesn't make a huge difference since it's kinda satisfyingly easy on normal, and equally fun playing all classes.

There have been laughs, but no tears, which sufficiently illustrates my level of involvement. Specifically two peak quotes that I was going to share but realized they're much better if you hear them in context, so: do Avaline's personal quests, and bring Isabela and Fenris at the same time in your party for a while. I know, Isabela is kinda useless gameplay-wise. But you shall not be dissappointed.




Wow this post is beautifully structured! Look at it! Wicked sick! I'm awesome. (Viewer satisfaction not guaranteed; depending on your screen resolution.)

BAAI

Pull out your binoculars and settle down with a bowl of chips because I'm about to backlink to myself: here. In that post, that's like a month old (gimme a "whoaaaa") I looked for a couple of things in videogames; dark, broody guys in leather, sensible women, coolness... well it seems Dragon Age 2 read my mind (more like the developers I guess, kinda freaky if the game read my mind). I've gotten pretty much exactly what I whined for, which is kinda lulz. And also explains if I disappear from the world for a couple of days. So bai.

McNinja meets Deadpool

The man who made Dr. McNinja is now writing Deadpool for Marvel. Need I say more? No. No I don't.

I think it might be time for me to buy another comic book. This one, for example. I so wish I had more money so I could do it more often! I'd want a whole library, a wall of comics! I'd want to go places and argue about whether the art of issue#233 was better than #232, I'd want to sit in my sea of Exiles and New Avengers and Gambit and Deadpool and discuss the development of Spider-Man or the validity of animations versus the comic book originals. I'd want to befriend the dude who whined at me when we first met for saying "comic book" and not "graphic novel", and beat the guy who prefers DC over Marvel in, well, I'm tempted to say Yu-Gi-Oh. If I'd been born in the US and, more importantly, had gotten the proper encouragement, you could've made an utter comic book geek out of me, Marvel.

Actually, the artist from kukuburi that I also read is/has also worked on Deadpool. Perhaps the webcomics I have found are of like-minded people? That wouldn't be beyond logic.

Here's the article, and here's Dr.McNinja.

Chill-pill

Famous bloggers blog at least once a day, they say. And do stuff like "outfit of the week" or "quote of the day". That's 365 posts a year. Many. I'm not going anywhere specific with this, it just sort of hit me.

So now I have a cat. Responsibilities. I'm in a mutual agreement: I provide for cat and cat provides company for me. Is it the female BIOS in me that goes "oh noes what if I do something wroooong", or is that just the general reaction to responsibilities when they involve other living things? Or inanimate objects, in some cases. Yes that's true, I freak out about inanimate objects too. As a matter of fact, I'm terrified of breaking anything at all, to the point where I'm even reluctant to do things I know are bad in a game-world even if I know that the solution is always just a 5-second quick load.

Anyway my point was that I waited and waited for the cat, and then when he was inside my apartment my brain imploded in "omigodomigod" over how much I should feed him, what I should feed him, if I should brush him, what to do about his teeth (because I read cats often get problems with their teeth), when I should let him outside... and that, that is the question. What if I let him outside and he doesn't come back? Or another cat beats him up bad, there's a lot of cats here. Or I dunno, if a giant fucking eagle flies in from outer space and eats him for a snack and good measure? Logically, it all seems as probable as the last suggestion there, or at least as equally valid arguments to not let him outside. This is most likely how parents feel, I imagine. Poor things.

To be honest I think of myself as quite qualified to take care of a cat, but the worrymonster isn't really interested in qualifications. It's very easy to get a job from him though, i hear.

So with regular intervals I give myself a mental slap in the face and a harsh "Get a hold of yourself!", but then again, nothing new with that. I'm usually the one telling people to take a chill-pill, and that includes myself.

Cocoon

The German woman who was kidnapped and kept in a guy's basement for 8 and a half years was just on Skavlan, you can see it on SVTPlay tomorrow probably. Strange somehow. Seeing her there, talking about it, its unimaginable what she went through and yet - she looks just like a normal woman.

We all do. Or, I should say, we look simply like people. It's so easy in movies or comics where people wear their scars or their powers on the outside, but that's not how it works in the real world. Or is there such a thing? If you looked properly into her eyes, would you see the pain she went through, would you see that thing they speak of in literature, where a person has gone through a great deal or seem older than they are? I think, to be honest, that that is only imagination, finding patters because we expect them, like seeing Jesus in a patch of dirt.

I think the patterns it makes is not in our faces or in our eyes or burned into our skin; it's softly ground into our person, into our behavior and characteristics, like a complex, three-dimentional puzzle by our gestures and our voices and every muscle that moves. They study brains to see if they can read the memories there, if like the rings of a tree one can read the history of a human in the mosaics of neurons, and perhaps. Perhaps that twitch is crafted to cover up a different twitch spawned long ago because of a mishap, and perhaps the story is written in our brains. But rather than that,

it is a wonder, isn't it? To be surrounded by all these people, to be enveloped in all this history, the pain and the laughs and the fortunes. The way the old woman by the bus stop hunches her shoulders, the corner of the mouth of the cashier, the hitch at the end of specific words when the tourist asks you for directions. It is all a part of their history, like hieroglyphs of their lives, that although we can't read them clearly, they all together form the weave that is the fate of our world - the past, the present, the future.

It is overwhelming. I saw this woman speak of her story, and all of this sort of washed over me, and I realized, it's not strange that I'm sometimes reluctant to go outside, to be among people even if I don't have to interact. They are interacting with me, all of them, with every movement and every glimmer of their eyes. I'm in a constant flow of information, like a million radio waves in foreign languages passing through me on every frequency, from every direction. And filtering it out is such a painful process, in many different ways. For who wouldn't want to try to understand the history of everything?

Press Publish Post

The voice control feature in Windows 7 is an unending source of amusement. For one it's really fun to be able to put my headset on the kitchen counter and yell "press b!" when i'm doing dishes and Winamp switches to the next track of music, but that's basically the most useful use I've found for it. It's decently good at recognizing voice commands, although some features like the "switch to" is a bit blunt; for example I can say "start Winamp" to start it and "start Steam" to start that, and I can switch to Winamp, but saying "switch to Steam" doesn't do anything. UNLESS you have Dragon Age running, because in that case, whatever you try to switch to that isn't Winamp (yes my voice recognition loves Winamp) it switches to Dragon Age. Even if I'm saying "switch to catfuck", I get Dragon Age. Which is somewhat impressive. Otherwise if I say something it doesn't understand it simply ignores me.

Now all I need to do is program a synthesized voice that can read out the messages that the voice recognition gives. Like if I say "press b" it gives a message that says "pressing b", or if I say something it doesn't understand it answers "I don't understand", so simply adding a voice that reads those out loud I'd have a computer that I can have conversations with, in a way. Although I have no idea how to do that. Or what use I'd have of it. But it would be cool!

PS. I tried to read this in but it was many annoying with all the "'s and caps and all so that was abandoned. I did publish it solely by voice though! Saying "view post" presses "view blog" but whatever :P

Kitteh LOL

So... I'm gonna be that annoying person who never communicates with any human being without telling a cute cat story. See my cat tends to sit on the most out-of-the-way flat space on the desk, which happens to be my drawing pad, which is a Bamboo Pen & Touch, and that last part means you can also use it like a laptop's touchpad. And little Loke's paws are exactly the right size to register as a finger. Then there's some buttons that are very easy to press, and a few "finger gestures" that mean special commands. So I'd be playing, say, Dragon Age, and just got into a fight where I'm surrounded by sixteen darkspawn and a mage channeling a fireball, when the cat goes LOL and alt-tabbs me out of the game. Which does not pause, when alt-tabbed. Hilarity ensues, particularly if I've forgotten to quick-save.

Kitty is also being a kitten and chasing my mouse pointer around, or attacking the lead character when I'm running around in DA or WoW. It's lucky he's not using claws, because I think my screen would disagree to that. In total though he's a very well-behaved cat. Yes, I will blog about something other than cat eventually. I'm working on a thing, actually, so when that's finished I'll be all deep and artistic and emo. Ahh the certainty of when an artist says "when I finish this I'll... " :D