The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So apparently City of Heroes is 5 years old recently? So they sent me an e-mail informing me that, hey, free play for a week. Come see our new stuff. So, on a complete whim, I took the time to download the client and play a little more with Crossfox, my hero I haven’t played with in, gods, years.

It’s clear that they’ve added no less than like 4 million new features to the game. The moment I logged in, there were all kinds of pop-ups telling me I had access to things I had only heard about vaguely in press releases and whatnot. It was overwhelming. So I ignored basically all of them and just ran around and killed people.

It’s nice to know that my character, who is like… an Empathy/Psychic Blast Defender, is still completely useless in combat. Psychic Blast has a neat sniper power, but goodness, I can do NOTHING unless I’m in a group throwing down heals. I feel like such a complete pansy. Just like I remembered!
It’s also a bit unfortunate that some missions still don’t have very clear indicators of where to go. I have a mission that I probably didn’t finish back in the day for just this reason, which tells me I need to “Kill 7 Clockwork” in this area. But I wandered around aimlessly and didn’t see a single steampunk robot. It was pretty frustrating! So I did other missions. They did add indicators for stuff like stores and whatnot, though, making those easier to find. I remember having my mind blown originally when I was told there was stores. “What? I can BUY THINGS?”

City of Heroes is still a fairly solid MMO. You have so many movement options, it’s kind of empowering in that regard, and it’s the most customizable thing around. You can only do MORE of that now, with being able to have multiple costumes and, hell, the new mission architect that lets you make your own missions instead of playing the ones in game. I think it’s pretty damn impressive how they latched onto the fact that that is the key feature of their game and are really pushing the crap out of it. I think that’s really neat. I give the game my seal of approval.

Still, since WoW, I seriously can’t play MMOs. I’ve done about 3 missions, and I really doubt I will boot the game up again. WoW is a hard, apparently impossible, act to follow, and the fact that I get my level grind, lewt getting fix from KoL, Twilight Heroes, and the like doesn’t help either. Every time I try to play an MMO again, I realize I am never going back, even if I had a group of friends to party with. And you know? That’s probably alright. I’ll leave that to my brother. Yep.

So, my little brother moved out.
Good for him, you know?

He’s got a small, one bedroom apartment at the top of an apartment building in town. He’s also got way, way more furniture that he can ever use for said apartment, as all my mother has been doing is making and buying him furniture for the past… month or so. Still, I hope he gets what he wants out of having his own place. I may still be in school limbo, but hopefully he can really get himself settled to get on with his life. In some way, anyway.

But yeah, my mother… I’m sure at least part of the reason why Jonathan wanted to get out of the house was to get away from the controlling nature of my mother. She’s a planner, and she is a manager, but she is very, very rarely a doer. So, for our entire lives, it’s mostly been Mom coming up with some complicated project and then us having to actually do it while she stands there and commands us to be happy and not be annoyed by having to do useless things in her exact, precise way, especially when we know a better way. Yeah.
Of course, the closer and closer it got to the day my brother moved out, the more and more clear it became that this was becoming a Mom project instead of Jonathan’s show, like it should have been. Jonathan asked me to help, said I could sleep in, no worries. I agreed, of course. He’s my brother. I’d love to help.

Mom woke me up yesterday earlier than I sometimes get up for class. No sleep for me! Then, the entire time, she was angry at me for not being awake and happy. Man, I wonder why that was! I seem to have threw my back out during the moving as well, as it’s kinda in serious pain right now. Still, I blame Mom for that too. Blame: It’s the cure, cure anything. I mean, she seemed pretty angry at me for getting hurt! Yay!

Bleh, I’m just kind of unhappy at the moment. I don’t mean to be quite so down on my mother. She has tried to be better about it, in general, and I have tried to be nicer towards her, and it has mostly worked. It’s just… bleh. Day like today. When I should be happy for my brother for getting his own place and being all supportive and such and she just kinda ruins it.

Bleh, no. No more negative emotions. And negative things.
Ha, we’ll see how long I follow that command.

Is there anything better than a good random generator? I don’t think so.
So here, have another good one. They fight crime! You can thank Brer for showing me that one.

There’s something to be said about the context of randomness. Good random humor is actually fairly hard to do. I don’t claim to be an expert. (I also don’t clam to be an expert, as I originally typed.) I’m not funny, perse. But what makes this particular generator, and most random humor, work is the context. These type of pitches actually happen. Plots and movies can get that ridiculous. They could almost, almost be believable. Almost.
And thus, humor is born.

Yep.

So, on Wednesday, it was finally time once again for a Hamster run. Hodgeman awaited! We were ready to murder in a very tedious and calculated way!

But, you know. Best-laid plans. Etc. Etc. Our Sauceror didn’t show up. You can’t get to Hodgeman without a Sauceror! What madness to think you could!
We started without him, hoping he could get into a position where he could show up late and just jump in. We raided, we killed, we pushed forward. Nothing. 2 hours later, he still wasn’t around. There were attempts to find a replacement, but they didn’t really go all that well. Someone offered, but was painfully slow and it was already almost 2 AM at this point. Eventually, we just decided to scrap it. So it goes, you know? Later reports show that he was without any sort of internet due to horrible annoyances from his internet company. So it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Just a really horrible group of circumstances.

Val took it pretty hard. Seemed kinda down for wasting everyone’s time. But hell, nobody really thought that. We were all there as a team to help each other out. Just because she was the boss, and was ordering us around like a boss, well, that doesn’t mean it’s her fault. Shit happens.
The only reason I particularly care about our failure is because we need to finish these runs up! The school year is almost done and I would like to start ascending again. Still, I don’t particularly care one way or another. It’s all in good fun. I refuse to worry or anything.

We’ll get it. Yes. Yes, we will get it.

(Pardon the long, rambling intro. This is a review for Rogue Touch. I promise I get to reviewing it at some point.)

I’m relatively new to the Roguelike scene. I played Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon 2 way back in the day on the Playstation, but much like my first play of FFT, I didn’t get it, and I never got far.
Fast-forward to a year or two ago. I love Pokemon, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon looked like fun, so I picked it up. I ended up putting a decent amount of hours into it. It was pretty easy, and since I knew Pokemon, I already knew all the moves and elemental charts and whatnot. I had a great time, and I picked up the sequel and had a great time with that too. (SMILES GO FOR MILES!) About that time, there was much talk and reviews on the Talking Time about Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. It was apparently the game that all Mystery Dungeon games were based on, and was more true to the Roguelike pattern than others. I tried it, and completely sucked at it! I went back to my easy baby Roguelike. But a few months later, I picked it back up again, and really started to learn it. It was good times. It’s still hiding in Best Buys for like 10 bucks, and everyone should buy it.

But yes, I’ve come around and I like Roguelikes. Which means when I heard that the original Rogue was ported to the iPod and iPhone for a buck as Rogue Touch, I decided that I could give it a go. I mean, it’s the game that all the other games are like, you know? I’d never played it. And surely, portable, with a different interface, I might be able to enjoy it.

I was completely right on that point.

The idea of Rogue is, of course, that you are a Rogue going in to the Dungeons of Doom in order to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and score some phat lewts along the way. It is the game that came up with the random dungeons, the randomized scrolls and wands you have to test, the cursed items… all those things that make up the strategy of most modern roguelikes are already here. It’s brutally hard, but I can already tell that it’s earned its reputation.
The game doesn’t use ASCII like a version one might play on the computer. It does use tiles. Personally, I vastly prefer such tile systems. I hated Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup until I realized how much help the tiles were and installed them. So yeah, I’ve no complaints about the tiles.

The controls, too, work surprisingly well. You tap to the sides of your character and he moves a square. Double-tap, and he keeps moving in a direction until you tap again, or he hits something like a door, or an item, or sees an enemy. He even automagically turns when moving down the twisty passages between rooms using this double-tap. Tap on him directly, and you get options like pulling up the inventory screen, descending stairs, and shooting a bow. There’s a button to tap to rest for a turn, and a button to tap to search. That’s basically it. It works pretty well, although not always perfectly. I’m sure it would be much less of a hassle to zap an enemy with a wand with a keyboard, since you could just hit a key or two. In this, you have to tap on the guy, then tap on inventory, then tap on the wand, then tap on zap, then tap a direction. Yeah. Still, I have no idea how it could possibly be better on the iPod. I’ve no complaints.

I’m still figuring out how to play the game worth shit, but I’m finding it as addictive as any other Roguelike I’ve tried. My best run so far is only to floor 17 (From what I understand, you have to pass at least 52 floors, maybe more, to actually win) but even then I was testing scrolls and potions and really getting going with my hero, whom I named @, actually. My main problem is probably that I fight too many things, but that’s just how I roll. I do find it funny that, due to all the fighting I do, sometimes the game changes my class to “Fighter” instead of Rogue. I don’t know exactly how it determines that, but it’s fitting.

Anyway, it’s certainly a solid roguelike experience on your iPhone or iPod, if that’s something you want. Apparently the sale that had it for a buck is over, and it’s three dollars now. But it’s probably worth that if you’re a fan of the genre. And hey, if you aren’t sure if it would be fun, you can always download the original game to your computer and try it there first, hm?

When you’re feeling overwhelmed, the thing you have to do is break the task into chunks that are not overwhelming.

This is just generally useful advice. Seriously, put that shit to work. Do it.

Still, sometimes when you’re most overwhelmed, you have problems thinking of things in those terms. You’re freaking out and you can’t parse everything the way you need to.

I suppose that was me on Friday of last week and whatnot. I had an entire mental breakdown attempting to finally once again face transitioning head on. In my head, things totally got overwhelming. I couldn’t handle it. My mood crashed hard. Very hard. I was pretty well out of commission there for awhile. I wrote a little blog about it. It was bad times.

However, a completely random bit of rambling in a depressive conversation with Brer helped turn me around. We talked about Health insurance, and how I could get it, and what I could do, and how it would help. Suddenly, a very vague and frustrating situation had a physical, present problem for me to deal with. I started to work on that, and my mood lifted… well, it felt pretty quickly to me. Maybe other people would think otherwise.

I really appreciate Brer helping me to break this into a smaller chunk I could deal with. I don’t know why I found it so hard. Much like I was talking about in the other blog post, I am better at this than I used to be. I used to have these panic attacks just with schoolwork, but I figured out how to break them into tiny chunks of things to get done, and not worry about the outcome, and it worked. But I’m so close to this shit. I couldn’t deal with it straight on, even with this, I guess. I’m not a strong as I thought.

But progress is being made. That’s the important part. It’s not, you know, fast progress. But I’ve got a plan I’m executing. That’s all anyone can ask for.

The semester is winding down. That means I’m almost out of novels from my novels class! One more after this! But I finished the second-to-last one, The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. And now I will blog about it.

If I were to describe the concept of this novel to you, you would be all “woah, what a great idea.” That’s because it is a DAMN good idea. Basically, souls of people that are remembered personally (aka met them in real life, not read about in a book or saw on TV) by those still alive go to a “City” where they live out their afterlives. However, the world is ending. There’s only one person left alive. This City is then populated by only people whom this last living human knew, and the book follows them as well as the last bits of the last human’s life. That is a damn compelling idea.

However, it never really works. There’s nothing particularly bad about the writing in this novel. Mr. Brockmeier likes his tangents, and the story often goes that way, but at the same time, it’s a tale of memory and remembering, so it fits the novel. The main problem is the lack of an overall narrative.
The story of Laura, the last person left alive, has a complete arc, but it has to end tragically. There’s little meaning to it. We struggle with her in the really harsh conditions she finds herself in, and we can sympathize with her, all alone, in the ice and snow. It’s beyond her to find sense in her situation, though. She’s just trying to survive a catastrophe she had no part in. She can’t make it mean anything, and I don’t expect her to.
No, it is the people in the City, who are looking on these events with much more knowledge from beyond the grave, who should be making all of this make sense. It should be in them, who are trying to figure out what to do with the knowledge that the only thing keeping you here is likely about to die, and what to do with what little time you have left in this second life, that gives the book an overall meaning and significance. However, it completely fails to do that. The chapters dealing with the City jump from character to character. Some people show up again and again, but we only get little slivers about what these people are thinking and worrying about before they are gone. They all have completely different goals, even when dealing with the same thing. I would normally be all for these different perspectives, but these perspectives completely fail to give any meaning to the events. The significance of their actual situations as souls in waiting really doesn’t matter to them at all. The fact that they are all about to be “evacuated” seems to matter even less. No attempt is made to tie a unified theme throughout, I suppose. That’s what I want. Maybe class discussion will help me find one, but I sort of doubt it.

It doesn’t help that the book ends so abruptly. Yes, it makes sense that the world will end not with a bang but with a whimper, but again, it just feels like a distinct lack of planning. The book just ends, with absolutely no guidance into what I should think about that or what to take away from it. Once could argue that perhaps that’s the point of the whole book. The whole idea is that death is ultimately meaningless, even after having lived through it once. But that’s giving the book a whole lot of credit, and it’s so much more likely that it just wasn’t put together well, wasn’t it? If that was the point, I should have felt it, right? I think so.

In any case, I can’t really recommend the novel. It’s not bad. You could read it and I wouldn’t stop you. Again, the idea, the concept, is amazing. I would have liked to have read a really good book based on that concept. I just don’t think that The Brief History of the Dead is that book.

So, earlier in the week, Rei crossposted a bit of information from CheapAssGamer. There was some good stuff on the list! I was wanting to try Soul Calibur IV and Too Human and Infinite Undiscovery, so I set my phone to let me know to go, and then I went.

I got there 15 minutes early. People starting pulling up. Oh, there was some Grandpas and Grandmas. Oh, here’s someone with a laptop to take to Geek Squad, I guess. The coast looked clear. Then, the college kids started rolling up. A guy pulled up on a moped, and stood right outside the door, prompting everyone to get out of their cars, including me. We waited. We were all here for the same thing. I watched, and noticed when the guy moved to unlock the door before everyone else. I got into position.

We all kind of rushed in at the same time. Not a run, but pretty well to the highest amount of walk one could get without running. I was under the impression they were all supposed to be in a bin, but I saw no bin! But wait, there they all were, on a side shelf. I rushed in and grabbed, dodging around people. There’s Soul Calibur, grabbed two Copies. Infinite Undiscovery, a copy of that, thank you… Too Human… where are you Too Human? No? No… gone already, forget it… Ninja Gaiden DS is down there, grab that… oh, the Neopets game was Puzzle Adventure? I was going to buy that for the PC when it hit 10 bucks so I could grab that too… okay? Okay.

An older lady came up and asked me “Is there a sale going on?”
I turned and politely responded. “Yeah, all these games are $10.”
“Are they computer games?”
“No, they’re console games, as well as DS. These won’t run on a PC.”
“Oh, well, then I guess they’re something I don’t know about then.”
Behind me, there was another mom asking about Pure for the PS3. She couldn’t find it among all of us gamers who knew exactly what we were doing. Her son had asked her to get it. In a shocking display, I saw a guy offer her one of the multiple copies he had grabbed to flip. It was a nice gesture.

I checked out, using my $5 coupon, and left. $48 bucks for all those games. (though one of them is for Essner, who’ll pay me back) Not bad! Hopefully they’re worthwhile. At least I had a little adventure of some sort before the boring work of today, I suppose.

I was pretty shocked that I was so successful. I was almost counting on me NOT being successful, much like my recent PSP game run to Gamestop during their Game Days sale. I collect so many games and barely play them. It’s kind of silly. But last time I went to one of these Best Buy clearances, there was nothing there by the time I walked inside. Two guys had EVERYTHING immediately. So I wasn’t expecting to win. But I did. So that’s cool.
I really don’t know why they advertised this in the paper, though. I would bet money that every single person who got most of the games there were people who heard of this sale on CAG. By the time the older set see the flyer in the paper and make it out there, there won’t be games left. It just seems like a waste of money to advertise it, as they’re going to sell out anyway. But eh, I’m not a Best Buy ad guru, so what do I know, I suppose.

Anyway, we’ll see how these games are. I would expect me to ramble about them in the future. So far, the only one I’ve popped in is Infinite Undiscovery, and had a sad reaction to the unreadable super tiny text in the thing. Oh well, we’ll see how it goes.

The way I work is fucking weird, man.

I don’t know. It was but a day or two ago that I had some really great conversations, some really great time with some really great people, and I felt refreshed, not only just in general but in preparing to start on the huge, complicated quest of getting all that transitioning stuff out of the way. Man, I have great friends, great people around me, and I was just going to go do it, you know? Get it done. Make it happen.

And then, the next day, I took a huge downswing.

I can’t remember the last time I took such a horrid downswing and felt so depressed, actually. I really don’t know what is wrong with me. Am I just punishing myself for actually looking forward to the future for once? Does something inside me think that, even though it’s all completely possible, that it’s not completely possible? Or is it just nerves in thinking about it making me weaker and more vulnerable to an already existing condition?

I don’t know. But I felt pretty horrible emotionally Friday, and as I write this, it hasn’t really gone away.

I told Brer the other day that I am a stronger person than I was a year or two ago. That I can make a plan and get things done now. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe I’m still the same stupid girl who’s hiding up with her computer all day so she doesn’t have to face the biggest change of her life. Certainly the diploma I’m about to have won’t change anything. But I thought how much better I was doing in getting said diploma was a sign that I had mostly put this shit behind me.

Bleh. Blah.

I’m going to work through all this anyway. I’m going to find phone numbers on Sunday before I let myself play what I hope is my treasure trove from raiding Best Buy, and I am going to call them Monday. I’m going to set up appointments, and I will make things happen. Somehow I will afford them. It will work.
Then why does just typing that make me have such a huge knot in my stomach?

Prismatic Sports Bra!

It’s good!

Join me tomorrow when I’ll tell you th…

Okay, fine, a little more.

First off, the idea of it being a “sports bra” is, you have to admit, pretty humorous. Even as a female character, the idea of fighting crime in just a crazy color-changing sports bra is funny. So it gets points there.

If you were thinking that there were similarities between this and the Amazing Technicolor Dreampants, you would be correct! This is not a remake of the crazy rainbow pants, perse, but a slight change on the same idea. Different equipment slot, a few different powers, same constant randomness of useful effects in combat. It also seems to combine with the pants fairly well. I’ve had both of them running, and the similarity of their powers means I am more likely to have one of the ones I really want hit every combat. (I assume for most, that would be the +PP effects, or maybe the +XP effects.)

The one new effect on the Bra that I especially like is the +sidekick effectiveness. I remember when the judo kid gloves hit, and I was really worried about them being useless, and then as I used them, I realized how badass powerful they were, at least for farming. I haven’t unequipped them since. And when, with those equipped and with the bra hitting the right color, I have seen some crazy chip drops. It’s totally sweet.

I also especially like, message-wise, the message after battle when you hit on the +XP color. The idea of a hero actually doing that just makes me grin.

The one drawback to this item is the lack of a -time piece of equipment in the slot. Ever since the Xentrium Breastplate existed, I knew there was going to be this issue: It’s hard to justify putting anything in the shirt slot that doesn’t reduce time per turn. It is an especially hard sell, to those who own most of the IoTMs like me, to replace the Letter Shirt and it’s -15 seconds. I still don’t know if it’s worth it for the bleeding edge types, but I found that the recent inclusion of the Xentrium ingot to make full sets of Xentrium equipment really helps alleviate this. I basically just put on Xentrium gauntlets and boots, two slots that I don’t have IoTMs for because I missed Roderick’s gear, and that basically fixed the problem. It’s not as good as just the Letter Shirt, much less that AND these gloves and shoes, but dammit, I’m casual. I’m having more fun with the Bra on. The Letter Shirt is just a pure stat boost, the Prismatic Sports Bra is fun. I don’t have enough time to play my turns anyway. Heh.

Yeah, I dunno. I like it. Random is fun, I suppose, and this is random. Plus, hell, the idea of being a constantly-shifting rainbow-clad avenger of justice is just awesome. Admit it.