The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Today is a day of WeenHallow. It is also a day where I work for like hours and stuff. THE TERROR OF WORKING YOUR JOB ooooOOOOOOOooooooh!
In any case, I’m going to be busy and shit. You know how it is. I guess I don’t really have anything particularly Halloweenesque to talk about. I talked about the party last time. What to do?

Well, I did watch Little Shop of Horrors.

During the party, Essner had some Halloween Pandora station running, and it played some music from the musical. Clicking through Amazon Prime Instant Videos the next day, I saw it on there, shrugged, and watched it while I cooked a meal and then ate said meal, and I enjoyed it.

I had thought I had seen this movie before. I mean, I was really sure I had. But it was obvious, as I watched it, that I hadn’t. There were just lots of moments that I really didn’t recall, and whole songs which I had no memory of. Surely I would have remembered “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space” if I had heard it before, right? It was really a fun little movie, and I’m glad I did see it.

I spent most of my time watching doing two things, though: attempting to figure out how you’d set this on an actual stage, and marveling at the weird collection of famous people in the film.

Seriously, this is a show that’s done a lot in smaller theaters, with smaller casts, but I spent a lot of the film attempting to picture how you’d do a decent Audrey II in the sort of budgets that those sorts of things would allow. Obviously, the movie had some super serious puppeteering because it’s a movie, but you’d have to have some level of that, no matter what. Would you have someone standing inside Audrey II the entire time, working the mouth? That would be a completely terrible job to have. I guess you wouldn’t have working vines? I don’t know how you’d make that happen, but that’s really a big part of Audrey II having a personality, and being able to gesture. It also seems like he’d be such a big set piece and so elaborate that it would be nearly impossible to get him off stage for scene changes. Surely someone smarter than me has figured this out, but I was spending a lot of the time wondering.

The other thing is, goodness, there were some odd faces in there. There was a young Christopher Guest there near the beginning that I didn’t even recognize at first. Crazy. Steve Martin had a huge role that, once again, I didn’t even remember as part of the film, which just goes to show how much I was wrong about having seen it before. Then Bill Murray is just in there as a masochist for like… no reason at all. Just because Bill Murray is awesome. So he’s there. How cool is that? For some reason John Candy didn’t strike me as shocking as those. It was just a weird point in most of their careers to be in this film.

Anyway, I enjoyed. That was my random, vaguely horror-related movie of the time period. Now back to work! Work work work. Happy fear and candy day.

Tonight I went to an awesome party. And I didn’t even have to hire Party Pete.
Basically, Essner brought back the Halloween game, in the form of a scavenger hunt spanning Cape Girardeau and Jackson. There were questions, requested photos, and appeals to fuck with the other teams. It was well put together, and a quite fun time.

My team was Team Ghost, and we spent time rummaging through my parents’ house, driving to the Pony, and running around in the woods. One of the objectives was to take a picture of a whole other team, and we thought we saw a team coming in those woods! We actually hid in the bushes waiting to ambush them. It was a false alarm though. We drove a truck over a soccer field to take a picture of a wooden bridge. Layne ran into many fast food restaurants for ketchup packets. I ended up buying a bunch of candy, because each type of candy you had meant extra points. We also attempted to pass off Predator as a horror film. It was a fun time.
Our overall victory, though, came from finding the SECRET CATEGORY. Essner had hidden an extra set of questions in the CD case he manufactured, and we were the only team to find it, giving us an extremely strong lead, even though we didn’t complete everything in the category.
On the way back to the house to count up our points, we decided to have a flashlight rave. Josh turned his radio to the techno station, and a Jamaican man told us about all the sexy sistahs and sissy boys out there. We laughed, became Team Rave, and dedicated our victory to those sissy boys and sexy sistahs. It was only fair.

Afterwards, we stuck around and talked with everyone. Essner had these fucking amazing like… Chicken Parmesan Texas Toast things? So fucking delicious. I hadn’t had dinner, and ate like a million of them. Essner had also bought a fog machine, so there was fog. Some people roasted marshmellows. I had some weird conversations with people who hadn’t seen me in months and thus weren’t prepared for the whole me being a woman thing now very well. Of all people, though, I was most impressed at how well Dustin took it. He’s such a nice guy, but sometimes kind of clueless. But man, he just went “Oh, okay,” and it was fine from then on. Pretty awesome of him.

Anyway, it was a damn good Halloween party. A great night all around. Thanks, Essner, for putting that together. And internet, don’t forget that my team won. Because we totally did. Yep. We won Halloween by like 90 points.

I was asked the other day what I was writing. Of course, I haven’t written anything in awhile: work and moving and all that kind of sapped up all my time! I haven’t had time to do much of anything fun or constructive recently (though today’s day off helped that a bit, I suppose). I mean, I should be writing though, right? I’m someone who does that. Who makes poetry and whatnot. I should be producing creative material, right?

Anyway, after I explained this, I was told that “maybe you should cut back on the blog so I have more time to write serious-type stuff.” (That’s not actually a direct quote, but I put it in quotation marks anyway. That’s how I roll tonight.) It made me think.

The problem with giving up the blog is that the blog is a major source of “everything is okay” in my life right now. The fact that, no matter how stupid, I put a blog up there every single day means something to me, personally. This several years long at this point experiment with daily blogging has yet to fail. It says I can create a project, and actually stick with it for a meaningful length of time. The days I nearly go to bed without writing a blog are days where I remember, and am struck with fear that I might miss a day. I actually went to bed without writing earlier this year, and woke up at 4 am, raced to the PC, and wrote something so I could get back to sleep.
There’s also just this general sense of “someone might see this” that really motivates me to keep writing these stupid blogs. I don’t really think many people care about what I write here, but there are a few, and the fact that this is there, and my internet whatever, means I don’t want to fail. It makes that deadline real.

I rarely have deadlines for creative work. When I do, I do awesome things (See: book of poemtry I wrote) and whatnot. If I found a way to get myself writing on a deadline, I could probably do more creative work every week. But I’ll be honest: I don’t know how the fuck I made the deadline on this blog a day thing real. I don’t really understand how it went from something I just kind of wanted to do to a requirement that invokes the responses that occurred up top. Somehow I made that happen. Making that happen with creative work would be nice, certainly. Eventually I’d start cranking out something great, at least from time to time. I need to come up with a plan. I really do. I’d write creative shit and post it on here more often, like a poem every week or something, but I am told you are not supposed to do that, because then it is “published,” and then I can’t actually do anything with it. Which is frustrating, but so it goes. I don’t know. I haven’t decided what to do.

So what am I writing right now? I guess nothing. I have that short story that was supposed to be porn but now I think I can turn into something much better that I have a bad draft of. I have my next book of poetry vaguely outlined in my head, with characters. I’ve done one or two test poems on here from time to time. I really do want to do that. Alternatively, I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe that story is better told in a novel. I also still have my last novel attempt half-written, Every Other Day, I Love You, and I really do still like that story and would like to redo the whole thing and make it better. I want to write a sequel to a porn story I wrote. I need to do a lot of writing for my Festivus gift sometime in the next month. But what am I actively working on? Not a lot.

I should fix that. Is stopping this blog a way to do that? I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m going to, in any case. I love you blog. Never leave me.

I ate a bag of garlic croutons. As a snack. That’s how I roll, motherfucker.
Know how else I roll? Sometimes, I’m like “I really have absolutely no idea what to write about today LINKS MOTHERFUCKER!”
And then there’s links.

Watch this shit. WA-CHAAAAA!
Links!

Looking for cool content to watch on my Roku, I have started watching NSFW, which is actually a pretty silly and funny little show. Maybe you would like to watch it?

Okay, here’s your pony links of the moment. Some animated gifs of complete awesome. And here’s a funny comic. Everyone likes funny comics, right? Now let’s get out of the pony zone.

Important quiz question I had linked to me. WHAT IS THE ANSWER?!

I’m going to see John Hodgman next week! He put out a trailer for his book! I am excite!

Finally, here’s an important PSA that you shouldn’t miss. Public Service. Being announced. Yeah.

Those are links. Be linked. And now be free.

I beat CODBLOPS.
I am on the cutting edge of video games.

I remember a time when I was in fucking love with Call of Duty. Call of Duty 4 was so good! I couldn’t get enough. I put in serious multiplayer time. I enjoyed the campaign. It was solid.

Those times are so long gone. CODBLOPS was not completely a failure in gameplay, but I was kind of bored the entire way through, because I have played this shooter before, and everything on top of that shooter was so stupid that it couldn’t engage me at all. I mean, I had some guns. I shot some mans. What more could I want, right? Apparently it’s a twist. I still enjoy shooters, I really do, but you need something to make that basic shooting interesting. Some games do it with a gimmick, such as, I dunno, Singularity, so that you have something to keep you going. Alternatively, you need a plot that engages you. Something that entertains and you want to complete the shooting to see more of, such as, I dunno, Battlefield: Bad Company 2. CODBLOPS was just shooting, and the story… ugh, the story.

The story in this game was just flat-out boring. Not for one second did I care why Mr. Protagonist was being interrogated. This made it so I really didn’t care about why anything was going on, and I was okay with that. I was find with just mindlessly shooting dudes while I listened to a podcast.
Then the endgame happened.
Even without me paying attention, the whole end of the game was just so stupid, I was blown away. Like, okay, even if you really want supernatural superscience bullshit in your Call of Duty, and you believe that this guy can have a magic man implanted in his head, WHY WOULD YOU TAKE HIM ON ANY MORE MISSIONS? You have no way to be sure he’s safe anymore. Don’t murder him if he co-operates or anything, but don’t let him DRIVE A HELICOPTER THAT CAN TAKE OUT EVERYONE ON THIS VERY IMPORTANT MISSION. I just… couldn’t believe it. Just… wow. Especially when you already had other characters you had played as who could have gone on the mission instead of Mason. It was just… so dumb. So dumb.

Plus, after you beat it, it goes into this ridiculous Zombie map where a JFK impersonator was yelling about how much he loves sniper rifles at me.

I was pretty glad to send that back to Gamefly.

Get out your dream interpretation manuals, because I had another vivid dream last night. This dream was weird in a lot of ways. For one, there was a lot of backstory in it. I felt I knew a lot about my “character,” who was me, but also was not me. I was still myself, and for part of it, I had the same friends, but my past was pretty different. It was also a dream where I distinctly remember me being female, which is always a good thing in my eyes. The events don’t really work too well if I wasn’t born female. It’s just nice that my subconscious is finally making that switch, instead of making me a genderless blob of a being like I always used to be. Finally, it’s just odd that, in this dream, imagry that I’m generally pretty okay with and tend to find fairly sexy, like puppy play and whatnot, was incredibly terrifying to me. I felt that fear. Odd. Anyway, here we go.

The first thing I remember was meeting at a big mansion type house with a bunch of people. I don’t really know who these people were: they were just friends of the owner. I apparently was too. He had a huge house, that had a huge grounds that were connected to many other buildings, lakes, buildings under the lakes, and so on, but we mostly stayed in the main house. I was spending a few weeks there as the owner’s guest. Apparently this was not the first time I had done this: we had all been there before. The owner was a rich dude, but he was also kind of a sleazebag. It was obvious that most of us, including myself, were simply using him to spend a vacation in some really obscene wealth. We were mostly free to do whatever we wanted, and we did. Most guests explored the huge grounds. I mostly stayed up in the little room I had claimed for myself, relaxed, slept, ate good food, and so on. I didn’t want to explore, for reasons that wasn’t clear to me at the time, but became clear later.

While staying here, the police arrived. It turned out the owner came into his obscene wealth by unscrupulous means, and they were doing a raid. All the guests scattered. Though I’d done nothing wrong, I got caught up in the rush and ran as well. I was being chased, and I headed out into the grounds. Each building I saw there filled me with fear. They were all fancy, in different styles. There was one which was under a man-made lake. However, they weren’t buildings: they were brothels. The grounds used to be, before the current owner bought it, a sex theme park of sorts, that had many, many sex slaves. The building I had been staying in was part of the area for guests, so it hadn’t inspired any fear in me. I hadn’t seen it. But apparently I had been a slave here, when it was open, and seeing the grounds I was used to caused me to have horrible flashbacks. I ended up having to hide in a building and run through an automated course for pet training that I had been through years ago. I was in tears. This was a bad situation for me. Traumatizing. I made it out, collapsing in the entrance to the building, and was eventually arrested by police officers. I told them what I knew, trying not to cry. I was eventually released for being co-operative and not being directly involved.

There was then a time jump. I was working at a store in a mall. This store was in a mall that catered to sex pet owners. This was apparently common in the world of my dream. People would come in with their pets on leashes, and it would make me shiver and shake uncontrollably. Nobody knew I had escaped that world. However, while I was trying to work, I was also attempting to organize some sort of mall-wide dinner event. It was going to be a big party, and I was trying to get everything set up. However, all the various store managers could not agree on what the main course would be, and it was all going to fall apart. Essner, Droid, Spaeth, and I were running around attempting to come to some sort of agreement with everyone so that the party could go on. We weren’t making much progress, but there was one person I knew could make a difference. However, ran a shop specifically for pet owners. I needed to go in to talk to him, but I couldn’t. I stood outside, frozen. I wished that one of my friends would show up and do it for me, but I was alone.

Then I woke up.

Yep, I have a strange, strange subconscious.

Awhile back, using free Microsoft points I got from a cheap Live Gold card, I bought Rock of Ages, because it looked silly.

It was silly.

Rock of Ages is an amazing game, but it is also a very flawed game. The campaign is not very fun. The AI is either steamrolled or does the steamrolling, and it rarely felt, to me, like there was anything in between. I didn’t get very far in the campaign because of this.

However, Essner and I played splitscreen versus for a whole afternoon once, and that was a blast. This was not just because I won most of the games, because I did have an advantage for a lot of it, seeing as I understood how the game worked. This was because the game is exciting and tense against human opponents. You can actually trick them, or trip them up with your builds. A human player can’t just decide to be able to make pixel-perfect turns whenever they need to. It’s pretty great.

Rock of Ages is basically a really, really weird tower defenseish game. You start by building defenses on a path to where your leader is housed. These are things like catapults, that deal damage, towers, which are barricades that have to be destroyed if someone wants through, or cows, which work to push things out of the way. You build until your boulder is ready, and then you roll the boulder down the track your opponent just filled with traps to try to hit their gate at a high speed and, eventually, kill them. This system is a bit flawed: It’s hard not to break the gate after three hits, even if you do terrible. It more comes down to slowing the opponent down so you get that third hit in before they do.

Again, these traps and the strategy they make are just stupid against an AI opponent, but when you can really mix up your strategy, and switch in the middle of the match to totally throw your human opponent, who is incapable of robotic maneuvering off? Or when you somehow slip past a horrible gauntlet of seemingly inescapable traps without a scratch? It’s totally fun. It helps that the game is kind of this super silly mashup of internet memes, history, and Monty Python animations as well. It looks fun, and it is fun again your friends. I got my money’s worth on that afternoon of versus play, personally. I may never play it again, or may only play more versus, but I had a really good time.

More ramblings, COMIN’ AT ‘CHA!

Flapjack did some sort of bad thing before I got to my dad’s birthday party. Jonathan and Shauna took him home. My mother was very upset. It’s a situation where it’s just really frustrating to experience. I mean, I totally get both sides. Jonathan and Shauna have to punish their dog how they see fit. It’s their decision. I’m not going to stand in their way, and I hope what they’re doing helps them. However, my mom constantly being on the verge of tears the entire time I am at the party is not something I want either. It’s something I would like to correct. I want my mom to have a good time. There’s no good way to be in the middle of this, not taking sides, AND find a solution, though. I certainly don’t know it. So I try to be nice to everyone without trying to stop everything. But it’s unfortunate. I wish I could find a way out.

In case you were wondering why Twilight Sparkle is totally my favorite pony, it’s because of shit like this.

I am really enjoying dressing up for work.
The whole concept still seems foreign to me. I’ve never liked looking nice. It made me look too masculine. I’ve always just been an asexual blob. But dressing up nice for work gives me confidence. I feel like I look good. Dammit, I do look good. I look good enough to say I look good. It helps me face all the people I have to deal with. They call my gender right almost always when I do. It makes work fun, instead of a chore. Well, I mean, it’s still work, which can be a pain. But it’s less of an emotional drain and more of a physical one, as it should be.
It just makes me wonder what else I can do. Cara keeps making suggestions. Normally I loathe clothing suggestions. But that’s because, in the past, they’ve been suggestions to make me look like something I wasn’t. While I initially dislike just about any suggestion like that, many of the things she’s telling me do grow on me. I should keep trying things. I can look good.

Back at my parent’s place, I only really watched television to fall asleep by. I’d put on whatever mindless bullshit was on adult swim and fall asleep. I’m finding I really miss that in the new place. I figured I didn’t need TV, and I sure as heck don’t, but there is just zilch worth watching on the free basic cable I have at the times of the night I go to sleep. Infomercials and such bullshit is all I get. It makes me worry. I’ve got to figure out how to cue up shit to fall asleep to, so it has to be something I wouldn’t mind watching, but it can’t be something so interesting I would actually want to finish it. It is like… the most stupid problem to have, but here I am.

Anyway, have to get up early for work in the morning, so I am going to attempt some sleep. Maybe. You have a good day, eh?

I guess I’m like… a T-shirt hipster or something. I’m very particular about shirts. They are serious fucking business. Because of this, I would never be caught dead in anything my employer sells. They are almost universally horrible, stupid garments, and I really just want to punch anyone I see purchasing them. Of course, tonight, I was left folding them for quite a length of time, so I got to get a good look at them. Here are some thoughts I had.

There was a shirt that said “Stewie” with a picture of Stewie Griffin on it that seemed to, obviously, be a sendup of Scarface for some reason. This made me think about Stewie as a character vs Stewie as merchandise. In merchandise, Stewie is as he was in, oh, the first episode of Family Guy. One note, only catch phrases from the first episode, etc. But recent seasons of Family Guy that I have had the misfortune of seeing have decided that Stewie is now a gay stereotype. He is the character they use for gay jokes. He is nothing like ANY merchandise with him on it. Supposedly someone who would buy such a horrible shirt would be a fan of the show. Do they really not see the huge change in character he’s made? Do they not care?

Even Kohl’s cannot ruin how awesome Adventure Time is, thankfully. Though of their shirt offerings, I feel the one with Jake and Finn fist-bumping really does not need the text on it. The other one, with the many action faces of Finn, is fantastic, and I almost would buy it. For serious.

I am really pissed that “Press Button, Receive Bacon” is on a shirt. I remember the first time I saw that particular piece of bathroom graffiti. I thought it was hilarious. Now it is on a shirt. It’s jumped the shark. Plus, the joke is not a joke outside of the context of the actual air dryer. It doesn’t WORK on a shirt.

There are a ton of Angry Birds shirts. It is obvious to me that someone saw Angry Birds being popular, said “We must make shirts,” but then did not actually have any ideas for shirts. Yet they made like 10 of them for Kohl’s alone. The little “humorous” sayings on many of the shirts just make no sense. Why does this have anything to do with Angry Birds? I will give a pass only to the “The Bird is the Word” shirt, which is acceptable, though nothing I would possibly wear. I could see people who play the game finding that entertaining, though.

The number of shirts with the exact same jokes shirts have had on them since I was young enough to think these jokes funny is just… depressing. I mean, I guess every year someone is old enough to find these funny for the first time? But you’d think that someone could actually come up with more jokes. When they do come up with another joke, about 10 different variants of that joke seem to appear on the scene. Someone must have thought recently “Ha ha, a pig being horrified at bacon is funny!” because there are tons of variants of that now. Sometimes, look, it’s a chicken and some KFC instead! Ha ha! Hilarious!

Yeah. Shirts. So wonderfully stupid. I’m so above this shit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to lay out my My Little Pony Steampunk shirt for tomorrow. (I’m so cool.)

A long time ago, I played, and apparently did not write about, an iPad game called Dungeon Defenders: First Wave. It was an alright game: Tower Defense with a little action twist. (This was far before games like Trenched, of course.) It was fun enough, but holy shit, the controls on the game were AWFUL. This was clearly not a game created with the iPad in mind, and yet here was the version of the game on the iPad. I wanted a controller badly. The virtual controls were just complete ass. What more, the game was clearly designed for multiplayer, which just wasn’t going to happen on the iPad.

Fast forward to now. Aesa, being the person that Aesa is, bought me a copy of Dungeon Defenders on the PC so we could all play together. Finally, a chance to play the game with a controller! I plugged in my Xbox controller and prepared to defend a dungeon.

OH WAIT THERE’S A BUG THAT MAKES GAMEPAD CONTROL NOT WORK. Fantastic.

So after being INSANELY ANGRY about that for quite some time, as I am likely to do about the stupidest issues in PC games, we finally got down to it and played. And then wiped like twice on the second map. And then quit for the night.
Basically, we’re awesome.

I tried the Huntress, who really needs to pull up her pants very badly. (Seriously, once I noticed this, I got really annoyed that she was my character. She’s super-deformed stylized cute. Why the fuck can I see her ass crack? What the hell.) She specializes in towers that are really kind of limited use items, like land mines and gas traps. You have to keep feeding them repair money to keep them going, but they’re quite powerful when they go off. Also, her weaponry seems really damn good for being at a distance. Much more powerful than the Wizard’s stuff, even if she has to reload from time to time. She was pretty fun, though she would be complete and utter garbage if you were playing by yourself. She works well in a group, though, because everyone else has basic towers covered.

Even though we were REALLY TERRIBLE (seriously, the difficulty much ramp up hugely, or the game must have been much, much easier on iPad, because I had no trouble with this level alone) it was still a pretty fun game. I don’t know if I would have paid what they’re asking for it, though. Seems more like a sale sort of game, though I’m glad I get to play with everyone now. Apparently they’re having special events and ranked challenges and I don’t know what? None of that really interests me. Just playing with my friends. This game lets you do that. Thus, it succeeds on that level.