The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I feel like I’m having problems finding things to write about lately! I’ve been consuming less content because I’ve been working so much, and my current game conquest I shouldn’t talk about, because the whole point of me playing it is to write an article about it! (Dun dun dunnnnn!) More and more, I find myself on days like this one where I just kind of want to go to bed, and don’t want to do this. Still, here I am, because this silly blog is such an element of pride for me. I’m proud that I write some sort of bullshit everyday. It means a lot. So here I am. Let’s ramble.

I still have no idea what the whole right thing to do is on FurAffinity. Every so often I write my stupid shit and post it there. I don’t edit it, and I don’t spend much time on it: I get feeling all guilty when I’m doing heavy editing and storytelling work on pornographies. Still, I put them up, and people who find them somehow often decide they like them, probably because they play into under-served fetishes I am also a part of. It’s when they favorite, or comment, that I don’t know what to do. People have sometimes sent me messages thanking me for watches on FA when I watch them. Should I be doing that? People leave feedback on a story and what they want to see. Should I address every person? I’ve mostly just stayed quiet out of being unable to know. I just don’t use FurAffinity that way. I know it’s some furs Facebook or whatever, but it’s not mine. It’s just an easy way to track artists who draw shit I like. I dunno.

The house-buying continues well. I guess I haven’t written about that much here, but I’m buying a house, and I’m excited. I’ve got all kinds of household goods I’ve been collecting, which is useful. Of course, I still haven’t gotten the most important parts, like a new router and cables to run all over the damn place for the serious internets. Of course, apparently my bank has decided to take my loan deposit out of my account twice, instead of just, you know, the one time, so I’m a big super-broke at the moment. I get to yell at them about that tomorrow. Yay! But yeah, that’s all going according to plan. I’m cooking and planning and scheming. Of course, I worry the house won’t really feel like my home until a certain wuff gets his butt down here to me, but that’ll happen in due time.

I also continue to unironically like ponies. I rather think the pony thing has gone too far as a fandom, though, and this sort of thing is proof, but that is part of the reason why I revel in it and enjoy it so much. For whatever reason, ponies are something that the internet has decided to just be okay with liking without caveats or haters. (Okay, there are surely those types out there, but for once, I just feel like they are getting drowned out by love, instead of the other way around.) People can show their love for this silly kids show, and it’s fantastic to watch people just go for it, and feel for once they won’t be judged for it. Maybe I’m misreading things, but that’s how I see it. I love it. The fact that it’s a genuinely good show that I am entertained by is fantastic too.
I do still think the term “Brony” is fucking terrible, though. Ugh. Certainly not going to call myself that.

Anyway, that’s a blog. Goodnight, everyone.

Usagi Drop is a lovely show.

For whatever reason I have been following a lot of anime lately. Usagi Drop is one of them.
It gets me every damn time.

I swear, an episode of this show does not end without me tearing up a bit. You can just feel the love radiating from these characters. It’s awesome. Daikichi is every bit as bumbling as you’d expect an older, career oriented dude to be who is suddenly a father. However, he has so much fucking heart. He dived into this thing head-first because he couldn’t stand to see this girl ostracized and hated, and fell in love with her immediately. It’s touching, and most of the big problems in the show are incredibly mundane. “Oh shit, I need to find a school? How do I even do that?” “Oh shit, I need to pick up Rin after school but my job requires me to stay and do overtime often.” “Oh shit, Rin is getting sick, how can I help her?” These issues are everyday, but they are harrowing. They’re tough, and the show shows exactly how they are tough. He makes difficult decisions, but the right ones. Things happen in a fantastic way. I love it. It makes me so jealous as someone who tries to write sometimes. I always feel like I completely fail at making those conflicts seem like conflicts. I feel like I can’t write a story based around that kind of action. It makes me jealous of shows like this.

Rin, too, seems to be really realistic to her character background. She was raised before having to do a lot alone. She was raised with her father, so she doesn’t think of Daikichi like that, although he clearly is. It just works. She’s adorable and also portrayed deeply. It’s nice.

Sure, there are some elements of the show that frustrate me. Daikichi not just getting up the nerve to ask the single mom he is clearly completely into on a date really bothers me, for instance. Maybe this is just a thing in general, where it’s easy to know what to do in a relationship outside it? I don’t know. Fucking ask her already! Gah.

But seriously, every moment filled with heart in this show makes me want to cry. I think that says something about my want to be a mother and have kids. Heh, maybe I’m not as good at hiding it and burying it as I thought. I’ve tried very hard to rid myself of that for a long time, since I can’t have kids outside of adoption and I hear that’s super hard to make happen for people like me. I certainly don’t think I want any children for awhile now anyway. Too much living my life as me I have to catch up on first. But I guess that’s still a want of mine. Somewhere, deep down. Heh, I bet when I become an aunt (which I am to believe is in my future some years from now) that sort of thing is going to come back in full force, and I am going to want a kid so badly! But for now, it gets to surface a little in teary smiles when I watch a silly show. I guess that’s alright.

Me hours ago when I wasn’t tired: Eh, I’ll write the blog later.
Me now: Well, I’m falling asleep at the keyboard, I guess I’ll go to be… oh wait, blog.
I’m a genius.

In any case, I wanted to talk about the customers at Kohl’s. I, of course, have to push the silly credit cards that we sell as someone on the register. It’s just a job, and it doesn’t bother me. (It does bother me a little that I’ve gotten caught up in the leaderboard bullshit because people keep telling me I’m good at doing it, but oh well.) I ask, and the moment they say no, I shut the fuck up. Other people go super-hard-sell on some customers, and that just seems crazy to me. That seems like bad customer service. I can’t blame people for not wanting a Kohl’s card. I most definitely have no plans to get one, and it would make getting my employee discount way easier for me. I can layer the Kohl’s Charge discounts on top of my employee discount, too. There are more benefits for me. But fuck if I want one. So I can’t blame people, but I ask because it’s my job.

In any case, when people say no, the one excuse I hear all the time is “my husband would kill me,” or some variant, such as “I would get in so much trouble with my husband.” At first, I thought nothing of this. But the more I’ve heard it, the more it started to bother me. It seems like such a stereotype kind of answer. “I am a woman and we are supposed to love shopping and not be good with money so if I had a card I would spend too much ha ha! Stereotypes!” I’m supposed to accept that because “Oh, of course stereotypes are real” or “I hear you I am the same way we are such women who shop too much ha ha!”
Of course, that might actually be some people’s situation. Their husband could be in charge of finances, and they could have bad impulse control when shopping. It’s possible. But I hear it way, way too much for it to be true for so many.

In any case, I was trying to figure out why one would lean on stereotypes like that. I suppose it just goes back to all those people who hard-sell these stupid cards. They feel like the only way to get people to shut up is to put the decision-making onto someone else. If that’s the case, I can’t follow up, right? I wouldn’t, but they’re making sure I couldn’t. If they actually make it clear they’re able to make decisions and think for themselves, then I suppose they assume I am going to hound them and generally make the interaction unpleasant. There is a co-worker I have who I will not name who will literally take the application, waves it in their face, and attempts to push a pen into their hand and get them going on things. It takes at least three no responses before this co-worker will check people out at the register, which is this co-worker’s actual job. This co-worker comes off as someone I don’t want to be around! This co-worker is making the shopping experience a bad one. I do not want to be anything like this co-worker. I understand wanting to dodge that kind of treatment.

But it’s really kind of sad. It’s weakening yourself, belittling yourself, and not for fun reasons. Sure, it’s just an interaction at a stupid retail store, but I know from experience that bowing down and using this kind of technique to dodge stuff again and again will eventually wear on you until it becomes more true than you’d want. People shouldn’t have that sort of erosion happen over a stupid credit card.

If you’re in my line, say no. I’ll shut up, having read the script I am required to read and thus done my job. If you’re in someone else’s line, say no. If you’re asked again, be annoyed as you have a right to be, and tell them that you “really need to get going.” This is not a lie, as I’m sure you need to not be in that situation and thus need to get going from it. Let that be the end of it. Alternatively, just ignore repeated questions after the first no. Pretend you heard nothing. I find that shuts things down pretty fast as well. But just, you know, trust in your own power to know whether or not you need another credit card. Because I’m sure you know that. I’m sure you can make decisions for yourself.

Bleh, alright, what’s on my list of things I should have already written about?
Sanctum? Alright.

There’s basically one downside to Sanctum. Getting co-op to work requires PC bullshit wizardry of ports and all kind of shit that’s just annoying. You can’t just join a game with your friends. It requires prep time. This is still a huge issue for me. I need to be able to invite a dude, have them join the game, and that’s it. Done. Game working. I know it’s an indie title, but fuck, they are hurting it’s potential usability big time with this old school bullshit.

Other than that, the game is great, especially in co-op.

It claims to be a first person tower defense game, and that’s totally what it is. You build towers, create mazes, and upgrade your weapons, and then let the monsters in. You have an assault rifle with a grenade launcher, a sniper rifle, and a “freeze gun” to slow enemies. None of these has ammo, but they have a cooldown. Use them a lot, and they heat up, and need to cool. You can teleport to teleport points you build on the map and attack enemies to help take them out. You can’t really be a one-person army. You’re just about as powerful as one turret, although you can be more pinpoint. But you can really help.

The game does some things great. If you’re playing a co-op game, and are trying to build a tower you don’t have enough money for, you can “hold down” the button until a friend comes over and picks up the rest of the tab for the build or upgrade. Mazing is extremely important, as well as upgrading your personal weapons. You really have to be able to strike a strong balance all around while playing. The game also has awesome Steam achievements to guide you towards various challenges you can do.

There were only four maps when I played, but they were all solid, and for tower defense, that can take you a long time. I certainly never cleared any of them in my time with the game, and I’m not terrible at tower defense or anything. But seriously, if the idea of a tower defense FPS sounds fun, you will like Sanctum. Pick it up for cheap sometime. It’s a solid indie game, and I’m glad I bought a four-pack and passed that shit around to people. Well, hey, I still have extra copies too, if you want one. Whee.

Happy Pony Day!
Let me talk about Penguins.

I’ve been watching Mawaru Penguindrum, as I said yesterday. But now I’m caught up. (Up through Episode 10. I think that’s caught up.)
I am loving this show.

If there’s one thing I really like about it, though, I suppose it’s how grounded it feels. The show can border on extremely silly, and there are many completely surreal and unrealistic elements to the show, like the silly transformation sequence I showed last time, and this lady who seems to be assassinating people’s memories with some sort of slingshot with a laser sight. But it never feels unreal. All the characters feel like actual people who could exist, reacting to things appropriately, even when they’re a little crazy. It feels stupid to me that I feel the need to point this out every time I notice it in an anime, but it’s honestly just rare. Anime tends to use so many stock characters and stereotypes. It’s so very nice when a show doesn’t. It shows that anime with good writing is just damn good television.

The show has also just flat-out shocked me several times so far. Ringo’s character has just overwhelmed me with how far she is willing to go. To the point of me yelling “OH FUCK!” at the screen. I’m proud of the show for going there. I’m proud of the show for letting a character with some believable and understandable motivations also be so batshit insane and uncaring. I like her, despite of how horrible she is. I’m interesting what latest plot twist will mean to her character going forward.

One more thing I appreciate: the show seems to be leaving nothing on the table. When recent reveal about a background element of many episodes being important to Himari’s past came about, I was all like “Ooooh. Good job.” It really completely spun her character about: She can’t go ANYWHERE without being reminded of her life’s failures. All intense. Little elements or things that seem throwaway keep coming back in bigger and more important ways. It’s nice, because it makes the show feel very planned, which makes me confident that the narrative will continue and end as good as it’s going.

There is one thing I don’t like, though: the Penguins themselves. I just don’t find them working as comic relief, which the show seems to want to use them as, and they’re just kind of stupid. They don’t seem to be doing too much, plot-wise, now. Maybe that will change. Probably will. But for once, the random dose of cute doesn’t seem to be doing the show any favors at all. If I had to pick a weakness, that’s it.

Anyway, I am going to keep following this. Because it’s awesome. So I wrote some thoughts about it. The end.

Today was a tiring day. Today was a mostly good day. Today has become a linkdump day.

It’s Rarity’s cigarette that sells this one for me, really.

Let Jeff Green invade your nightmares.

Join me in being sad once again at the loss of Idle Thumbs.

This is my Tiny Tower. I can’t escape Tiny Tower.

Were you wanting a 20 minute long remix of Mario Songs? Well, you can get that right here.

More Persona 4 Fighter footage. It looks so damn good. I want it now.

I started watching Mawaru Penguindrum today. It’s sometimes a bit weird.

This is one of the better Retsupuraes I’ve seen in a long while.

I’m off to bed. Thanks for being nice today, world. My day off is over, so, you know, can’t rest anymore!

River Song is a waste of a good idea.

I dunno, I just have to say this, because it frustrates me. So much of Dr. Who is so much better now that Russel T. Davies is gone, but at the same time, they’ve done so much shit. The show is so great, but they just tend to forget where the line is for creating entertaining cheesyness and real, terrible cheesyness. They do great work, and then cross the line and ruin the work they’ve done.

River Song is just such a great example of this. Current season spoilers coming, of course, so, you know, if you’re not caught up, don’t read.

When River first appeared, she was a great idea for a character. Being from the Doctor’s future, she was the first character who truly had something up on him, and could put the Doctor off=guard. You could see the Doctor react to that. It bothered the shit out of him, which was perfect. He was threatened in a whole different way. It was the sort of thing that you could get some character development out of the Doctor from, which is hard to do with a character like the Doctor. I was down.

Then she came back for another episode, which was fine. Sure! Why not? More Angels and shit. She’s still mysterious and a problem for the Doctor. I can dig it.
Then she came back again.
And again.

At this point, the mystery of her was wore out. She was just this person that the Doctor was supposed to be in love with. But there were no sparks between them. That was kind of a problem. Still, I was okay with it. Then there was this pirate episode that disgusted me so much I kind of gave up on the season.

Coming back, I got caught up with what had happened. And what had happened was bullshit. Apparently River Song is Rory and Amy’s daughter for no reason, and she’s also part Time Lord for no reason, and she’s also an assassin for no reason. I watched the episode “Let’s Kill Hitler” and I shook my head. They were flushing her character, and all the good she brought to the show, down the toilet for some really, really stupid plot twists out of nowhere.

I see it again and again from the show, and it frustrates me. It’s like they don’t know what they’re doing. I think the problem is a George Lucas kind of problem, where they worry that they need to make a show that kids will like, instead of just worrying about making something good that kids can watch. Whatever it is, I wish they’d stop it. They’re obviously capable of making some super-fun, super-interesting television. I wish they’d just do it.

There are times when I am like, “I am a pretty damn good conversationalist. I can get my ideas across, I can be witty and funny, I can listen and give good advice, and so on. I got what it takes to conversate.” I go out. I turn on charm. I may not be the best, but I can charm some people. I can orate. I can give orders to my crew. I can make assignments. I get stuff done. I do stuff.

Being semi-competent in conversation has just been doing great things for me recently. I feel like I’ve been getting really close to Cara and Aesa with all this talking we’ve been doing. Deep conversations. Good conversations. The kind of conversations where you leave knowing there’s a connection there, a strong one, that’s only going to get stronger.

Then there are conversations with my parents, where my wordskills completely fail me. When I can’t get across what I need to say because they won’t listen, no matter how I put it. Where every time I talk to them, it becomes more and more clear that wanting to be close to my parents is not a mutual feeling. I leave each encounter feeling the gap between us widen.

Words, like Space, have a terrible power. Good and evil, all in how you use it. All that shit. I spend hours at work thinking of petty and spiteful ways to use words to get revenge. I think of scenarios where I can annoy the shit out of those in my way, or make them feel how they make me feel. Or maybe I just roleplay, in my head, screaming at them, loudly and insistently, telling them off and telling them exactly what I wish I could without insulting them. Just yell “Fuck you, you selfish assholes!” Just scream until things somehow get better. Like screaming ever helped anything.

I talk to people about things. I talk to them when I am tired, like now, and I tell them things that I wouldn’t say otherwise. I tell a certain someone about how I love them and wish I could move our relationship forward into something beyond online sexytimes. I tell friends how much they mean to me and everything I feel about them. I tell people about how I used to sing songs about how much I deserved to die and how I’d kill myself soon, surely. I sing those songs to myself. I argue with myself, then tell my puppy dog about it and cry. I make plans. I execute on plans. I laugh. I enjoy myself. I talk to people about things.

I’m talking to people about things.

Goodnight.

Another iOS game I’ve been playing, one that is pretty fantastic, is Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard. It’s a Gameloft joint. I never know what to think about Gameloft. Their games are normally solid, but they’re also normally complete fucking ripoffs of console IP. Still, this one is licensed and it is really great.

I’ve been thinking of the game as SWAT 4 Lite. This game has most of the fun parts of SWAT 4 (looking under doors, planning attacks, clearing rooms, ordering your squad) without all the tedious parts (being incredibly difficult, following police procedure) which were cool to include in SWAT 4, but make it a game I will never play for fun. Basically, you get thrown into various scenarios around the world and your squad of three people (I guess the other three people of the Rainbow Six are backups in case you die? I dunno.) has to infiltrate buildings, rescue hostages, diffuse bombs, and so on.

The graphics in this game look fantastic for iOS. They’re basically of an early PS2 sort of quality. They’re not as pretty as, say, Infinity Blade, but this game is doing a whole lot more than Infinity Blade, what with tracking two companion AIs around with you and all the enemies, so I think it’s really good visually.
The game also has really slick presentation. When you peek under doors, the enemies are having funny or relevant conversations, which is a nice little touch. Your mission briefings and guy in the ear guy does a great job of being a tired veteran of this sort of thing. All of the icons on the screen make basically perfect sense without having to decipher them. (I knew, for instance, what the “Flashbang and Clear” icon meant before the tutorial told me.)

The controls, however, are shit. I’m sorry, but emulating dual analog shooters on the touchscreen just DOES NOT WORK, no matter how much you want it to. You just cannot do any sort of twitch shooting and moving in this game. Luckily, the game knows this, and this isn’t a twitch shooting kind of game. It’s very methodical, with a majority of the kills coming from ordering your teammates, if you’re playing right. They also layer on a fuck-ton of auto-aim, which helps a lot. When I first started the game, I thought the controls would be a dealbreaker, but as I learned that normal FPSing wasn’t the focus of the game, I really changed my tune. They did a good job of making up for the flaws in playing a shooter on an iPad.
The only other control thing that seems a little wonky is the cover mechanics. You can only get into cover at certain points, but the game is sometimes kind of picky about what distance from them you have to be to get into cover. It’s normally not a life-or-death thing: you’re normally getting into cover by a door before you tell your team to breach, for instance. Still, it’s a bit frustrating, and I kind of wish they would have made that as sticky and forgiving as the auto-aim for shooting is, as then you could take a little more active role in taking out bad guys without getting yourself killed, if you were the sort to want to do that.

The game has an EXP system that unlocks weapons a la Modern Warfare, because that’s a thing all games must have now. It’s inoffensive, but also mostly useless. I don’t know. I haven’t switched from the assault rifle I started with, because of course I want an assault rifle. It’s flexible. If I took a shotgun, I wouldn’t be as good as sniping from cover. These unlocks carry over into the deathmatch multiplayer, which I’m sure is pretty bad and I haven’t even pretended to be interested in. The game, however, does have co-op through the story, which is crazy and seems like a feature nobody would use, but I guess for the like 2 people who both own this game and have iPads in the same room or whatever, that would be pretty damn sweet.

I’ve played 5 or 6 of the missions so far, and I really had a lot of fun. I bought it on sale for a buck, and I don’t know if I’d quite bite at the $8.99 I think it normally sells for. But this is Gameloft: next time they have a sale, probably around Thanksgiving, it’ll be a buck again. When it is, you should really consider picking it up. It’s just a really polished, really fun game. I was surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m glad I picked it up on a whim.

Before I get started, I decided to add an iOS category today, which I should have done a long time ago, as I know some of you probably don’t give a shit about the iOS games I talk about. This took forever because I had to go and label all my old blogs, and I don’t know if you know this, but I have written a ton of stupid blogs! Anyway, I hope that’s useful. Then again, I doubt anyone uses the categories, but eh, whatever. It’s sorted and shit, right?

Anyway, today I want to talk about Hospital Story. No, this isn’t a game by Kairosoft, the people who brought you hits like Game Dev Story and Hot Springs Story. They really want you to think it is, though, with the icon looking pretty well exactly like those Kairosoft games. No, this is a fairly useless microtransationfest that probably isn’t going to hold your attention more than 15 minutes. Still, it’s free, so maybe 15 minutes is enough.

I downloaded this game because I often click on the little ads that give you free Tower Bux in Tiny Tower because 1) I want free Tower Bux, 2) It takes like 2 seconds, and 3) I want to support the people who made that game, because it is so awesome, and I assume they get money for people who agree to take a look. Hospital Story was the first game on there that really seemed like it might be fun. I thought maybe this would be someone else’s take on the Kairosoft sim model, and I was interested to try it.

Basically, the game goes in rounds. People come in the top of your hospital, and they need various treatments. You have a little electric machine, and little heart monitor, a strange machine that looks like a hand, and some sort of brain scanner. You drag the people to the machines, then tap on them to send one of your workers to do the procedure. Many patients need multiple types of procedures, so then you drag them to another place, tap on them to send a guy, and so on. Finally, after they’re cured, they’ll go to the desk, and, you guessed it, you have to tap on them to send a worker over to take their money. A game day is maybe a minute or two long, and then you can upgrade your equipment and hire more workers or whatever before going at it again. The game also gives you experience points, and you level up, but these levels seem to do absolutely nothing besides show up on the top of the screen. I don’t know why there’s an EXP system besides the fact that games have EXP systems, I guess.

This game is all about microtransations. You can upgrade your stuff with the in-game money, but hiring most of the staff requires “Medi-Points” which, as you can probably guess, they’ll be happy to sell you. They give you a few to start, which is enough to hire a few people and not be totally screwed, but it is really frustrating. They do have one thing I found smart, though: they have this weird thing where you can elect to watch commercials to get small amounts of Medi-points. Instead of forcing them on you, it’s voluntary, but they reward you. I could really get behind this sort of model as an alternative to paying, but the returns just aren’t any good. I had to watch like 7 commercials to get enough Medi-points to hire one of the cheapest nurses, and that was only with the bonus points they gave me for starting the game. I’d be doing that for an hour or more before I’d be able to buy, say, the Cat Doctor. It’s just not worth it.

As you play through the game, patients start coming in faster and faster, and you have to scramble to get them all taken care of. This might be a cool little arcade game, if for the fact that basically the only thing that makes it possible to do the numbers they throw at you is having enough staff. If you don’t have enough, you’re screwed. If you do, it’s a cakewalk. And, of course, you have to hire new workers with Medi-Points. Yeah.

Once the game picked up speed, I had fun with it for a little while as a time-waster, but it’s nowhere near deep enough of a game that anyone would ever think to spend money on it, and their little “watch ads” thing, while smart, just doesn’t give enough of a return for you to even want to try it. It’s free, sure, but there’s no reason to try this game.