The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

You know what I need to do? I need to enjoy my successes.

I got an acceptance email from a lit mag today, saying that my short story, “Downsizing,” has been accepted for publication there.

That’s top of cool, isn’t it?

At the same time, I didn’t really jump up and down. I told everyone because that’s what I’m supposed to do, you know? In the same way, I succeeded at this because that’s what’s supposed to happen. I’m supposed to write things, and submit them, and get them published.

Basically, this is, like, the stupidest way to think about things ever, and I do it all the time.

I don’t know why my instant reaction to being successful is to undercut my success and attempt to make it meaningless. When amazing, awesome victory is merely “adequate,” it’s hard to take joy in anything. But this is really cool. This is like, the first time a serious publication has picked up my work. This is a thing that I should be proud of, and I’m letting my stupid brain stop me from being proud.

So fuck that, I am proud. I did it. Me. I win at writing, and will continue to win.
I’m cool.

At this point, I’ve played an afternoon or so of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer, and I just have to say, it was everything I hoped for.

A long time ago, I bought The Ship, because it sounded really cool. The idea of having one target you had to sneak around and kill sounded like a lot of fun, but in reality, it just didn’t work. Since the only people on the map were players, it was much safer just to kill everyone, even if they weren’t your target, in case they were gunning for you. There was no actual way to hide or be stealthy, because there was no way to mistake you for someone who wasn’t out to get you. It was a good idea, but a flawed execution.

Similar, Assassin’s Creed 2 did a lot of things right. You felt like a real badass when you stabbed someone, and you could really move about the world well, climbing over buildings and so on. However, needing to be stealthy always annoyed me. I’m just trying to get somewhere fast, why am I getting in trouble for running instead of moving at a snail’s pace? The game seemed to punish you for using the movement freedom it gave you by making you run about and avoid guards all the time. It annoyed me. What was the point of hiding from the stupid AI? Why is running a crime in Italy?

Brotherhood multiplayer is the best of both of these worlds. The way you have to stalk your targets works just how it should have in The Ship. The game world is populated with AI versions of all the players, who go about their daily lives. Thus, you really do have to check out each character, and see if they are acting “AI-like,” all while not blowing your cover as well. This gives you a reason to do all the cool things you can do in Assassin’s Creed. Blending in with crowds makes you go into AI routines, so you look like everyone else. Walking with a crowd makes you automatically follow the crowd in an AI-like way. You can scale buildings to give chase to your targets, or run away, but that is non-AI behavior, and is going to be noticed by other players who will react accordingly. Thus, it becomes less stupid that running tips people off to your presence.

Anyway, I love it. It’s a lot of fun. With Portal 2 waiting, I can see me never playing the single player of Brotherhood, and just playing more rounds of this from time to time when I need a break.

The main complaint I’ve heard about the multiplayer is how you can’t really do anything about who is hunting you. Personally, I think that works as it should. It dodges the “just kill everyone” thing that happens in The Ship. Attacking anyone, AI or player, who isn’t your target will turn out very badly for you. It keeps you focused on what the multiplayer is all about, which is stalking people. Yes, sometimes I found myself frustrated that my counter didn’t go off before I died, but for the most part, if I get killed, I just go “Ah, damn, should have paid more attention,” respawn, and keep going. Plus, I’ve unlocked the Smoke Bombs, and those totally let you fuck over pursuers that you see coming, but can’t stun. There are options.

Basically, the game forces you to play the game, which I don’t mind at all. Even if you’re bad at Brotherhood’s multiplayer, you’re still getting a worthwhile experience. Smart things, like having multiple people targeting players high on the leaderboard, and nearly nobody trying to kill lower ranking players, really helps make the game feel friendly if you aren’t doing well, and really intense, even if you’re playing a bunch of newbies who don’t know what they’re doing.

Anyway, it’s not perfect, but I am really, really impressed and wanting to play more. Even little touches, like the fact that your character moves about the city like an AI player until you tilt the stick when you respawn is just such a nice touch. I’m sure the experience will be even better in the inevitable Assassin’s Creed sequel, and I look forward to that too. But it’s just so refreshing to have a multiplayer versus mode that doesn’t feel like the same deathmatch bullshit over and over again. I love it.

I wonder where the luck/strategy threshold is for Essner.

So we played Acquire this evening, a game which has a strong random element to it. You draw tiles from a box that you can play on the board. Knowing what kind of connections you can make with tiles and guessing what various hotels your opponents are investing in are important to the game. When you know this, you’ll know what is going to buy out what, and thus what to invest in. Of course, you only know the moves possible from your hand. You don’t know what everyone else is drawing.

Essner seems to think this creates a game where there is no strategy to the moves and decisions you make, and someone just randomly wins. While luck does play a huge part, the idea that it’s only luck is verifiable as not true, which I think he would admit. It doesn’t change his gut reaction to the game, though, which is perfectly fair. A lot of the game can feel really random.

I just wonder where the line is for that kind of reaction, though. I mean, this is a guy who loves to play those coin push machines, and I feel like that’s almost completely random. Does he agree? Does he think there’s some small element of strategy in playing those games? I can’t speak for him, so I’m not sure. We play stuff like Magic, which has an obvious random element in card drawing, and other games with dice rolls and things of that nature, and he doesn’t really seem to think those are luck based, even though he always critically misses.

I don’t mean to pick on Essner. The other people I know who don’t like Acquire have the exact same feeling about it. I just wonder what it is about how the game goes that causes it to feel that way. Is it simply because you have to hedge your bets against many possible futures, and try to set up a situation where you can capitalize on most of them, as opposed to dealing with one threat in front of you?

This is what I am thinking about as I head to bed. What do you think of Acquire?

I remember when I was young, and we had Comedy Central. Late at night, at the crazy late time of midnight, they would show Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was a magical show, and I remember trying, each and every time when I didn’t have to get up early the next day, to stay up and watch it. Almost always I would fail, but those times when I didn’t were the best times. True comedy times.

Now I live in an age where I would say that the majority of my non-video game entertainment, and significant amount of my entertainment overall is based in watching things that have taken this general format and ran with it. Stuff like Spoony, the many, many LPs I watch, and so on, are all comedy similar to that which I tried my hardest to get to see over and over again. Still, I guess I wonder why I gravitate to spending my time on that, when so many other avenues of amazing entertainment are out there. I’m behind on Community, 30 Rock, and Archer. I hear Important Things is on Netflix streaming now. So many things I could be watching. Yet this is what I spend my time on.

Here’s my current theory: it turns viewing into a pseudo-social experience. Now, that seems kind of potentially depressing, that I’d be replacing the people commentating in these videos for “real friends,” but it’s kind of true. I never see films alone, nor do I want to. I never watch TV shows unless I’m watching them with people, really. If I’m turning a television on, it’s because I need inoffensive background noise, I’m going to play a game on that television, or I’m watching something with someone. I don’t really watch things on my own. It’s slowly gotten to the point where it just doesn’t fit with how I go about doing things.
So I watch Let’s Plays were I have commentators “watching” with me and cracking jokes, adding to the experience. And I sit there, enjoying their humor, obviously, but also thinking about what they’re missing, reacting accordingly, and so on. It gives me the extra level of interaction I have sitting around doing something with my friends, but I can have it when my friends are busy or otherwise indisposed.

Did I manage to write that in a way that didn’t sound lame? I don’t feel like it’s lame. I feel like it makes sense. I watch things because I want to have the social interaction around watching something, whether it be discussing an episode over dinner or whatever. These sorts of internet entertainment let me have that in one complete package when I can’t figure out how to make schedules work.
And hey, if you have a better explanation, I’d love to hear it.

Today, my mother asked about buying a 360 for her TV downstairs.

I thought this was a bit silly, but I told her the price. She didn’t feel like it was worth 200 dollars. When I asked her why she wanted one, it was so she could play games. Well, hey, that seems like the reason one would get a 360. Of course, the games she wanted to play was trivia stuff like You Don’t Know Jack and whatnot. She wants to be able to play with Dad without bothering me, which is nice of her, of course. It’s not a great idea. She doesn’t trust herself with a 360 controller at all, so I don’t know what she’d do with actually owning a system. But it’s kind of cool she wanted to.
I followed this up by showing her the new Jack on my iPad and some of the funny Portal 2 videos that have been going around. I was showing her what was going on in gaming, and she seemed relevantly interested.

It’s kind of amazing to me that trivia has basically made my mother respect one of my biggest past-times. She doesn’t understand most of what I do, of course, but she gets the appeal of having everyone over to play Jack, or Buzz, or Scene It!. She wants to play these games, and even though it’s normally a huge hassle for me (she’ll only play them downstairs, so I have to unhook all my systems and carry them downstairs and hook them up there and such, which would be less of a problem except I am also forced to hide all the cables, making it hard to adjust things, but oh well) I always go ahead and do it because I love having her, and dad, and everyone involved. It feels awesome, and it’s a lot of fun. It worked with Dad and Golf, and it works with my mother and trivia.

Similarly, giving my mother a good, working laptop has done wonders for her understanding why I am on the internet all day. She gets as stressed as I do when the internet doesn’t work nowadays. She is on there, watching videos, reading news, or playing games on Yahoo games basically every night. She understands it, and doesn’t fight with me about being connected anymore.

For so long, I wished she would just leave me alone, or try to understand why I enjoy what I enjoy. It always seemed to hypocritical that she’d tell me I needed to not play games the whole night when she’d spend the whole night watching television. Finally, I have that understanding, at least with this stuff, and that’s pretty neat. Gives me hope for other things.

Flock sent me an e-mail today, telling me of it’s death.

Right around the time I fell in love with having two monitors, I heard about Flock. Originally a fork of Firefox, and eventually a fork of Chrome (and changing right around the time I changed over myself, like it loved me), Flock was supposed to be a “social web browser.” It originally drew me in with its interesting bookmark integration and built-in blogging software, and soon became my main browser, with Firefox, and eventually Chrome, sitting on my second monitor for opening links people sent me in chat and whatnot. It was built upon the solid innards of the more popular browsers, but it was something unique, and something mine. It worked well, and I enjoyed it. Even after Chrome appeared as a fantastic second browser to Firefox, I found myself ending up booting Firefox 3 to the curb instead, and sticking with Flock.

Alas, I should have guessed this day would come. As much as I loved Flock, it really didn’t offer anything that Firefox with three or four plugins didn’t have. Nobody was going to pile onto it. It couldn’t be worth the money to keep developing and updating. I’m not surprised they’re closing up shop, but I am sad to lose it.
I guess I have a little Indie Rock Pete in me, as I really did enjoy using a browser that was capable, but unknown. It was my special portal to the internet, that only I used. I don’t think I ever met anyone else that knew about it. It didn’t have the stigma of something like Opera, and it was not as complete bullshit as Safari or IE. It was totally mine. It has a special place in my heart because of that.

I installed Firefox 4 today to replace it. It looks a lot better than 3 was, and once I installed a plugin to make the address bar like Chrome (I can’t live without searching in the address bar anymore. It immediately pissed me off and I immediately started searching for plugins.), it seems like it will serve me well. Still, I already miss the way Flock would, very slightly, misrender my website, and the way it would fake out not saving my open tabs on a crash, then suddenly restore them. God speed, little browser. Rest in peace.

I. Love. Space Channel 5. If you have any doubt, I offer this image of furry me cosplaying as Ulala as proof. So yeah, love the game.

Sega has recently put out an incredibly shitty Dreamcast collection. Seriously, of the four Dreamcast games they could have picked, they picked Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 Part 2, and Sega Motherfucking Bass Fishing. What the hell? So, so many great Dreamcast games, and that’s what they chose. That’s not what I’m complaining about, though.

I rented this collection because it gave me an excuse to play Space Channel 5 Part 2 again. I own it on PS2, but I recently tried to play it, and the spiffy HDTV made the timing go a bit off, which I hoped this collection would fix. I had also heard there were Xbox avatar awards in the game. Now, I’m not going to spend money on avatar stuff, but I do think they make amazing awards. As someone who has played this game a million times, I figured I’d be able to pass whatever challenge they were tied to, and get some cool something or other. I mean, one of them might be an Ulala outfit, which would be fantastic.

Well, I played through the first run-through of the game the moment I got it. It took me about an hour and a half. I haven’t played the second “Extra” playthrough yet, but it’ll probably take me about as long. I played a little Ulala’s dance mode. Then I went to check how to unlock the avatar awards.

Unlocking the Ulala costume requires you to play this game for 10 hours. That’s it. No skill, no nothing, just 10 hours of play. These aren’t hours in the menu. These are hours when the game is actually running. A game that takes less than 2 hours to beat. A game that won’t run unless you are hitting the buttons and not failing.

What the fuck.

Now, I’ve logged TONS of hours into Space Channel 5 and it’s sequel. Seriously, I can’t count the number of times I’ve beaten the first game. I probably put at least 30 hours into that silly game, and it has a length similar to Part 2. I beat Part 2 tons of times as well. Even I think this requirement is insane.

Space Channel 5 is a success because of its incredible passion. It loves it’s stupid world, and shows it. You can tell every inch of the game was crafted with vision. The result isn’t great, perse. There are much better music games out there. But Space Channel 5 just does what it does with so much style, you can’t help but smile at it. But it was never about having a lot of gameplay. Certainly not 10 hours worth.

All the games on the collection apparently have similar rewards. These times maybe make more sense with Sonic Adventure and, I guess, the Bass Fishing, if you are one to actually play a fishing game. They make no sense for Crazy Taxi either. It’s obvious that these requirements were just thrown together by some intern because people were too lazy to make actual requirements. If they were going to just turn in something, I wish they would have made it attainable.

I am gaming the system to get my Ulala costume. Stage 2 will run for 15 minutes without you having to hit a button, and I’m letting Ulala fail that report over and over to run up my time. I’m not proud, but I am doing it. That doesn’t make this little achievement okay. It’s not. It’s kind of bullshit. It’s bad game design. It’s punishing fans who likely have played the game to death before this collection and are most likely to want this little reward.

Or at least it’s annoying me. And let’s face it, it’s my blog, that’s all you have to do to get me to complain about it.

My mood has really been up and down recently. I’ll have a fantastic week, then a week when I’ll feel like garbage, then a week where I’m kind of just tired, and then one where I go back and forth constantly… I do my best to keep my shit together.

Still, I have some feel good stories to share about how awesome people in my life are, so I think I will.

Story one is a theoretical. Let’s say I still worked at… you know what? Fuck that bullshit. I do work at Kohl’s. At this point, they aren’t going to cut me loose and try to replace me on my class with 6 weeks left. Yes, I still work at Kohl’s. Anyway, the other day, I found out that I have become the Superstar for the month of March. (Superstar is like Employee of the Month, only there’s two of them a month, because why not.) This is voted on by everyone at the store. However, my ad set team has created a voting block, because why not? They tend to pick someone they feel deserves it every month and get them one of the Superstar slots. I normally don’t involve myself with it because, I dunno. I’m just enough management to feel like I’d be manipulating their votes, and they tend to discuss it while I’m working on other things anyway. The point is, I had no idea this was happening beforehand, and I knew the voting block of my team had decided to give it to me.
So, of course, I thank everybody for voting me Superstar during our break. Everyone is all awesome and supportive. Jane especially speaks up, and she says, “We did that back on that night when you were really down. Well, I mean, that’s not the only reason, you deserve it, but we wanted you to know we appreciate you.”
It kind of knocked me over.
Normally, when I get to work and feel a little shitty, the routine of work tends to draw me out of it, or at least let me ignore it for awhile. There was a night in early March, though, where I was just feeling completely defeated and terrible, and basically apologized for being low energy. I could tell everyone was worried about me, but that they’d go out of their way this much… that meant something. It’s great to know I have such great friends at work.

Of course, I have them at home, too. Story two. I was at work, and worrying like crazy about talking to my parents more about transitioning. I’m about to start the name change process with a court hearing next week. It’ll be a little before it officially takes effect, but it’ll be rolling. Things will be happening. I’m really worried about telling them that it’s hitting, since so much other stuff has been going on. I was driving myself crazy, and Brer was being Brer (meaning supportive, but his viewpoint is extremely biased at this point so when I’m really out of it, I have trouble taking what he says on this kind of thing seriously). I randomly texted my brother about this stuff.
His immediate response was if him and Shauna could be there for me at the court thing to support me. I didn’t even explain it well, likely, so he didn’t know all the details, but he wanted to be there for me. Shauna did too. I texted her a thank you, since Jonathan was speaking for both of them and I appreciated her support too, and she made it clear, like Jonathan, that they are fully behind me. Heh, I got so focused on the family members who might be an issue that I forgot about everyone who’s right there with me already. I tend to do that. It’s nice to be smacked around and reminded.

I know some pretty great people. I really shouldn’t let my stupidity make me forget that.

And I loved it.

I’m not all the way through it yet, but I am really enjoying My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It is not a show I am going to recommend to you unless you have a child in the appropriate age range for a show like this. Then goodness, get them in front of it. They should enjoy it, and you can rest assured that it’s better than a lot of the garbage out there for kids.
But man, I just love stuff for kids when it’s done with a level of respect for the audience. It makes me happy. It makes me grin.

I know I’ve talked about it before. I tried to find some reference posts about how I love childish things that are taken seriously, and I found this one, but I feel like I’ve written a lot more. I just love the formula. I can see right through it, of course. I’m versed enough in plots to know, within two minutes of an episode of Friendship is Magic, exactly what is going to happen throughout the episode, and I’m always right. It’s following a formula, for sure. But it’s a safe and relaxing formula. Horrible things can happen, but you know that they’ll be wrapped up by the end of the episode, friendships will be strengthened, and everything will move on. I like that formula when it’s done right. The problem is, to do it right, you have to have characters with at least a little depth to them, and that’s often where shows fall flat. The characters are empty placeholders because the people who make these shows assume that children don’t understand how people work, and don’t have even the most rudimentary level of empathy and ability to follow more complex plots and ideas.
I’m not going to attempt to pretend that the character of Twilight Sparkle is some genius invention of art, but she is a very well-rounded character. She demands a level of organization of people around her, but is very sloppy in her own research methods. She’s happy to have friends, but many of her passions involve alone time and solitude, and so she not only has trouble finding a balance between the two, but also figuring out how to actually interact with those around her in an effective way. These are all character traits that are relatable and realistic.
She’s also a fucking wizard, so that’s cool too.
Throughout the season as I have viewed it, every one of the main ponies has had their personalities fleshed out in this way. Even Pinkie Pie, who really seems like one-note comic relief on first glance, is actually fairly fleshed out. None of them is just always right. They bicker, they’re always flawed, and it’s only by working together do they come to a solution to issues that isn’t a huge problem. It’s a mostly ensemble cast, though Twilight Sparkle is obviously the focus, and it makes it so that no one character is the “win” button. So often in shows like this you have a situation where side characters fight, and sigh, it’s time for main character, or “God” or “parent” character who is always right, to come in and fix everything. That isn’t the case here. They come to their own conclusions, and work things out themselves. It’s nice.

People were going insane for this show. I ended up reading this article by the main person behind it due to a twitter post, and I really liked her approach and her frank discussion of how she wanted to make a show worth watching, and not just a toy commercial. Still, it wasn’t until I saw the love put into the animation through the silly music video Val linked me that I decided to check out the first episode and see if what Lauren Faust had said was actually reflected in the show itself. I’m 17 episodes in now, after being unable to stop loading up “one more,” and I feel like she, for the most part, succeeded in her goals and made a really fantastic children’s show.

I’ve been thinking about the character relationships, and the general workings of the entire world of Equestria all weekend. As a person who is trained via lit crit to read too much into everything, I’ve certainly found some interesting things about the general world that I keep trying to figure out in my head. For example, all ponies have something called a “cutie mark” (which is a terrible name and I hope was dictated to the creative team by the toy department) which they develop as they grow older and which reveals their special talent and passion. In some ways, this mirrors the normal process of going up, but in another, it’s something that really speaks to a level of fate being ingrained in Pony society. What marks you is the one thing you can do well, and thus should do. You shouldn’t aspire to do other things, because those aren’t your special talent. Applejack is marked with apples, and thus should work on the apple orchard. That’s it. This sits potentially wrong with me, but says something interesting about the world. Similarly, Pegasus are in charge of changing the weather in this society. Seasons don’t change on their own, but only change via hard work, and those with wings are responsible for quite a lot of making sure nature is functional. They’re expected to bend the natural order to their will, but at the same time, Fluttershy is a pegasus who is totally focused on being in harmony with nature. Is she actively fighting against her place in the world? Or does her mark exempt her from that, because she is obviously supposed to deal with nature? Also, the prestigious ponies up in the capital of Canterlot simply use magic to change the weather and seasons, while those in Ponyville must resort to days and days of hard work to make nature happen. Does Princess Celestia not care about the plight of the working pony in the fields?

Also, Magic is Science, but Magic is also Friendship. Is Science actually Friendship? IS IT?

This is the kind of bullshit I think about, and will continue to think about as I load the next episode to watch while I eat. At least I am in good company, and am not the only one thinking about this kind of ridiculous stuff for fun.

I had heard good things, so I went on my iPad and downloaded Shadow Era. It’s a free-to-play CCG that uses microtransactions for getting new cards. The best part is that they have an “open platform” stance. Your account lets you play on the web, on iOS, on Android, and so on. I love me a card game, and I’m not unwilling to drop a few bucks on additional cards, so I was excited to try it.

The game runs pretty well on the iPad! Although there is a bit of a learning curve with the interface, I never had any problem picking what I wanted to do. The game seems strongly based on the WoW CCG, which is a good base. WoW is a pretty good game, and the preconstruct deck I picked out was pretty good. I was enjoying playing against the built-in AI.

Brer got on, and I’m like, hey, maybe I’ll try playing a game against a real opponent! I mean, it was free, and he could play on the web and face me, right? So I told him to get an account and we’d throw down. I clicked on the “Challenge” tab in the menu so I could challenge him to a game. That’s what you do in card games, right? I was shown a list of ongoing games, but none I could join. The only button on the screen was “quick match.” I figured that meant they didn’t have ranked games yet or something. I clicked on it to make a room for Brer to join.

It threw me into a random match with a random dude.

I searched the FAQ, the forums, all around the menus, and I confirmed it. There was no way to play against a friend.

You know what would get me to pay a few bucks to buy cards? Being able to play a fun card game with my friends. Know what I can’t do in this game? Play with my friends. Competitive play isn’t fun unless I have a complete card pool to build decks from, and I’m not going to get invested enough to buy a full card pool without getting my friends involved and playing. For a game so polished, I was shocked it was missing such a simple, vital feature.

I wouldn’t doubt they will eventually add it, and when they do, I would suggest giving the game a try. But right now? It’s kind of useless. Good job, guys.