The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Sometimes it takes sleeping for hours and hours to make you realize how tired you are.

Sometimes.

It bothers me how tired I am. Falling asleep at my desk at like 8:30 PM is completely lame. At the same time, if I didn’t need sleep, I wouldn’t be doing that, would I? When I go to bed at 10 and don’t wake up until noon or later the next day, it just kind of proves my need. I needed sleep.

Part of me says this is me getting old. I mean, I’m getting older. Time is marching on. I can’t just stress my body out like that. I need to actually get 8 hours of sleep from time to time.
The rest of me says that this is simply a sign of how stressed I am. Now, I feel like, for the most part, things are under control. Maybe not proceeding at the pace I want, but under control? Certainly. At the same time, I am being pulled in a lot of directions at once with no relief. I know that, if I admit to myself how I feel, that I feel that I need more time to myself. I need rest.

I need to sleep all day on a Saturday.

So, you know, I guess that’s what I did. It would be better if I could go to a Prospit or Derse to get more stuff done during that time, but I suppose I’m not that lucky.

Basically, I’m tired! That’s what I’m saying. I’m tired.

Because I know the number of times I will play through The Passing is limited to maybe one or two more, I recently listened through all of the possible dialogs throughout the campaign. They’re fucking hilarious. I suggest you play The Passing like a million times or just watch the videos here.

It just amazes me how brilliant Valve is. Or at least, it did when I started listening to these clips. The Left 4 Dead maps don’t really change much, at least layout-wise, and you’re expected to be playing these maps over and over again. Putting in, seriously, this much dialog is such a great solution and, more importantly, builds a slightly different narrative each time. It creates the feeling of variation, and also makes the characters extremely strong.

Seriously, Valve has done a fantastic job of storytelling in Left 4 Dead. Do they get enough credit? I don’t know. But you’ve got very deep characters and a fairly cohesive narrative, even when all the players can do whatever stupid bullshit they want. The game is designed to create narrative high and low points, and it actually work. When you play it, it’s not just a game. It is a narrative. There’s sometimes narrative in, I dunno, Modern Warfare multiplayer, but it’s always meta-narrative. It’s always the player interacting with another player. In Left 4 Dead, this is often the case, but it is also, simultaneously, a narrative about the characters. Because the game is all about interaction between these four people, the player narrative becomes the in-game narrative. It works. It works damn well.

It’s something more multiplayer needs to do. It makes it way more engaging. Then again, it’s what makes Left 4 Dead so unique. Brer and I have talked about how to take Left 4 Dead into non-zombie genres. It would work. I would be quite enamored with it. Hopefully Valve can do it! Or someone, I suppose. One just assumes Valve because, you know. They’re Valve.

Awhile back, I had tooth problems, as you could recall. Recently, I’ve started noticing an effect these problems had on me.

I stopped biting my nails.

For the first time in my life, I have fingernails. Well, on some fingers. Some not so much, since they were seriously bitten down that seriously. But I have some fingernails!

It’s really kind of fucking me up.

One would think that it would mostly be benefit. “Hey, I can pick up coins from the ground now!” and so on. But I’m not really finding it to be the case. I have years, literally a lifetime’s worth of muscle memory of how to do things without fingernails. Now I can’t do those things. Even typing this blog, from time to time I find my fingers hitting the keys in an odd way, because there’s a nail on them, and I’m not used to accounting for it. I feel like I can’t do the simplest tasks. It’s really stupid.

I mean, I’m going to try to keep them. But I’m not going to lie: I’ve been tempted to gnaw them off, not because of the bad habit, but just to let me work without having to adjust. It’s weird. Fingernails are weird. Someday I might master them. Until then, I’ll bumble about when, say, attempting to pull a paper off of a stack of papers.

It seems really stupid, honestly, but I’ve been using Epic Win for a week or so, and it’s pretty amazing.

I’m really good at keeping things in my head. I always have been. I’ve never really had to keep much of a schedule or anything like that. As I got more and more into all this teaching and schooling stuff, though, I started to have to give myself loose guidelines. I used my phone’s calendar to point out when I had to be places. But I still never really connected up and attempted to keep a list of tasks. I still kept those in my head.

However, it was starting to become taxing, because to remember them, I’d have to go over them often. It sort of started to feel overwhelming in a way. I had heard of Epic Win, and I decided to splurge and try it. I liked the cut of its jib, so to speak, and I figured it might be useful.

I don’t know if it’s REALLY proved useful, but I’ll tell you one thing it has done. It’s made me feel like I’m getting shit done.

I often feel like I’m not accomplishing anything. Nothing is moving forward. I’m not doing anything. It can get downright frustrating, and contribute to generally horrible moods I find myself in. In reality, though, I do actually get a lot of shit done, and just listing it, and then completing those quests… it really makes me feel more productive. It’s a nice feeling. It’s something I rarely feel. Hell, take this blog post. I have a daily quest set to write a blog. Just checking it off on there when I finish writing this helps me to realize how much work I actually put into this silly thing. It’s a lot. It is significant, and it’s something to be proud of, even if it isn’t the most amazing blog in the world. It’s awesome to get to see that.

It’s also making me more productive as well. Or if not more productive, at least a bit less of a procrastinator, as I tend to set quest deadlines in empty spaces, spreading my various tasks out a bit more, instead of doing them all on one day. That’s another benefit.

Yeah, I really like Epic Win. I wish it had a bit more functionality. For example, I’d love to be able to link to my character, show off my stats and loot, and such. It also seems a little expensive, especially since they’re selling additional character classes as DLC. But hey, I’m getting things done and enjoying myself. I mean, I have a quest log now. That’s way more badass than a list of chores. I can get behind that.

I believe I mentioned that I never actually dress up for Halloween. I always get some ideas or something, and then never follow through because of busyness or laziness.

However, I had a Halloween party to go to, at my brother’s house. I was thinking it might be nice to dress up.
Then I had a dumb idea.
Because of this recent comic by one Phillip Armstrong, Phanto was in my head. I got to thinking, “You know, with a little effort, I could create some sort of shitty Phanto mask to chase me around.” I threw the idea at Brer, and he got a chuckle. “Okay then,” I said, “Fuck it, I’m doing it.”

I doodled Phanto heads on some paper, and taped them to bits of an Amazon box that was sitting in the room. Then, with a gigantic roll of duct tape, I attached the head to one end of a hangar, and the other to a belt, and used massive amounts of duct tape, and additional cardboard, to create a shitty harness system so that Phanto would float behind me. It didn’t work perfectly, and of course, when wearing the thing, I couldn’t, say, sit down. But it was something. I took the big key by our door, to give Phanto a reason to chase me, and went to the party.

Of course, when I got to the party, nobody knew what Phanto was. Well, a few did, but were still confused. I guess it was more of a strange concept, seeing as I wasn’t dressed as any of the cast of Mario 2. But hey, I made more of a Halloween effort than I have in years, so I’m calling it a win. Something like a win. Yeah.

“How did Gamma World go?”
I’m glad you asked, voice in quotes.

I believe it was a success.

Originally, we were supposed to have like 6 or 7 people make an appearance. It was going to be a big crowd, and an intense game because of it. Eventually, people had to bail and it ended up being a more intimate, but no less intense, affair with me rockin’ the Dungeon Mastering, and Kevin, Jonathan, and Spants playing characters.

The cast of characters included Hiro G, a Gravity Controlling Japaneseman from Japanesetown, who was in gay love with his former master of manhole-cover-throwing, who was a plant, and had a love child Bonsai plant named Phyllis. Next was Ox Bellows, a Speedster Thespian who annunciated everything, was wearing a Sharks costume from a production of West Side Story, and could do a badass electric boogaloo. Finally, we come to Containment Zone, or Contain, for short. He may be glowing softly from radioactivity, but that didn’t stop him from being a master of stealth, and also a collector of metal fragments and purifier of water, since he had one of those.

The trio soon began to be huge dicks to all the NPCs, which is pretty par for the course. However, and this is why I think Gamma World fits our group a bit better than straight DnD, this made sense in the more post-apocalyptic setting they were in. They had to fend for themselves, and there was always somewhere else to go, whereas in DnD a lot of the time settings are created that has the players involved in some sort of group or something, and pissing people off at random would create consequences. In here, though, sure. They started by seeing a robit explode, and then pissing everyone off and heading out with their like, four horses, which caused them to rename themselves The Horse Lords. For they are clearly the lords of horses.

Most of the night was roleplaying them pissing off everyone in the town and proceeding towards ADVENTURE! but they did eventually get into a combat. I was impressed with how they attempted to think outside the box, be stealthy, and use the environment to their advantage. Of course, their attempt to flip over a huge boulder on a dude completely backfired, causing them to lose their surprise round, but they made it through the combat okay. They had all drawn Alpha Mutations that drained life, and, calling upon listening to many a Penny Arcade DnD podcast, I decided to try using enemy banter to make combat more enjoyable. I started having all the monsters shouting about how it always seems to be life-stealers, and kill the fucking vampires, and please don’t drink my blood, it’s not tasty anyway!
Those powers really swung the battle in their favor, but still, one could tell it was a high death setting, as I got Ox Bellows down to like 2 HP at one point, and he would have died if Hiro hadn’t used a power that gave him temporary HP earlier in the fight. This caused Contain and Hiro to argue about who got control of Ox’s horse, Contain claiming he should get it, as Hiro had two, and he only had one. Hiro responded, “To be fair, you also have that dead horse,” a horse carcass they had picked up on the way to the place where combat was occurring.

It’s that stuff that’s awesome, and really made the game a lot of fun. This setting is way, way more suited to the way my friends play, much like Paranoia, and it is a ton of fun. Granted, whenever we play, we have the most fun just free-form roleplaying, and it just makes me wish I had an easier time convincing people to play something like, say, Primetime Adventures. Still, it was great, great times. Over too soon, but great times. Hopefully we can find a time to play some more soon.

Every October, I tend to try to think of some things I could dress up as, and every October, I end up not dressing up as anything at all because I got too busy or was too lazy to attempt to figure costuming out.

Oh well.

Halloween has always been an exciting time, mostly because I am around so many people who feel that it’s an exciting time. There’s nobody more into Halloween than Essner, for example, which is why we always attempted to put together those elaborate Halloween games for awhile. As such, it has always been something that has had parties around it, and has been fun.

It’s also meant me eating way, way too many Smarties.

Fuck, why am I so obsessed with Smarties? (For our Canadian readers, I mean Smarties, not Smarties.) Maybe I’ve written about this before, but shit, you put a bag of Smarties next to me, and they’ll be gone. Like, immediately. I’ll feel slightly sick, but I won’t be able to stop eating them. I will continue to pop them in my mouth, again and again. I’ll have a huge pile of wrappers on my desk.

And that’s the true meaning of Halloween. Maybe. Candy is the true meaning of Halloween, right? Smarties in particular? Also, I guess, women dressing up in “Sexy” outfits and pretending they’re a costume. That’s a thing Halloween is too. Mostly the Smarties, though.

Hope you have a decent Halloween, in any case. I’m going to go Pahtay, certainly. Maybe grade some papers. I dunno. Probably stay away from Smarties so I don’t kill myself with sugar sweetness. Probably.

Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 for the 360 is fantastic, but man, Microsoft is screwing people over by forcing Valve to charge for all that DLC. I say this because I’ve recently played through The Passing and The Sacrifice with my brother and Brer, and while they are really fun little campaigns, I can’t help but feel like I would have felt gypped if I had paid 7 dollars for them.

If for no other reason, the Passing is probably the better DLC because it has so much fantastic dialog. Valve knows what it’s doing when it’s trying to create characters who are only built through realistic dialog. They’re fantastic at it, and throwing both groups of survivors together to talk was a great way to let the writers of the game have fun. There is some hilarious stuff there, and while I’ve only played through it one and a half times (the half was due to technical difficulties) I already heard a ton of different dialog. There’s some of that in The Sacrifice, too, but since there’s less people to play off of, it’s, perhaps, less obvious. They do give Louis some great dialog in safe rooms, though.

Lengthwise, neither is really long, though you can tell they put The Sacrifice together with the idea that it would be a shorter campaign for Versus. Nothing wrong with that, of course, especially since it’s free on the PC. Again, having to pay 7 bucks for it would be a little harder to swallow, but it’s still just fine. At the same time, there’s nothing particularly different about the levels: they’re just a different place to play Left 4 Dead on. They try to mix it up with a door you have to open that has a tank behind it, the “Sacrifice” mechanic, and the original Left 4 Deaders providing covering fire for you in the end of the Passing, but it doesn’t really change it much. You don’t have anything as sweepingly big, change-wise, as Hard Rain, or the first time you do the conclusion to Dead Center. It’s not a new game, so that’s probably too much to ask for, since, as I said, they did try to mix it up within the confines of the game, but I’m just saying, if you’re wanting something fundamentally different, these won’t do it.

But still! They’re fun! Plus, with Left 4 Dead currently being on sale on the PC for the same price as the 360 DLC will cost, well, you should probably pick it up. It was nice to get back to the game. I’m not going to be the sort who plays the mutations every week, but the game still holds up, and is a fantastic time with friends.

I am sitting in a Borders, writing this on my tiny little netbook. It’s been awhile, netbook! I forgot how terrible your keyboard is. It’s pretty bad. But oh well, you’re my little computer. Mokona-chan, I have named you. (All my computers are named after xXxholic characters. Shut up.)

Awhile back, I decided my tiny little computer hadn’t gotten enough love. I hadn’t used it in awhile! I had also heard about the Flow Chromium builds that are out there. I love the crap out of Chrome as a browser. I’ve basically stopped using Firefox completely, even though the name is much more appealing. As such, bringing the smaller, more streamlined experience to a whole OS sounded like a great idea. It would do the few little things I needed to do quickly and well. It would rock, and I’d get more use out of my little lappy. I did an OS install.

I hated it.

I didn’t realize how much I depended on the little things in an OS in order to function. Without a task bar and set programs, I found it very hard to operate. Sure, I could use online word processors or something, but it wouldn’t be organized in a way I could deal with. I mean, I couldn’t even figure out how to shut the computer down. It was just so completely different, I couldn’t understand it.

In addition, I expected Chromium to be extremely compact and speedy, but I didn’t find that. My little lappy here was chugging on it, which was unappealing. If it’s going to chug anyway, I might as well have a more complete experience!

So I went and installed the latest EasyPeasy build.

I had an older build on here before my Chromium excursion. It was functional, but kind of janky at times. Certainly better than the bullshit linux this thing shipped with, but not great. I was pleased to find that this new build fixes most of that. It seems a lot quicker, and has streamlined the menus in such a way that I still have access to everything, but can get to my most-used programs in a much clearer way. I appreciate that quite a bit.

It also adds this new thing called Empathy. I don’t know if this is a general Ubuntu thing, which EasyPeasy is a fork of, or what, but it’s pretty great. Basically, it builds basic chat and social networking functionality right into the OS, and it works. My Twitter and AIM are right there, built in, in one spot. Since I’m not running three different programs, it doesn’t eat up as much processing power either, which is always a benefit on a little thing like this. It’s pretty nice stuff! A great feature.

Anyway, that’s sort of what’s going on on the netbook front with me. If you have an older netbook, or just don’t want Windows, EasyPeasy is a great alternative, while Chromium still has a ways to go. I’m very happy with the latest EasyPeasy.

And hey, I’ve mostly gotten reacquainted with the shitty keyboard on this thing. I can almost type full speed again. Crazy. Too bad I’m done typing on it for now! Oh well.

Apparently nothing can piss me off more in video games than poorly constructed mazes with no useful minimap.

I mean, first, I was doing the LotRO Harvestmath thing with Essner and Brer. There’s this haunted house, with a bunch of quests in it you do to get little coins you can trade for silly shit. Fun, silly times, right? Except this Haunted House is designed to be impossible to navigate. The mini-map doesn’t actually show all the walls, stuff is constantly jumping out at you and messing with your vision, and there are three doors to every location in the house, and two of them don’t work. Attempting to do these silly quests filled me with great, great rage. I just wanted a silly mask, game! Don’t piss me off! It also didn’t help that I felt fairly completely ill for a lot of us playing, as well. Either way, I logged out kind of pissed.

Then, a few days later, I start playing Dragon Age. It’s really good! But I decide to do the mage tower first, as I want Healer Mage. In this quest is a horrible Fade sequence that lasts way the fuck too long. In it, you’re dropped in several mazes. One of them has a bunch of nonsensical teleporters in it. I got so pissed at this area, you wouldn’t believe. Well, I mean, mad enough to get pissed on twitter. It also didn’t help that doing one of the things you need to solve the maze is completely unintuitive and kind of buggy, at least in the 360 version. Doing it throws up an error of “You can’t lockpick this” even as it’s functioning properly. If you don’t ignore the error and let it happen, you’ll be stuck forever. It’s really stupid.

Basically, I hate non-logical mazes forever. Teleporters that don’t follow simple “this door leads to this door” logic and instead does whatever it wants, depending, is a great way to piss me off, apparently. Fuck teleporters, and fuck mazes! If, you know, you find them sexually attractive. Otherwise, just hate them with me.