The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

The air conditioner in the computer room is a bug magnet. Somehow they manage to crawl through the fucking thing and get in here from time to time. About a week ago, a wasp, of all things, got in here. It wasn’t attacking me or anything. It was just flitting between the two light fixtures and doing its thing. It was a wasp, so I didn’t want to mess with it. I figured it would just die in a day or two.

I was wrong.

I mean, I would have just kept ignoring it, except it made the most annoying buzz. So finally, I decided I was done playing around, and I was going to get rid of the wasp. I grabbed a tissue and approached. It was flying, and I snatched it right out of the air and threw it away! I was kind of proud of myself.

A few minutes later, it was flying around again. I was being too lame! I didn’t really get it!

Pulling on all of my Maya the Bee knowledge from my youth, I figured that if I could get it wet when I caught it, it would be immobilized somewhat, and I wouldn’t have this issue again. So I went and got a Lysol Disinfectant Wipe and pulled the same trick again. I grabbed it in the wipe.

Then it stung me.

I dunno if it hurt more because of the disinfectant or what, but it was completely unpleasant, and I was then on a rampage. I stomped downstairs and asked if there was a flyswatter. Apparently Molly had destroyed the flyswatter. But my dad was ready to fight, making me feel all girly or something. He came up and pulled the same trick as I did… only he was standing on top of a stool, making me worry about him falling onto my computer. He crushed the bug like CRAZY inside the tissue, and thus put an end to it.

FOR NOW.

DUN DUN DUN.

I showed one of my poems to Airek, one of my fellow TA’s. It was part of my book of poetry project and was sort of by a character that was kind of very angry and very sexual, but the poem went well, and he thought so too! But he said it reminded him of another poet, and he was going to show it to me. Shockingly (which I say not because I don’t trust him or something, but because I know that I would forget that book for weeks if I offered to let someone borrow it), he remembered to bring it within a day or two, and handed it to me to read. I’m not through it yet, even though it’s a little book of poetry. Maybe I’ll write it up when I’m done. But reading it so far has just been a kind of weird experience.

Airek is apparently a note-taker. There are notes of his scribbled all over every page of this book, and honestly, it’s pretty damn neat. It’s cool to be able to see all kinds of ideas for interpretations in the margins and such. I can read a poem, and I have a whole different reading of it right there on the page, and I can sit there and go “no, I don’t really think he’s got it” or “Yeah, totally” or “I didn’t even notice that.” It’s just amazingly interesting, and so far it’s really made the experience of reading the thing so much more entertaining.

I don’t know. I could never take notes like that. I’d feel like I was messing up the book. Hell, I can’t even bend the covers of paperback books without being frustrated. So I’m not about to write all over a book of mine. (and at the same time, I am probably not going to own enough books of poetry that I’d want to do that to anyway, heh.) But it’s just kind of neat to have that guided tour. Like he really wants me to get what he saw in it. It reminds me of a personal essay I read once (I can’t remember details, sorry) about how a person wanted the old, beat-up rental textbooks because then they could see the history of all the people who had taken the class and scribbled notes, and it made them feel like they were a part of something, or that they were peering into a hidden past. It’s kind of like that here, and I can’t say I’ve ever really felt it. When my textbooks have scribbles, it’s normally just a random thing or two highlighted. Airek was really copious with his note-taking. There isn’t a page without multiple things on it. I’m really feeling it.
And now I shared that feeling.
Yeah.

I thought I would elaborate on the throw-away line yesterday about the BlazBlue soundtrack. I’m really quite addicted to it, and honestly I don’t know exactly why. It’s completely the same sort of hard rocking crazy guitar solo stuff that was in Aksys’s earlier games, like, say, Guilty Gear. (Okay, maybe this is a more appropriate example, but, you know… Bridget. Less Than Three.)At the same time, I don’t know. I find it oddly compelling.

Granted, it meets my requirements for a good game soundtrack like this. It is incredibly upbeat, constantly giving off energy. I can totally picture myself playing the game the moment I hear it. It screams “action.” I’m moving about the campus, having imaginary fighting game battles all the damn time now. Which is fun enough.
It’s also just so… weird, kind of. I mean, it takes a song called “Oriental Flower” and it turns it into this. It’s almost humorous when it gets off of that opening and into the bulk of the song. It takes some really fucking weird kind of vision to create something like that. I don’t know. It just seems hard to imagine any sort of metal-y song having anything to do with a flower. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe flowers are really hardcore.
Maybe Brutal Legend has almost given me an ear for this kind of music. Or maybe it’s just the whole “fighting game battles in my head” aspect that cannot be discounted or belittled here.

Anyway, I’m listening to it pretty well non-stop at the moment. So I suppose I recommend it. It’s just kind of a weird thing for me to recommend, I suppose.

So, I walk out. It’s a normal day. Time to go to the office, then to the press, La Dee Da. Just like any other.

THEN.
DISASTER STRIKES.

I only had 18 minutes worth of podcasts for hours and hours of work.
Fuck.

I figured I was boned, and would just have to listen to music, of all things. I had the BlazBlue soundtrack and stuff, so I had something to listen to, I guess (Seriously, I don’t know why, but I find it quite nice), and that would be that.

Then, I was checking twitter on my phone and I realized I HAD A PHONE WITH INTERNET. My Blackberry has a normal headphone jack. I figured it was worth a shot. So I navigated to the gdgt podcast, which I listen to sometimes when I have gaps in podcasts like this one, and tried opening an episode.
Honestly, I was completely impressed. In the two straight hours I was streaming podcasts from my phone, it only buffered four, maybe five times. It streamed those MP3s like a pro. I was honestly quite impressed with both the 3G connection and my little phone for playing audio so well.

Granted, it certainly wasn’t perfect. I couldn’t do anything else while it was streaming, not even check my schedule or anything if I needed to. I think I might have still be able to take a phone call, because I accidentally hit the phone button in my pocket and things didn’t stop playing, but that would probably be it. Certainly way less than ideal for normal, everyday podcast use (which I’ve had someone ask me about, believe it or not). At the same time, it’s nice to know that, when I get in a jam I didn’t prepare for, I can stream a decent-quality MP3 without much lag or effort. That’s just pretty damn cool. I’m pretty happy with the little machine.
But let’s hope I keep more prepared in the future, and don’t have to resort to it. Heh.

So I was watching the third season of 30 Rock that Essner lent me on DVD (he was totally right, it totally picks back up and is hilarious once you get past the first few episodes) and I had to stop. So I took the DVD out of the 360, which I was using to watch it. A day and one long Beatles: Rock Band session later, I sit down to watch the rest of it. I pop the disc back in… and it starts exactly where I stopped it.

It was magic.

I was so impressed I tweeted that shit. And then I get a flood of replies that tell me that basically all DVD players ever nowadays do this.
Guess this says how much I watch DVDs.
Still, it was really neat. It doesn’t seem useful for, say, movies, but for a TV show disc you’ve Play-All’d, that shit is perfect. It’s nice to know I can count on such features in the future.

Maybe I’m impressed by too little. Who knows.

I had heard some great things about BlazBlue. Second coming of fighting games! (Okay, less that. That was Street Fighter IV.) A really, really great and unique game! I was really tempted to buy it and try it. But no, I told myself, that would be a waste. Then I got Gamefly, and rented it. Now I’ve tried it.

Gods, it is just so complex.

I mean, I don’t know. I turned the game on and tried to play, and it seemed like nothing I was trying to do actually DID anything. I would hit buttons and my character would fly about the screen in odd angles, but never seeming to attack or anything, and just generally being ineffective. I picked another character, and the same thing happened. I just had no idea what I was doing at all. It was completely obtuse: normal fighting game knowledge only barely prepares you for this game, if at all. None of the button mashing I normally do to figure out how things work was working.

So I turned off the game, frustrated.

Then people on twitter were like “You need to watch the tutorial DVDs!” I worry about a game that requires watching long tutorial DVDs in order to be comprehended, but I pulled them up on Youtube nonetheless. I was immediately further demoralized. These videos show some really, really advanced shit. They talk about deep strategy where I was still needing to figure out how to, you know, attack people. I scoffed at the whole thing. “Ridiculous. Over-complex. But that’s music’s good.”
So I looked up some music on Youtube, and was listening to this track, which I think is pretty great, and I go “okay, I’ll give it another shot.”

So I boot the game back up and pick Carl Clover, because I like his song. And suddenly, I realize the DVDs were actually effective. I suddenly understood what I was trying to do. I mean, I wasn’t great at it, but I was pulling off combos. I was making some rudimentary versions of Carl’s combo loops that he can pull off with his sister. I was beating the computer. Impressively, the videos did what it was supposed to!

Then I sent it back to Gamefly.
Why?
Well, if I had to watch tutorial videos just to understand it, there’s NO WAY IN HELL I am getting my friends to ever touch this game for more than five minutes. Besides Jonathan, sometimes, none of them are going to be willing to invest the amount of time required to comprehend this game. BlazBlue is completely a commitment, not a game. I felt like, at least, Guilty Gear could be played on a mashy level with some amount of effectively, but this game? Not at all. There’s no casual enjoyment of this game. It is all hardcore.

So it’s not really useful to me. But good on it for existing. There has to be a core fanbase that is obscenely happy with this game. And hell, if I could get it for like 20 bucks or something, I might pick it up again and see if I can figure out Carl Clover further. But really, there’s so very little reason to train with it when I’m never going to have competition, so back it goes.

In stark contrast to Scribblenauts, we have Batman: Arkham Asylum. This is another game that came in from Gamefly, and I was excited to play it! So excited that I immediately lost an entire weekend playing through it from start to finish in like… 3 long sessions. It was that good.

The developers made so many good decisions in this game. Putting it in one small area instead of all over Gotham makes the whole world seem much more alive and much more full-featured. They got great voice actors for everyone, mostly people from the Animated Series, which was a great choice. They figured out pacing perfectly, and though the game is basically made up of small “minigame” sections (Hand-To-Hand combat, Stealth Takedowns, Detectiving, Scarecrow sequences, etc) they switch up so fast and so often that they never feel old. Seriously, the brawling combat is the best example of this. If you look at it, like seriously take a look at it? It’s not really that fun. It’s very button-mashy. It’s not deep. But you don’t do it enough in a row to feel that. They keep it from you so that you don’t realize it’s not all there. This goes for the rest of the “minigames” too. Very long sequences of any of them would be really annoying, but the game keeps you from having to do them. Even when you have a one time minigame, such as a sequence where you are trying to evade Killer Croc, it still changes up what it is doing throughout the sequence to keep you from getting bored. It knows its weaknesses, and has designed the game around them. It’s just really intelligent that way.

The plot is… the plot. It’s not the best Batman story ever? But it’s fairly solid, and again, having competent voice acting in there really makes a difference. I was never really drawn forward by the plot though. It was more the spectacle of the whole thing. The game is just constantly holding carrots out in front of you. You know another of sequence X is going to come up, or you’re going to meet a new Batman villain soon, because it’s alluding to it, and you have to keep going to see it. Even deaths keep you going, because there are so, so many unique death messages. Whatever villain you’re fighting at the time comes up on a black screen and taunts you for your failure. It’s great.

There are some things that bother me, but they’re really nitpicks, places where the game trips slightly, but doesn’t really fail. For example, you’re constantly getting new Bat-gadgets to deal with things. You have this explosive gel to blow up weak walls, but you can only blow up walls you can reach. What if you want to blow up a far-away wall? Well, then you get a three-part grappling hook and pull the wall down… what? It makes no sense. The first time I saw a far away wall, I said “Well, I’ll just cover a Batarang with explosive gel and throw it at the wall.” If I could think of that solution, Batman could, because he’s the fucking Batman, and why would he be tiring himself out by pulling down a wall, anyway? It’s just kind of stupid.
There are a few other things like that. But it’s nothing that would stop you. It’s just a really odd decision someone didn’t think all the way through.

Anyway, I can’t recommend Arkham Asylum enough. I mean, it’s not a super-long game, and I really think the “challenge” modes offer absolutely no appeal, so you’d probably be safe renting it. But it’s such a perfectly crafted game you at least have to play it. The fact that it’s a licensed game just makes it even more crazy that it’s so good from beginning to end, because it is. It is clearly one of the best games of the year.

So everything you’ve heard about Scribblenauts? All of it is pretty well true. You can make God fight Cthulhu and a Giant Squid. You can create just about anything you can think of, and have it do something. Everything looks all scribbly and neat. There’s all these puzzles.

You also can’t control any of it worth shit.

Seriously, who the hell put all this work into this game, making all the items work, rolling with the idea, and then made it control like ass? You have to do everything with the touch screen. Everything. That means any time you tap on something you may be 1. Moving Maxwell, the character you control 2. Firing a gun or attacking 3. Picking something up or 4. Moving an object around the environment. If you need to do one of these in particular, like, say, attacking the person who is about to kill Maxwell, good luck! The game just guesses what you want to do, so Maxwell might just bound forward into danger, or off a cliff, even if you have wings or a jetpack, because it didn’t realize you wanted to fly over the gap, it just assumed you wanted to jump into it.

Ugh.

Seriously, I wanted to like this game so bad. But when I have to replay a level multiple times not because I couldn’t solve it, as I came up with a solution on the first try, but because the game’s controls cause me to fuck my solution up again and again? Well, then I get angry and unhappy.

I’m very glad I rented this game. It’s worth doing that, just to fuck around with for awhile, but man, it just does not have any staying power at all. Maybe in the sequel they’ll make it control worth shit. Then it might be something to look forward to.

So the other day, instead of getting my work done, I banged out some poems. These were more poems from my Presidents of the United States of America poetry project, which started as poems about one album, then turned into a small Chapbook, and has now become, in my mind, a full-blown book of poetry called “Repeater/Deleter : A Two-Sided Love Affair of Dominance and Submission”. So I wrote some more of them. Then I thought about what I’m actually doing.

Is this a project worth continuing? Is this something I want to bring to fruition? And if it is, is it something that should be my, I dunno, thesis? If I’m going to create an entire book of poetry anyway, it does make sense to double dip. Less stress, etc. At the same time, while I think I’m a fairly decent poet most of the time, I feel like I’m probably stronger writing fiction and things of that nature. Full-blown prose. Or at least Microprose. Uh, I mean, Microfiction. Anyway, if that’s what I’m better at, then that should probably be what my thesis is, right? As that will follow me in later academic endeavors, and I’ll want my best foot forward.

I so don’t have this whole Master’s degree Academic Track thing planned. I’m just going with the flow. Sometimes I come upon questions like this, and I worry. But I should just keep going. Keep flowing. What I should really do is, probably, show most of these poems to someone, like Karen, and see if she thinks they’re worth pursuing.

Or I could just go get more of my classwork done. That would work, too.

I got it in my head that, for Halloween, I was going to run a one-shot Call of Cthulhu game! I don’t really know why. I didn’t have any experience with it. But hey, I bought the book, and I schemed, and I planned, and on Wednesday, Jonathan, Spaeth, Essner, and Ben all played my little campaign.

The story I planned was based in 1920’s Arkham for ease of writing and familiarity for everyone, since we’ve all played so much Arkham Horror. I constructed a story about a Mask I made up and a creature called a Dream Sucker, which was sort of like a mosquito made of light that sucked out creativity until you sort of ended up like a robot. By a coincidence, all the players get infected by these beings, and had to work together to stop them.

The game wasn’t scary at all. We’re like… the least serious roleplayers on earth. And while sometimes I wish we’d get serious and do something serious, I wouldn’t trade the fun we have for that. We were laughing the whole damn time at stupid jokes, stupid decisions, etc. Jonathan’s character broke into a guy’s house, and then left a note with his name an address. Ben constantly attempted disguises and critically failed, causing us to invent crazier and crazier ways where he was MORE like his normal self in his failed disguises. Spants tried to pull guns on everybody, and Essner used his character’s “mentor, Dr. Phillip Rochester,” as the reason for every single thing he did. It was really quite ridiculous, in an awesome way.

From a planning standpoint, though, I feel like I succeeded pretty well. There were several points where I guessed what everyone would decide to do perfectly, and had notes for just such an occasion. I made a physical puzzle involving mocked-up card catalog cards, and while it stumped them for awhile, they all said it was a good puzzle. Which was good! Puzzle-making isn’t easy. I was glad that worked out.

But yeah, overall, a very fun time. I stayed up too late, perhaps, what with me being all old and going to bed early nowadays, but staying up for some fun once and awhile isn’t so bad, is it? I didn’t think so. I made a puzzle, drove someone insane, and laughed so hard I probably kept people up. That sounds like a good night to me.