The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, last I checked, it was February. So it’s IoTM time! Or it has been IoTM time. Yep.

Twilight Heroes offers a set this month, the foxy sombrero mask and the foxy caped suit. Since they have the word “foxy” in them and everyone in game calls me Foxy (Thanks to Val) I couldn’t NOT get them, even if they did nothing! Luckily, they don’t do nothing.

The standout piece, for me anyway, is clearly the sombrero mask. It offers an increase in farming profits, doubling my +chip bonus from the next nearest hat, the royal crown. I’d wear it, even if it didn’t have “foxy” in the title. Clearly, though, this is a reference to Zorro more than anything, and I think that’s done well. The other abilities of the hat, that of increased enemy fumble chance, is… interesting. Very interesting indeed, especially considering the ability when worn with the suit, which lets you, Zorro-style, emblazon some initials onto your enemies when they fumble for a little extra damage. Apparently Cris pushed for the customizable initials for me. Heh. I’m flattered, and I do think that part is awesome, even if the only obvious choice of initials for me is “fox”. Heh. Customization rules! Also, the idea of me carving out my initials with, say, a cannon makes me smile. In any case, I think the hat is a complete win, either as a farming aid alone or just being fun with the full suit.

The main problem I have with the caped suit, though, is that it’s a suit. Suits take up both the shirt and pants slots. I mean, for a character who’s going for ranged weapons and reflex, the foxy caped suit offers some nice bonuses. The combo with the hat isn’t too impressive, but is appreciated. (The real combo benefit is the one on the hat, as far as I’m concerned.) The -10 seconds makes it on par with the Xentrium Breastplate, which is almost a requirement. But the fact remains that, if I equip this, I can’t equip both the Letter Shirt or the crazy rainbow pants. Losing one of those I could handle, especially for the fun of the initials. (I keep my double tower shield always equipped for the battlecry, even though there are much, much better farming options for that slot) Losing both… I just can’t justify that most of the time.

Overall, though, I think this month is a pretty solid one. If nothing else, the hat is a good buy alone for anyone who wants to increase their in-game wealth with the added bonus of the fumble chance, and if you’re a player who doesn’t have, you know, most of the IoTMs like I do, the caped suit is probably a really good option if you’re playing, like, a ranged-attacking Gadgeteer or something.

The future is hazy.

Yes, I mean, I’m about to graduate. That’s awesome. But we’re in a time when people are getting fired all the time, and I just… I don’t know if, once I start looking a month or two from now, if there will be good jobs out there for me. So I feel like I should exercise all options.

Which meant applying for Graduate School.
Ugh.
The last thing I want to do is have more school. THE LAST. But I was told about the Teaching Assisstantship thing on campus, and it just seems way too good to pass up. Basically, I can teach a class and work at the University Press some more and have all school fees waved, plus get paid for my work. So, basically, I can get paid to get more experience in the field I want to work in and get a few graduate course hours.
It really does seem like a good thing to do. I can’t just pass it up. So I’m not. I’m signing up. If I get a magic perfect job before the semester starts, I can always drop out.
It does bring up the question of what I’m doing about transition… I’ve been waiting forever. I’ve been waiting for graduation to move away, but if I do this, then I won’t be moving away for… hell… another 2 years at least? So, you know, I’m going to do it anyway. I’ve waited long enough. I deserve it. It’s only going to make more stress, especially with the parents, but who cares. I need to be happy.

Of course, just applying creates headaches. In a one week period I have to fill out all these forms, pester people for letters of recommendation… it’s been exciting times… but I think I’ve got it all in hand… still, it’s been a lot of extra stress. I’m too easily stressed.

Stress! Yes!

Anyway, I guess that’s what’s been going on with me in the “Real” world.

So, I was continuing to have a roguelike urge, and Talking Time had, conveniently started up a thread about stupid roguelike deaths. I was all playing Shiren, but they kept talking about a PC roguelike called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It’s apparently a modification of Dungeon Crawl, if you couldn’t guess. Since it was popular and free, I decided to give it a go.

It went badly. It was all ASCII characters and I couldn’t grok the controls or understand anything. Ugh. I went on my twitter and complained.
Red Hedgehog responded in surprise. “But it’s so newbie-friendly with its mouse controls!” Mouse controls? I knew of no mouse controls…

It was then I learned that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup with tiles is almost a completely different and much much better game, from an interface standpoint. Everything is very visual, and you can mouse over anything to get a list of commands that object can do, and the most common ones are mapped to the left and right click. So the mouse basically works as a cheat-sheet and an interface all at once. You can even see what the enemies are holding by their pictures. It’s pretty rad.
Once I got controls that worked, I was hooked for quite awhile!

Granted, I suck ass at these games. There’s like… a whole bunch of layers or something in the game, many different dungeons in the dungeon, and I still haven’t found any of them. Not one. But I’ve been pretty impressed by the different classes, as they really do seem to play fairly differently, at least at low levels. I’ve had the most success with Healer, though, as they come already with the knowledge of what potions are potions of healing, which, well, really helps me remember to actually attempt to use potions of healing. Which is probably why I’m so successful with that class.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a roguelike, it comes highly recommended by me. It’s so, so much easier to comprehend than, say, Nethack, and it’s a good time. Oh, and if you want even more information, I’m sure @play would be happy to oblige.

So, with the purchase of 1up, there was a sudden lack of podcasts and podblasts in my life. All the awesome people on Talking Time got… well… talking about a podcast called Idle Thumbs, and I had to try it. Because I was desperate for podcasts.

I laughed so hard. SO HARD.

Idle Thumbs claims to be mostly about Video games. And it is, you know, mostly about video games. But that’s not why you will become a constant, dedicated reader of Idle Thumbs. Oh no. You’ll do it because they are masters at refbacks and random humor. They are just so spontaneously humorous, it is amazing stuff. Amazing.
It’s so amazing, I actually went back and listened to every single past episode. I can’t remember a podcast that has caused me to want to do that besides Idle Thumbs. That’s a pretty big recommendation. Well, I think so.

Anyway, if I can’t convince you, just have a listen to this little ditty. Idle Thumbs often has songs. They also know all about… The Wizard.

So onward marches the semester, for better or worse, and so I’ve read another novel for my novel class. This one is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Now, after how much I enjoyed Motherless Brooklyn, I was looking forward to more. I really don’t read enough, and if the class keeps feeding me stuff like that, I was going to love it.
Water for Elephants did little but disappoint.

There are books in the world that are so much worse than this book. It has a really strong sense of setting, and the writing is not altogether horrible. But being alright doesn’t really a great book make, and this book is just kind of alright.
First off, the book has a wrapper. Meaning it’s a story within a story. This can be really awesome. See something like, I dunno, Big Fish. However, there is absolutely no real meaning to having the wrapper in this book. There’s absolutely no payoff to it (and I’ll get to the ending in more detail in a minute, I have complaints about that too) and it takes up a very large portion of the book. Every time the story would get back to the old man who was remembering all this, I would sigh, and have to slog through to get back to the stuff that was more interesting.
Even the main story, though, was not perfect. Above all, the story itself seemed determined to shock. There’s nothing wrong with this either, but it honestly just felt very out of place, because when you were in a moment that was supposed to “shock” the descriptions would get all super-intense, and the language of the book would change. It felt out of place, and it just didn’t work at all.

Finally, though, the last nail in the coffin for this book was the ending. First of all, it really tried to write up, with the wrapper, that the fact that Jacob married Marlena was some kind of twist, when you knew, you knew, the moment Marlena entered the story, he was going to get the girl. But that’s just annoying. What’s wrong is that the ending is such a complete happily ever after. They miraculously go from being completely broke and jobless to having enough money to support themselves and an elephant and a chimp and a whole bunch of horses. Hell, even the old Jacob gets to improbably relive his glory days recklessly. This just does not jive with the grittiness, the dirtiness, the reality the rest of the book is trying to sell you. The book attempts to make the ending seem less perfect than it is by killing off several characters you might like right at the end, and it might work… if the fact that those characters were around wouldn’t have made trouble for the couple. If they would have still been alive, then Jacob and Marlena would have to figure out how to help them, and they couldn’t ride away on the Rainbow Happy Ending Express unhindered. It just doesn’t work.

So yeah, I was very disappointed with Water for Elephants. It was not anything that I would call a great book. It might have come off a little better if it hadn’t been in such close proximity to Motherless Brooklyn, which was just… awesom. But only a little better. Only a little.

So, I don’t know if you listened to the last 1up Yours, (even though it seems like Listen UP is the exactly same show only it doesn’t have Shane) but if you did you probably heard Luke Smith and John Davidson talk about, what else, an iPhone game. Mr. Davidson likes talking about those, and dammit, I appreciate it, because there just aren’t any good ways to get information about iPhone games. Parish’s iPhone blog is a good help, but at the same time, he’s talking about all things Mac related, whereas I want mostly just an app review portal, you know?
Anyway, so they bring up what they’ve been playing on their iPhones, which is WordJong: Daily Challenge. I’ve heard of the WordJong before, back in the EGM Live days, when they made fun of the DS release, and then found out it was actually kind of respectable. I’m still wanting more killer apps on my iPod, because I find myself playing games on it in between classes all the time, so I snapped it up for $5. It was a good choice, because it is a damn good word game. It’s probably not worth the full price DS release, but it’s hard to pass it up as a $5 download.

The game basically is what the horrible title suggests. You play MahJong solitaire, but instead of the normal tiles, the tiles have letters on them. You have to spell out words, trying to spell long ones to score more points, all the while having to adhere to the rules of what tiles you can use in MahJong, as well as having to clear every last piece from the board. This is made easier by bombs, which can destroy a single tile. You can only hold one bomb at a time, but if you don’t have one, you get another one every time you spell a 5 letter or longer word. Of course, blowing up tiles gets you no points, so it’s perhaps better not to rely on it.
Obviously, if you have no love of word games, this is completely not the game for you, but it’s the perfect game to pull out for 5 minutes if you enjoy word-based action. There is a new puzzle every day, and that puzzle is the same on every copy of WordJong, so you can compare scores with friends. Each puzzle ramps up in difficulty like the daily crossword puzzle in the newspaper. Monday’s score to beat is easy, and then each day gets harder until you reach Sunday’s impossible number.

I agree with the Luke and John that the game desperately needs an online friend leaderboard so you can race for high scores against your friends more easily, but other than that, it’s really hard not to recommend. This is exactly the kind of experience I want on my iPod: a relatively fast, easy to grasp but decently deep little game. If you have an iPhone or a Touch like me, you should really give it a purchase.

…oh my, I just learned there’s a free online version on their website? That’s awesome, although the rules seem a little different. Instead of bombs, you earn wild tiles, which aren’t in the puzzle itself this version. But yeah, that’s great. Just go check it out and try it for yourself.

So, I didn’t think I was going to get to go out and see it opening weekend, but I managed to swing it! I saw Coraline. This is the first movie that I’ve actively wanted to see for a long while, so it was a good excuse to get out of the house. Being out of the house is good, right?

The first thing that kinda surprised me when I got there was that it was in 3D. This was a mostly pleasant surprise. I don’t think it added a whole whole lot to the film, but it was fun, and a good reason to see it in the theater. On the other hand, I didn’t much appreciate paying like 3 dollars extra to buy the 3D glasses. On the other other hand, these are some serious 3D glasses. I rather like them. I’m keeping them. (There was a box to recycle them outside the theater. Why the hell would you do that? You paid extra for them, and they’re nice! Crazy.)

The movie itself… well, I think Essner said it best. If you watch the trailer, you know whether you are going to like the film or not. The movie is not surprising. It doesn’t switch things up, or have any twists. It’s just fairly straightforward.
Now, I don’t find that a bad thing. I love childish stories. This is completely a childish story, and it was a lot of fun for me to just let my inner kid out and enjoy every moment of it. It was well-enough put together, though I think you could safely say it follows a formula that many stories have used before. Still, those kind of things are why I like childish stories. I like getting lost in that. That’s mostly a personal preference, though.
It also helps that the visual style is pretty nice and stylized. I mean, I’m in the camp that says that the expense of doing stop-motion animation just isn’t worth it, but at the same time, once you’ve spent that money, it looks damn cool. The movie knows it, too, because the beginning perhaps drags a little bit trying to show you “Look how awesome our effects are!” And they’re awesome! But it apparently put Essner to sleep. It certainly takes a little while to get dramatic, I suppose.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty nice. I had a good time. I smiled all the while. Still, it’s not an instant classic, and I’m certainly only going to consider getting it on DVD on the cheap. It was fun, though.

And gods, it was a million, billion, billion times better than Corpse Bride. I think everyone can agree on that.

So, after all the planning, all the leveling up, all the nickel grinding, we finally got to do our first Hamster Raid in KoL. It was… not what I expected.

First of all, I had a takedown before it, and I was scrambling the whole time to hurry up and get home and I managed to make myself so nervous and worried about it at work… I’m retarded like that. It carried over into the raid itself, where I was pretty nervous and on-edge the entire time. Of course, that made me be careful, and I didn’t waste a single turn. Still, it was much more stressful than I believed it would be.

Secondly, it took a lot longer. I figured parts of it would be tedious. The whole thing is all about doing repeated actions in unison time and again, and it didn’t sound like the most fun thing ever. But I only expected it to maybe take an hour. We started around 11, and I didn’t get to bed until around 2 AM. Hopefully future runs, now that we all know what we’re doing, will go a little faster.

All in all, I did a lot of work, knocked a lot of hobos out of their skin, and I got, well… nothing, in return. I didn’t win any of the rolls. Not that that was important to me. I was just, you know, doing it to be part of the group. And be helpful. Things. Stuff! Yes.

Anyway, I guess that’s one raid down, and what… 6 left to go? 5? Until we all get a Hamster? Hopefully they keep going well, and faster.

So, it’s offical now: My friends love Dominion.

Dominion is a card game made my Rio Grande Games. I heard about it on the 120 minutes of Jick and Crew, as they were talking about a card game that was about building a deck, much like you build a deck in Magic the Gathering. Of course, the very mention of a card game was enough to inspire some interest in me. So much so that I ordered a copy on the spot, even though this was back right before Christmas and I had gotten a big bunch of board games we had yet to play.
It was totally worth it.

In this game, there are three types of cards. There are action cards, which let you do things, as well as just let you do more things in the turn, like draw more cards or have more money. There are treasure cards, which are money. Finally, there are victory point cards, that do nothing, but whoever has the most victory points wins. Players start with a deck of 7 Copper (worth one monies) and three victory point cards. Every turn, you can play an action, then buy a card, then you dump your hand and draw a new one. Each card you play goes into your discard pile, and each card you buy goes into your discard pile. When your deck is empty, you shuffle your discards to make your new deck. The game ends when three types of cards, or the “Province” victory card, are sold out.

It’s really a very simple game, but it’s shockingly strategic in its simplicity. You not only have to constantly adjust your deck-building based on what everyone else is buying, but you can do things like try to corner the market on a particularly useful card. You also have to balance making a more effective deck with actually buying victory points, as well as figuring out what to do with those victory points when they get into your hand, because they’re mostly dead weight.
On top of all this, you only use 10 different types of cards to buy in every game, and the game comes with 25 different types. So, by switching out what cards are available, you really switch up the strategy of the game. It’s really, really damn cool.

The best part, though, is that all my friends love it. So often I get a game like this that I can obsess over, especially due to the card element, and then my friends are very “eh” towards it and I never get to play. Not so with this. Even Buchhiet loves the crap out of it, and the individual games are not all-night affairs like Arkham Horror or whatnot. It’s so awesome to find a game that we can go to again and again.

Now, here’s to hoping that Rio Grande soon puts out an expansion pack of new card types to buy. Each card in the game seems stamped with an expansion symbol, so it seems like they are planning on it, but I haven’t heard any announcements. We’re all hoping, though.

So a bit ago, Brer told me about this movie called Felidae. It looked like a Disney animated film, but it was all made in Germany, and based on a series of German detective novels. It was never released on DVD, or even outside of Germany, but a rare Laserdisc release of the film had an English dub on it, and, well, you know. With the power of the internet, it was findable. I was game, and we went about watching it.

This movie is mature stuff!

The first indication of this was quite early in the movie, when the main character, Felix, goes out and finds a dead cat. This isn’t too surprising, and you can’t see too much, but, you know, this isn’t what you would expect to see in a kid-oriented film. Soon, he meets some cats in the new neighborhood, who insult him by calling him gay… and then it gets more and more mature from there. There are extremely graphic and gore-filled deaths and evisceration, and plenty, plenty of talk about sex. Dead cats with their guts hanging out are used as marionettes. Felix kills things on camera in full view. Hell, there is even a SEX SCENE. It’s kind of amazing to watch. It makes you realize how censored so much of our stuff nowadays really is.
The movie isn’t perfect by any means. The dubbing is pretty god-awful, though if you were to look back at when it was probably dubbed, it was likely par for the course. The story itself also seems rushed to fit into the running time. Felix plays a detective role, but often we see him just pulling facts out of mid-air to move the plot along quicker, instead of seeing him actually work them out. There’s also a theme song at the beginning and ending of the film that rivals Soul Runnaz for worst adaptation of a plot into a song.
Still, I find it really hard not to like the movie. I’ve expressed before how much I, for whatever reason, crave childish things taken completely seriously and written well. The story underneath it all was a pretty damn good story, and the presentation just… it brings up those childish likes while appealing to that adult side of me. I ate it up. I would love to see more movies like this, definitely, and I certainly think this film is worth seeing, even with its flaws. It’s actually kind of a shame it isn’t on DVD somewhere. It would be a nice little movie to own.