The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I want to rip my face off. I want to sleep. I want to force everyone far away that I wish was closer into my bed for safekeeping. I want to touch technology and bend it to my will. I want to be feral. I want to be smiling and mean it. I want to sit down and be able to stand back up afterwards without a huge pressure on my chest. I want accomplish. I want to feel pride in my accomplishments. I want to sing. I want to push emotion through people with music. I want to find the solution. I want to be given the solution. I want to disappear. I want to sleep for months. I want to wake up and know the danger has passed. I want to pet my dog without feeling like crying in joy that this little girl cares so much. I want to speak with the girl I love without feeling like a horny freak. I want to fix all my boyfriend’s problems. I want my boyfriend to fix his problems. I want my ideas to be worth something. I want my thoughts to become reality at a pace much faster than the years and years it’s taken for my first big idea about my identity. I want an identity. I want to swim in water and have it feel relaxing again. I want to buy a swimsuit. I want to not have to make the conscious decision to look happy. I want to stop acting. I want to smash my head against this desk, again and again, until I can see what I’m thinking, dripping off of the edge of the wood. I want a wish other than what I’ve been blowing candles out to my whole life. I want a life. I want a place that is mine. I want rooms and rooms of people I love. I want to love people. I want to make love to people. I want to high five a stranger and have it feel legitimate. I want to relax. I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror. I want to stop having to tell myself to breathe. I want to lock myself in my room. I want to hide under the covers. I want to hide under the covers with people I love. I want to drive something into my eye with such force that I can’t pull it back out again. I want to dwell in the glow of each other’s majestic presence. I want to not feel like any moment now I will trip over a gust of wind that’s slightly out of place and drop everything I am trying to keep together. I want to keep everything together. I want nothing to change. I want to feel like things are changing. I want everything to change. I want to fail. I want things to be better. I want many things removed. I want many more added. I want the mathematics of my life to be logically sound. I want a Pepsi. I want to bleed.

I do. I really do.

I guess I’m older now.

This is the second year in a row where I haven’t actually known what my age is at my birthday. Let me do some math… hmm… okay. 27 is the correct answer. I am 27. I think. Okay, I just double checked, I am definitely 27.

Milestones like this are normally either places for pep talks or pity parties on my part. I do that shit because it’s my blog, and I can do what I want with it. Doesn’t make it less stupid, though. I don’t think I want to do that this time, but who knows what’ll happen by the time I get to the end of this post.

This year, I did and am doing things for myself. I cleared my schedule so I’d get to relax on my birthday. I bought myself the gift I wanted. (Yes, that’s the stupid iPad.) I schemed ways to make sure Grandma was still involved.
Basically, I did what I needed to in order to make the day feel like something special. It wasn’t going to do it by itself. Nothing in life is going to just happen. I made it happen.

Trust is good. Depending on others is not good. There are people I trust more than anything in this world, who I love very much, but I learn that I should not depend on them. I should do things myself. I should make things happen myself. A job done by someone else is rarely completely right. There is always room for disappointment. The important things in life are those you tackle yourself. What you go after. What you create. What you are. Nobody else can figure that out or do that for you.

Is this a pep talk? Oh well.

Today is my day. I am making it as such. This life is my life. It will be as such. I’ll go back to working on that now. Have a great day.

I am totally writing this on an iPad, you all. I am living the dream.
Granted, the iPad is way more typeable than the iPod just because it is bigger. But I will not be making a habit of blogging from it. Especially since I am sitting in front of my computer as I write this blog post. I am awesome. But, you know, first night with it, gotta go with the gimmick.

Basically, I’m not having buyer’s remorse yet. The iPad is doing exactly what I wanted, and even more. It is a fun little time wasting device.

One thing I kind of forgot about was the multitasking. That should maybe be in quotation marks. Since my iPod can’t do it, I forgot about it. It works… Okay? Mostly it just seems to make me have to manually quit apps from the task manager.
There is one benefit, though. I can be on a Skype call and actually use other apps. It works in the background like real multitasking! This is the thing that shocked me when I found it out. I thought it would just work with the iPod and Pandora and have the fake switching for everything else. I was proved wrong.

That thing with the task manager is really my only complaint, though. It has scaled up all the iPhone games I’ve thrown at it so far like a champ, which is something I expected, but wasn’t sure about. The iPad games I have also work really well. I bought the iPad Plants vs Zombies for charity, and goodness, if I didn’t know better I would say the iPad was the lead version of that game. Multitouch makes the game a dream to play, and it was fantastic enough to begin with. I also splurged on the iPad version of Words with Friends. It’s kind of stupid, but is really is easier to play when you don’t have to zoom in on the board. Plus, I have a unified account, so I can play my turns on whatever is handy, which is how it should be.
(An aside: why aren’t more apps as good at multiplayer as Words with Friends? Developers have a model to copy! Make it happen!)

I will admit, as I write more on this keyboard, I am getting into a groove. It’s not going to replace a keyboard or anything like that. Not going to write a short story on it. But this is pretty solid when in landscape, really. I’m doing something similar to touch typing with not too many typos.

Anyway, there are some day 1 impressions. I am sure I will be writing more about the thing in the future. Sorry if you don’t care for that. It will probably be game reviews, though, so that’s a thing, yes?

Here’s the problem: I finally got my post to twitter thing fixed, and now I’m going and doing a stupid linkdump because I don’t have anything interesting to write about! I’m doing it all wrong! Oh well. At least tomorrow I’ll have some HORRIBLE iPAD IMPRESSIONS to bother you with. For now, cool links! Let’s empty those open tabs!

Mr. Nedroid Man is too hilarious and amazing, and this tumblr post proves it. Also this twitter post. Basically, anything he does.

This is a pig wearing boots. That’s really all there is to it. Just enjoy it.

I watched this neat little video that flies you through the history of titles in movies. It’s pretty cool.

I always give my students a useless link to look at to help them procrastinate every week. This was this week’s. It’s also Shauna-approved, so that’s lovely as well!

I don’t know if this is a real ad or not, but fuck, it really should be.

Finally, bringing it back around to the iPad world, here’s the best review of the iPad 2 I’ve seen. Mostly because it’s cute as fuck.

Have a good day, everyone.

I remember a time when I used to review Items of the Month! That was a time when I had less of a problem playing my turns every day, so that I could actually get around to trying out the items at a decent time. This isn’t happening anymore! Thus, especially with KoL, I have no idea what some of the IoTMs I bought do until months and months after, mostly because I am still insistent on doing 100% familiar runs. Thus, these reviews have fallen a bit to the side.

But I kind of wanted to talk about the Mini-Hipster. I’ve been using mine during this current KoL run that I’ve been working on, off and on, and he just really surprises me. At first glance, he’s kind of one of those “jack of all trades” familiars, which do all kinds of random shit all the time and I generally enjoy. He has the free combats tacked on to make him interesting to people who don’t just like cool shit, but he’s mostly just a familiar that does cool shit.

But when the Mini-Hipster single-handedly one-shots the Bonerdagon, well, I have to wonder what is up.

Seriously, the attack damage of the Hipster’s attacks is insane. I’m at a point in my run where I am doing maybe 50 damage with a regular attack, if I’m lucky, and the Hipster is doing 200-300 damage every time it decides to do an attack action. Of course, one of it’s attacks is Hot-Based, which is how it managed to take out the Bonerdagon with ease. I will admit that a dedicated attack familiar would probably do that much damage, if not more, over the course of a battle, but a dedicated attack familiar would not also be healing me and giving me lots of stats like the Hipster does. It just seems crazy.

I’m sure it’s not as crazy as I’m making it out to be, of course. It is a fairly rare action, so you can’t depend on it, and the first action the Hipster takes is always a stat-up action, I believe, so you have to be able to survive at least one hit, if not two, if you’re going to get lucky with it. No serious speed-runner would ever actually care about it. They’d just want the free combats against scaling monsters for free stats. Still, it feels like something is broken each time the hipster lazily shakes greasy hair sweat towards an enemy and it does 5 times the damage of my normal attack in sleaziness. I suppose that’s kind of the benefit of using Mr. Store stuff, though. It’s supposed to make you feel powerful, or like you’re getting away with something cool. I can’t say that isn’t why I pick them up. But normally there’s a sense of balance around them, or a sense of what it’s doing that’s powerful being very tied-in to the general theme or whatnot of the item. I don’t see that with these attacks. They strike me as odd.

I’m still going to enjoy the free kills but, yeah. Odd.

In theory, there is such as a thing as a “popcorn flick.” To my knowledge, this is a movie that you put on because there’s nothing else to do, and you enjoy your popcorn and watch. You aren’t challenged, or even necessarily engaged in any way, but you watch it, and it doesn’t offend, and that’s fine.

That’s basically what Paul is.

I watched Paul, and that was fine. There were some laughs, and some chuckles. I didn’t want to claw my eyes out. It then ended, and it left no impression on me, nor any need to ever see it again.

If there’s one thing the movie was, the term “formulaic” would be completely accurate. Everyone in the story was simply there to fill a slot in the story. Two friends are there because you’re supposed to have buddies on an adventure, but one is designated to fall in love, and here comes female character to fall in love with and serve no other purpose, and so on and so forth.
Seriously, I can sit here and try to think of any actual character traits that the main characters had, and I would totally fail. They were not characters, but simply placeholders which existed to fill in slots in jokes. These jokes are the exact jokes you would expect from a movie about a wise-cracking alien. That doesn’t mean they aren’t funny sometimes, but they certainly aren’t unexpected.

I guess what I’m saying is, basically, look at the elevator pitch for the movie. Imagine the checklist such a movie must have. If you would like to see someone methodically checking off everything on that list without any twists, turns, or derivation, then you may enjoy Paul.

On the way back from the theater, Essner and I had a discussion about formula and how sick we were of it. I think I was less sick of it than him, but regardless, we both agreed that this kind of movie is not really worth our time anymore. He was being much harder on it than me. I feel it’s harmless, though nothing I will ever need to see again, whereas he seemed to find it very offensive, or at the very least bad. When I got back to Tweetdeck after the film I was greeted with this article which seemed to offer a potential interpretation on why we were reacting this way and echoed several of the points Essner was making about how the shows he watched as a child, which were re-purposing plots and pop culture he was not old enough for yet, made it so that when he reached the age where such things could be consumed, he already knew how they were going to turn out and there were no surprises. All this really seemed relevant as I really thought about the film and what it meant about film-making as a whole. There will always be people who enjoy formula and not being surprised. Hell, I really enjoy a formulaic children’s show about the power of friendship now and again.

But anyway, I guess I was talking about Paul. Paul is a movie. It has a joke or two. Seth Rogan is a wise-cracking alien who says the word “fuck.” You know what you’re getting into if you see it.

Yeah, depressed bitching today, move along, nothing interesting to see.

There’s a saying along the lines of “work expands to fill the available space.” I kind of feel that way about my depression. If I have more time, it expands outward to fill all available time. It’s more diluted that way, of course, and not hitting me as a strong wave of panic or other issue, but it can still totally wreck my shit. I’ve had free time this week, and that’s nice, but I’m mostly spent it feeling awful, getting nothing done, and generally wanting to give up on life.

I’m just not sure what I can do. I tell people I don’t feel in control, and they tell me I am in control. I tell people I feel like I’m going to collapse in on myself, and I’m not on solid ground, and they tell me I am. I tell them I can’t do anything right and they tell me I do all kinds of things right. Do I really feel like shit? Surely not. I’m sure they’d tell me otherwise.

You can’t get anything done without smashing things. There’s no nice way to get anything done. Everyone will see you the way they want to see you unless you punch them in the fucking face, shatter their reality bubble, and force your way of thinking onto them. Maybe that’s justified sometimes when the reason you’re doing it is good. When you’re trying to make things better. When, in the short term you make people bleed so that in the long run they can be safer and happier.
But when what you want to change is people recognizing your weakness, and that you need help, well, what do you do? You can smash, but what’s the point in that? You’re weakening those who can help you for selfish purposes. It’s stupid. It serves no purpose. So you sit, isolated, and rot, unable to do anything.

I don’t know why I was using the second person there. I’m obviously talking about me.

Nobody can pull me out of my funk and fix my life but me. That’s obvious. I’m not wanting a magic wand, because a magic wand simply does not exist. However, how can I confront something everyone thinks doesn’t exist? How can I get advice and support in fixing things nobody else can see? How can I face up to what I need to do when everyone denies I need to do anything?

I have no idea. It would be nice to know.

Here’s a tale of me being super stupid.

So my birthday is coming up, and the more I thought about it, the more I just wanted to get the stupid iPad and be done with it, so I can have fun fucking around with my expensive toy. All the reviews of the iPad 2 suggested that it was a nice upgrade, but not super necessary, so I started thinking I should just grab a used iPad 1, save some money, and still get to play with my stuff. I mean, my iPod Touch is 2 generations old now, and is still playing games just fine (though they take awhile to load sometimes). The iPad 1 is playing iPhone 4 level games with no issues, so it should be fine for awhile yet.

Where do you buy used electronics? Well, eBay, I suppose.

So I went to eBay, and I started looking at stuff. Prices were about where I expected, or so it seemed, so I started bidding. However, I soon realized that people on eBay are at least as awful as I remember. With 20 seconds left, the price of every one of these used iPads would jump up 40 bucks instantly. Still, I kept trying and trying. I even started bidding on the 32 gig models, figuring they’d actually be less in demand than the 16 gig cheap ones. I was right on that one, but I still kept failing.

38 failures later, I was kind of frustrated. However, I was angry at it, and that meant I couldn’t give up. I bid on a new auction, and it immediately shot up to my max price, but stayed there. “There’s no way that one won’t get sniped for 5 bucks more,” I thought, “I’ll just bid on another one then and call that one a loss.”

You can see where this is going.

Of course, with my luck, I won two iPads at the same time.
I could hear Essner’s voice in my ear mocking me for owning not one, but two iPads.

I pounded my head on the desk, and started doing damage control. Things will work out. I can either resell it, or if negotiations with the seller go well, I’ll just pay them a small fee and not buy the second iPad. But man, it’s just another stupid mistake on top of everything else going on in my life.

I guess it makes a story, though.

Today I realized that I was sitting within arm’s reach of an arcade stick, and I had a copy of Super Street Fighter IV sitting on the table over there, and yet I was playing Street Fighter IV on my iPod instead.

I bought Street Fighter IV for my iPod because it was on sale for a buck, and Capcom was donating all proceeds for it towards the relief effort from the earthquake. I had heard surprisingly good things about it, so I thought I’d give it a try. If nothing else, I’d get this blog post out of it. I wasn’t expected it to be as good as it is. It is a really quality game, and completely worth your dollar.

There are several omissions from this version of the game. One is some of the characters. Apparently for awhile they slowly added characters, but they’ve basically stopped now. While I’ll miss personal favorites like Sakura and Dan, I understand why they weren’t priorities, and you still have a pretty decent selection of SFIV fighters in there, including all the required ones like Ryu, Guile, and Chun-Li.

The other omission is no Indestructible. Oh nooooooooo. But at least it still has Guile’s Theme. And the “fight over” theme, which is kind of the best music in the game, as far as I’m concerned. Always makes you feel badass after a round.

Anyway, onto how the game plays.
I don’t know what dark sorcery Capcom employed to make the virtual joystick in this game so good, but all iPhone developers who want to try to have a virtual stick or pad really need to employ it. Every single time I pulled off a dragon punch motion on this thing, I was blown away, but I can do it with a lot of consistency. Fireball motions are never any problem. The stick is fantastic, and that’s the whole reason why the game is playable.
Though not a one-for-one recreation, the game is very, very similar to actual SFIV. All the characters they included have the same moves you remember, and can employ them the same way. I picked Abel, for instance, and was using a lot of the same techniques I use in the actual game. You don’t have quite the same range of moves, though, simply because they have reduced the game down to four buttons: a punch button, a kick button, a “special move” button which you use to pull off your EX moves, Supers, and Hypers, and a Focus Attack button. This means you don’t have as much variety of normals, really, but it still does a fairly good job with what it has.

The game also looks pretty great, while running without lag on my second gen iPod Touch. It seems to be using techniques similar to Killer Instinct, which is smart. The fighters are actually sprites that have been ripped from taking pictures of the fighters in 3D. Still, it looks great. The animation is sometimes jerky when doing things like throws, since the game is trying to figure out how to get the two sprites to connect in a good way, but overall it looks very fluid, too. It’s certainly not enough to throw off someone of my skill level, and let’s face it, you’re never going to be super serious on your iPhone anyway.

The game has multiplayer over Bluetooth, which is nice, seeing as it’s a fighting game at all. It even has “Fight Requests” like the actual game, though the concept of someone noticing you playing SFIV on your phone, booting up their copy, and both of you having Bluetooth on for them to join you in the middle of your arcade session is a bit unbelievable as a scenario. Still, they tried. There’s no online play, because, well, let’s face it, fighters have a hard time dealing with lag on a console, much less over 3G. It’s good they have something.

Seriously, if you like Street Fighter IV, or fighters in general, this is totally fun to fuck around with. The AI is about what you’d expect from fighting games (I can beat everyone on normal but Zangief, who gives me lots of trouble, just like normal SFIV) and they intelligently set the game up as leaderboard-based as a race to get through tournament mode and beat all the fighters in the fastest time. It even saves your progress between matches, if you just want to play one round and then go back to something else. It’s totally fun to fuck around with for a dollar, and completely playable. It’s pretty fantastic like that.

I played Dead Space: Extraction, and that was kind of shit because pointing at the screen with the Wiimote is kind of shit. Then I played Dead Space the iPhone game, which was shockingly good, if not always the easiest to control. At this point, I decided I really needed to play the actual game. I had turned it down originally because “it’s like RE4 and that’s not a game for me,” but my experiences with RE5 and going back to RE4 made it clear that no, it is a game for me, I just didn’t know it. When Dead Space 2 came out, I finally gave in. Gamefly sent me the original Dead Space.

I’m years late to the party here, but fuck, Dead Space is fantastic.

Now, much like RE4 and RE5, Dead Space is not scary at all. You are way too empowered as a player for the game to actually be very scary. Though your weapons are “improvised,” you still have tons of weapons and ammo to take care of anything the game might throw at you. It gets you with some jump scares once and awhile, certainly, but I didn’t really find myself nearly as scared as, say, when I played Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which has no combat. So, yeah, it’s pretending to be a scary game, but that’s really not what it is. What it is is a fantastic third person shooter with addictive upgrade mechanics.

I once listened to a podcast with Shawn Elliott where he called Dead Space brilliant because of its “focus on skill shots.” I didn’t completely buy it at the time, but now that I’ve played the game, that is totally what sets the game apart. Having to shoot off limbs seems a bit odd and questionable from a story perspective, but once you get into the gameplay, there’s no doubt that it makes the shooting feeling unique and fresh. Not having to aim for the head for once, and having a wide variety of arms, legs, and tentacles with which to come up with strategies to hit well really makes you think about combat completely differently. It’s tense trying to shoot an array of wriggling tentacles in the air above your enemies, instead of their heads, because those tentacles are harder to hit, but cutting them off will do way more damage than pumping many rounds into their body. They make it worth your while to try these shots, which I normally wouldn’t do, and it really makes you rethink what weapons are good and how you shoot.

On top of this solid shooting action, you have really additive upgrade mechanics. An upgrade system is always welcome, but they’ve set up their system in a fairly unique way. Buying upgrades to your equipment requires “power nodes,” which essentially work like skill points you can put in the various trees of your weapons and space suit. Some spaces on the tree, though, give you no benefits other than letting you connect to other spots on the tree. What’s more, you don’t get too many of these in the world: you have to purchase them. You get some money from enemies, of course, but most of your money comes from selling excess ammo to the store. This creates another reason to want to make those skill shots and make every shot count. Instead of giving you no ammo and potentially frustrating a player by having to restart again and again, they give plenty of ammo, but really reward you for not using it by letting you buy more upgrades. It’s really genius.

There is a story to the game, which is… okay? There’s a crazy cult making monsters. Sure. I didn’t really get attached to any of the characters, though the setting is really nicely realized, and you mostly feel like you’re in a real spaceship interior as you walk around, which is appreciated. I’m sure someone who cares about world lore could get attached to that stuff, but I’m not that person. The game also gets a bit weak near the end, with you having to slowly drag this monolith around with you in between combats. It’s really annoying. But the gameplay really covers any rough edges. It’s really solid, and a lot of fun, and I hear the second game fixes a lot of those rough edges and makes it even better. I can’t wait to play it. For now, though, I’m glad I went back and played this one. It’s a good time.