The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

By the time you read this, Retcon will be happening. Of course, I write shit early, so I don’t have any amazing stories about it or anything, but I mean, I have to get the word out, right? I’ll give it a go.

There was a time when I played so many browser RPGs. SO MANY OF THEM I PLAYED! I did it all the time. You know this, you’ve been to this blog. However, recently, I haven’t really been doing as such. It’s not been from a lack of enjoyment, because when I do manage to jump in and play, I still have fun. Basically, I have trouble devoting my time to anything regularly nowadays, and those games sort of went the same way. It’s a shame, but it’s true. I still play once every week, or maybe less, I do admit, but it’s not a serious thing. I’ve wrung most of the “new” experiences out of something like KoL, and so there isn’t a whole lot extra there for me. I don’t really play games to achieve mastery. I play them to see new things and have fun, you know? I’m a Heart-y Diamond. Or something like that.

However, as I mentioned, Twilight Heroes is starting Retcon today. This is basically their version of ascension from KoL. Ascension is a great, great mechanic, and kept me playing KoL for a long, long time. Twilight Heroes is an equally fantastic game, and now that Retcon exists, I get to see so much more of it. I am never really an “endgame” sort of player in any of these sorts of things, and that’s been the state I’ve been within in Twilight Heroes for forever now. Retcon changes all that, though. I can redo quests I did so long ago, I probably don’t even remember them. I can try out the other classes, and see what I think about them. I can use some of my huge selection of IoTMs that are designed more for lower-level play, and see how they affect things. Suddenly, the game opens up a whole lot of newness. I am completely excited.

Twilight Heroes is a free experience worth your time. Retcon will make the game have a clear ending point, even if it changes down the line. In a sense, it’s “complete.” Because of that, you aren’t going to get a better time to jump in to the game, unless you jumped in near the beginning like myself. This is a perfect time to do that. I do suggest you do that. I’m biased for a lot of reasons, of course. I’ve made some damn good friends from the game, and am pretty damn close to someone who writes for it. But I enjoyed it before I had those connections, and I still enjoy it.

Oh shit, twitter just updated and said it went live. I’m jumping in. You guys should too.

Okay, so there are two health meters: Physical and Mental. The main problem is that a lot of the healing techniques for each use up the other meter. For example, to free myself of stress would help to refill that Mental meter, but it comes at the cost of the Physical meter, because I have to go out and work, probably, to fix things, and I get tired. Same with Physical. I could lay down and sleep all day, and maybe I might actually feel rested in the end. However, it’s at the cost of that Mental meter, since I’m going to be worrying about all the shit I’m supposed to get done. There are quick fixes, too, of course. I could eat some candy to help keep my Mental stats up, because that’s enjoyable and relaxing, but that’s bad for my Physical meter. I could drink a bunch of caffeine to keep my physical side working fine, but that can potentially do something to my mindstate. In addition, there are plenty of activities, such as, say, homework, that eat up both meters. There’s lots of interacting gameplay systems at work here.

Life is kind of a back and forth fight between those things. There are more wants and desires than you can ever comprehend. You just have to do your best to feed those desires and make them work. Somehow. However, I’ve always taken a firm anti-physical stance. Since I hate my physical form, it was easy to destroy it, and keep my mental abilities and feelings in tip-top shape. If you just fuck over one, hey, you have half as much to worry about. You can make it work easily.

Basically, I guess what I’m saying is, I never really realized how difficult it is to attempt to deal with both meters. Giving a shit about things like my appearance and health for what may be the first time in my life is incredibly taxing. Of course, I also chose to start doing it at a time where I am already very stressed attempting to deal with mental issues and things. I’m doing all sorts of stressful work. Really good planning on my part, I know!

I know none of this is new information. It’s just, as I sit here, having to schedule time to sleep in between work and commutes to St. Louis and grading and denistry, I realize how hard it is to make it all work. I’m having trouble with it, that I never had before, and it’s because I’m giving so much of a shit. That’s a good thing. Caring about myself was the goal. But damn, that’s hard, especially knowing that I could remove all this stress from myself

As we all know (because I’m just addressing my past and future selves… okay, addressing you too, dear reader, but you probably also know. Also, you’re dear. You’re a dear. Also maybe a deer. I mean, I have furry friends. You could be.) I am knee deep in the theory shit. It comes with the English grad student territory. As I work and try to make sense of the incredible quagmire of bullshit that theory entails, I find myself coming back, time and again, to one thing: Dom/sub, power play sexual relationships, BDSM or no.

The question I have to ask myself is why.

For some reason, it makes it quite easy for me to grok a lot of these theories when I go “but how does this apply to a D/s situation?” I quickly lay out these ideas and I am instantly fine. Well, okay, not instantly, but they do make a whole lot more sense to me. I mean, it is something I know, but at the same time, it’s not something I KNOW. I dabble, but I can’t say I’m really in such a relationship. The closest thing I have to that is my relationship with Ecks, but even that is just an incredibly awesome friendship wrapped up in that kind of clothing simply because it’s fun. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and it’s something I know about, but it’s not my life. It doesn’t seem like it would be something I’m constantly drawing on.

Yet it is.

If I had to venture a guess as to why things work out that way, it would be because a sliding scale of social power is a metaphor I use to easily and, as far as I’m aware, effectively deal with social situations that come my way. I use it to plan my actions and feel out how people are reacting to me and what I’m doing. I use it to judge when people are not being honest, because if they’re playing outside of their projected power space, they’re up to something, or they’d be projecting that level of power. Similarly, I tend to look at how the world works as social relationships and social systems. Even my potentially bad habit of putting a ton of personification on objects that don’t really fit that mold (the writer of all the post-humanist rhetoric I’ve read would be disappointed in me) is all done in order to make the world work in the social interactive metaphor I’ve put forth.

Once I’ve force everything into that view, I suppose that a D/s sexual relationship is one of the purest, and least hidden forms of such a relationship, making it easy to choose as a non-confusing example to apply it to.

In the end, I have a pretty good grasp on this stuff, and that’s what’s important, education and future-wise. But I’m endlessly interested in my own thought processes and why I do things the weird way I do them. I spin it around in my head again and again. I write blog posts to put my thought processes out there in a more concrete way, to better understand them. I do these things.

The way I do them is kind of like a D/s sexual relationship…
*rimshot*

At some point, I decided I was going to post here daily.

It’s days like these where I kind of regret that decision. I’m bleh, and I barely have time for the work I have to get done, much less my blog, which is kind of optional.

However, I’ve come up with some solutions for these days. One of them is trying to write many posts in advance. (Didn’t happen this time!) Another is the linkdump. I often refuse to close random cool things just because I feel I should do something with them, but don’t know what. Now I will share that with you.

Here are the six tabs that have been open in Chrome for awhile.

Jeff Green is now working at Popcap, and in celebration, someone on twitter drug up this GFW Radio clip. It’s funny. GFW Radio was awesome.

I’ve also watched the latest Ok Go music video. It has cute dogs! The song is pretty neat too. You’ve probably seen it, but if not? Here.

This is one of my favorite recent Fake AP Stylebook tweets. Great stuff.

Kale asked me what a fox sounded like. I told him. Then he sent me this video for reference. It’s kind of completely adorable.

This may be the best Professor Layton comic ever created.

This isn’t particularly awesome, but it is a tab I had open! I was looking over the DVD and Blu-ray release information for Scott Pilgrim vs The World. I will be buying that, I’m sure.

That’s it!
“But wait!” you say, “Don’t you have the blogging tab open to write this?”
To that I say, “ha HA, Bitches, I use two different browsers! That one’s open in Flock!”

I prepared a poetry presentation today, and it struck me how different this presentation is going to be than how I normally look at literature.
OR IS IT?
Well, it kind of is.

In general, as a reader, I am a big picture and character person. This is especially true reading short stories and novels. I come up with an overall impression based on gut instinct and reader-response concepts. Sure, when prompted I can point back at the text and find proof, or at least what I’m referring to when I bring stuff like that up. In general, though, it’s all about big sweeps. General character concepts: who they are, why they’re doing what they’re doing, and so on. It’s looking inside the character’s head and seeing how the reader relates to that.

In poetry, though, I tend to get way more detail-oriented. When I really try to read a poem, I look at silly things like the effect of titles, use of line breaks, and punctuation. I see how words line up on the page, and ask why. I look at the little details of construction of the poem and focus on that almost exclusively. I mean, I still form that overall picture of what it’s about, but that’s not what I obsess over, like I do with prose.

At the same time, I guess that’s not really all that different from what I do with prose, because what I’m doing is attempting to figure out the motivations of the poet or speaker. Why would they put a line break there? Why would they use that awkward slant rhyme? I attempt to figure out what the poet is trying to do and figure out what the reader’s reaction to that is. I am treating the poet like a character in a short story; it’s just that the poet’s motivations and so on are manifest in these little decisions, just like a character’s motivations and such are manifest in the little things they do throughout a story. In most situations, I think this really works, as speaker and poet are pretty clearly linked. One always claims that you need to treat the speaker and the poet separately, but most rarely do, and in many situations, it isn’t important to anyway.

It tends to look pretty different from the outside, but I guess it is still me. I’m not totally a New Critic when I look at poetry! Whew. I was worried for a second there.

When Reach was coming out, I was all like, “No. I hate Halo. I dislike the feel of all of Halo’s weapons, and I hate how everyone takes a million shots to kill. I hate how it moves so slowly. I had a lot of fun with Halo 3, but that was dicking around with awesome people. No, I don’t have time for Reach, and I don’t want it. I only bought Halo 3 to play co-op anyway.”

Then everyone started talking about it, and eventually Cole was like “Hey, I got my students loans and I bought Reach, let’s play!” So I gave in to the inevitable. I would be timely, I would play Reach.
I haven’t beat it yet. I’m on Mission 8 of what, 10 missions, I believe? 11 missions? I’m a good chunk there. Enough to write some impressions, anyway.

First off, it’s clear that Bungie is really good at what they do. The game shows a really strong level of polish that I sometimes forget Halo has after playing so many other standard shooters. The experience is refined to perfection.
It’s just not really any different.
Seriously, the gameplay is exactly the same as it has been in previous Halo titles. They try to mix it up by adding the armor abilities, which are cool, though sometimes kind of silly. For example, Sprint is so basic, as you play, that it bothers you when you pick up some other cool thing and lose it. There’s no reason for it not to be just a normal ability you have. Playing with the Jetpack, Hologram, and Drop Shield, though, is a ton of fun, especially in a co-op scenario, where you can run ahead and use Armor Lock or the Drop Shield to draw fire, and have a friend rush up from behind. They did those abilities well. Still, the way you kill the enemies, fundamentally, hasn’t changed. The Plasma Pistol works just like a Plasma Pistol, and you use it to pull down shields the same way. The Assault Rifle is still completely awful and I hate it (although they did power it up a bit from Halo 3, so that is appreciated) and the grenades grenade the exact same way. You have a few new toys, but you’re fighting the same enemies who fall to the same tactics. In the end, it’s just Halo.

The campaign does try to mix it up with a weird space shooting section. This section controls really well, but it is, in the end, kind of shallow. Your missiles are super-homing, and it brings up a little “lead” marker on your screen, so any difficulty in shooting targets with your cannons is nonexistent as well. It’s a fun distraction, but just that. If you could bring those ships into Forge and do something cool with them, well, then we’d talk. As it was, it was a nice break from the normal bang bang of the game, but nothing more. I couldn’t handle a whole game of that, for example.

I do appreciate other little touches. For example, I love the fact that you make your main character, and see them in cutscenes. I couldn’t give a shit about the Halo story, but the fact that I can make a custom female Spartan and see her doing things story-wise is actually something I really like. I mean, my character is going to be generic gun-wielding dude no matter what they do. Might as well make them customizable, so I have a chance of being a little more attached. It also makes campaign co-op more inviting, because you’re rolling with your friends, who all have their unique colors and outfits on. It’s nice.

That’s… about all I have to say about Reach. I don’t regret not buying it. I may regret it once Coffee and the other Talking Timers come up with some ridiculous Forge maps I can’t play, but I probably wouldn’t have time to play them anyway. I do say I am enjoying the campaign, and want to finish it. But that’s purely because co-op makes everything better. I can’t imagine playing Halo: Reach without at least one other person, just like I couldn’t imagine playing Halo 3 that way. I tried playing ODST that way, and hated it completely, just confirming my suspicions.

I dunno, it’s Halo! What more is there to say, really?

I bet I’m late to the party on this, but…

Oh. My. Fucking. God. Sprung may be the most amazing game of all time.

Every page of this LP of Sprung, I am laughing my ass off. It’s well made, but it’s not just that. The entire game is so mind-blowingly, hilariously bad. I’ve only read through Brett’s story, but I’m working through Becky’s too. It’s what I’ve been doing instead of writing this blog post.

You owe it to yourself to check it out. You really do. You will be amazed this game exists, and you will laugh.

Oh yes. You will laugh.

Last night, after having listened to even more of Tweet Me Harder‘s amazing fanfiction that they’re doing, as well as having recently read Wide Sargasso Sea for class, I got to thinking: There’s a lot of critically acclaimed fanfiction out there. One could think of countless Bible fanfictions, for example, many of them important works of literature, like Paradise Lost. There is plenty of stuff in the canon that, when you think about it, is just fanfiction.

That’s so weird.

I mean, there’s no doubt that there is a bit of a difference between, say, a fanfic where two characters in your favorite anime fuck because that would be nice and a book like Wide Sargasso Sea. I’m not comparing these works of literature to that. But, well…

Way back, when I was much younger, I read most of a huge, I’m talking Novel-length here, fanfiction crossover between Ranma 1/2 and Sailor Moon. Much like Wide Sargasso Sea, the author was attempting to reconcile the various canons of these works into this story, which explained things that she thought were important. It wasn’t written in a tongue-in-cheek way. It was very serious. It was treating the base subject matter with respect, and really trying to create something entertaining and significant.

I look back on that now, and my first response is to shake my head. “I really read that stuff?” At the same time, as I think about it, I almost certainly enjoyed that fanfic more than Wide Sargasso Sea, because I am more of a fan of those two properties than I am of Jane Eyre. I mean, I certainly know more about them. Most of my Jane Eyre knowledge comes from my reading of The Eyre Affair, which isn’t exactly a perfect picture of the novel.

Maybe that’s it. Because they’re based on “respected” properties, the sorts that the people picking the canon would know about and have an appreciation for, stuff like Wide Sargasso Sea gets a free pass, even if it is just playing off someone else’s brilliance. Is that fair? I don’t know. Sailor Moon is not going to have the cultural significance of Jane Eyre in the future. Or is it?

I forget where I heard or read about this, but when the Scott Pilgrim movie came out, there was a lot of discussion about how it used video game references in the books and movie. There was talk of video games being at the point where they can be used as cultural touchstones, where you can work recognizable elements into another work, much like you could references to famous literature and key movies, without actually making the work be about video games. Now, I don’t think that’s totally true for Scott Pilgrim, but there certainly is a measure of it. Overall, too, things that I’m sure people of the time never would have dreamed would gain the cultural significance it did are super important. I’m sure those in charge of the canon who saw Star Wars for the first time probably wouldn’t understand how timeless it was going to become.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: write on, fanfiction writers. I mean, if nothing else, working those writing muscles is going to help you to create something completely original down the road, to be sure. At the same time, fanfiction is just one incredibly intense literary allusion. In this copyright-happy world, we maybe have lost sight of how wonderful people can make things when they build off of the ideas of others. At some point, I remember someone putting forth the idea of a world where anyone can write about Spiderman, because he’s no longer under copyright. Wouldn’t that be awesome, they said? I agree. It kind of would be. There’d be plenty of shit, sure, but soon, someone would hit upon something fantastic. That’d be cool.

I had a soundtrack to the past few days! And it’s this song.

Seriously, I tend to go through through phases when I find an album that I just listen to constantly. It’s this kind of obsession that caused me to listen to so much Presidents of the United States of America that I wrote a whole, whole book of poetry about it. Ok Go’s second album, Oh No, has recently fallen into that rotation for me. I’ve been listening to it constantly, letting it flow through me.

It’s damn good.

Like, seriously! There’s a lot of songs on their first album I don’t particularly care for. Get Over It is good. Otherwise, I dunno. But man, I really like most of Oh No. The first four songs are solid gold, and there is plenty other good songs on the album.

I’ve focused on Invincible and A Good Idea At The Time in the past, but now at the moment the main focus of my love is It’s A Disaster. It’s upbeat, exciting, but it also has pretty solid lyrics. The chorus just rings true. Bad shit is happening, but in the end, that bad shit is all we have, so we might as well enjoy it. We might as well sing a happy song about it and just have fun, you know? As things fall to shit around me, I could stand to remember that.

Anyway: Ok Go is pretty neat. I don’t really like the single with the Rube Goldberg machine, but I should still check it out at some point. Yep.

I kind of wanted to not write about more doom and gloom. I’m too much that recently. But fuck. I had no time to write a blog today, so this is what you get. Sorry! But hey, you could always watch this video Val shared with me of a dog dancing if you want something more positive to do with your time. Go dog go!

Anyway.
Today sucked!

I was booked the entire way through. On top of that, I hadn’t really slept. I felt sick for most of the night before, and didn’t really rest, and as the last blog post says, I was already really tired. So I was working on no sleep and no energy, and I was feeling really depressed. I sent my mom a pointless depressed text that I instantly regretted, but I was making it through.

Then my phone broke.

Nothing gets me more angry than technology that doesn’t work. I was out having lunch with Cara, but I was angry. I was feeling disconnected, and I didn’t really have the money to buy a new phone I really wanted. Things were bad. I went to the AT&T store, and they were useless, as expected. I got on the phone for two hours talking with people. To their credit, they were very polite, but I ended up having to escalate the call. See, maybe this is selfish of me, but I didn’t want another Blackberry Bold 9000, because it would be my 6th one or so? The construction quality on them sucks. Since I was out of warranty, I didn’t want another one that was just going to break. Eventually, I got them to send me the new model Bold instead, the 9700. That’s something, at least. One problem solved.

However, due to the tiredness, I had expected to use those two hours on the phone doing my homework for class. I then had to rush to get that done. I finished literally a minute before class, thankfully. But it was sub-optimal.

Also, during the break at class, Cole borrowed a dollar and we both went to buy a soda. We went to the only machine not marked “Use Exact Change” and he got a soda… and I said “You know, with my luck today, that was probably the last bit of change in the machine.” And I was right. It was. Yay.

Now I’m home and writing a depressing blog post. I hope something goes my way soon. That would be super nice!

I’ll try to write something more fun tomorrow. Wish me luck.