The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Since last Friday, say, I’ve been in a horrible depressive funk. It’s kind of shitty. I’ve been working on Assassin’s Creed 2 and hiding to attempt to combat this, but I don’t know how well it’s gone. I’ve basically been lashing out at Brer and being pretty stupid and secluded. Cara said I was “absent.” I guess that works.

I really wish I had a handle for why I get like this. I mean, I have theories. I’m burning all my social energy and I’m running out, or my body just decides it’s not going to take any more and needs a break. I don’t know. I just hate how awful I am. I hate not really understanding why I feel so horrible, and I hate that these situations have come back. I used to be able to ignore them, or at least keep them to one evening, but this shit has gone on for like 4 days and may still continue. I don’t know.

Anyway, moodiness sucks and I hate it, the end.

Still, I guess it’s nice to have a little time to indulge it. And I survived the semester with a 4.0, even with everything I was fighting with the whole time.

I have it together. Kind of. Even if I am completely broken sometimes.

Yep.

See, it’s supposed to be like Saddle, but I put LoL in there, because this post is about LoL.
Amazing.

Now that the school semester is over, I’m finding time to get back to playing LoL multiplayer and whatnot, which is lovely. I really do enjoy that game, more than I ever expected myself to when I installed it. It’s probably because I’ve got Essner and Jonathan hooked, so I always have actual teammates to play with. It also helps that I’m actually getting competent with people.

The first character I decided to main was Tristana. She’s nice, of course. I still enjoy her. But I really got the hang of her because she’s the first character where I really learned how to use all of her moves. I could do some serious killing.
Yet, that’s not really my style. I enjoy having a heal. But I never really felt like I was effective with any of the healers I had played, except maybe Kayle, but even then, she’s very “heal herself” focused and not actually for healing a group.

Then I tried Nidalee and fell in love. I purchased her immediately, and I haven’t looked back.

Now, I don’t really care for her flavor, perse? She also doesn’t look particularly cool. But her abilities just fit me perfectly. Basically, she can, when she hits level 6, shapeshift into a Cougar. This cougar has a completely different set of abilities: one created to kill people. As a human, her set is extremely support, although her Javelin Toss can do some decent damage.

This works just perfect for me.

Most of the time, I can be support and defensive. I can use Primal Surge to heal and Javelin Toss to finish off foes. Bushwack is great for tracking traveling foes as well, of course, though it’s never really a big attack. Still, useful. Then, later, when I want to kill something, I can switch to the Cougar. Takedown is REALLY powerful, Claws are fun, and Pounce works similarly to how Tristana’s rocket jump works, in that I can use it to help me escape from situations, which is awesome.

Basically, I know how to use all her moves. I know what they’re for, and most of the time, I can apply them. I feel like I’m doing things as Nidalee, and she fits my playstyle. It’s completely badass. I’m even getting to the point where I can actually hit people with Javelin Toss, which is extra awesome, as I’m not really the best at skill shots.

Yeah, it’s good to be playing LoL again, and now that Essner has a good computerbox and a headset, I envision many more rounds being played. I can’t wait.

I order Essner’s birthday present from Amazon I get this electronic mail that says that hey, I have $5 of MP3 credit for no apparent reason now! Therefore, I felt like I needed to go attempt to search for music. However, I’m horrible at such things. I ended up wandering around the site for a long time, but eventually I looked up My Robot Friend, and found their latest album, and… well…

Take a listen. And watch.

This song is amazing. It kind of sums up exactly what I love about Hot Action, their first album. It’s kind of creepy, kind of upbeat and kind of not, and it just hits all the important notes. The lyrics are just so awesome as well, and that video is kind of creepy.

Needless to say, that’s all I’ve been listening to since. Just that song, over and over and over again.

Cole said How to Train Your Dragon was really good, and wanted to see it a second time. So we went and I saw it.

Now, Dreamworks often kind of sucks. They’re no Pixar. You can usually discount them and their animated movies as cash-ins grabbing for that “parent desperate to take their kids to something” demographic. There are some exceptions, of course. Kung Fu Panda was pretty fun. Word on the street was that How to Train Your Dragon was another such exception. They were completely right.

The plot of this movie really got to me. It’s basically a story about how father and son live in different worlds, and although both are legit in many ways, neither will listen to the other. Hiccup’s dad is the main dragon-killing Viking. He wants his son to fit in, be strong, and most importantly, be able to defend himself so he will be safe. Hiccup realizes that Dragons are intelligent and aren’t bloodthirsty killers unless provoked, and attempts to play biologist, actually learning about them, and along the way, learns they can be ridden by working with Toothless, his adorable dragon. Both want the village to live better, without fear of dragon attacks, but neither can really completely understand the other’s position.
That kind of conflict is so real, and it certainly hits on things in my own life. That’s some serious, actual characterization in there. Plus, compare this to, say, Ash from Fantastic Mr. Fox. Now, I love that movie, but Ash is “different,” but proves himself by doing things everyone else’s way. Instead of being his own unique person, his moment of proving himself comes from being an athlete, just like everyone else. By comparison, Hiccup proves himself by doing something completely different, and by solving the problem his own way. At the same time, he wouldn’t have been able to solve the problem the way he did without his Father’s strength to save Toothless. It gives credit to both sides of the argument. It’s okay to be different, but the old ways have merit. Few movies actually give credit to both. It’s either an Icarus “don’t fly so close to the sun” story, or a “man, parents have it all wrong” kind of story. How to Train Your Dragon hits an excellent middle ground. That’s just kind of awesome.

Yeah, so, How to Train Your Dragon has strong characters, and that’s really what makes it a great movie. They’re realistic, and they’re fun. On top of it all, the animation is also pretty great. Toothless is cute as hell and also completely bad-ass, and he’s animated so great that you can buy it. There’s a little bit of stylistic difference between the viking adults and the viking kids, but that would seem to be completely on purpose, to attempt to help establish that different sort of world. It does look pretty great.

Honestly, I feel like there’s a chance that this movie will be better than this year’s Pixar offering, Toy Story 3, mostly because I just feel like Pixar never wanted to make a Toy Story 3, but is doing so because of HUGE PILES OF MONEY. That worries me that it’s not nearly going to be as touching or “real” as this movie. Granted, it’ll probably still be fun, but it surprises me to say that How To Train Your Dragon has set a bar that Pixar needs to make sure to surpass. It’s a really good movie, and if you like animated stuff, you should see it.

I’ve got this copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, completely legit, sitting right here next to me. I’d love to have Windows 7 on here.

I just don’t want to install it.

I keep making lists in my head of everything I need to back up. Chat logs. DnD characters for these campaigns I’m about to do. MP3s. All my iPod games, somehow. So much stuff to potentially forget. Then it’s all the time it would take to reinstall all my key programs and get everything set up…

Most of the time, when I have to do this, it’s because of a catastrophic problem such that going through all that is better than not, or because going through all that is going to get me a nice, beefy, new machine, ready to roll. This isn’t going to get me either. This will be the exact same machine with the exact same power. Granted, I quite like Windows 7, and it’ll be nice to have it on my main box. But the difference won’t be huge. It’s hard to find the motivation.

Some day this summer. Just like all the other things I have to do this summer. Someday soon I’ll make that upgrade. It’ll be a long, boring day, honestly. But I’ll make it happen. I’m sure to tell you all about it when I do, too.

Feature I’m most looking forward to? Well, I bet Windows 7 will have less shitty support for multiple monitors. That excites me quite a bit. We’ll see when I install it, though, I suppose.

That’s it. As of today, I’m free for the summer!

Of course, I’m not really free, right? I think I made approximately 4 billions promises of things I’m going to get done over the summer. I’m going to run a DnD campaign, I’m going to do an LP, I’m going to catch up on tons of TV shows, I’m going to play many long RPGs, I’m going to relax, I’m going to start the real life experience, I’m going to work a lot of hours at Kohl’s… so, so many things. So maybe it isn’t as much of a break after all. I don’t know.

In any case, I am free now. It’s lovely, honestly. Completely lovely. And maybe now that it’s done, I’ll be able to write you a bloeg better than this one in the future, hm? You have a good day.

One may have noticed that Mother’s Day was last Sunday. After we all had a nice brunch breakfast thing and the grandparents went home, we were left with a question: what should we do? I decided to step up to the plate. “Why not play that Clue game that Mom got awhile back?” A long time ago, after I had shown my Mom Scene It? and she had fun just using the DVD and answering the questions, she saw this copy of Clue the DVD Game in Goodwill or something. She thought “Hey, Scene It was fun, maybe this is fun!” Of course, it doesn’t work without the board like Scene It does, but I remembered it existed. I figured that invoking was a good move: I’m sure Mom forgot she had even got it, and that seems like a cool way to say “Hey, I remember and appreciate what you do.” Additionally, Shauna is a huge fan of Clue, so this was a new variant that she’d enjoy, maybe. So we set up the board, popped in the DVD, and played a family game of this Clue variant.

There were some good things about the game, as well as some bad things. For example, I think it was completely the right move to remove the spaces in between rooms from the board. In this game, you simply can move to any adjacent location. This makes so much more sense: the dice-rolling in original Clue just drags the game out. I also enjoyed having a fourth thing to solve, which was the time of day of the crime. You can still only invoke 3 different things when you’re making a suggestion, so it adds a bit more strategy to the game, as it becomes more complicated to figure out what you’re opponents have figured out due to the larger pool of things to think about. I also think that the DVD adds narrative to a game that could use it, at least for people playing like my mother. One of the new things you can do is “Summon the Butler” who will tell you background information about what was happening when the crime was going down. Adding the additional information through the DVD with particular scenarios does limit the number of times you can play, but also makes it feel more like a mystery, because you can figure out the answer through these other clues, not just with the cards. Finally, I really like how the game puts a clock on gameplay by causing you to have to “turn in” clues to the center of the board periodically. If you run out of clues, you lose, but by that time most of the clues are out in the open, so the game is about over anyway. This makes it superior to, say, Harry Potter Clue, which can just kill you at random for no reason, and leave you sitting there for the rest of the game.

Still, the DVD also adds plenty of annoyances. You have to make accusations on the DVD menu, which is cumbersome and annoying. In addition, messing up an accusation doesn’t end the game for you, which takes a whole lot of tension out of the game. I suppose that is more friendly, but it makes it so you’re much, much more rewarded for guessing earlier rather than later. You also have to constantly play silly minigames on the DVD and whatnot, which really just slows down the game. It doesn’t particularly add much. Special effects when going through secret passages just pointlessly screw up solid strategies of getting where you need to go to make suggestions. Slowly adding the item cards through, once again, summoning the butler is cool, but because of it, there’s little reason not to spend every turn summoning the butler until all the items are out of the Butler pile.

Final random note: the sculpts on the individual pieces are fantastic, which is kind of shocking to me. They have a lot of detail. Like DnD miniature level of detail, or more. They’re really quite impressive.

I think that, in many ways, this game is more friendly than standard Clue. Standard Clue is dated and uninteresting at this point, really. There are much better board games of that sort out there. This keeps the core of what makes the standard game interesting, streamlines in some places, and adds flash in others. That flash is often more annoying than not, but for people like my parents, that’s going to add additional investment in the game, so I think that, for a family play sort of situation, that’s a very good thing. Overall, I could actually see me playing this again with the parents, which is kind of surprising. With my friends who I can play complex board games with? No way. But this is a nice game to whip out when I need something to play with the family. It was certainly worth the, like, 3 bucks my mother paid for it.

NevznachaY, your thread title on Talking Time was literally TOO AWESOME not to steal. Sorry. Had to be done. You rock.

Anyway, I saw Iron Man 2 day one, and I was very pleased with it. It was pretty much exactly what I wanted out of a sequel to the first, and it was a lot of fun.

There are plenty of flaws to be found, though. The movie is really over-extended, with a lot of characters and stuff going on that, unless you get a primer beforehand, might not make much sense. For example, the movie never really explains much about who Black Widow is, or even calls her Black Widow. I also think a damn good argument can be made that, by making Whiplash able to so easily make his own suit, you are really sort of insulting Stark’s genius and devaluing his abilities. Apparently everything about it is supposedly so complex that most big governments can’t handle it. In the first movie, at least, The Dude was having a team of people work with Tony’s blueprints to make his suit. It made a little more sense. Whiplash, although completely badass, was working out of an old apartment building.

Still, I don’t know. I had no problem turning the parts of my brain that look for that stuff off, and just focusing the parts of my brain that enjoy seeing Robert Downey Jr. do things on a screen. He is still the PERFECT Tony Stark, and he is so much fun to watch that I honestly have a hard time caring about plot problems because he makes them all okay in my eyes. Maybe that’s silly. Maybe I should hope for more. But man, he just makes it fun.

There was also some action. Some stuff blew up, and Iron Man shot some lasers and stuff. That was pretty cool too, I suppose. The CG is solid, and there’s nothing at all wrong with it.

…the more I attempt to explain why I liked the movie, the more it’s clear that it’s purely about the actors and the acting. They were fun. They were very fun. People were talking, in said Talking Time thread, about how nice it would be to have a superhero movie that’s just character development. I think that this group could come very close to pulling that off. Still, though, they need to sell toys, and excite kids to ticket sales, so I guess it’s simply unlikely.

Still, I suppose I recommend it, because ROBERT DOWNEY JR. If you really liked the first one, I don’t think you’ll have a problem liking this one. If you didn’t see the first one, well, I think you should see that one first. It’s a little stronger, and it’ll give you a good idea on whether this sequel is worth your time. That’s about all the advice I can effectively give, apparently.

First off, let’s just say that I’m glad I bought this lappy. It’s made class a lot easier and it’s made working with other people on projects possible. It’s also just nice to be able to use a computer in bed if I’m sick, or just want to watch some Giant Bomb videos while I lay down. It’s great. I didn’t pay too much, and I think it’s been all positive, in general.

Still, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably do it a bit differently.
Basically, when I decided to go with this laptop, I went “Oh, look, it’s pretty decent in stats. I’m going to care about that, so this is a good option. Also, it’s widescreen, and I do really like my widescreen monitor. This’ll be perfect!” Those assumptions are pretty completely wrong. Although I’m glad I could play LoL on this thing when I needed to, it’s not really a significant benefit. I’m not doing much gaming on this thing. I guess when Starcraft 2 comes out, it’ll probably be nice enough that I can run things on the lowest settings on here and LAN party, but still, a very minor benefit.

What I’m really using this lappy for is being portable. I’m carrying it around with me. I’m whipping it around in bed and looking at things.
What I needed was portability.

I look at Cara. She has a 13″ Macbook Pro. I’m not really jealous of the Macbook part, but the 13″ part makes me feel silly for having this huge thing. She can put her laptop in her purse. I had to search and search for a bag to actually fit this thing. Her laptop is light and easy to carry. I get tired hauling this thing around campus. Since I’m not doing anything intense on this, there’s really no reason why I had to have this big, heavy machine, and I’m jealous of the smaller machines of my friends.

Let’s not diss this laptop. It’s pretty great, and if you did occasional bouts of heavy computing and only wanted a laptop, this thing would be great. However, what I wanted was a portable computer, I see now, not a second computer. I made bad decisions.

Oh well, it’s water under the bridge. I have this and it works fine. Maybe by the time this is completely outdated or broken, I will be smart enough to take these kinds of considerations into account when I purchase a replacement. Still, though, it’s so awesome to have one. I just maybe should have thought more about actual use cases before I bought.

It was alright.

This situation was so momentousness that it caused Kevin to text message me “What the hell are you doing in a bar?!” That’s how serious this situation was. But it was Airek’s birthday so even though I didn’t understand the “bar” and didn’t think I’d have anything to do there, I went ahead and went. Which was good! Got to wish him a happy birthday and talk and play a little pool and had fun! Still, I escaped fairly early, and that was good too. I hope they all had a good time, though.

Seriously, though, I guess I just don’t get it. There’s nothing about a bar that really makes it seem like a place to hang out. I suppose it’s claims to fame are 1) It’s got alcohols and 2) It’s a public setting where you could meet people. I guess that’s all it needs to work. However, I really don’t care about either of those things, so I just don’t really have any need to ever go to one on my own. I went and enjoyed myself this time, but once the ratio of people I know to people I don’t was skewed heavily towards “people I don’t,” I departed. I’m sure all those people are completely great, don’t get me wrong, I just… didn’t want to deal with the awkwardness of trying to engage them when they’re already in a very strongly defined social group. I guess I’m just antisocial or some shit. Whatever.

There was also another strange concern while I was there. I came in with Cara, which was cool, because she is cool. But while we were playing pool, this guy drinking with a girl commented on the game a few times, and it occurred to me that he probably thought we were a couple.
Now, I like Cara a lot. There’s nothing the least bit insulting about being considered to be dating her, even if that is in no way the case, and certainly nowhere in our future. But it was more… being considered a heterosexual couple that bothered me. I could feel particular social assumptions about me being male being put on me. I’m pretty sure he thought I was throwing the game, for instance. (I wasn’t, I was just playing completely like shit, and Cara was on fire) It bothered me a little. Not enough to get in a huff about it, but apparently enough to mention it on a bloeg.

Anyway, that was my bar experience. Afterwards, we got an ice cremes at Port Cape and then I went home probably right when the actual party was starting. Huzzah. It was fine, and if I had a good reason like that party, I don’t doubt I may end up at a bar again. But there was nothing about it that made me go, “Damn, why am I not going to bars all the time!” Even if I wanted to drink, it would be better at someone’s place with a few friends, you know? I dunno.