The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

There is one thing I’ve been doing all day for several days, and that thing is playing Words with Friends. Please note how awful that title is. Words with Friends. Ugh. It sounds like you’re about to confront your friends for something they did wrong. It’s… pretty terrible. However, it is actually a well-implemented Play-By-Email style Scrabble Clone for the iPhone. I’m enjoying it a lot.

I learned about the Words with Friends phenomenon (okay, it probably isn’t a phenomenon) from Cara, who was playing it with her aunt as we sat down to take our awesome final. The final consisted of having lunch, good conversation, and, as it turned out, playing fake iPhone Scrabble, because I downloaded it immediately onto my iPod Touch and had at it. See, the main feature to this game is that it has a fully-featured free version, so you can just tell anyone you want to download it and play with you. This is a really effective feature. The free version isn’t a demo. It’s the full game. The only difference is that it pops up an ad every time you make a move. However, there’s nothing stopping you from immediately hitting the home button, backing out of the program, and not looking at the ad at all. If you are monetarily challenged, you’ll have no problem dealing with these ads and having a good time. Still, they annoyed me, so I splurged and spent the 3 dollars on the ad free version. I didn’t mind: even though the company that made this game obviously had no idea how to title something, they still made a game with a great interface that works very well for a game you play slowly over the course of a day or two.

Basically, you set up anywhere from 1 to 20 games running simultaneously. As I said, it’s done in a casual “play at whatever pace” style: You play your turn, and then it sends a push notification to who you’re playing, who can respond whenever they want. Then you get a push notification, and so on. This works extremely well for Scrabble, especially since it’s often a game where you’d like some time to stare at the board and evaluate your options, options, options. This also works surprisingly well with my iPod touch. When I’m at home, not doing anything, I’m in Wifi, and I get these notifications, so I can play. When I’m out and about doing things, I’m not in Wifi, so I don’t, but they’ll be waiting for me when I get home. Granted, the game can’t entertain me during boring parts of life that way, but it actually still works fairly well when not always connected, like when you’re on an iPhone.

The game lets you challenge Twitter and Facebook contacts, as well as type in usernames on their little service. It also has a matchmaking thing for play against random people, because random people are your friends whom you want to Word with, obviously. You can leave messages after every move to gloat or just talk, and when you finish a game, you just hit the “rematch” button and start a new one with your friend again, immediately. It’s pretty well everything one could want from a mobile, online Scrabble game, and it’s available for the price of free.

I’d have a hard time not recommending that you download the free version. If you enjoy playing it and hate ads, feel free to throw some money the developer’s way, if you want. But you don’t have to to have a great time. If you download it, face me. I’m, shockingly, named poetfox on there. We can words. With friends. All day long. Perhaps.

I guess at some point I played Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

I was really kind of unimpressed. Back a few Christmases ago, Jonathan got me Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters for the PSP, and that was pretty great. Since I hadn’t played one of these games before, the shooting and stuff was really kind of novel and fun. I blew up a bunch of things, and tried a bunch of weird weapons. It was pretty neat. Near the end of the game, though, I got to a boss battle that I just couldn’t handle, and had to put the game down. Up until then, though, it was fun times.

However, I didn’t really realize a couple things about the game, since I hadn’t played others. For one, I didn’t realize that the incredibly disjointed and almost nonsensical plot of the PSP version was actually accurate to what the full console releases had. I felt like stuff had gotten cut out to fit it all on a UMD or something, but no, Tools of Destruction has the exact same lack of plot. You’re just going to incredibly random locations for no real reason to shoot people, and it never really tries very hard to explain it. There are some cutscenes, where people talk, but there might as well not be: they don’t say anything that clarifies anything that you are doing. This was really disappointing to me. People throw around terms like “Pixar movie” when describing the style of these games, but there’s nothing about them that connects with that at all besides a vague art direction element.

I also didn’t expect the big games to be so dead-set on giving me huge areas with no guidance that I have to stumble my way through. Because it was on the PSP, there were no big arenas in Size Matters. It was one straightforward shot. This worked well, and Tools of Destruction works well when it is following a linear path, shooting dudes as well. When it gives you bigger, exploratory areas, though, the game completely falls apart. The controls and the map system were not designed for this kind of gameplay. There’s no guidance on where to go, and some of the jumps you have to make are not very clear. The whole reason I sent this back to Gamefly was because I got into one of these exploration sections and, even after consulting a walkthrough, I had no idea where to go. It was infuriating.

Eventually, though, I did figure it out, only to get into a Clank puzzle section in which I was given no guidance at all. I was told that Tools of Destruction was a “reboot” so the series would be friendly to newcomers, but the game assumed I knew all the, quite different, Clank controls from previous games. Once again, I had to consult a walkthrough just to learn what arbitrary buttons to press to get the game moving again. After managing that, I got a long way through the puzzle section, then died. I learned, then, that I was checkpointed at the beginning, and I had to redo it all.
Fuck. That.
I sent it back to Gamefly.

So yeah, I guess I didn’t really enjoy Tools of Destruction too much. Which is a shame, because it was yet another PS3 game that had gotten great buzz and I was really looking forward to trying. I don’t know if I just have a very thin skin for not knowing what to do now, or what, but I just can’t stand that kind of guesswork any more. I have so many other awesome things to do with my limited free time, I see no reason to spend it frustrated at a game that won’t make my objectives clear.

CHECKLIST GO.
Mom: Check!
Dad: Check!
Jonathan: Check!
Grandpa: Check!
Grandma: Check!
Shauna: Check!
Brer: Checked a long while ago.
Friend Gift Exchange Victim: Check!
Kale: Check and sent out!
Festivus Gift Exchange Victim: Check and sent out!

That’s right! I win at Chrissymas Shopping! I am the best! And technically I was done much earlier in the week than this, so I was like… double the best! Maybe even triple!
Hopefully I got everyone something good. I try. I’m pretty happy with most of what I bought. There are a couple risks in there, though they are educated risks. Of course, we’ll have to wait until the Christingmas to see how those play out. Still, it’s nice to be prepared and not feel like I am all desperate to find something. Even with all my work, I managed to get all the shopping done! And, honestly, a lot of that was due to Amazon, with Prime shipping. Thanks, Amazon! I am sure as hell renewing my Prime membership.

But yeah, shit, Christmas is even starting tonight, as we’re doing a little Christmasing with Shauna before she leaves. Craziness. It’s so close. Here we go.

Hey, my first semester of teaching is over as of 2 PM today.

Yay for me?

Seriously, though, I think this semester went almost shockingly well. My class did not necessarily do great. I gave out, what, at least five F’s? But those were mostly to people who decided it was not in their best interest to show up and turn in papers, so I have little remorse for them. I managed to avoid completely falling apart or getting behind. I even forced myself to become a morning person, and worked every morning on all my shit.

What’s better, my final was pretty good for my ego. I swear it wasn’t actually my intent when I assigned it. I had to give some sort of final, and it just seemed easiest to assign a little no-stress essay. “How have I changed as a writer this semester?” was the topic. And yet, a vast majority of the essays ended up being about what the class did well and what it did badly. I had a few people who were kind of down on it. One in particular said the whole class was confusing and that they’re just going to go back to “writing like they did in high school.” But the vast majority cited various activities that I thought had fallen completely and utterly flat as being extremely useful. Apparently my whole class is just too shy to talk in class, but at least they’re getting a little out of it. Or at least they know how to flatter me really well, not that it affected their grades any.

Anyway, yeah, I am just really happy with how the semester went. Happy with all this teaching stuff. I feel legit and important, and I feel like I have my life together. Well, sort of, anyway. That’s a good feeling. Possibly even worth all the running myself ragged I was doing, hm?

Let me tell you, though, I am very much looking forward to the ability to sleep in and not have to do any of that stuff for awhile. I’m sure Christmas break won’t feel like near enough. I’ll try though, dammit. I’ll try.

As a twitter user, I follow tweets from people. A lot of these people are internet personalities I like, or people on Talking Time, or even some people I know in real life. However, every once and awhile, a novelty twitter feed comes along that is so consistently entertaining, I must follow it, and laugh all the time. I will show you two now.

Brer recently showed me Friend_Computer, and it is pretty completely awesome. If there is anything I always wanted, it is a twitter feed direct from Alpha Complex, where I can interface directly with the most helpful friend I have, the computer! It answers questions helpfully! It provides useful information! What more could one ask for from our friend, the computer! I love you, Friend Computer! It’s a tweetfeed in its early stages, but I am already smiling at it.

The best one, by far, though, is Fake AP Stylebook. I am a complete nerd for such things, I know, because it directly affects the work I do. But man, it is so funny so often. There is nothing quite like editing jokes to brighten one’s day, let me tell you. Here are just a few samples of recent useful information. Follow it. Love it. Use it. Well, if you’re using AP Style in your publications, anyway.

Yeah, hopefully those feeds can brighten your day just a little. Laugh and be merry! It’s, you know, December and all. That’s what people do in December, right?

This is the picture in question.
But yeah, so, internet pornographer, fellow Talking Timer, and all around neat dude Momo was doing these tiny little thanksgiving commissions on FurAffinity. I rather like his art style, and I dig his comic, UFO, even though it’s very silly and doesn’t update often. I bet his pornography is pretty cool too! So I was kind of wanting to do it. I was all waffling, though, because I know him from Talking Time and I thought it was weird.

Then Brer told me that was the stupidest worry ever. And he was right. So I went for it.

And that was the result.

I really like it. I look really neat in his style! I do always wonder, though, why I always end up blond in these sorts of things. I’m not, last I checked. I guess I just seem blond? Or it just looks a whole lot better in contrast to reddish brown fox fur? At this point, it’s almost completely part of how things look, so I have no issue with it, but I just have to wonder sometimes. Heh.

Anyway, there. That’s my picture. I showed it off. Whee! Less lame furry things to come tomorrow. Maybe.

I wrote an actual professional review of the book, and I was just going to cross-post it, but then I’m like, wait, that’s stupid. If I post the full text here, then I can’t put it up elsewhere. Therefore, you get the very casual review version. Lucky you.

I had to read a book of short stories for my short story class. The press constantly gets review copies of books, so I always just assumed I’d grab one from the review shelf and use that. Susan tends to use the reviews for class in Big Muddy anyway. So, a few weeks ago, I grabbed a copy of the first short story collection on the shelf that seemed halfway interesting, and was soon in possession of a copy of Fugue State by Brian Evenson.

First off, I highly recommend clicking on that link up there, or these next links, and it seems like my favorite story from the collection, “Younger,” is available online in audio and text forms. It might give you some idea of what I’m talking about.

“Younger” really sums up what I did like about this book, and I did like it. It’s filled with psychological horror, the sort that isn’t connected with monsters or anything supernatural, but is just powered by characters having internal conflicts that make things creepy. I’m not a horror person, but this kind of character struggle is something I love in stories, and Evenson does a fantastic job of it, when he puts his mind to it. The majority of the stories play out in a form similar to “Younger.” I don’t feel they’re as successful, but, you know, they’re still fairly entertaining and, if nothing else, are based on a very entertaining idea.
The rest of the stories are split between a dark humor and what I would call more standard horror fare. You have stories that are just humorous in the tale of a editor who wants to publish literary work but ends up publishing trashy mystery novels with names like “Never Been Bjorn” about a detective who’s a swede, because that’s the hook. You have stories about a woman fucking a mime because “it would be a good story to tell at parties” who is haunted by the act ever since. These are just really clearly meant to be humorous. Then you have stories like the title story, “Fugue State,” which work with a supernatural threat. Still, even the supernatural stories are very character-driven, which is good. At least in my opinion.

The main issue I had with the book is that many of the stories have endings that fall completely flat. I know endings are hard. Endings are very hard. But it’s just a shame when you get a published work with so many failed endings in it. So many stories have such great premises, but once that premise has run its course, the story just stops, without any sort of satisfying conclusion. The previously-mentioned “Invisible Box” is probably the worst offender in that regard, being so entertaining, funny, and slightly creepy all the way up to the ending, which just seems completely phoned in.

Still, as I said, I certainly enjoyed the book overall. There were some very good stories in there. At least read “Younger” for me, hm? If you like that, and think you’d like a little more, even if it isn’t quite up to that quality, then Fugue State is almost certainly a book for you to check out. It’s pretty solid stuff.

People are saying that Uncharted 2 is one of the best games of the year.
I’ll be honest. I don’t see it.

I mean, you know, everything that has been said about the storytelling in this game? Completely true. The voice acting is top-notch, the characters actually act in realistic ways, there’s great dialog while you’re playing… you believe these characters. Nathan Drake is a pretty likable guy, though how anti-gun he is at the beginning of the game is pretty humorous seeing how many dudes you kill by the end. But those elements, that people point out as being excellent? Are.

The rest of the game? Not so much.
I feel like this game has a lot in common with Brutal Legend because of that. The presentation of Brutal Legend was top notch, but the gameplay was lackluster. This is the same way.

The shooter segments basically work like Gears of War. You’re hopping behind cover and shooting dudes, only you don’t chainsaw them. You can rush up and do a punch combo to take them out, if you’d prefer. The controls, though, feel really weird. I never felt like I had exact control over the shooting, and it felt like the guys took too many bullets to kill. There were these super-dudes covered in armor with big helmets that you can only kill in an efficient manner by shooting them in the head. They’re really annoying. It’s all passable, but nothing special.
The one interesting decision I think they made is that Nathan can’t carry many bullets. You only have enough bullets to reload your gun twice, at most, at any time. It really makes you scavenge for ammo, which is a different feel than something like Gears. You often had to debate whether to run out of cover to get more ammo or to switch to your pistol to finish people off, which is cool. I did like that.

The real part where the game falls apart for me, and for some reason, this is what people say they like the most about the game, is the platforming. Nathan Drake has the best grip of any person ever, and has to climb every wall forever. You often have to traverse terrain like this, scaling walls, leaping from roof to roof, etc.
There are two main issues with this. One, the game is almost always one or the other. You have to platform for a long period of time, then you have to do nothing but shooting for a long period of time. The game would have been much better had they mixed it up a bit more than they did. They could learn from Arkham Asylum.
The real main issue, and the reason why I got so frustrated that I sent the game back, is that the game gives you very little indication of what you’re supposed to do. You’re given a goal, and no clear way to get there. The locations look fairly realistic, so they’re lacking markers that jump out at you to say “climb here!” The characters in the game, whom you’d think could give you hints with the good dialog, are useless in these sequences. In fact, most of them start with Drake saying “how the hell am I supposed to get up there?” This frustrated me to no end. He’s supposed to tell me so I could do it! There is a hint system to help you go where you need to go, but you can only activate it when the game thinks you’re lost. Making the game think you’re lost basically involves setting the controller down for a few minutes. It’s stupid. Once you find the path, it’s not like there’s any challenge in it, either. You just move on a linear path forward. These sequences really got to me.

On top of it all, the game is kind of stupidly hard. There are five difficulty levels. I picked Easy, one up from the easiest setting, and I died constantly. I picked Easy so grenade launchers wouldn’t cheaply kill me in one hit out of nowhere, thanks. I just wanted to play through the story everyone was saying was so good. But no, they had to make the game stupid hard.

So I sent it back right at the end of the game. I really don’t get Uncharted 2. If you enjoyed it? Wonderful. Good for you. But there was so much bullshit annoyance in the game that I just can’t really recommend it that highly. Obviously it just wasn’t a game for me.

For Droib’s birthday, I was attempting to think of something cool to get him. It was then that I remembered that, at some point this year, Droid was in the market for filling up some shelves with some good board games. Now there was an area I knew about! We had also, in our youth, played hours and hours of Risk at his house. So I went out and, with some funding help from one Justin Spants, acquired Risk 2210 A.D. for him, since everyone has always said it is the best variant of Risk created yet. I hadn’t played it though. However, we got together on Friday night to give it a try.

First off, let me just say where I stand on standard Risk: it’s not very well designed. The first few turns are fun stuff, but after that, the game gets boring and stupid. I don’t think we’ve ever actually finished a game of Risk. It’s just too much of a pain to do so. There are also some constant strategies that are always brought to a Risk table, for better or worse.

Risk 2210 addresses most of those concerns. First off, because the game is always only 5 turns long, it keeps the game confined to the turns that are interesting, keeping the game from going on for hours and hours in wars of attrition and rolling that nobody really cares about. Secondly, the fact that you have to mark four random territories on the board as “nuclear wastelands” at the start of the game really changes how the board, whose land spaces are pretty much the same as regular Risk, play. In our game, for example, large portions of Asia were irradiated, and the other wastelands were blocking passage into Asia. This made Asia way, way easier to take and defend than in a normal game of Risk, and thus way more viable, which was interesting. Next time, something else will be more useful to hold because of those areas. I really like that.

The other things Risk 2210 adds to make the game different from the normal Risk experience are also fun. You have commanders, something taken from Lord of the Rings Risk which is a very welcome addition, as those are quite fun. However, you have five different types: Diplomat, Land Commander (or Landmander, as we called him), Naval Commander, Space Commander, and Nuclear Commander. Each type lets you use a d8 instead of a d6 in certain situations that are pretty self-explanatory. Are you fighting at sea? The Naval Commander would give you a bonus there, and so on. Having a commander on the board lets you buy and use their Commander Cards, which do different things related to their specialties. Each deck is shuffled and random, but since each Commander has a different style of ability that you know beforehand, you really can plan your strategy more than you can with some cards of this type in other Risk variants, which is really cool. You can build Space Stations to fortify specific areas and let you send troops to the Moon. Oh, and there’s a separate Moon board to take, and underwater sea colonies to conquer. You also get to bid resources on when you take your turn, which is a great mechanic. Do you save your resources to buy more Commanders and commander cards, or do you really want to get in there and go first?
Honestly, though, it’s just Risk, in the end. You still point at places on the board and roll dice over and over again to whittle down armies. But as I mentioned before, that only gets boring when two players are crazily fortified and there’s no chance for people to swing from the bottom to the top. Since the game only lasts 5 turns, and there are so many more options than in a normal Risk game, it really keeps the fun going all the way through.

Here are three strategy tips for when you play. 1) People seem to forget to look at the Moon board. If you can sneak some troops up there and take one of those continents, that could be a huge help. That was what I did, and it let me manage to win. Somehow. 2) You want to go last on the last turn, so you can be completely suicidal. It doesn’t matter how many armies you have when the game ends, just how many territories, so a suicide run is very effective! This was the other reason I managed to win, even though I was in bad shape for most of the game. Bid to make that happen! 3) If you add magnets to your game, this is what happens.

I think I picked a pretty good game to get for Droib. We had a great time playing it, and hopefully we can play it again sometime. What people were saying was completely right: this pretty well is the best variant of Risk I have played, and I have played quite a lot of them. If you’re going to play any kind of Risk, I would very much suggest this one.

There are very few movies that I wait for with incredible excitement. I’m pretty completely in the video game camp now. I only ever see movies when Essner invites me. That’s always enjoyable, but, you know, I rarely have a movie that I desperately need to see.

Fantastic Mr. Fox was that movie.

I’ve had plans to see it forever. I wanted to see it while I was in Arkansas, but it wasn’t out yet. I wanted to see it opening night, but I got sick. Last week, I finally got to see it.

It met all my expectations.

I admit those expectations were high. I mean, it had anthropomorphic, talking foxes, so you know I was interested. But even without that, it was a Wes Anderson movie, and he is, by far, one of my favorite directors. It had all the great actors involved for voices that he uses time and again because they’re totally awesome. It seemed like a winner. I wanted it bad.
And it was every bit as wonderful as I had hyped it up in my head to be.

This movie is not for kids. Sure, it’s rated PG, and is a stop-motion animation film with talking animals, but it is completely for adults. Characters say proxy f-bombs using the word “cuss,” which is kind of humorous in is own right. There’s fairly extreme violence. The plot is completely based off of a mid-life crisis plot that children will likely not resonate with, and has consequences that do not magically disappear at the end of the film, though it does come to a sort of happy ending. It’s a very adult movie, and a very excellent one.

This is completely a Wes Anderson movie all the way through. The stop-motion may be considered by some to be a gimmick, but I think it works incredibly well. Wes Anderson has always had a sort of weird retro kitsch style about his films. It makes them look very distinct. Therefore, it makes sense that, when making an animated movie, he would use a sort of outdated method that gives it a weird, but unique outdated look. It works just great.
The dialog, too, is completely Anderson fare. It is both hilarious and subtle, bringing out some fairly deep characters, certainly deeper than you might expect from a family of stop-motion foxes. Mr. Fox is a full-featured person, who’s dealing with a lot of issues having to deal with settling down and having a family when he feels himself a wild animal, not to mention dealing with the fact that his “fun” may have brought down an entire community later in the movie. Ash, his son, is dealing with issues of “being different,” something everyone tells him even though he thinks he’s just another member of the group, even while his cousin, who has moved in with the family and is better than him at every activity he tries, is seemingly proving otherwise. These A and B character arcs give the main plot, which, honestly, can get incredibly silly at times as Boggis, Bunce, and Bean spend insane amounts of money to take down Mr. Fox, some really strong depth.

The film is just incredibly fun. It was very enjoyable to watch, and it wasn’t mindless in its construction. What more could someone want from a movie? If you like Life Aquatic, Rushmore, or any of Anderson’s movies, don’t overlook this one just because it’s animated. You’ll enjoy it just as much, I promise.

Also, it is supposedly about penises. So, you know, that’s exciting too, right?