Rambling 2

Tim: "So it's like they always ask me, 'Tim, how do you deal with flesh eating fungus?' "
Jim: "You're kidding. People always ask you that?"
Tim: "No you idiot. It's a framing device."
Jim: "Ah."
Tim: "Think a little."
Jim: "Well, I'm sorry-"
Tim: "Don't be sorry, be polite."
Jim: ...
Tim: "Where was I?"
Jim: "We were talking about how you cope with unexpected family visits."

Rambling 1

So then we were camping

Camping is fun

Except we forgot the marshmellows

Got lost in the woods

A bear ate Steven on day three

Then this witch started in on us

Found weird things in the trees

We kept walking in circles

Misplaced a few more of us

I think Andrea went nuts

Always hard to tell with her

Ran out of pop tarts

Both types

Ran into a werewolf

Sounds outside the tent at night

Horrible chainsaw weilding maniac...

But finally...

Made it

Safe and sound

For the four of us left

Here we are

Safe

At Camp Crystal Lake

Oh, Right, I Have A Blog...

Um. Yeah. Forgot

Heh.

(CrapI'mgonnahavetomaketwopoststodaytofittheschedual - all worship the schedual)

So...

Yeah. We all knew this would happen. I have a good excuse, though!

Give me a moment

It will come to me anytime now....

Okay, I forgot. Sue me. It happens.

Anyhow, here I am - about to go to sleep and needing to type up a post.

We've all been here before. Trapped. Needing, desperately, that one point where we have a lucid moment to produce something workable, and yet - we are caught flat footed.

Some of us work through it. Others procrastinate.

Some, like me, take the third option of giving the viewers something, pretending it is decent, then sneaking out the back.

Don't knock it. It is how the writers of Heroes have produced the last few seasons.

On the other hand, knock it.

So anyhow, I put up something. Nothing good. But something. Now to get to the sneaking out the back part of things...

Skittles and ponies!

For Your Consideration / My Record Holding (version 2)

I've told this story elsewhere. But something has recently made it come to mind for me again.

A few days ago, someone at work was cut by a sheet.

A sheet.

Yes, and this dangerous thin-weave cloth was checked over carefully by several folks, to find out what dangerous teeth and claws it was hiding. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was a sheet, and as offensive as any peice of fabric gets, which is to say not very. Certainly nothing was on it that could possibly be called an edge or a point. Yet it managed to leave a respectable hole in a coworker.

I have, over the years, been injured a lot at work. I once had someone remark to me after a long weekend, that she couldn't remember a week when I hadn't been cut or jabbed or otherwise hurt. For a relatively static job, that's something. But it is never the dangerous things that get me. Never knives, or falling objects, or, you know, stuff that happens near me that should by all rights send me to the hospital. So I have some regrettable experience with bleeding at my job. Usually it's from the things that shouldn't hurt me that I receive cuts. (Or falling out of things, but that is a story for another time.)

Don't believe me? Heh. In my tenure at the place I work (hereafter known as Soar), I have been cut or injured by many strange things. I have received minor cuts from balls, by blankets. I had to pry a splinter nearly half an inch long from a old wood toy out of my hand once. A pillow once made me bleed. I will bear the scar from a sofa to my dying day (its a small scar, but still. A sofa.) A coffee mug gave me a cut that took eleven stitches to close. Other minor injuries include doors and one very irritable chair. I have embedded small bits of glass in my flesh more than a few times, and there was that incident with the book.

Ever get a cut from a book's leather cover? I have.

I can take these. They don't bother me. Most have reasons behind them. The ball had glass embedded. (Glass hurts me often - as does ceremic.) The pillow, needles. The sofa did its work on me with a staple, and the full weight of its steel reinforced sleeper frame behind that staple digging in. The coffee mug shattered in my hand and a shard passed through the finger. The blanket...

Well, okay. No one knows how the damn blanket cut me. But that one is weird enough that it isn't pathetic, its more a file for the bizzare.

Seeing why, as weird as a sheet cutting someone, I am not more amazed?

The worst though, and the record of the oddest object to every cause a person to bleed? I still hold that one.

That's because, about a half a year ago I was cut by a Hello Kitty Pez Dispenser.

You read that right.

More, there was no conceivable way for it to cut me. It wasn't broken. No part of this thing was hard or pointed. There were no sharp edges. There were barely edges! I can't even recall corners that weren't rounded off. You could hand this to a kid, and he'd be safe from everything except eating Pez.

How the hell does one live down being injured by a Hello Kitty Pez Dispenser? I mean, its got a big cute rounded plastic cat head for chrissake.

This is the rock bottom of injuries. This makes paper cuts look noble.

Sorry, distracted.

Anyhow. Some places, it seems anything can be a surprise. Also, next time you get injured, stop and think, "Hey, as bad as this is, it could be worse. A sheet could have done this to me." Or, god forbid, a Hello Kitty Pez Dispenser.

Unless, of course, you think you can top it?

Isomnia

I do not like spring.

Well, perhaps that is an overstatement. I do not like spring as much as I do winter. Or autumn. Summer... I suppose it ties.

Yes, I like cold. Yes, I am allergic to mold, dust, and pollen, which makes spring a special kind of trial for me. Frankly, like most people allergic to large swathes of earth's plant life, I find a certain joy in morning frost. But more striking is the system shock of sudden warm nights, and what it does to my sleep schedual.

I have always been an insomniac. Not that bad of one, really. Exhaustion will usually get me a decent few hours of sleep a night. After a week the four to two hours a night catches up, and I get a real nice, long rest. Then there is the first month of Spring.

I don't sleep well in the heat. It tends to make me stay awake as, if not more, effectively than caffiene or pain.

Last night was warm. Last night, I did not sleep.

After dawn, I got about thirty minutes of sleep. I managed, through various means, to acquire forty more here and there during the commute and waiting for work to start. All of this was extremely shallow sleep. I doubt I got down to the lower layers of unconsciousness - little to no REM, and stage five sleep? Ha. Too scattered and desolute for that.

Then I got an eight and three quarter hour work shift.

It is days like this that I consider to be erosive to the soul. Certain incidents along the way were also very bad. Maybe we'll be exploring those later, but on exhaustion's edge they certainly didn't help.

I had a long day. I have now been awake approximately thirty three hours to an hour and fifteen minutes of sleep over the last two days.

But hey, got in that third blog post this week. All worship the schedual.

Anyhow, just checking in. Now I am going to go curl into a ball and go comatose somewhere. I hope.

Final Fantasy XIII Early Impressions

So sue me, I am desperately seeking a topic and I love me my video games.

Okay. So I knew that people would be not liking this game. I can see why. Final Fantasy XIII is a departure, even more so than usual. Which is the first thing that sends a fanbase into a rabid frenzy. Change something, alter a good formula, hell - switch artistic styles (look at the folks who raved lun about Wind Waker), and some group of the fanbase will start screaming an waving signs.

So, in a series that always changes something big time every time, they apparently decided XIII would be a lucky number to alter as many things as they could. I kid not. Battle system? Entirely different - only a couple other games that I have ever played is anything like it. Game combat is fast paced, largely automated (until it isn't - SURPRISE!), tactical in the extreme, occasionally unforgiving (read the tutorial that sort of makes sense, then figure the rest out), and resembles nothing else in the series. Hell, so far it only vaguely resembles anything in any series I have seen. It is terribly rigid in places that I am used to flexibility, and fluid where I am used to order. It keeps me on my toes, true, but it is also nearly a system shock. It is the familiarity equivilent of juggling on a moving mopad. I am sure it is very easy if I get used to it, but until then I shall enjoy careening about with the occasional 'incident'. I am enjoying the flow of the encounters (I think. Probably) and I still twitch a little. I am an accepting person.

In a bit more detail, the combat is... active. Ever play Dragon Age: Origins? It is almost nothing like that. But chances are, Dragon Age is the closest battle system to FFXIII you've ever played, so keep it in mind. All damage is healed between battles. There are no magic points, technique points, etc, your characters just do what they can. You imput skills to use for your leader, or have the computer figure a set on the fly - and your companions are technically entirely out of your control and doing whatever the heck they like. You have only the most marginal, theoretical control over what two thirds of your party is doing at any given time. Which occasionally leads to screaming at the fricken' incompetents. Meanwhile you are trying to juggle what roles they are supposed to be doing, whatever the character you are controlling is doing (What is my leader doing? Staring at the bad guys? Again? FRACK), and keeping track of sixteen other little details wizzing past. Plus, it is in HD. My TV is not HD. My TV is BD - stands for blurred definition. Damned if I can read half of what pops up on the screen. Of course, all dialogue is now spoken - no message windows - so that isn't as bad, but it makes battle information interesting (little bar says I am dying, I just wish I knew what the hell the little numbers up there said, little bar tell me what you are saying!) I can only imagine this gets better. I mean, it isn't like any of this is new. Okay, the paradigm thing is - and those roles are going to drive me bugscrew - but even they have some precident if you squint. But it is like the Constitution back in the 1700s. Nothing really new there, but put it all together and step back and go, 'Well then. That's gonna be interesting.' So. Combat is jarring, but it usually goes by fast before it drives you madder than staring into the face of Chluthu-

Can I see the fanbase shatter into a thousand pieces arguing about this? You betcha.

Also, the story. It's good qualities I will get to later. Let's talk about the bad, first.

This game is a rail RPG so far. Its a very, very good rail RPG. I am liking it. But RPGs, you usually expect to explore, to see the side road. To find your own strength. FFXIII? Welcome to point A. Look at the line. It will take you to point B. Have fun with that. The game is linear as a novel in its early stages. Interactive to a degree (and novels, whatever else, rarely go 'in this battle the team were horribly eviserated because the reader is an inattentive moron - go back two pages and read better next time') but you will be walking more or less forward a lot in this game. Primarily to get away from what is behind you, but there is nothing to either side, and every time I have doubts about this game, its because my gamer's instinct wants to go sideways. Wants to explore.

I can't. For everything I am enjoying, there is a limit to how much I can embrace walking from point A to B. Thankfully it is getting better the further I go, like combat. The first two chapters combat was not only the odd, rigid but fluid system that caught me flatfooted and still does, it was also exceedingly simple. Then fighting, lacking a better term, went bugscrew on me and I am still plumbing its new, strange depths. Hopefully sooner or later, the linearity will go bugscrew on me. Heck, FFVI - originally FFIII in America - was fairly linear right up until its entire second half where you basically had to sail off an island, get a ship, and destroy a madman gone god. Everything else was optional - including making sure that two thirds of your party survived the apocalypse, and getting ready to have a chance in hell of surviving the last place. In other words, half the dang game was optional. It was the plotline equivilent of a tree - fairly straight at the bottom where everything is trunk, then a sudden, vast branching. Final Fantasy Sidequest - and often considered best in the series. So, I am crossing my fingers that bugscrew linearity will happen again, in FFXIII. Here is hoping.

But to the good parts of the story, it is compelling. This is a fairly well realized world we are talking about here. There is depth and complexity in what is happening, and the fact that the game starts on what is essentially the thirteenth day after some mysterious ball started moving, it more or less whispers to you, "we now begin your game on hour fifty. Catch up or die." You join the story in media res as a conspiracy to massacre a city starts to fall apart as resistance and defiance and desperate last stands derail a holocaust already in motion. You follow a soldier and a pilot, who quickly are revealed to be strangers to each other, and uncomfortable companions at best, as they make their way across elevated rails and floating switchbacks, watching a doomed citizenry try to save themselves - too late, it seems - from a world that has suddenly become murderously hostile to them. The soldier, a caucasian woman with the assumed name of 'Lightning', and the pilot, a jive, gangy black man with a big afro housing a bird named Sahz, are helpless to do much beyond keep themselves alive. This is painful to Sahz, as much as he tries to hide it behind good cheer. He has got a reason, not yet voiced, to stay alive and free regardless of the cost and so follows the vetern fighter as she carves her way through the smoke and gunfire. Lightning - not so much pained by the tragedy around her. She's got bigger concerns... someone to save, something to kill.

Elsewhere, a young rowdy with a hero complex named Snow and his band of militia / amateur monster hunters have also broken out of their trains and become the core of one of the largest knots of resistance. He arms former citizens and leads them against and army. It is very brave and incredibly badly thought out - like much of what Snow does. He wins some victories. He gets a lot of people killed doing so. One of them is a middle aged mother. She saves his life. He can't return the favor. Her last words, a plea for him to save someone important to her, visibly break open the bravado that gets Snow through most of his waking hours. The wounds mends, but not entirely. Occasionally it breathes enough that you can see big, brash, impetuous Snow convulse with the scar of maturity.

Not far away, a teenager named Hope (a boy. I don't think school was much fun for him with that name) is watching, and sees Snow get his mother killed. This does bad things to Hope's mental equilibrium. He wants to give Snow a piece of his mind. Or maybe kill him. It is hard to tell, and not because it isn't clear. It's because Hope is a teenager, and the the whole marked for death thing was already blowing his mind. He isn't coping, and when wracked with rage or indecision, the way his entire world has crumbled rings through. Perching on his shoulder, egging him on and further mindscrewing him about every ten minutes, is a teenage girl named Vanille. She's a ditz, a flirt. She's jailbait and sunny innocence. She's also calculating. How much of what she appears to be is real, I don't know. But despite her many goofy, fluff brained actions, occasionally there is a very serious, very solemn narrator who clarafies points across the fourth wall. We the players need only to watch carefully, and we know it is her. But if that is the real her, then she's faking with her every moment in the party. The game lets the player know they've never seen Vanille's real face. Then let that thought slide away. I'm waiting for the payoff. I wonder if she's the villain.

Or maybe the real hero.

Anyhow, across this battlefield the five characters make their way. Hunted, shot at. Heading to the thing that caused it all - a divine/demonic being with the power to bind mortals to its will. Just encountering this thing doomed a whole city to being 'Purged', being massacred quietly. It can take anyone who comes near it, marking them with a geas, a task they must perform. Those who fail it become monstrousities. Those who serve it well are made into immortal stone. A bad bargain at best. Lightning wants to kill it. Snow wants to save someone from it. But if you reverse the names, you'd still be in the right. Sahz, Hope, Vanille? Complete strangers to each other, to those two. But drawn along.

Then bound together in a fell contract that will force them to function as a group for a purpose they can't even make out. Their world wanted them dead before they became tools for a monster, just on the off chance they might have been what they now certainly are.

This a well told tale so far. Even better with the characterizations, since all five characters have their own motives, their own personalities. They don't always work together well (or at all). These people don't know each other, and the dynamics of their group show it, and do so with a superb skill that sells all the rest. Party interact is pitch perfect, and it makes everything else click.

Most games tell stories. It is a large chunk of the point. That FFXIII has a story good enough that I am, currently, completely and totally fine with the alien architecture of the system, says a lot for it.

Granted, I am not that far in. Plenty of time for it to get better or worse.

Bad Signs for Romance

Stumbled across a book today. Been laying around in my reading pile, and its one of the odd ducks - not something I bought in my usual lines. It is one of the texts I picked up because it looked so different I just had to read it. In this case, because it sounds so quirkly. It is called 'How to Spot a Bastard By His Star Sign' and with a name like that you can bet it is not exactly a book which is overly rosy in its view of my gender. Basically it is joke astrology, pointing out just how men of each sign are horrible wrecks of humanity, broken in truly terrible ways. And how to romance them, or at least resign oneself to the best of a bad lot. As literature goes, it skates close enough to the gender line that, if it was a man writing about women, chances are it would procede the lynching of some male author somewhere. It is irreverent, spiteful, and you can read enough disgruntlement in some chapters that you think this is less a joke than therapy after some truly spectacular bad relationships.

I find it hilarious.

Particularly as I am a Virgo. Usually this, astrology wise, sees me pegged as... excuse me, going to go to one of my lifelines for this - ah, yes, as 'very picky, shy, smart and very self critical' (thanks Moony! [was sort of hoping perceptive was in there somewhere {sigh}])

How was I to know that I was more? Romantically, at least. Virgos, as described by the book, are one good push from obsessive serial killers. That's right folks. I (and approximately twelve percent of the male population) am apparently Dexter - or at least a trundling cart heading down the hill in that direction. Not to mention that I apparently have some obsession with ice picks I never knew about (wow, you really do learn something new about yourself every day, huh?). Cough. Anyway. I am a budding socio/psycopath (well, at least it proves that all those people who think that my smile is creepy right). I don't quite believe it, but the authors gave a convienent checklist to see just how much the Virgo is, well, Virgoian. Let's see how I stack up!


Item one:
"[Virgo bastards] enjoy repeating the same tedious task in the same mind-numbing fashion."

Um. Okay. They've seen me at work.

Well, that's not fair. I don't enjoy that. But I will occasionally take up a 'tedious' or far more often a pointless task, and repeat it ad nauseum. I will admit to sometimes enjoying this. Even data entry. That's right. You heard me. Occasionally I enjoy data entry. Does that make me so evil?!?

....

On second thought, don't answer that. Moving on!

Item two:
"[Virgo bastards] have an unhealthy obsession with the little details - details normal people can't be bothered with because they've got lives."

Okay. Fair enough. I'll give them that one.

I do have a life though. It just isn't... very exciting. At times. But details are good! There is a devil in them too, apparently. Cough. Anyhow, anyone who doesn't pay attention to details is just asking to be caught by one someday and I am just digging the pit deeper so moving on -

Item three:
"[Virgo bastards are] too thick-skinned to notice people crossing to the opposite side of the street when they see [them]."

UNTRUE. A: Only once has anyone ever done that. Twice, max. And I am old enough that such a thing means - oh, wait, are we counting instances of this that happen on Halloween? Okay, then people do that to me a lot. But only on a certain holiday, and they're scared-y cats anyway! Maybe it is the creepy laugh. The trench coat. The axe. But seriously, most people have a lot more folks running screaming from them than I do. Also B: We aren't thick-skinned at all.

Do this to a real Virgo of either gender, and we'll obsess about it. For days.

Item four:
"[Virgo bastards] write checklists to ensure that [we] do everything [we] keep threatening to do."

No...

But...

My, what a fascinating idea.

... ahem... Later, later.

Anyhow, as you can see I only fit half of these which means I am either not yet a perfect Virgo (bummer) or not a bastard (internet quizes have lied to me!?) or the authors are wrong (le gaspe!). Which is sorta depressing. Particularly as the dangerous, edge of murder Virgo they describe has a better social life than I currently do. (Let's not explore that.) Certainly a better romantic life. And more ice picks.

I wish I had an ice pick.

I will have to explore this further. There may be wisdom to be gained from this. Still, food for thought...


(Author's note. This blog post contains quotes from 'How to Spot a Bastard By His Star Sign' by Adele Lang & Susi Rajah, copyright 2002, from St. Martin's Press. It's a funny book, and highly amusing even if you are [perhaps especially if you are] an actual male bastard. Go buy it. And if you are Adele Lang or Susi Rajah - please don't sue me)