Vorlonesque

I'm still Gen1 and I have over 100 hours playing the thing according to Origin!

I should mention last year I played through ALBW...and it was like childhood all over again...a new overhead Zelda game right before Christmas and one that evoked memories of LttP! I even stupidly bought a Gold Zelda themed 3DS to replace my red one because it looked awesome (and I wanted to give my mom my old one). In terms of Christmas food we usually have Turkey and Ham...so its basically Thanksgiving 2: This Time With Presents and Trees!

For me, Zelda games have become a Christmas tradition since I first got Link to the Past for my birthday as a kid (my birthday is in early December) and played through it and finished it days before Christmas...taking a break to put up the tree and decorate it and then going back to play somehow managed to link (no pun intended) those two things together in my mind. A couple years later Link's Awakening came out and I ended up getting it for my birthday as well, and sometimes I played it under the tree at night with the blinking lights and my off-brand Lightboy illuminating my Gameboy (I also played it in the car when we were Christmas shopping on the day a particularly bad (in my memory at least) snow storm hit...my dad was getting a haircut in Buchannon WV, and we then went to Clarksburg to shop at the mall and Toys R Us for relatives and I played the game in the car for the long drives back and forth...I beat the Genie boss with the bottle that day). Every year before Christmas I usually try to fit some Zelda in somewhere...this year I'm finally getting around to playing through the 3DS remake of Ocarina of Time along with maybe playing through Link's Awakening again (now that I have it in COLOR on my 3DS via the eShop VC stuff). DOOM is tied to Halloween for me, and Zelda to Christmas. Here's a picture of my Aunt's Golden Retriever after playing with my little cousin's all day last Christmas Eve...they wore her out! 5 minutes later she bounced back and was ready to play some more! http://i.imgur.com/LMtEInp.jpg Edit: i just realized that first picture could be photoshopped with some empty beer bottles to look like the after effects of a doggy bender!

What if attacking too many animals too often in to short a time would result in a horde of angry chickens descending upon you and pecking you to death ala LttP (though with shades of The Birds)? OR perhaps the abominable Swamp-Thing would show up and murder your character while giving a monologue about nature and the environment.

I think the Seventh Seal pic may be my favorite.

It kind of makes sense given how much Mel Brook's previous classic monster movie parody (Young Frankenstein) was shaped by the old Frankenstein movies of the 30's.

I enjoyed the first season when it aired. It wasn't my one of my favorite shows at the time...but it was fun stuff that was occasionally really good. I think it was with Durka Returns that it really got rolling...that was a really good episode and after it every episode was solid...and then I think "Nerve" and "Hidden Memory" were what really cemented Farscape as one of my favorite shows. Those two episodes took everything that was good going through the first season and wove them together really effectively while actually changing things up dramatically. They also introduced a great villain and made all the characters we'd been following miserable in new and exciting ways!

I didn't notice consciously but I kept getting a weird fascist/racist/skinhead/nazi vibe from the whole thing for some reason and I wonder if that was why. I didn't notice directly because I was really so put off by the whole thing that I was actually backing away from it and slowly moving my mouse to close the tab in my browser...I couldn't even watch the whole video...it was just bad.

Through the whole monologue I kept thinking "no this can't be real, this has to be a joke, no one is this self-unaware...I mean the voice over, the dialogue, its all laughably bad in such an on the nose way that it has to be parody." I half-way expected him to leave his hovel, and outside it would be a colorful bright 2d art landscape and he'd climb atop a unicorn and go flying through rainbows and smiling clouds fighting dragons just to fuck with the audience...but no it wasn't a joke. The violence was actually disturbing and unsettling...and if they were actually going for that to make a statement in another sort of game that wouldn't be a bad thing...but in this context it feels more like it was just the sort of thing the folks making this thought people would enjoy somehow. I think there is a difference between shooting rockets at a guy on a Quake Live server or gunning down guys shooting back at you on a battlefield in some military shooter and putting a gun in the mouth of an unarmed person begging for mercy and pulling the trigger.

This image may be what I'm thinking of...which would be the Queen xenomorph from Aliens I think...and even there they maybe just look clear-ish to me for some weird reason. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wyh4kQdM4ck/U9V66ApADTI/AAAAAAAAMis/CCgcdbwh6m8/s1600/alienqueenface.png Edit: and even if they are clear I think I must have somehow "retconned" my memory of the original xenomorph from Alien in my mind to have the same teeth (and probably never paid that much attention to it in the movie...for some reason the Queen Alien's teeth are something that stuck in my head I guess). I watched both movies sooooo many times (particularly in college when I first had a combo DVD player/CD-RW writer (made by Iomega if memory serves and I'm nearly certain of that...would have bought it in either late 1999 or early 2000) in my PC and watched the handful of movies I bought over and over because it was so neat being able to watch movies on my PC in my dorm room...and being able to watch DVDs was new to me since I didn't have an actual player for the TV at home or at college). I don't think I've watched Alien in probably 10 years (I watched bits and pieces of Aliens when my brother got the BluRay recently (a couple years ago) for Christmas...but that was more just wondering into the room to watch it a bit here and there...but watching the whole thing was probably around the same time as Alien). I ought to rewatch them here since its been so long and this seems like the ideal time of year to do so. Damn that tangent/edit was longer than I meant it to be. On the topic at hand, I'm probably going to wait until I'm over this cold or flu or whatever virus I have right now to play Alien Isolation, as I want to play with the oculus rift and I can't with my nose running like a faucet...and even without the rift I probably wouldn't enjoy it getting up every few minutes (or less) to blow my nose...I'm surprised I managed to play Quake Live and Titanfall that way today. I'm also a little bummed that Isolation is so long...it seems like 5 hours would be the sweet spot for that given that its working to maintain suspense...I wonder if that was something the designers really wanted or if it was seen as a necessity for a AAA game. I don't mind long games every so often, but the kind of game Isolation is seems to work better as a short solid experience (in theory at least, as I haven't played the game). I actually like story driven games in general to really be shorter...as I end up coming back to them weeks later and forget where I am...there are exceptions of course, but even those exceptions leave me trying to put together the puzzle pieces of what I was doing the last time I played when I take a break from a game.

I think I must have misread the reflections on the teeth in a scene as being behind the teeth instead of the opposite...everything I look up looks silver so yeah...I have this weirdly vivid image in my head that's wrong...its weird how memory works.

I always thought its teeth were clear. Edit: Kinda like teeth some of these guys have: http://scienceheathen.com/2014/05/18/deep-sea-fish-black-dragonfish-long-nosed-chimaera-blobfish-hatchet-fish-giant-oarfish-barreleye-fish-sloanes-viperfish-etc/

I'm posting this from a moving car on I-79 on my way to a 6 month Doctor's appointment (I'm not driving so no need to worry (about that at least)...my Mom has the same allergist in Pittsburgh and its a 2 hour drive so we always make our appointments on the same day and car pool down there to save gas). Since its rare that I'm able to use the internet like this from a car (and I only got a data plan back in 2013), it always blows my mind that I have internet like this on the go...it's like the future! I'm going past Fairmont, WV now. Edit: made corrections...I'm typing on a tablet so its hard to type in a moving vehicle. Going past Morgantown now.

Having read the slate article sarah argobot (sorry if I mispelled that...I really should go to bed right now but I keep typing things and reading things for some reason) on the affirmative consent bill in California, I can't see any reason to be against the bill...its seems like a good idea (or to quote my Mom "a no-brainer"). Its not destroying the presumption of innocence integral to our legal system...its simply defining consent as what it actually is CONSENT! Its basically providing a better workable definition of consent so that (as was mentioned earlier) maybe more rapists might actually be successfully prosecuted. It makes sense and looking at it without having some sort of weird knee-jerk "but what if?" reaction I can't see any downside to it. On a side note...I can remember when Jerry Brown ran against Bill Clinton in the Democratic Primary back when I was a kid...damn that was a long time ago! Edit: Ok, I checked and I didn't mispell sarah argobot's username...I'm always paranoid that I'm going to do that anytime I'm typing someone's user name (either through mistyping or autocorrect).

I was both in the gifted program (I had a higher than average IQ) and LD (learning disabilities)...they eventually figured out that I had ADHD (and I really do...it took me a while to figure out how to fucking concentrate on things). Grade school was basically hell for me, junior high started off worse and slowly got tolerable and then better...and then something clicked in high school and things started to fall into place as I finally figured out how to deal with my ADHD and I was lucky to have some really good teachers. I did have to work my ass off at times, and I learned that I couldn't trust what I thought I heard or understood at all and that I had to always second guess myself because I would miss details if I didn't or I would just hear things "wrong." I also sort of put my social life on hold because I didn't want to distract myself from studying since I had to do more of it (especially early on...later I got better at it, but I would obsessively over-study no matter how well I knew the material). All that said it was more or less luck than anything else in my case...I happened to have parents who took the right approach in my case, I happened to have a lot of good teachers who helped me, and lots of other factors (including a lot I'm not even aware of I'm sure, along with socioeconomic stuff or whatever...I mean if my family was poorer it would have been harder for my parents to get me the right help just to give one of many examples). Edit: I would add that they took me out of the LD program in 8th grade I think (and they were decreasing my involvement in that all along)...the gifted program wasn't so much a thing in high school either. One of my best teachers who was my gifted teacher in middle school ended up teaching an AP Physics course an hour before school started for college credit when the high school dropped their physics course. She was awesome...she and the chemistry teacher fought hard to get a local college to come in and offer the course (which she taught), because they believed that having a physics course was valuable for us. I remember getting up early to get into school a little over an hour early to take an extra class every day that semester...and then every week we'd have a lab one night where we would come back in at 5:00pm and do a lab that would run until 7:00pm or 8:00pm (I can't remember for certain...that would have been in fall 1997...so its been a loooong time ago).

What about a Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy (or Zelda) game where the shop keepers are all just one guy who has to follow the hero(s) around and show up at the shop before they arrive and then pretend to be a different but identical looking shopkeeper.

This oddly sounds like a lot of news coverage here in the US (with the exception of a handful of sources that have specific leanings and thus split things into "us and them" or "good vs evil" but I'm not going to name any names...you might remember one of them having issues with Mass Effect though).

DOOM is one of my Halloween traditions. I always play some DOOM of some sort on Halloween. Last year was all about DOOM2...year before I finally finished Episode 4 (They Flesh Consumed). I think this year I'll maybe try to play through Final DOOM or maybe marathon through DOOM2 or something. I usually play some online DOOM with ZDaemon or Zandorum (I think the year before last I played a lot of CTF on all sorts of weird custom maps with ZDaemon). I also like playing Costume Quest, Left 4 Dead (1&2), and the Quakes on Halloween...but DOOM is a must...ever since I played it that lonely Halloween night waiting for someone to show up and trick or treat at our door in the middle of no where while my Mom played the Dark Shadows theme on our record player and lit a couple candles (I think they were black candles) when I was a kid in the 90's. That same night I think I finally beat Eye of the Beholder and then beat it without using the trap through persistence! That game was a few years old when I bought it...but I really wanted to beat the thing and kept at it until I finally did. Never did beat EoB2 though...got stuck on some pressure plate puzzle.

I decided to replace Evil Kosh with Good Kosh for now. I might go back to Evil Kosh eventually...but I'm in a Good Kosh mood and I use Good Kosh everywhere else that has avatars.

It made me cringe every time I saw it for that reason (among others). That's something that if you've ever had any safety training or have ever handled a gun in the presence of people who are even remotely concerned about safety that is drilled into your head. If you follow those four rules accidents are really unlikely and when I see people not following those it makes me really nervous because that is when bad shit happens. I also cringe whenever I'm watching a movie and a person is running with their finger on the trigger...that's a good way to have a negligent discharge.

I have to admit...imagining that immediately triggering a Bink screaming video face made me laugh way more than I should have. Tbh...the screaming face thing for some reason always strikes me as hilarious!

It might fall under False Equivalence in some way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence I think the biggest problem with it (the "everyone's a victim" argument) is that it ignores numbers...in order to make that argument you have to show that statistically the victimization is happening to all people at about the same rate (I'm probably wording that wrong...my brain isn't firing on all cylinders this morning). If a group of people are more victimized than others then the "everyone's a victim" argument falls flat.

This is why on various issue I'm not a fan of people getting angry because somebody hasn't spoken out on a specific issue...not everyone is informed on everything and sometimes its best to wait until you do know about an issue before you speak. I've occasionally opened my mouth on various things without all the facts and it always goes badly I've found...so I agree that sometimes saying "I don't know" is the best response. We've sort of been taught or conditioned or whatever that we should always have an opinion on things even if we aren't informed...that its important to form some sort of opinion. I've found its actually far more useful to sometimes just say "I don't know enough to have an opinion on this...ask me later, I need to do some reading." Even then its soooo fucking tempting to just jump in and go with "your gut" and that often goes really badly because you either A: end up locked into and invested in some half-formed view you won't back away from regardless of what new information you get, or B: you end up realizing you chose a terrible position on an issue you knew little about and you now regret that. I've done this often enough to know it never goes well and sometimes its best to wait and think before I jump in...but on the internet it seems especially easy to just jump in anyway because its so quick and easy to do. On the issue of false equivalence I think that a lot of people tend to be bad at weighing levels of wrongness. People have this weird tendency of seeing imperfection as equal to wrongness. You see that someone whose on one "side" of an argument saying something wrong or doing something bad, and on the other side you see a lot of people doing really mind-breakingly wrong fucked up shit...and I think some people go "oh those are both not perfect and therefore wrong" without realizing those aren't equal things. People also suck at realizing that someone can say something shitty while still being factually correct...because one person out of the many saying "hey the harassment and misogyny going on is fucked up and wrong" might also say or do something that is arguably shitty or wrong doesn't mean that their statement about misogyny is somehow wrong...or that whatever they did is somehow equal to all that fucking harassment committed by a whole shitload of people on the other side of the argument. It basically comes down to some folks seeing that people on both side of an argument are imperfect and then making the fallacious illogical jump to the conclusion that both sides are equally wrong or bad as though its a binary value. Edit: I changed my text for the A: and B: thing because a 'b' followed by a ')' creates an emoticon which I for some reason didn't think of as I was typing this

When I first watched bits and pieces of Sarkeesian's videos I was kind of skeptical...and my reaction to anything is to pick it apart and nitpick...but I've pretty much come around now (especially with this last video). I think the fact that I'm not that familiar with this kind of critical study/analysis means its going to seem odd to me at first and it took me a while to wrap my mind around what it was. The thing is...even if I didn't like the videos at all I probably wouldn't be voicing that too much; because I don't feel like giving the asshats who are harrassing her any ammunition. I feel like they've poisoned the well to the point where its difficult to have any sort of discussion about her videos...and that's sad because instead of having any sort of thought provoking discussion about anything these guys have made the whole thing about them and their harrassment of Anita Sarkeesian. I feel sick that any converstation about Tropes vs Women in Video Games will inevitably have to mention these assholes and their repugnant actions...and it feels like they're "winning" just by distracting from the conversation about TvWiVG. Edit: I would add that my reaction is pretty much irrelevant...I just threw it in there to illustrate my personal experience. I often find that with this stuff what I don't know drastically outweighs what I do. I'm not very familiar with critical studies and I had to become a little more familiar to form any sort of opinion.

It still has interesting movement options to differentiate itself. I don't use the Titans all that often because I want to be running routes and going fast. Its not Tribes or Quake fast (sadly)...but I do find it fun just to move around in the game.