a girl's work is never done

[freckles_and_doubt]

There are, alas, actual disadvantages to a lovely five-day trip away to mingle with my academic tribe at a conference - not only the rigours of the plane trip (although, I have to say, the regimen of leaping up two-hourly to wave my feet around meant that I arrived far less stiff, tired, sore and swollen-ankled than I usually do), but the rude shock of arriving back to the rigours of the bloody day job. We're in the first couple of days of exams. The procession of students through my door is more or less continuous, which is making me very, very grumpy, as is the fact that a lot of what I'm doing for them is simplistic form-signing scut-work. Quite a come-down from the rarefied altitudes of academic discourse.

Of course, the non-scut-work portions, the actual advice, are at this time of year rife with pity and terror rather than boredom. Mostly, what I can't stand is the way in which my phone calls and my office and my inbox are infested by people whose interaction with me is entirely defined by demand. Either they're asking the impossible and being resentful when I can't produce it, or they're shouting at me about how the system is my fault, or they're simply sitting there, dumbly exerting the giant weight of expectation which says I'm supposed to sort their lives out, get onto it, because nothing else I could possibly be doing could possibly be more important. I spent an unfortunate proportion of today slightly hysterical under the relentlessness of it all.

Fortunately, for that there's Mass Effect 3, which is somewhat enjoyable escapism even given that it took me three and a half hours and excavating about 8 forum discussions for three separate plans of attack before I was able to persuade the wretched thing to install from the disks instead of downloading the whole 10 gig from Origin. DRM, cuss spit. Also, my early impression is that the third iteration of the game is more than slightly lobotomised compared to the first two. But that might be the work annoyance talking. I shall certainly pursue this line of enquiry at unnecessary length at a later date. Now, however, I have to re-seduce Kaidan, who's being stubbornly annoyed with me, and subdue these damned Reapers. I'll take it.

Comments

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

I shall be watching your ME3 progress with great interest. DRM hackptui, indeed.

Also, I did not find it lobotomized in terms of story at all. I don't know if you mean in terms of gameplay, since the controls are probably very different for the PC version.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

"Lobotomised" is probably a bit strong, but it's a simpler interface, yes, and cuts out a lot of potentially interesting bits like hacking and bypass and what have you. Basically, you hits your things with gunses, or biotics, and that's about it.

[pinkthulhu.livejournal.com]

There was a massive outcry about the ending of ME3. I don't know if your experience will differ. I've not played it, unfortunately. Are you playing as male Shep?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Nope, always girly in my avatar choices. I find a very strange disconnect if I play a male avatar: a female one I think of as "me", a male one as "him". I'm much happier, for example, being a male character if I have to do thieving or assassination, because it's clearly not me doing it.

Dammit, I absolutely have to dig out some of the psych crit on gamer identifications. It's completely fascinating to me.