freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with mad gaming

It's been a horribly busy week, full of stress and angst. (Exam results came out yesterday. Can you tell?). Saturday was another bloody migraine, fortunately prevented by Judicious Drugs from reaching the throwing-up stage, but rife with nausea and aura and the need to lie flat for several hours instead of attending bakercourt's wedding, an omission about which I am still gnashing my teeth. I'm still all pale and headachey and migraine-hungover, and even without that still tire incredibly easily, which means I'm boot-strapping my way through running today's multiple year-end progression checking training sessions via judicious application of chocolate, Earl Grey and energy drinks, and snarling at the last-minutenesses of students. (Couldn't find V, am desolated to report that Spike tastes worse than Red Bull, and has left a thin film of metallic ick over my teeth, as though I've been slugging mercury).

However! Let us die or be upbeat! By way of retaining such remnants of sanity and positive thought as are left to me, I record for posterity the various random validations which have been vouchsafed to me over the last couple of days.

In the Department of Self-Indulgent Piano Noodling, spent a happy half hour on Sunday haxOring the correct chords to Paul McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights", which I don't think I've actually heard since the 8Os, but which is, once you've listened to it four times on YouTube and uttered little shrieks of enlightenment at the chord changes, actually a rather lovely tune. That man wrote ridiculously catchy music, which I generally can't hear without thinking about the Hitch-Hiker's Guide bit about happy, lilting, tuneful songs, and Paul McCartney, if he'd written them, wondering what to buy with the proceeds, and thinking probably Essex. Also, power ballads on piano are indecent amounts of florid, sumptuous fun to play.
Skyrim, while absorbing and beautiful and addictive, is also ridiculously crashy. When I tried, this morning, to get in my designated half-hour of play before rushing off to work, it had developed, overnight, a perfectly new and spontaneous bug which crashed it instantly the moment I tried to load a saved game. Any saved game. Aargh. This caused much chewing of the furniture and a small, doomladen cloud of blue curse words, followed by ten minutes on Google. The gathered wisdom of the ancients (i.e. geeky types in the last two weeks) prompted me to updated my DirectX (was unnecessary, have the up-to-date version), update my graphics card drivers (needed new version, but didn't fix problem), and then reboot, whereupon the crash problem was no more. I love doing that. However minor a victory it is, it fills me with feelings of instrumentality and competence and geeky joy.
After this morning's training jaunt, in which I was probably lucid and coherent until the last fifteen minutes, the Deputy Dean sent me a joyously unprompted little email congratulating me on an excellent session and my "gift for presenting complex material in a lucid and succinct fashion". He cced it to the Dean. I feel like a smug kitty who's just been scratched on precisely the right spot behind the ears. *purrs*. Also, if they only knew how much of my "gift for presenting complex material in a lucid and succinct fashion" is the direct result of DMing complicated rpg systems like Rolemaster and briefing DMs for tournament modules, they'd ... well, probably be very confused. And surprised. And oddly less approving.

Gosh, that was a good exercise, I have validated myself into a much better mood. To round it off, have a gratuitous and wonderful chunk of Middleman fanfic, written with absolute authenticity and deliriously Middlesque language by the unpronounceable Javier Grillo-Marxuach himself, and notable for its ability to solve one of the most perplexing issues of our day, namely how to phonetically render the noise made by the TARDIS taking off. Fudgety-Bow-Wow, Dubbie!

Current Mood: hopped on guarana
Current Music: Paul McCartney in my head

The knell of blogdoom the internets over is the moment when one's mother asks, with polite parental concern, why one hasn't been blogging to the regular (slightly obsessive) schedule. Oops, busted. The reasons for my recent non-bloggery are many and varied, but mostly it's because I've spent the last week solid playing Skyrim, the sequel to Oblivion. It's probably fortunate that the inexorable roll of time sent me back to work this morning, only semi-fatigued and vaguely functional, otherwise I might still be spending twelve hours a day bashing my way around its Vikingoid, very beautiful and snow-encrusted haunts.

Skyrim and its immediate ancestors are the fantasy, sword-wielding, magic-slinging, hack-and-slash equivalent to a first-person shooter, but with far stronger RPG elements - character class specialisation, rather a nifty experience/level system, the occasional need for a moral choice in a quest outcome. As a substitute for the intricate companion interactions of Dragon Age it ain't up to much, not least because I really have no compelling desire to unpick it analytically via the medium of bloggery. However, some observations:

Glory, but its landscapes are exquisite. I love that I can bash my way off across the countryside in any direction, with only the minor impediment of meticulously-detailed precipices, canyons, fortress walls and those bloody ice trolls to prevent me, while stumbling over an apparently endless plethora of random mini-quests. The countryside is unreasonably beautiful, whether tundra or snowscape or forest or cave, and the level of detail on plants and stones and what have you is exquisite.
Its people, conversely, simply look weird. Possibly I'm over-habituated to the unreasonably beautiful visual aesthetic of Dragon Age, but somewhere in the bowels of the setting there appears to be a check-box labelled "Enable gnarly troglodyte people", and it's resolutely checked. Their Elves are ugly. Their Elves! How can you have ugly Elves? It's against all nature. But it explains why they don't employ a romance option. No-one's attractive enough.
Fundamentally, one makes a living in these settings by wandering around the countryside finding graves, ancient burial chambers and lost-civilisation ruins to rob, an activity rendered only mildly non-trivial by the screaming hordes of undead, bandits and renegade necromancers. However, I still cannot bring myself to steal things from the living. Fortunately the game labels all illegal theft objects in red, so they're easy to avoid.
The equivalent of the Morrowind cliff racer, i.e. "low-grade monster most likely to make me squeak by sneaking up behind me to attack unexpectedly", is the skeever, a sort of hefty rat thing whose tails are useful in alchemy. They're weeny, but nasty because they attack below knee level where I can't see them and have usually gnawed me for a reasonable total of Tiny Animal Crits (non-Rolemaster players move along, nothing to see here) before I've worked out what's happening.
I must say, publically and with resolute definition, that the mouse-controlled looking around is an abomination unto Nuggan. I seem to be hard-wired to key movement, which means I lack all control and finesse with the mouse. This isn't too much of an issue until I'm in a combat with multiple enemies, at which point I absolutely lose track of where everyone is and "wild swings" doesn't begin to cover it. There's a reason why I never hire hirelings. It's not worth the swearing as, yet again, I accidentally decapitate one. Also, the game balance is weird. I'm playing on the lowest level of difficulty, and still find certain combats horribly challenging, possibly owing to aforementioned lack of mouse skills. But killing dragons is easy. Go figure.
I love buying houses. And furnishing houses. And filling the houses up with random bits of stuff I procured during aforementioned grave-robbing expeditions and can't bear to sell because they look cool. (Troll skulls! The glowy axe I refuse to give to the Daedra lord on the grounds that he's evil and the quest pissed me off. Dwemer centurion dynamo! It glows!). Survey says I'm probably a girl. However, the logic and interface of putting things down, particularly in specific places, has been directly imported from Oblivion without any much-needed refinements, and consequently blows goats.
This game is craft-ridden to an extent which makes me ridiculously happy. You don't just pick up ingredients to make potions, you find ore to make armour, or tan the hides of the creatures you kill for leather, and then improve the items to increase their value and efficacy. Then you enchant them, at vast expense and difficulty. If you wander around with a pickaxe in your backpack you may stumble around veins of ore which you can merrily mine, before refining in a smelter. I think the SCA has infected me unduly, I adore this aspect of the game.
Skyrim bards only know three songs, one of them scurrilous and the other given to radical re-interpretation depending on whether the town/singer supports the Empire or the rebellion. You don't hear the third much, which is a pity because it's beautiful, hauntingly Nordic-sounding and, unlike the first two, actually good.
I am very happy with this game, but I have to say its habit of randomly crashing several times a day for no reason is rather mitigating the immersion experience. Dammit.

My first day back at work was, for some reason probably not unconnected to guilt levels, ridiculously productive. However, I'm dead. I think this fatigue thing still needs management. Probably by playing Skyrim self-indulgently. Alas.

Current Mood: vaguely Viking

Oh, dear, it's that time of year again: the time when a giant fun-run of some sort comes pounding past my bedroom window at 6am on a Sunday, causing really quite transcendent quantities of sleepy swearing, and a wistful longing for caltrops. They never bloody warn us about it, possibly in perfectly rational fear of the caltrop response. The road outside is all festooned with cheery, inspirational billboards inciting runners to greater heights in the name of health and charity, which as far as I'm concerned they absolutely don't need, being ridiculously cheery as it is. Nothing like wakening from a sound slumber to the strains of pounding feet, panting, and loud, jolly interchanges of exhortation and mutual support. Bastards. On the other hand, about half of the posters opposite our gate appear to have been ripped from their backing, which suggests that some of the runners find the slogans the precise opposite of inspirational. Heh.

It was all doubly ironic this year, as I'd just hung a new curtain in one half of my bedroom window, its darker fabric a deliberate attempt to cut out more light so I can sleep later in the mornings. Doomed. Sod's law for you.

Right, annual mini-rant over. I shall now return to the bosom of Dragon Age II, which I have rediscovered under the twin spurs of not enough sleep/concomitant lack of brain, and vague political interest. I'm playing a male Hawke, as I'm interested in seeing how it changes companion and NPC interactions. Today's fascinating geo-political ramification: apparently I'm much happier with playing non-Lawful-Good if the avatar is male. This is undoubtedly about reduced levels of identification, I caught myself thinking "Gosh, this guy looks like a bit of a bastard, let's go with the smugglers this time round." Hmmm. I suspect Anders gets knifed, too, if I last that long. Fascinating.

In other news, the house smells deliciously of gammon simmering in cider, in preparation for ham rolls to have with popcorn movies this evening. Rude awakenings notwithstanding, I am having a Good Day.

Current Mood: sleepy but content

When I went to see my doctor last week in re the exhaustion levels, I subliminally expected her to tell me to buck up, stop whinging and simply get on with my life, taking it slightly easy if at all possible until I'd regenerated some health. (It's easier in Dragon Age). The result of her unexpectedly concerned response is to somehow have given me permission to be ill: "take a week and a half off work" appears to have allowed me to stop pretending I'm not exhausted all the time, as a result of which I'm rather more than semi dead and very, very glad I don't have to drag myself up to campus. The mind is an odd thing. Also, her image choice ("you're starting to live off your capital") is really sticking with me in an extremely cautionary way. Things To Do This Week: rest. Also, wrestle boss in re extended leave.

Since ill health is boring, have some linkery of various degrees of joyous-makingness, depending on your personal proclivities.

For dance fans, fashion fans and fans of very nifty editing, this ad may hit your buttons with the cheerful octopoid multitudinosity with which it hits mine.
For players of Dragon Age II, particularly the girly ones, Fenris cosplay! Amazing costume, and the dude has the necessary level of elven emaciation going, but I have to say, the I Have My Arm Around Felicia Day Effect notwithstanding, he's way too cheerful for strict verisimilitude.
For music lovers of approximately the same vintage as me, and/or who cherish a fondness for 80s dance music, Goth or New Wave, She Wants Revenge. I had never heard of She Wants Revenge before matociquala linked it. How did that happen? It's like Bauhaus mated with Sisters of Mercy and had the offspring raised by Depeche Mode. It seem to make it slightly redundant to have actually gone through the 80s.

Watch on YouTube

In other slightly happy-making news, the problem with Winona seems actually to be the On switch. If I dig my fingernails under it I can persuade the thing to switch on for about five seconds and start to boot up, although it won't stay on. I don't want to fiddle any further because the rapid on/off cycling can't be good for the hard drive, but at least I have a diagnosis, if not a solution.

Current Mood: buggered, but content
Current Music: Lucretia My Reflection, in my HEAD!

There is no moment when I'm happier or more myself than when I'm prowling around a classroom, such as today, refereeing a spirited discussion of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" for 20 voluble and intelligent second-years. Lovely tut: I'm still buzzing. So we were dealing in some detail with the Victorian context, and the use of supernatural symbol to explore the desires and anxieties of the age, and in particular Stevenson's presentation of the classically Victorian dichotomies of "good" and "evil" through the figure of Hyde and Jekyll's complicity with him. At which point the discussion takes this sharp right turn:

CHATTY STUDENT (musingly): It's like when you're playing Mass Effect, and you score points for good or evil choices which affect the way your character is viewed, and the direction of events.

ME (surprised and pleased, but attempting to remain suave and professional): Why, yes. *inserts well-directed contextualisation contrasting Victorian views of morality with those of our contemporary age as reflected in computer games, avoiding, with consummate self-control, the word "postmodern"*

ANOTHER, EQUALLY CHATTY STUDENT: Actually, I think the Victorian view is more like Fable. Mass Effect has a lot of grey areas and points where the moral choice is not clear-cut.

ME (trying to repress flashbacks to the last few months of Dragon Age and related rants): Valid point, that's Bioware for you. Although I think that Stevenson is actually problematising the clear-cut dichotomies of Victorian morality... *reigns in and directs resulting melee of input without mentioning Dragon Age more than five times*

I should point out that my seminar, in a somewhat interesting intensification of the usual Humanities Demographic Effect, includes nineteen young ladies, one gentleman, and me. All gaming input up to this point has come from the young ladies.

SOLE GENT (raising hand hesitantly): Um, is this actually happening? I'm in a room full of women and they all game?

A quick poll suggests that they don't all game, but, in fact, seven of the nineteen do, indeed, game quite seriously. Eight if you count me. Subsequent discussions managed to remain bizarrely on the Jekyll and Hyde topic while simultaneously haring off in the direction of doubles, masks, the Hulk, superheroes generally, TwoFace, the doppelganger effect in The Vampire Diaries, and a brief and lateral attempt to get me to commit to whether playing computer games gives free reign to your Dark Side in the same way that taking a potion and releasing Hyde does. (For the record: no).

On the slightly disconcerting side, apparently Dragon Age is determined to colonise all areas of my life, however unlikely. On the upside, the gender balance of geekdom has changed radically in the last five or six years, is all I can say. And a good thing too.

Current Mood: buzzed

Aargh. You were right,

dicedcaret, I hadn't actually watched the last episode of this season of Castle. I watched it last night, to fill the void left by having finished Dragon Age II, a rant on which subject is forthcoming, watch this space. In the Castle department, woe, and angst, and trauma, and tragedy, and yet again, cruel fate intervening in indefinitely-delayed declarations of love. Am currently contemplating how to use the debris on my desk (four defunct rechargeable AAA batteries, small aquamarine plastic mirror with obscure branding, gorgeous purple knitted owl gloves courtesy

first_fallen, tub of vanilla body butter, ceramic cat with flower pattern, pile of parental wedding photos) to construct time machine for sooner consumption of the first episode of the next season, because aargh, and I really need to see how they write themselves out of this one. Also, if you're not watching Castle, get onto it. It's cute and fluffy and funny and Nathan Fillion is adorable, and then every now and then it blindsides you with an emotional blow to the solar plexus, and other mixed metaphors. Solar plexus is a really odd term, have you ever noticed? It looks like something in an alien language.

In the Department of High-Class Loonery, Scalzi is particularly vintage recently. My subject line is nicked from the comments, because the concept of a .357 hollowpoint badger made me snort Earl Grey out my nose, and also

wolverine_nun will angst about not recognising it, which is fast becoming the happiest side-effect of my love affair with obscure quotes in subject lines. Insert evil "mwa ha ha ha" here.

Random Friday is apparently random. I've done not much for the last two weeks, except to observe my hobbling gradually erode into actual walking with limping when tired, and to construct newer and more interesting ways to be able to sit at a desk for any length of time without my feet swelling up. (Current solution: footstool + 2 cushions + Hobbit + interesting contorted sideways position which is giving me backache, see below). Still tire very easily, but I'll be back at work on Monday, probably for a reduced day with some time working from home, just so that I don't end up as a melted puddle of thing under my desk by the end of the day. Hobbit, of course, feels me being at home for two weeks and largely immobile is merely the universe finally catching up with the Correct State Of Things For Cats.

Current Mood: sort of

A few catch-up post-hospital points:

Those of you planning to take aspirin on long haul flights as a DVT preventer, please reformulate your plans. Two separate and unaffiliated doctors have now told me that aspirin is not effective in thinning venous blood, it tends to have more effect on the arteries, which are not implicated in DVT. If you're really worried you need to take Clexane two days before you travel, but mostly that's prescribed for people who've already faced the DVT affliction. Like me. The socks are effective, but they're most effective in conjunction with moving around often/doing the foot exercises, which are the things you really need to do.
Apparently Hobbit needs about five days to Express his Miff at my three-week absence. He suddenly agreed that I actually existed around Wednesday, and has spent a lot of the subsequent days asleep on the cushioned footstool next to my gammy foot, one paw resting on it in a proprietorial fashion. I'm not sure if the improvement in the hobbling is related or coincidental, but I'm a lot more mobile and in far less pain than I was a week ago.
Immobilisation from DVT is apparently the necessary motivator to actually getting around to ordering a wireless modem for the house, which means I can look up things on IMDB with Winona while watching TV. Score. Once I've set it up, that is.
The improvement in the leg to the point where I can actually sit at the computer for any length of time is absolutely correlated with a sudden rediscovery of my incomplete Dragon Age II game. Huzzah.
Things they actually don't tell you while you're flat on your back with a pulmonary embolism: survival rate for the damned things is about 50%. I got lucky.

Current Mood: better for being off work

I have a New Resolution for today. When the Dear Little Students knock on the door, I will attempt to school my inevitable, snarling gut-reaction into a welcoming smile. If it kills me. It may be more of a terrifying grimace, in which case score, they'll all run away and never come back, but hopefully it will, via strict behaviourist principles in which I do not believe owing to early romantic conditioning, at least modify my behaviour slightly towards the "sweetness and light" end of the spectrum. Maybe.

I've been at home for two days, wrapped in the loathsome embrace of Sid the Sinus Headache, and while I'm back at work today, I still feel as though some bastard snuck in and packed my skull with hot cement. It is not unlikely that this is affecting the tendency to red rage. I also think my hormones are horribly out of whack, the homicidal urges seem to be fairly cyclical, so seeing my Nice Doctor is high on the agenda. That would be the agenda labelled "Let's Not Kill Students Today and, Incidentally, Remain Employed". My incredibly lovely boss is very cool about me working at home fairly regularly, she says because she's not sure the university insurance will cover it if I dismember anyone. This means she is noticing the snarling. Busted. Oops.

In other news mostly unrelated to my decomposing state of health, we finished the Lady Blackbird game last night. This was completely indecent amounts of fun, at least as much because of the composition of the group as because of the game ethos and setting, and the fact that Lady Blackbird herself was a deluded and flamboyant narcissist who I could only play while drunk. The player input to the scenario is fascinating and, in our hands, completely demented. Example: I do a sort of general magical sense thing to see how many people are in the three pirate ships parked on the asteroid for our rendezvous. I randomly come up with:
(a) one ship with 37 people on board;
(b) one ship with only four people on board, only they're extra large; and
(c) one normal pirate crew complement of 12.
The rest of the group refine this into
(a) the Raven, crewed by Captain Emeritus Fop and his 36 dandyish, effeminate, bureaucratic incompetents;
(b) the Potato Chip, crewed by four cyclopses, who are very large and very fearsome fighters with high squeaky voices; and
(c) the Knotted Pine, crewed by Captain Jack Table, who is efficient and manly and completely backstabbed us at the last minute, the bastard.
The scenario finally ended on a large scale, with betrayals, revelations, disillusionments, rejections, realisations, hostage scenarios, allegiance shifts, lightning bolt attacks, an enormous space battle between the pirates and the Imperium, and a successful annexure of the pirate kingdom by

librsa's character, more or less accidentally. Ten minutes before the end the DM was planning to suggest we made this into a campaign. Ten minutes later we'd utterly stuffed that by bombshelling the party in all directions while role-playing to the hilt. It was epic. And enormously good fun. I want to play more with that group of people and with that particularly open-ended contribution thing. It made me realise that actually DMs and LARP designers are wasted as players.

Finally, since we're working this "a propos of nothing" theme, here is China Miéville being blackly funny about Britain's current state of political incompetence. Now with added political superheroes.

Current Mood: a bit ded
Current Music: Simon & Garfunkel

It's been a rude shock to come back to work after a ten-day break, particularly when my week has been rendered more than somewhat hideous by a continual stream of angsty student queries. My immediate response to a knock on my door has been instant, reflexive, homicidal rage, which I instantly have to choke down in order to be empathetic to their problems; this has resulted in increased homicidal impulses owing to frustration, and as a result a rather nasty feedback loop. It is also bringing out my worst hedgehoggy tendencies to contemplate the fact that, following a roleplaying game on Wednesday night and Salty Cracker expedition last night, I have

khoi_boi's birthday dinner tonight, a LARP tomorrow and a dinner date for Sunday night. Five days of unrelieved socialising make Extemp a grumpy, grumpy thing. I apologise in advance if I accidentally dismember anyone in the next few days. Nothing personal.

That being said, last night's dinner was excellent (La Mouette has a winter special on their six-course tasting menu, highly recommended), and our Lady Blackbird game is continuing to be disreputably and chaotically hilarious. The game system allows for a minimal DM presence and considerable input from the players, three out of five of whom are experienced DMs, so we tend towards horribly complicating our own lives in inventive ways. There is, thank the aetheric space-jellyfish, reason to believe that my thoroughly annoying character may be showing signs of actual personal growth, and a concomitant drift away from rampant and entitled narcissism. We can hope, anyway. If not, the Pirate King is going to almost certainly have to spank her frequently just to remain sane. On the upside, detonator innuendo, a moodily-organ-playing captain, an asteroid field which grows evil vodka potatoes, experience points for disdain, and a pirate called Cholmondeley Veruca. "We have booby-trapped your ship, in the sense that we've sent Kale to fix your engines". Also, points to the (somewhat besotted) Captain for reflexively shooting the pirate who made personal remarks about Lady Blackbird. It was cute, and is directly contributing to her personal growth. Thank the gods.

Current Mood: growly, bearlike
Current Music: David Bowie, Scary Monsters

My mother has just emailed me reproachfully, saying, somewhat portentously, "You haven't blogged for nearly a week". Oh, dear, she's right, I really am apparently on strike. While the last few days have included lovely socialisings (Jim & Julie's wedding, which was wonderful, and a spa/Mount Nelson tea day on Wednesday in honour of

schedule5 on Wednesday), in fact I am near-homicidally antisocial right now and very much inclined to stagnate in my study in a state of particularly prickly hedgehog, playing computer games and being cynical about the Royal Wedding. (In my role as a pervy long-skirt-fancier, I have to say her dress was pretty, but a bit arb. I actually preferred Julie's. However, the mass outbreak of fancy hats on these occasions makes me deeply happy).

Entertainment in my Prickly Hedgehog Hibernation continues to be provided by Dragon Age. I thought I was emerging from the glorious fog of narrative immersion, but the Evil Landlord wandered into my study yesterday, quietly placed the disks for Dragon Age II on my desk, gave me a meaningful look, and wandered out. I'm doomed.

The hibernation may well have been triggered by the weather as much as the 11-day break; we've had the first serious several-day bucketing-rain session of winter, and the heater is perpetually whirring in the direction of my feet. My car has signalled its displeasure with the seasonal damp by emitting an unpleasant whirring noise in default of actually starting, so Tuesday is going to be a bit complicated, what with going back to work and arranging car wossnames and starting my teaching and all. By the immutable workings of Sod's Law, the defunct car has naturally coincided with a sprained ankle (I apparently did something weird to it while bounding around on the dance floor at the wedding), so I shall be hobbling around a bit in pursuit of the necessary Point A to Point B perambulations. These things are sent to try us. I'm currently happily detached from it all to the point where I'm vaguely sure I'll make a plan. Thing. Wossname.

I'm going to bed now. Hedgehoggily.

Current Mood: totally spaced

The above being the noise of:

Rain on the roof. And on the laundry on the line until I remembered to bring it in, in the middle of the morning's Easter wafflefest with the Usual Suspects. I'm still full. But happy, and happily aware of the garden being happily damp.
Me hitting a very large, very fat mosquito very hard at 3.23am this morning, which was the time I woke up randomly and couldn't get back to sleep for two hours. Part of this was the irritating jet-fighter whine, the other part was because my sinuses were in a state of revolt, probably because I incautiously attended a braai. My body hates me, which is OK, because I hate it right back.
Me hitting darkspawn very hard with a very large blade that's all coruscating with electricity and also randomly paralyses opponents at intervals. Dragon Age is still eating my life. I'm ok with that. Also, one of my companions has a pet nug called Schmooples. This makes me giggle like a loon quite often.
Superheroes hitting things, possibly with other things. You can probably narrow the sound effect by referring to this handy chart.

Must sleep now. Happy Easter!

Current Mood: death to darkspawn!

Yesterday was all misty and moisty, with that kind of light, persistent rain that drifts gently sideways in the wind but doesn't let that distract it from implementing a fairly relentless soaking policy. My garden is all happy and damp, if somewhat buried under plane tree leaves because I've been too busy playing Dragon Age to actually do any raking. (There's a long post in my future about the narrative structure and principles of Dragon Age. You have been warned). Today is clear and cold, and the cats ran screaming through the house when I emerged from my bedroom in the first boots of the season. You'd think they'd learn that I metamorphose into a sort of clumpy, jackbooted thing punctually every year and no-one ever actually dies, but no, the annual ritual is fear and trembling for several weeks as my feet inexplicably morph. Dear little twits.

In fact, it's autumn, and winter is breathing down its neck. I am a happy bunny. Also, memo to self, acquire new umbrella, those bastards who broke into my car that one time nicked it.

The Dragon Age fixation means I'm not good for much in the Interesting Life department, because second-hand rehashes of someone's gaming experience are not of blinding interest to the onlooker. (I assume. If you'd be blindingly interested, do let me know and I shall unleash the wittering accordingly). I did, however, cook dinner for

strawberryfrog on Tuesday, which was fun, and stretched my catering-for-vegetarians muscles a bit, as well as allowing the Frog to photograph my cats in a variety of contorted positions (both him and them). There was also a Lady Blackbird gaming session last night, which is evincing more and more bizarre twists as we get right into the swing of the DMless format in providing our own challenges. (Giant space jellyfish! Three giant space jellyfish! And an Imperial fleet!). It's been an interesting roleplaying experience because I'm playing a character I frankly dislike - she's a privileged, sheltered, narcissistic twit, and I'm only able to access the necessary mode of flamboyant self-centredness if I'm slightly sloshed. On the upside, fated love triangles, and she blows things up with lightning, which is always amusing. Also, parrot!

I also posted a new Microfiction. You are probably bored with me saying that I don't like my own writing and never feel it succeeds, but this one felt particularly slight to me. I was weirded and confused when a fellow writer mentioned they really liked it. For a highly trained literary critic I have absolutely no discernment, apparently.

Finally, today is my last day of work before an 11-day break, sparked by the inescapable elegance of taking three days off around the mad Easter holidays. *dances around office on tip-tips of toes*

Current Mood: wayward puppy
Current Music: Fleet Foxes

Good lord, but the spam on this LJ account is starting to gain momentum - I'm having to delete it several times a week, which is odd, as I am certainly not a high-traffic site, or even one with a particularly obvious demographic. Strange and random and horribly wholesale are the targetings of marketers. And the spam comments are all completely surreal. I fail to see the purpose of spam which makes some generic, specious and ~~reasonably accurate~~ flattering statement about my beautiful prose, ritually reiterates one word that's a product-related trigger of some sort, and fails to include any linkage or actual product name.

It's been a very odd few days, as you can possibly tell by the uncharacteristic gap in posting. I am, once more, insomniac like whoa and dammit, which means that I have even less brain than usual and a tendency to utterly forget important things, like, e.g. to bring up to campus this morning all the work I did at home on Friday. Or to finish or post a Micfic. My level of stun has been entirely appropriate for bumbling around Ferelden hitting darkspawn very hard and with a sort of meditative calm (or, in fact, hitting on companions very hard and in a spirit of amused experimentation), so thank heavens for Dragon Age. I certainly haven't been appropriate for much else.

The oddness of the last few days may, in fact, have been triggered by, or at least be perfectly exemplified in, our Thursday night Fiasco! game, which managed to infest a small Kansas motel with love triangles, obsessive Pony Express subplots, teen pregnancy, wild and rather hit-or-miss badger-acquisition schemes,

librsa's completely bizarre and beautifully deadpan immortal eccentric, and a Family Secret about circuses and super-strength. (My character hoarded all the white dice and then rolled ridiculously well for a good outcome, and ended up finding happiness as a superhero called Padlock). I do like this game.

It was also a reasonable herald to the weekend's levels of odd: I'm possibly also very tired (and hence, paradoxically, insomniac) because our Cherished Institution ran its open day on Saturday, and I spent five hours solid giving advice to confused Matrics and talks to giant crowded lecture theatres. This was on top of Friday night's shindig to celebrate the professional oath-taking of the students in one of our department's programmes, to which I was invited rather pointedly because of the curriculum work I do with the programme. It transpires that the pointed invite was so that they could haul me up on stage for a Special Award for, apparently, input and patience and keeping them honest. In the Great List of Completely Blindsided Moments in my life, it's currently ranking slightly below the Evil Landlord giving me a netbook for my birthday. Did not see that coming at all. May have simply gasped incoherently, like a goldfish, in place of a thank-you speech. Am somewhat gratified that the Dean was in the audience being forced to notice that I am apparently doing a Good Job. Also, it's entirely fortuitous that none of the incidences of me losing patience badly at peak times of the year have apparently been in the context of the programme. Lucky, that.

Now I shall write a micfic, because I am being Haunted by the Spectre of Stv's Eyebrows. Aargh.

Current Mood: undead undead undead
Current Music: Death Cab for Cutie

In the Department Of The Approximately Three Million Things That Make Me Cry, Earth/orbit flute duets between astronauts and rock dinosaurs are a new acquisition. At least this one doesn't happen routinely. It's also, despite the fact that I cherish no fondness whatsoever for Jethro Tull, incredibly cool. (Via Making Light). Also, hooray for Yuri Gagarin. My geek starsign is The Astronaut.

Watch on YouTube

In other news, I have just spent a happy half-hour searching Penny Arcade for Dragon Age references, the which I now actually get. (Especially this one, which for no adequately defined reason cracks me up.) This is to make up for the fact that EA celebrated my acquisition of my new computer by importing my techno-jinx into its servers, which thereafter refused to recognise my downloaded content (or anyone else's downloaded content) as valid. Sodding DRM. But you have to respect my techno-jinx. It thinks large. The servers are, fortunately, up this morning and my extra content is happily enabled, which is probably just as well as I was at a level of rage and frustration which might have powered the techno-jinx into a re-enactment of Y2K.

Current Mood: sniffly, addicted
Current Music: Annie Lennox

I have bought myself a new computer! This was achieved by the simple expedient of printing out the system specs for Dragon Age 2, Fable III and Skyrim (these last are a bit speculative as it's only out at the end of the year), and waving them at the nice Korean lady in the computer shop with an instruction to put together something which would run all of the above. Which she did, muttering things under her breath about "another two gig of RAM, then", and what have you. I connected it all up last night, with only one minor problem with the fact that monitor and printer connections have morphed into new, sexier shapes since I last bought anything. Fortunately the EL had the relevant adaptor, and I am now pursuing the pleasures of Dragon Age on my very own machine. Wheee! Also, crash, boom, thud, powee, zot, and the unmistakeable glug of healing potions going down.

It is, I have to add, a very weird thing to realise that the only reason I haven't done this earlier is quite simply force of habit. I'm not used to thinking of myself as being The Kind Of Person Who Has A Nice New Gaming Computer. That's always been the EL's department: he has the new computer, I buy minimal stuff at the bottom end of the range owing to financial constraints, and I play spanky games (note: not in any dodgy sense) on his computer when he's not around. Except, actually, in practical terms there is absolutely no bloody reason at all why I can't acquire the spanky machine for myself. I have the disposable income these days. I'm just not used to believing that I have. Clearly fifteen years of impecunious grad student existence, plus a nasty couple of years of financial strain owing to a terminally ill father, have beaten into my head the sad mantra of "you can't have nice things". I'm forced to be grateful to Loot for gradually indoctrinating me into the possibility of buying Cool Stuff just because, one book or CD or DVD at a time. Or occasionally five at once. I have a very low saving throw versus Acquire Cultural Product. Possibly I have transmogrified the standard girly-issue gene for Low Saving Throw Versus Shoes.

It is also a truth universally acknowledged that swearing at traffic in order to arrive at work at 8.30 on a Monday to listen to a string of panicking students who haven't read the notice on your door suddenly makes a lot more sense when you realise you're doing it to finance your habits of cultural acquisition. And thus does Western Capitalism make monkeys of us all. The kind with our fists stuck in the calabash. Bother.

I should also add that it is an index of the love I have for my friends that I only assembled the computer last night, owing to the presence of a braai-type celebration thingy for

starmadeshadow, currently in town, with the Usual Suspects, during the rest of the day. It was lovely, and entirely worth the delayed techno-gratification. I forget how much I enjoy large crowds of nice people, not to mention the small herd of girl-children who apparently spent the afternoon jumping on my bed. It had suspicious pock-marks in it, like elephant footprints in the custard.

Current Mood: new computer, wheee!
Current Music: Neutral Milk Hotel

... today's Daily Voice billboard headline:

CONDOM TRUCK SPILLS LOAD.

Except to add that making the font <big> made me snigger. Apparently I'm eight.

On an only tangentially related note, formatting those angle brackets to show has entailed using the codes for "greater than" and "less than", which is a bit painful at the moment following yesterday's unhappy Dragon Age discovery that (as

smoczek knows all too well after hand-holding me through Excel formulae) I'm apparently incapable of distinguishing between them. This makes an astonishingly huge difference when you're setting party tactics to automatically hit the healing if your health drops to <10%. Or, as it transpires, >10%. No wonder I kept on running out of damned healing potions. Sigh. Maths, so not my strong suit.

Current Mood: Friday! Fridayfridayfriday!
Current Music: Neutral Milk Hotel

I am forced to contemplate the horrible reality that I'm about to upgrade my computer for entirely frivolous reasons. The Evil Landlord played the new Dragon Age for fourteen hours straight yesterday, which meant I was entirely unable to play the old Dragon Age, my computer being a bit weeny even for games which are several years old. I had a moderately productive day as a result, but you have no idea how twitchy it made me to hear fights and explosions and tactical swearing resounding down the passage, and not be able to pursue my own enjoyment of same. Although, I have to admit, if I do upgrade (which I can afford, and have been promising myself) and install the game and my save files, this house will succumb to a thick pall of computer gaming over evenings and weekends, in which we'll probably entirely neglect to speak to each other, cook meals or feed the cats. So, not much change there, then.

(We are remembering to feed the cats, mostly because they have that "interpose self between person and screen" thing down pat, but a reasonably large proportion of the feeding seems to be for the benefit of the marauding neighbourhood tomcat, who has cunningly circumnavigated our sneakily closed cat-door and is now accessing the house through various bedrooms or, quite possibly, the walls. In addition to nicking food, he beats up our cats and, occasionally, sprays. I am now open to offers of dart-guns, cat-traps, hit-squads, small quantities of plastic explosive, or voodoo curses of the requisite nature).

Part of the moderate productivity was a new Microfiction. This volume's themes are all pictures, this one being the very odd one here. I think I may have been getting a bit stale with the one-word themes: this one has galvanised me to slightly odd creativity. Then again, it's a very odd picture.

Now I shall go and plant pansies. Mmmm, pansies. Totally the wrong time of year, but I love their little velvety faces. I also have to do something to console myself for the slightly blasted heath nature of the garden after the garden service had with it their wicked way - they've mown the lawn down to a sort of straggling stubble, circa Aragorn somewhere around Rivendell. Which will teach me to mow the darned thing more often, I suppose. A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot, but its demands are unceasing.

Current Mood: involuntarily productive
Current Music: Editors

I have been whiling away the days, or at least so much of the days as are characterised by an absence of Evil Landlord, since I need to use his computer, by playing Dragon Age. This is not quite meeting my deep-seated need for a first-person fantasy RPG (i.e. the sequel to Oblivion), but it’s more than somewhat entertaining. The world-building is, at least this early on in the game, potentially impressive, the scripting and voice acting aren't half bad, and it embellishes its fantasy clichés with an earnest charm.

I am, however, not designed to run a party around a gaming landscape – I hate it, and in tactical terms I am even more of a stunned herring than usual, which puts me in the positively near-death ranges of piscine insensibility. Apart from inevitable click confusion in battle situations and stupid party member AIs rushing them into death-dealing situations because I haven’t set their tactics properly, there’s something peculiarly irritating about wandering around doing quests when there are other people peering over your virtual shoulder. I like to do quests slowly, exhaustively and with a sort of zen contemplation, which is horribly disrupted by companions tagging along. Particularly since my two current companions are embroiled in the kind of heavily snarky banter which simply screams “ROMANCE!” down the line, the whole thing being made all the more surreal because the female character speaks in the sultry and slightly detached tones of Aeryn Sun.

I like the dog, though. Solidly muscled, and with that sort of cheerfully homicidal look characteristic of bull terriers. It's an extremely good sign that I haven't yet managed to accidentally kill it.

The tactics are probably not materially assisted by the fact I’m having a bad couple of days for glandular symptoms, rendered the more hideous by a randomly disrupted night and insufficient sleep. Last night I dreamed the Evil Landlord added two stories to the house and painted it pink, in the process removing the piano and refusing to give it back. The renovation bill was seventeen million rand. The result was something like one of those tall, narrow Victorian semi-detached things with a violent case of embarrassment. I awoke exhausted and bemused. However, I work at home tomorrow, while overseeing the garden service in a probably lackadaisical manner, so Things Are Looking Up. Possibly.

Current Mood: exhausted, bemused
Current Music: for no adequately defined reason, Neutral Milk Hotel

Observe the extreme self-control with which I refrain from making some sort of lame subject-line pun about pilgrimage, or something. Although it was: I've been looking forward to Scott Pilgrim for months, on account of (a) hopeless Brian Lee O'Malley fangirling, (b) hopeless Edgar Wright fangirling, and (c) general nerdy indy-music video-game fangirling.

So, first off: wheee! I am somewhat thoroughly immersed in the comic books, having read the whole series three times since August, when I bought them in a bizarre and distributed acquisition spree across two airports, three bookshops and the length, lingth and longth of Britain. I <3 Edgar Wright. The mood, tone and feel of the film is pitch-perfect; it's almost impeccably cast, cleverly scripted, and the editing and cinematography are always competent and occasionally bloody marvellous. It's in spirit and very largely in plot an extremely faithful adaptation, with whole chunks of dialogue and framing of shots stolen wholesale from the comics. It made me giggle with unseemly glee rather often. (Particularly, for some reason, in the first Sex Bob-Omb song. I don't know if it was simply the dreadful Canal Walk sound, but the whole thing came across with the absolutely perfect incoherent repetitive garage-band distort. It made me very happy.)

( Here be spoilers or whatever. For both film and comics. )

Quibbling aside, however, I loved this movie - I loved its speed, its ability to mimic the comics in a narrative construction which is all about inconsequential juxapositions, its faithful visual renditions not only of characters but of all the video-game nods and elements. I loved the over-the-top framing of the fight choreography and the way that the film didn't fulfil my fear that they'd disrupt its central fantasy conceit, that Scott Pilgrim can kick anyone's butt. (So many contemporary fantasy films bog down in "The Hero Acquires His Skills". It's trite. The comics make me very happy in their complete refusal to examine how it is that Scott does what he does). I loved the music. The music made me nostalgic for my days in a garage band, and I've never even been in a garage band.

This is one for the DVD collection. I shall happily re-watch it whenever I want to break out my delusion that Hollywood can make movies which are sensitive to their source material, and are able to embody the happy, essentially innocent fantasy of a world in which the extra geeky dimensions are unquestioned and joyously real. Or whatever.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

smoczek, being a lady of infinite resource and sagacity, has recently acquired the Fiasco! role-playing system, and five of us spent a somewhat enjoyable few hours in narrative construction yesterday. It's a lovely system: the point is character interactions rather than stats or exploring a world, and the whole thing progresses as a series of highly cinematic scenes, with responsibility for driving them rotating between characters. The mechanism for choosing and resolving scenes is both minimalist and elegant. At a conservative estimate I'd say that the whole thing was designed in response to the classic gaming group predicament of everyone wanting to play and no-one actually wanting to run a game, by a bunch of roleplayers with a neo-noir fixation, a respectable chunk of LARP-design experience, a good grasp of narrative balance, and thoroughly evil minds. It is quite possibly the most fun I've had role-playing ever, and I'm not just saying that because I ended up with the contortionist burlesque performer with pythons and a cat-burglary habit who finished the session having sold out absolutely everyone at least once. And we didn't even use the jewel-encrusted sex toy.

Also, the mechanism for choosing who gets to go first is to determine who has the smallest home town. I was born in Bulawayo. Win.

It was a lengthy, animated and (as usual) rather drunken session. I'm feeling more than somewhat fragile today, although I can't tell if that's because of the booze (I don't think so, actually), another thrice-damned sinus infection (a bit of an occupational hazard at the moment, everyone seems to be exploding from pollination), or the fact that I attended my Favourite Niece's fifth birthday party this morning. She had a fairy party. There must have been two dozen small kids there, most of them in some combination of fairy dresses, wings, wands, glitter and butterfly deely-bobbers, and a uniform outbreak of pink. Even the little boys were all crowns and cloaks and what have you. (And, for no adequately defined reason, a Spiderman). Much fun was apparently had by all. I bowed out early owing to the depredations of Sid, but it was rather fun watching them bounce around the show on frenetic cupcake energy. Also, memo to self, decision not to procreate apparently working well for me.

Current Mood: a bit under the weather
Current Music: Belle & Sebastian

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Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with mad gaming

AROOGA-THUMP!

sword, axe and spear, O!

can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man

dance the ghost with me

you go, girl

slowly blown to bits by .357 hollowpoint badgers

docs in socks

pour, oh pour, the pirate sherry

If you can't trust your own insane crew members, who can you trust?

can't be buggered at all

blat

puddle-jumping

the best the kindest fresh unique BDSM

Ground Control to Major Tom

OK Computer

reproduced without comment...

the game's the thing

where you'll find me now

what do you think of my lair of cool shit, buddy? you're the target market.

I am unable to understand how such a totally ingenious plan could go so amazingly, horribly wrong.

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December 2024

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