The Rabbit Hole

Forgot to mention in my post about Once Upon a Time: Still not a Fables TV Show, but this show is like playing the "Hey, I know you from somewhere..." game every week. And, maddeningly for me, I cannot figure out where I know people from. Because they're even so obscure, I haven't seen them in much. One of the guys bugging me the most turns out to have played the boyfriend/ex of the lead on Covert Affairs, itself a show that I cannot figure out how come I've seen as much of it as I have. (Oh, wait, I remember now: the blind guy was hot.) That's on top of the LOST cast reunions and the random Bucky Barnes cameos.

Perhaps the one that blind-sided me the most, however, is the straight-laced nice-guy playing Jiminy Cricket is HOLY FUCKING GOD KAIDEN ALENKO!?!?! I knew I recognized that oddly gruff voice, but it weirds me right the fuck out to see him acting. At least he's more handsome than Kaiden?

Sigh, the backlash against the ending of Mass Effect 3 continues apace. Apparently, there's real enough protest that somebody has raised $70k in protest. Thank God, gamers are not entirely useless and they've donated it to Child's Play. (Spoiler warning: they talk about the ending, but not in detail.) If you're going to raise a ruckus that only makes you look like an idiot, by all means, at least donate the reward of that ruckus to somebody who'll be more grateful for games than you are. Suck it up and deal. Unlike just about every movie trilogy I could name, this game ended on a cohesive note, and its ending is not inappropriate for the tenor of the series. Why it should be sunshine and rainbows (Krogan! Made me a cake!) in order for it to be "good" is beyond me. God for-fucking-bid these people should get their way. They want the "Hollywood" ending, according to that article. I'll take what BioWare puts out over any Hollywood ending. Last I checked, movie-goers weren't thrilled about the Disney-fication of every goddamned thing.

In short, look at all the fucks BioWare doesn't give 'cause you didn't get a blowjob from the ending of their game. The game is actually really good, and aside from Vega, full of aliens to wuff. Well, it's full of humans to boink, too, as this comic accurately lampoons. And while I'm collecting all my favorite webcomics on this subject: THIS. I know why it's there. But it still sucked ass to wait through.

I think someone accidentally dosed Shepard with sex spores.

( Absolutely no specific spoilers, but just in case. )

On the other hand, Bastard Male Shepard is TOTALLY going to pretend to love everybody and sleep with them.

In other news, my colleagues are squealing over Diane Von Furstenburg's (I should be worried that I spelled that completely right, shouldn't I?) new line for GAP. Meanwhile, I am watching this at work, totally spellbound:


I also read this entry on a blog and cracked the fuck up at the entries "John Carter of Dune" (oh God, I'm still laughing) and "The Punisher and Batman debate the death penalty." There are some better conceptual ones (Ferris Bueller's Day of the Living Dead" was pretty inspired) but those two were especially hilarious. I'd actually pay money to see Paul Dini make the Marvel vs Capcom one.

I don't think I have anything in common with these people.

The thing is, when I'm playing Mass Effect, I'm usually bitching about/at it (if not aloud, then at least in my head). The constant loading, the needless slow-ups, having to go all over my enormous ship to talk to people all the time, lest I miss when they really want to have a talk, the fire fights that I still can't aim at no matter what I do...

The second I step away from it, all I want to do is to go back. I was up until an ungodly hour this morning playing, but what all I achieved for that, I could not tell you. I grabbed a few more people onto my ship, said hello to some old friends (wow, it was awkward telling off the person I went after, romantically, in ME because I'm still interested in the one I got in ME2), explored a few worlds while trying not to attract undue attention from the galaxy-ending baddies. So I did stuff. But mostly I just talked to people and did a few errand missions. They've made it more and less complicated to do what was always my favorite part of the flying around part of the game, which is mining for shit on planets. It's less work to find stuff, but it's more dangerous to try. Totally addictive.

I have to stop reading the internet, though, because despite the fact that Shepard has grown, as a character, in different ways between different folks, the second I hear something that spoils anything, I get irrationally pissed the fuck off. It's the last game in the series (or so BioWare claims; I'm a tad skeptical that they wouldn't keep going for all of my and every other fan's money), so I want to get through it without being spoiled (which is why I can't say more than I have here; respect!). Especially since every development makes me want to hug the game and squeeze it until it pops with love. If those get spoiled for me, I develop an equally passionate response in the opposite direction--I WILL KILL EVERYONE.

So, yeah, I need to finish this without spoilers. I also need to figure out why none of my avatar rewards for the game are showing up on my avatar. I want my N7 helmet and my Normandy, damn it.

I've seen many arguments for and against prosecution of digital content pirates. This is the best argument I've yet read as to why prosecution is the losing strategy if your battle is really about sales and not, say, some sort of ego trip about controlling content.
( Some more thoughts on this. )


Speaking of Legos and pirates, though, I bought the latest game, Lego: Pirates of the Caribbean, and it's delightful, if a little bizarre. Like, I can hardly tell where the cut scenes are going to end and going to drop me in to play the story. Also, a lot of the story play seems to take place in scenes that aren't, strictly speaking, movie-based. For instance, recruiting Jack Sparrow's crew to go chase after Barbosa in The Curse of the Black Pearl. In the movie, Jack goes as far as to find Mr. Gibbs himself, but the rest of the crew shows up at the dock later, and that's the end of it. In the game, I run around finding each person and securing them for my ship. It's a little backwards, but in a movie where there are a) invincible zombie enemies and b) not infinite amounts of droids to destroy, it's passable. It's a Lego [Fill in the Blank Film Franchise] game; it could be Lego: Twilight and I would still play it. (Especially if I got to bash little Edward into a million studs on occasion.) Hopefully, too, it will tide me over until Lego makes my dreams come true and exploits its possession of the rights to The Lord of the Rings to make a game in addition to the physical sets.

And did I mention that I'm playing all these games on my brand new PS3?

In 2010, when I started biking to work, I promised myself that if I hit 100 trips on my bicycle--trips that would otherwise cost me a ride on the subway, not bike rides taken just for the fun of riding--I would buy myself a present with the money I'd saved commuting. I didn't make it in 2010. In 2011, however, thanks in part to the unseasonably warm weather and my increased endurance, I rode my bike on over 250 rides over the course of about 6-7 months. Counting strictly by $2.25 rides on a pay-as-you-go accounting (or $2.10 or so, with the MTA's bonus thrown in), that's more that $500 saved by not taking mass transit. If you count instead the cost of unlimited 30-day Metrocards for those months, I saved hundreds of dollars more. You could even subtract the money that I did set aside for the infrequent ride on the subway and/or bus (about $60 pre-tax from my paycheck), and I was still ahead by more than the cost of the system. And I was staying in shape. Win-win-win all around.

Why a PS3? For starters, it does have some games you can't get on the XBOX that I've been interested in playing, and I enjoyed some of them at PAXEast enough for it to stick in my mind this long. (Looking forward to the Uncharted series a lot!) I also know quite a few people who have them now from whom I can borrow games, which makes me less nervous about the investment. Ther's also the Blu-Ray player, which, as I build up my library, will come in handy. Plus our apartment already has an XBOX 360, which my roommates have rounded out with a Kinect now. I even got a $75 gift certificate at Target for buying the bundle I wanted anyway (it came with a Move controller and a game as well) after Christmas. I made out with a bandit. I feel a little ashamed spending so much on myself at the holidays, but it was something I earned. Next year, I'll try to save up for a TV :)

I have no idea how to friend people on it, but I'm TrinityVixen (shocker, I know). Say hi to me some time? Please do not laugh at my laughably paltry amount of trophies. I'm working on it!

No one told me that Mass Effect 3 was coming out March 6, 2012. You are all so, so fired. I had heard only rumblings that it was super delayed and, like, never coming out.

Well, at least I can finally use up that $50 gift card I have to Best Buy! No, in all seriousness, when I've wanted things from Best Buy, I've been at a loss as to what to get. This is at the same time as I can easily drop $50 at any other site on DVDs/Blu-Rays I want. That's because their prices aren't ridiculous. But video games are ridiculously priced everywhere unless you can wait until there are cheap-ass discount used copies available. (The Darkness: a game I wouldn't have enjoyed half so much if I'd paid $17 instead of $7 for it.) It's going to be $80 anywhere. I will thus be able to use my monies up at Best Buy. Unless, of course, BioWare borks that idea by releasing it to other stores with better pre-order bonuses. ::crosses fingers against that happening::

Yes, I am aware that it comes out only a month before my birthday and that I should wait. Fuck that. I want it on release day. I want the $80 collector's edition even though I didn't think the collector's edition was really worth it the last time. I want it. I want to have its babies. I spoil myself. By that time next year, I'll probably be staring down another season of applying to vet school a second time. I'll need it. Yes.

I AM SO BORED. Here, I'm going to post about some things.

This actually excited me a lot until I realized that the article was about the release date of Mass Effect 3 being pushed back. As feiran  likes to say, balls to buttfuckers. However, that picture makes me inordinately excited. Mostly because NEW PEOPLE WITH SHEPARD AND ONE OF THEM IS AN ALIEN AND I LOOOOOOFFFFFF THE ALIENS. I am not rational about these games. I just...I'm not. Color me impressed with the anonymous human however: they found a way to make a reasonably attractive male character! Trust me, this has been impossible in the games so far. I have kept on playing male characters, but they are all, despite HOURS of investment on my part, incredibly ugly.

Oh man, if they dropped the price of the Wii by just, like, $50 more, I would get one. Mostly for this game. But even at $150, I can't justify buying a system with games I don't play, especially with the new system coming out in a friggin' year. I can't get an entire system I wouldn't hardly use for one game. They really, really, really need to port this game over to, like, the Kinect. You hear me, Microsoft? I will buy your stupid attachment if you get House of the Dead: Overkill. Hell, I'll buy a goddamned PS3, even with the massive problems they've had with losing customers' credit card data to hackers lately. GET ON THIS.

Okay, I'm super bored at work, but I'd be even more super-bored if I went out to the airport early (for all that they might have working AC, which I do not have at work right now). So I'm browsing and I come across this teasing, teasing art from some official Ubisoft artists.

Now, granted, this is on Kotaku, which is part of Gawker, which, as moonlightalice likes to say, reports on stuff that they found on napkins in dumpsters--and not even dumpsters near the people who actually make the stuff they want to report on, so take the accuracy of the reporting with a grain of salt.

BUT STILL!!!! The promise of an Assassin's Creed anything gets me really excited, and I'm with the Kotaku person: please tell us where to send you money for more of this plz kthanxbai? No, seriously, the makers of this game and Bioware, who make my beloved Mass Effect could offer to sell me a mystery box with the promise that there could be anything from a statuette to a slip of paper that just says "Congrats on liking our games so much" and I'd be like, "HERE IS MY MONEY. I CAN GET YOU MORE. DO YOU NEED MORE? 'CAUSE I CAN GET IT!!!"

I can, you know. Hook me up!

Time for a good old-fashioned gripe. Here's what's annoying me this week!

1. People who pronounce things wrong.
I don't mean people who don't speak English well or have accents. They are lovely and allowed to speak with accents all their life for all I care, especially if they are British. (Or Australian. Or Kiwi. Or even South African, though I will probably confuse that with one of the others--or all of the others at some point.) I mean people who were born and raised in America and obviously speak fluent English who insist on pronouncing words that they clearly have only ever read on paper in a way that is stupid and obviously wrong, and worse, no one corrects them.

( FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT )

2. People who are anorexic presuming to lecture other people about their eating habits. Yes, this article has to do with the Kevin Smith kerfuffle, which should be discussed in terms of customer service and has instead devolved into "Fatties deserve it." But it's a good read. Because even if you want to make this about someone being fat, end of story, you really, really shouldn't let anyone that obsessed with food tell you what's right and what's not when it comes to a) eating, b) obesity, c) anything else. Obsessed people make very poor philosophers.

3. The fact that I'm probably going to have to buy this expansion.
( I hate this strategy. )

I'm not... look, it's not like I'm sorry about doing it. Or embarrassed. I lost the ability to be embarrassed by my geekery when a kid I knew in high school--who I hadn't interacted with for four years--introduced me to his girlfriend as "that girl with The Matrix stickers all over her binders."

But I must have been really tired when I made my second Shepard character. I don't even remember naming him. It's a blip on the timeline of his creation compared to the agonizing process of trying (and failing) to make him not ass-faced. (Note to future self reading back on her LJ tags as Mass Effect 3 comes out: JUST LEAVE THE DEFAULT.)

I was looking at his name today. I named him Morbo. It's not that that's extraordinary--people often name player characters after other characters. moonlightalice was just regaling me with the tale of her Star Trek Online character, Leah Brahms. So this sort of thing happens.

But...Morbo? Was this because I finally watched the last Futurama movie recently? Why Morbo? Why don't I even remember naming him that? I almost did a spit-take when I saw his name.

If I were to ask "What is wrong with me?" would I like the answers I'd give myself?