| My Favorite Memory |
[Aug. 25th, 2005|11:13 am] |
( It's crude, even! )
So, you know, if you really miss me, you can email me - Swimmy, gmail, blah dee blah. I'll respond. AIM, maybe not so much. Nothing's ever permanent, you know.
he EndT |
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| HEY HANNAH |
[Aug. 21st, 2005|12:54 pm] |
I probably won't get to talk to you before you leave. I can email you my address whenever I, you know, know it, but I don't know where to send it. So email me, or something, swimmy at gmail.com.
I love you. Have a safe trip. |
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| Severe? |
[Aug. 13th, 2005|03:05 am] |
I guess my social anxiety is severe. Whenever I have discouraging thoughts, I coil up, wrap my arms around myself, cringe. I hardly know how to deal with my unfortunately flawed perception of reality, let alone any kind of truth that always eludes me.
When my family first got internet capabilities, oh so long ago, I was addicted to chat rooms. Yahoo! rooms, specifically Christian youth centered ones. Lame, huh? It's there that I developed my distaste for internet atheists (who, as most well know, exist more to antagonize internet Christians than to actually discuss anything - I guess they have the right, after dealing with the hyperevangelical types that dominate the real world). It's also there that I learned most of my social skills.
Now, for those of you who don't know, a chat room is not a good place to learn social skills. I didn't have much alternative - I was raised on TV until the 4th grade. I fostered my Animaniacs obsession, did Wacko impersonations around people, bounced, said weird things, and, as far as I can remember, was generally disliked. Around 7th grade, on a computer that froze any time I tried to do anything, I chatted on Ye Olde Internette for hours. I learned, in a manner, how to speak almost normally. Or, at least how to pretend. I learned to feign self confidence; I would enter a chat room and start talking about how cool I was. It was a joke, of course, but when school started up again I found it wasn't a terrible technique in the real world. It gave me something to say, at least.
It's not enough. Conversational skills with one type of person may go nowhere with another. This was the case with my roommate last year; he was a sports freak, into mainstream rap, completely... normal. I couldn't talk to him at all. It was pointless to try. We reduced all conversation to simple pleasantries: Hi, what's up?, what've you been up to?, bullshit. I never learned pleasantries in chat rooms. Even before then, I hated them. I had a teacher who, when she saw me every single morning, would wish me a good morning. Often I didn't even respond - or I'd grunt, mutter good morning back in a grumpy tone. One day she got fed up. She took me aside and explained that I shouldn't be so crabby, that I should wish her a good morning happily, and I just shouldn't be such a negative nancy in general. After that, I tried my best to avoid her.
I still don't understand, now, why the hell she even cared whether I good morninged her or not. If my crabbiness was ruining her day, she didn't have to say anything to me. She could have ignored me every day. She could have nodded at me. I would have nodded back - I like nodding. It's a mildly enjoyable activity, as evidenced by boom boxin' thugs. I didn't see the point in talking. It was always early, I never slept well, I didn't want any noise - and that's all "good morning" is. It's two words that everyone says and hardly ever means. I didn't want to participate in the wishing of good mornings, so I didn't, and I got lectured for it, near punished. Back then, of course, I was so sensitive that a lecture was enough to completely wreck me. After one from another teacher, also about negativity, I never talked to him again. I suppose I thought everyone carried their memories the same way I do.
My manner of internet socialization hasn't prepared me for much of life. As a friend said, I'm doomed to be a recluse, a complete misanthrope. I'm not jealous of those who aren't - they can spend their whole lives saying, Hi, what's up?, what've you been up to?, good morning, don't be so negative all the time, bullshit - I guess I've just wanted to dabble, see what it's like, try to be normal for a little while. Psychology's not so friendly.
Enough seriousness. Let's amp up the terrible.
I have a hymn voice. I can sing hymns just fine; everything else sounds absolutely awful. Luckily, I'm not constrained by pitches, so I can use both my terrible hair metal voice and my terribler girl voice on occassion, for entertainment purposes. Todd let me borrow a computer mic, so I now present to you, my faithful readers, bad renditions of bad songs, sans instruments of any kind, so my horrible singing is even more apparent. If you listen to these, I promise you will cringe.
I've only sung choruses, and in one case a verse. The whole songs without any instruments would just be too painful.
Pink Steel - We Fight For Cock
I love the lyrics of this song, so I had to sing the first verse. It's gay as hell.
Dio - Holy Diver
My hair metal voice is pretty much an imitation of Dio's. He's got style, and he's a mountain of a man.
Triton - We Accept the Challenge
This is the song from Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare. I couldn't make out the second part of the chorus, so I made up some words. They actually make some sort of sense, if you've seen it. I may explain some day.
Journey - Open Arms
I employ the girl voice in this one. Also, Todd sings with me, slightly louder. Ouch, my ears.
Enjoy.
Farewell sweet prince; you will be missed. |
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| I think I've got something in my teeth |
[Aug. 12th, 2005|01:49 am] |
I GOT ALLIGATOR, I GOT BUBBLES, I GOT MUD ASS |
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| Ontario, too. |
[Aug. 9th, 2005|12:58 am] |
I used to not wear shoes. Of course, I had to sometimes, but whenever I could I took them off. I would walk around school, pavement, grass, anywhere, in my bare feet. My justification was that shoes made my feet stink. (This cracked at least one redneck woman up.) Walking barefooted isn't exactly comfortable for me; I don't have any callouses on my feet, they're as soft as can be, just like my girl hands.
When my dad was in Germany, a few months back, he took Silke's address. Using the phone book and his bitchin' German skills which don't exist, to get her father's number. Her father informed my father that he rarely talks to Silke now: She moved out long ago, got busted with drugs in a house full of girls, and was currently on probation. She's out of school, no internet or email address, and a cell phone that she rarely answers. Our parents exchanged email addresses. Weeks ago, my father informed me that he had emailed Mr. Eckert and he hadn't responded.
There were no drinks in the dorm. The cafeteria was just below, but it was only open three times a day, and only served disgusting, near-rotten food. Seriously - they made a deal with a company for bargain food that had passed the expiration date. We stocked the girls with snacks and drinks once in a while - or, we stocked ourselves and the girls stole it all because they were starving. I guess that weekend we were just out of drinks. Except water, we had plenty of that, gallons of cold water when you wanted warm showers and ancient hot water heaters that didn't heat large rooms but would burn the shit out of you if you touched one, if they administration wanted to waste money on heat that day. Like Soviet Russia, man, but with rancid bread instead of no bread. (The people at church love my Death To Uncooperative Peasants shirt.) The gym was open all night, and the "rec room," which once had a pool table until the art teacher hauled it to the boy's dorm so his kids could play instead of the actual bored-as-hell students, had a drink machine. It also had one for shitty snacks - an old one you could reach your hand into and steal something on the bottom row, until the maintenance guy put a cage over the opening. Who knows how old the snacks in that machine were? I'd occasionally get a Twix from it. Can't go wrong with Twix.
My dad popped into this room last night with a mischeivous look on his face and said, "You have to come here now" in that you-have-to-come-here-now tone. In my brother's room, he had his inbox open. A message read, in a paraphrase with as many details as I can remember, "hi mr. mcgowan. how are you? i think about you and others from WCA all the time. that was an awesome place. i'm working in a cafeteria. i know, it's not the best job in the world. how's tim? does he have a girlfriend? i've been dating a guy named matthias for over a year and he's 14 years older than me (!)" There was a farewell, but I don't remember the wording. My father asked, "Now why'd she ask that?" and "Why'd she tell us that?" Why do you think, dad? Don't you know what's important in life?
It was raining damn hard. I don't know what inspired the others to follow my lead. Maybe they weren't - maybe it was just a collective decision. But I was going to walk down there barefooted, so I did, and they did too. In the rain. It's not a terribly long walk, but it's more than any normal person would travel without shoes in the rain. Of course, when we got back, we didn't even want to go inside. No, we had our snacks and beverages, and we were going to play in the rain puddles. Kind of hippie, huh? We were trying not to be disgruntled.
Summer's winding down, and so is this journal. I can promise terrible a cappella renditions of 80s power ballads, completely uninteresting theology, and absolutely nothing about videogames as videogames. Then, who knows? Let the fire rain down. |
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| Eating disorder |
[Aug. 2nd, 2005|04:56 pm] |
I'm still trying to make it through Gravity's Rainbow. I can't, really - not just because it's hard to read, but because I can't do anything that requires much focus these days. Fostering my word association nonsense has turned reading into a game, wherein simple phrases like, "Hand me a fag" turn the paragraph before me into images of restaurants and bars in the middle of the morning, sweaty sweaters and stained shirts, dim lighting and dim conversations. My mind at any moment will stray into what I know isn't worth my time. I get frustrated writing, can't finish, don't know exactly what to say and can't focus on my thoughts enough to explore them. Right now I have one thousand words in a Word document about Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare and I realize, it's not funny, nobody would actually want to read it unless they've seen the movie and they can say, "Haha, yeah, I remember that," and it's not even half finished. I tell myself, "Get to the point," and the point, really, is just me singing an a cappella rendition of the chorus of one of the movie's songs, which is horrible and funny. Yet, if I don't write the rest of the crap, nobody will understand why it's funny, and the point is lost, so why bother?
I can still play videogames, which is why I write about them so much, even though I don't want to. There are better things to write about. I could write about why I think The Rentals are the greatest thing ever, and why I didn't realize this until recently, or some nostalgic piece about childhood, or something else about Silke, or I could show you all what I looked like as a chipmunk-cheeked 15-year-old, yes, I have pictures, or any of the bad movies I've seen recently, or that wedding I attended a few days ago, and why it meant the death of this region of earth (like, seriously, it's as if Lich, the Fiend of Earth, has stolen the earth orb or something - where are the Light Warriors when we need them?), or maybe something as simple as PUNK ROCK!!!! in bolded and pink letters because that's how it's written. But I can't.
A few days ago, I somehow managed to make it through a whole day without getting any food. Maybe we needed to go grocery shopping. I don't eat unless food is convenient; I can't cook, and sometimes my mom isn't around to do just that, so unless there are pop tarts or hot pockets lying around, I just don't. At the end of the day, my stomach hurt, just a little bit, just like old times. When I rested to play me a game, my mind didn't escape to inane emoteen nonsense, and I just played, and it was good. When I awoke the next day, I picked up Gravity's Rainbow and read a decent chunk, without once urging to put it down, check the forums, check livejournal, or generally internet - no desire to drown out my own noise with music, none to play a videogame, none to talk to friends, just one: to read. I noticed, after I was finished, for the time being, that my stomach still hurt a little. No breakfast, no dinner, no lunch, no breakfast, and I could read - I was myself again, moderately eloquent and witty, able to write, able to think, above, and it felt wonderful. I told all this to my favorite person, who's going to India this year, I mean, what the hell?, and she, in all her wisdom, pointed out, "You have an eating disorder."
I've been well fed this summer, and this past school year. Before that, my freshman year of college, I would go three to four days at a time without eating. I didn't hide it, except from my family, who could tell anyway, who can't when you get those rings around your eyes and your skin turns even paler than it was before?, and I convinced myself I was doing it so I could save my precious food money for videogames. Whether I was or not doesn't matter, because now I don't have precious food money, but I still don't want to eat. I have been, mind you, because when I don't people hassle me, and my parents want to go out to eat often enough to ruin my plans, but I would rather not. I get the feeling that my brain only functions at its best in a partially starved state, when I have a nice dull ache in my stomach taking the place of thoughts I don't need, and that, friends, is what doctors call an eating disorder. As my friend said, "[Teenage girls] give eating disorders a bad name"; I like the thought that starving oneself for mental enlightenment is superior to performing the same so boys will like you - it makes me feel better than someone I'm similar to, which is how most elitists spend their time. I could always just say I'm fasting for religious purposes. I went to one or two Christian club meetings in college. During one, someone stood up and asked for donations for starving children, arguing that, "We all know we're going to wake up and get some food to eat tomorrow; these kids don't." "Speak for yourself," I thought, and didn't give anything.
There was a girl in high school, who, after I had some fun intentionally passing out in the middle of class, told me, "I worry about you." I can't imagine why. I didn't worry about her. |
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| Movies, faces, pillows on zoomers |
[Jul. 25th, 2005|08:18 pm] |
I've realized, recently, that I hate movies.
My friends will ask if I want to go to the theater with them. I never do, unless zombies are involved. Todd noticed a long time ago my insistence on pointing out any movie's flaws, no matter how insignificant. After Kill Bill Vol. 1, which I love dearly, I told him, "There were two problems with that movie." He almost freaked - he didn't want to hear it. I told him anyway. "For one, that scene where it introduces O-Ren's assistant, it says, 'To her right is...' It's actually to the camera's right. Also, after the bride gets slashed in the back and falls in the snow, there's no blood stain when she gets up." I had to point these things out. They bothered me. This was nothing, of course, compared to my Matrix: Reloaded frothing rant. Words can't describe my ire as I walked out of that movie. I was genuinely angry at how bad it was. The only other movie I know which gets me so worked up is Man On Fire, in which you cannot count to three before the camera moves or focuses on something else. It almost makes me sick, the way it spins around everyone during simple dialogue sequences, as if they're full of action or something. But after most movies I see, I feel some kind of mild anger. I've recently taken to refusing to see movies (namely, Napoleon Dynamite) because I can be sure long before I see them what I'll think.
I need to make friends with other people who hate movies, so together we may play videogames or rock out instead.
Crappy B movies are excepted, of course.
In 2 days I will be taking a trip to Fairfax, VA, for orientation at GMU. After this, I will sit on my butt until the end of August, when school starts again. This has been a pretty lame summer, all in all, and I'm psyched for moving out of, you know, here. Hey, eshock, you still around? If you're still in the area we have to meet up. Anyone else who lives near D.C., I will need some non-crummy friends. I will be bringing Nukie with me, so you can just use me to watch the worst movie ever.
Edit: Maybe I'm not going to orientation. My family's so weird.
This is a boring entry, but nothing is happening, so I have nothing to say. Why do I update when I have nothing to say? Because who knows how much time we have left?
If you like videogames or videogame journalism, have we got a site for you! |
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| It's always been like this. |
[Jul. 15th, 2005|01:24 am] |
Me: God. I was in a Colliseum, and there was this crowd of spectators, and I was wearing my red Snoopy shirt with no pants or underwear on, and [Michael] Jackson kept trying to touch my stuff.
Cate: you sick fuck
Tim the Zuhalter: Like. What the fuck kind of 6 year old has a dream like that?
Cate: (I typed duck)
I just watched Species at Todd's house. (Todd, as I might have mentioned before, is my BFF for realz, who just returned from a craaaazy European mission trip.) I forgot that the alien girl had so many nude scenes in the movie, but I remembered almost everything else. I remembered it from ten years ago, when it first came out, and I was only ten years old myself. Because I had an older brother, just about all kinds of movies made it to my young, confused eyes. It was especially odd, considering that, in earlier points of my life, my parents made sure that we saw nothing remotely offensive or evil. GI Joe was banned because of violence; The Smurfs were banned because of witchcraft. My first RATED R movie - parent-sanctioned, even - was Knight Moves, a suspense thriller detective blah blah blah movie about some kooky chess killer. I remember three things: the intro, in which a little boy stabs another boy's hand with a pen for beating him at chess, a chalkboard in which the solution to all the puzzles spells out something, and this guy getting his throat slit at the end. I remember my mom being particularly shocked at that last part, remarking, "I didn't realize this movie was that bad," as if the eight year old boy getting a pen shoved all the way through his hand was like sunflowers riding dolphins at the park with bells and candy canes and some other annoyingly happy words.
And from there, well.
Todd's parents did a slightly better job protecting him. He was raised not on the naked chick from Species, but on the Gospel Bill Show, which is pretty much the greatest Christian television show ever created. Veggie Tales can go dry its mouth, because Willie George is a brilliant man. T.U. Tutwater, heh. Todd, on the other hand, had Nickelodeon. My parents decided, while I was very young, that cable was both too expensive and also evil, so we were reduced to Fox and ABC. (We eventually got some CBS and NBC; I don't know how that worked out.) For years, I had nothing to watch. I didn't want to do anything else, though, so I watched the nothing that came on Fox and ABC. I have, to this date, only seen one episode of The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and every episode of Full House at least twice.
And a whole bunch of R rated movies. I remember seeing RoboCop and RoboCop 2. By the time my brother rented those, my dad had given up on worrying about us, and my mom was too depressed to do anything, so we watched them with dad. He remarked, during that one scene in RoboCop 2 where the guy's getting surgeried upon without any anaethesia, "Pause the movie, I think I'm going to get a glass of blood. I mean, Coke."
(Aside: For those who don't know, all soft drinks are "Coke" in the south. I've never understood why this is, but the way northerners say "pop" [pap] makes me cringe a little bit, so "Coke" is fine by me. I say "soft drink," and personally think Coke - as in Coke Coke - is disgusting.)
And all of this was probably not very good for me, considering how active my imagination's always been. I remember, before I ever saw an R rated movie or anything bad, I saw a picture of Michael Jackson on the cover of a book in a bookstore. I didn't know who he was, since my parents had sheltered me so much from pop culture, so I asked. My mom said he was either a "bad man" or a "pervert," I can't remember which. And that night, my dreams proved both phrases.
Another note on confusion: I once asked my mom how people got AIDS. She told me, "By being naughty." For a short time, I feared that I could contract a life-threatening disease by disobeying my parents. I didn't understand how the biology of that worked - would my immune system temporarily break down by sinning?
I don't think that, now, I have a much better grip on things. Just last night I was telling a good friend that his mother was a laser who streaked across the sky, and the she was, therefore, a whore. It wasn't even a play on the word "streak." In fact, it wasn't anything. Kind of like The Nothing from The Neverending Story. What a crummy villain, just a bunch of clouds running by in the sky. And that wolf. I always walked out of the room when the horse died, because that scene scared me. I never much cared for the giant turtle afterwards, either. And it's all because of that little locket.
I mean.
I need a game addiction again, but I am poor. Pity my flesh. |
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| Tribute |
[Jul. 11th, 2005|01:51 am] |
That's part one of a tribute to Ninja Golf.
I guess that this:
is part two. (My ninja is African because that's what color I had.)
But this:
is not part three.
I tucked in my shirt to show off my kickin' ninja belt (that I've had for about 10 years, good Lord), and I ended up looking like a Holocaust victim.
Contribute. |
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| Look at me, dancin' on the moon. |
[Jul. 10th, 2005|12:05 am] |
Sometimes, when I'm taking my car just down the road to return a video, I'll pop on the CD player (it's not screwed in properly, so I have to reach behind it and hold it as I put the face on), dig through my CDs, and surf through the tracks just to listen to one solitary song during my short trip. Driving without music doesn't really bother me, but I have no idea why I would so such a thing when I have some. Sometimes when I'm driving... on the road at night... Ahem. Too much Jawbreaker. That is, sometimes, when I'm driving, I imagine that other people are with me - not so much because I'm lonely and really want someone to talk to, but because I just really, really want other people to hear my music. I dream that I drive by someone I know whose car has broken down, and I have to give them a ride home, and he or she laughs as a sing along to every word, even matching the pitch, of "Hazelnut" by Apocalypse Hoboken. (Because, you know, I can do that. I've got that girlvoice.) Or maybe they flip through my CDs, I tell them, "You may not know any of these bands... Here, just throw some Jamiroquai in or something," and then I sing along to that in my girlvoice. I roll my window down when I'm in the more populated sections of town. Even though I know it's not likely, I just want someone, anyone, any passerby or other person with his window down to hear my music and know that this rocks.
Or maybe not. Maybe they'll just pass it off as weird, noisy, or too easy. It doesn't matter. I want everyone to know this music exists; I want them to know that I exist, through it, and that maybe I'm weird, noisy, or too easy, but that it doesn't really matter because most of us are anyway.
This is why I provide songs here. I know only a small handful of people actually download them, but I want you to know what I'm listening to, not just see a few words telling you.
Recently my mind has been malfunctioning. After I finished all the stories in DWVII and realized I was a little too weak to take on the final dungeon, I resigned myself to quite a bit of class-leveling. I turn music on during these sessions, but it's not enough to keep me from being a bit more self-aware than I prefer. When you stay cooped up as I do, it's hard not to see what's wrong with what you're doing, or what's wrong with what you've done, or what's wrong with what you're planning on doing in the near future. (For the record, drowning out my existence, ignoring precedent, and continuing the current trend for an indefinite period, respectively.)
You know, for a while, I had a vendetta against happy music. Things that lacked at least some degree of anger or were too poppy simply pissed me off. And by anger, I don't mean harshness - The Weakerthans are easily one of the most outraged, angry bands I've ever heard. No, I mean bands like... Ash.
Ash, you see, is this British pop-punk band that is just really bloody sappy. I mean. Well. Just listen to "Candy". I mean that. Listen to it. (It's offline now, you can IM me if you want it.) It samples Burt Bacharach's "Make It Easy On Yourself" and is really plainly, ridiculously a pop song of the highest sapfest order. When I first heard it and the album it belongs to, Free All Angels, I kind of got pissed at Ash and decided that I didn't really want to listen to this band anymore.
What was I thinking?
Well, Free All Angels is their worst album, to be fair to myself. But what about "Candy" angered me so? Was it just that I was used to songs like "Innocent Smile" and "Lose Control"? (Which, for you gamers, is the only good song on the original Gran Turismo soundtrack - how 'bout that?) No... I had already heard songs like "Aphrodite" and their other overly-poppy tunes. But Candy struck me as too much.
(You know, I wanted to link every last one of those songs, but I just don't have the webspace.)
Class-leveling in DWVII gives me an urge to revisit old music. I relistened to Free All Angels and still conceded to myself that it is, without a doubt, Ash's worst album. It starts off strong and just dies a horrible death. But Candy. Candy.
I LOVE this song. I want to vigorously, violently penetrate it all night long, even though it doesn't have a body or a vagina or... well, never mind. But I... I used to skip this song as I listened to that album. Now it's all I want to hear.
And it's still a bad song. Anyone with basic rhyming ability could have written this, and since it's mostly a sample of another song with some beautifully awkward drumbeats tossed in, the music is nothing special. I don't care. I, as someone who very often listens to white-noise-rape-your-ears-with-violence bands, think this is one of the greatest things I've ever heard. And Ash, despite being the most saccharine opposite-of-punk band around, is one of the greatest on the planet. I mean that.
Aaaand there goes the rest of my credibility. |
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| You're back! And you're not bleeding profusely this time! |
[Jun. 29th, 2005|05:33 pm] |
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OH MY GOD I'M TOTTALLY IN DHARMA RIGHT NOW! |
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| TNT KNOWS DRAMA! |
[Jun. 27th, 2005|04:27 pm] |
I watch copious amounts of Law and Order. I've mentioned this before, I think. I like the quick pace, the lack of any character development outside the cases... you know, the style of it as opposed to the other TNT DRAMA shows. A few days ago, there was an excellent episode about conspiracy in Washington. At the end, after a surprising plot twist, I got the message,
"To be continued...
on HOMICIDE"
It was on next. I was curious about the conclusion, so I figured, why not? The L&O characters were all guest-starring, so even if the show sucked they would make up for it, right? No, in fact. Homicide, which I have only watched that single time, is such a terrible show it made my anus bleed bubble gum receipts. In the middle of the episode, with this BIG CASE that might have lead all the way to the President! going on, the story focused on two women - neither of which I knew, since I was not a regular Homicide viewer, but one of which I recognized as a guest from the previous L&O episode - standing next to some fence and bitching to each other about unmerited gun-pulling. Seriously, they thought it was worth the time to ignore the main storyline and focus on this:
"We're just saying..."
"Nobody's saying anything! I wish if you people just had something to say, you'd say it to my face."
"I'm here, in your face, aren't I?"
(Fade out.)
DRAMA!
It's IN YOUR FACE like a woman scorned by a young, attractive rookie. This is what TNT knows. The DRAMA of high school Boston police precincts.
During commercial breaks (and I mean every single one) I watch these advertisements for a show called The Closer. It stars Kyra Sedgewick. I know this because the commercials repeat her named... repeatedly. It's like a Fugazi album or something. Now Kyra, she's this exceedingly unattractive woman with a southern accent who makes DRAMATIC facial expressions that make me want to punch the bitch's teeth out. The commercials have increasingly pounding drums in the background so we know that what we're seeing is DRAMATIC. Unfortunately, the presented dialogue is, you know, just kind of cliché.
"You don't have to be such a bitch about it."
"If I liked being called a bitch to myself, I'd still be married."
She's copping an ATTITUDE, see. Everyone thinks she's stupid because she has a southern accent, but she's actually smarter than all of them, see? And she has a southern accent, did we mention that? And an ugly fucking face, dear God, I can't even describe how homely this woman is. It's as if they wanted to make an Erin Brokovitch show, but they forgot to get an actress who's mildly attractive (I'm not much of a Julia Roberts fan, but next to Kyra Sedgewick I think I'd settle), can deliver an entertaining line or two without making us cringe, and was in something a bit better than Phenomenon.
I've yet to watch the show, of course. The commercials are enough. I'm probably wrong, though - TV Guide says it's "thrilling," or some such buzzword.
Just about every ad for The Closer is followed by one for Into the West, which has executive producer Steven Spielberg, don't you know, and is about cowboys and indians and shit. See, this is DRAMATIC because people died in the West, and there was lots of oppression or something. There might have been something about using every part of the Buffalo. I really can't insult these commercials - the show itself doesn't look bad, I just don't ever want to watch it in my life. (The West sucks. Just stick to Oregon Trail.)
I just want to watch Law and Order, and I don't care about the DRAMA of it. TNT needs to stop this "We know drama" crap and start exploiting what really brings them the ratings: Sam Waterston and every one of the assistant DAs are cute, much unlike Kyra Sedgewick or Steven Spielberg.
In my creative writing class last year, our wise professor gave the formula for DRAMA:
Drama = desire + danger
He continued to tell us that this didn't mean necessarily violent danger - we didn't have to have ninjas in our stories. I was tired; my brain processed the two sentences together, and I unintentionally noted:
Drama = desire + ninjas.
Catching my mistake, I sat giggling in my chair for a good twenty minutes. I should start writing for TNT. I know DRAMA. |
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| Hey, little fingers |
[Jun. 22nd, 2005|05:36 pm] |
Few things are more satisfying than getting a shooting star time, the present, and a record katamari size in one try.
My papercraft Prince inspired me to play through Katamari Damashii again. I hadn't touched it (except to show off to friends, of course) in quite a while. The trailer of Minna Daisuki Katamari Damashii made me giddy like a schoolgirl fused to Brad Pitt's head. Whispers of Katmari Damashii DS cause me to orgasm multiple times in my sleep, ending in a fun underwear-burning fad that spread throughout the country like pogs or AIDS. The paper Prince is sitting happily next to Monitor Bee, coaxing me into playing his videogames with a passion. They stare at me with their dead paper/dead bee eyes and shoot lasers from them; I think, at first, to kill me, yet it turns out that ninja assassins sneak up behind me quite often because my music is too loud. Then Pac-Man messes up the mix, and we all groove to some Constantines.
This is all my current life consists of. Boogying with Pac-Man and Sam Waterston. (His squirrely eyes are so cute.) It's pretty nice. No hassles, few people, lots of filth - both on the floor and on my computer. (Slightly less than when I had regular links to furry porn and gay prostitute advice booklets from Aderack.) I get reminded every so often that I make a better recluse than I do a superhero or a Mexican. I get sucked into friendships sometimes without any thought or reason. And they suck, but I go with it anyway, because I'm not as much an asshole as I claim to be.
Ajutla seems to think driving is a remedy for angst (so long as it is in a Ferrari and the Outrun girl is next to you). Driving, to me, is torturous - it no longer makes my stomach hurt, but the act is somewhat akin to attempting to sleep. Even with others in the car, the inward focus of thoughts while driving is enough to kind of suffocate me. I had a small panic attack while driving, once. It's something I plan to abandon, when I move to Fairfax. (I don't want to deal with D.C. traffic anyway.)
As a different mode of transportation, I believe I will get a magical paintbrush that can create rainbow-colored lines to carry me over spike-pits. Those things are a real bitch.
Most of you have probably seen the Mario blocks project. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend, in which we applied videogame conventions to the real world. "Hey, there's my face in that bush over there, 1up!" I would like to do something like this to confuse the Greenevillians. Perhaps a Mega Man head in a bush is in order - or, better yet, on top of a platform that's difficult to jump to. We make people work for their powerups in this game. Or, if I could somehow print off large sheets of paper, I could create 3D Goombas. Or make a real Mr. Saturn invasion. Mmm, goosebumps. BOING!
I rarely talk about videogames in the real world, but they're on my mind quite often. I'll give an example whenever I can get ahold of a camera.
My uncle visited this last week. He lives in a convent in LA. I believe he belongs to some sort of Hinduist religion. He's quiet, awkward, acts about like I did when I was 15. Somehow, the fall of the Soviet Union always comes up in conversation when he's around. His escape from the south is understandable - this place is like a disease. Most of the intelligent people I know (at least the young ones) either hate the entire region or the specific place they were raised. The few I know who love it here are frat-boy high-school-was-the-best-time-ever types. I suppose it would be nice for retiring, but as a young freak with narrow tastes, I'd just as soon see a katamari roll up the whole place. It would make a better star. |
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| Is June over yet? |
[Jun. 15th, 2005|01:42 pm] |
Derivatives are a lot of fun. Once you learn the rules, it's great to do a nice product rule + quotient rule combo in your head and freak out those pre-cal kids who still have to do them the long way. I mention this because my brother's girlfriend is taking a pre-cal class, and I find it amazing that teachers refuse to explain any of these concepts in plain English. Yeah, formulas and proofs are great, but they're nothing but a trick to casual observers. Explain what a derivative is, though, and don't just say "it's a slope." Show why it's a slope and what the implications are. I believe Ananda's is an online class, and powerpoint presentations are a great way to explain by illustration. Instead, it's just boring formula BS. What a waste of time.
Economics is largely the same way. Those who know nothing about it figure it has something to do with banks. (I am often questioned about how much math I will have to do in my future occupation. Math - how terrible!) People who have had a class can tell you something about supply and demand, maybe. But even most econ teachers will have trouble applying the graphs and the numbers to the real world, though they might understand it themselves. The ability to manipulate and control language is, unfortunately, a rare gift these days; unfortunate especially for our citizens who are now easily confused by vague, uncertain, or nonsensical political terms. I blame... the sea.
Actually, I blame our horrendous education system. And Xenu, who is partially related to the sea, I believe. I mean, surely he used some underwater volcanoes, right? There simply aren't enough above ground ones to kill that many billions of people. Or Thetans. Whatever they were.
Speaking of Hubbards, Count Hihihi pointed me toward the complete works of Rob Hubbard a while back. I got a couple soundtracks, dug them, and then kind of forgot about it. The videogame remixes topic at the now-defunct insert credit forums (R.I.P. - if I had some liquor I'd pour it on the ground for you, but I don't drink and if I did I probably wouldn't want to waste liquor, so never mind) reminded me, and I set to work downloading every last one. I listened to about half of them and kind of stopped when I heard the perfect song. Track 3 from Monty on the Run is so beautiful I don't think I need to hear any more videogame music ever. I'm still going to download all of Virt's stuff, but I probably won't listen to it.
I got a lovely smiley-face ring from a capsule toy machine, and I'm going to go get me some Kirby DS action. Until next time, Planeteers.
( Take that, Thetans! )
The MSPaintness of this one really shows.
Edit: Check this out. Individual-site-based Javascript blocker. The ridiculous number of scripts some sites run are amazing, and this takes care of them nicely while still easily allowing you to turn it off when you need to. No more annoying videos and ads in Myspace, a site that greatly overuses javascript. (I noticed there are certain normal hyperlinks it uses javascript to open. What is that? They're links, you freaks.) Zophar.net used to be the only site that could regularly bypass Firefox's popup blocker with popunders, and now it's powerless against me. Sure, I could have just turned javascript off in Firefox's options, but even insert credit and livejournal use a couple of scripts. This is much easier. Get! |
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| Swimmy and Videogames: A Brief History |
[Jun. 10th, 2005|03:20 am] |
Super Mario Bros. was, naturally, the first videogame I ever played. My experience with it was quite short. After watching my brother play quite a bit of it, I started my own game in the first level, immediately ran directly to the right into the first Goomba, and died. Josh explained to me, "You have to press A to jump." Well, I well knew how the buttons worked. So on my second life, I ran to the right and jumped into the first Goomba, and died. "No, you have to jump on him." I well knew that, too, but on my third attempt, I missed him. I jumped clear over the first Goomba. In bewilderment, I turned around and attempted to kill him. I jumped into the back of the first Goomba, and died. I gave up on him. I jumped over the first goomba, missed the first mushroom, and ran into the second Goomba, and died. After several tries, I picked up on jumping over the Goombas. Not on them, of course, but over. My younger sister, however, upon first picking up the controller, ran to the right and died on the first Goomba; on her second try, she landed on his head, squishing him and receiving some points.
The point, dear readers, is that for a long period of time, I sucked at videogames. Eye-hand coordination was never my strongest ability. I couldn't catch thrown objects of any sort. (In fact, whenever I did catch something, I bragged to myself for hours: I caught it!) So, when I noticed that my sister, who had no interest in the medium and largely hated videogames, could play every single one of them better than I, I gave up on them. I was content to watch my brother play. Not only was he good (at the time none of his friends believed that he could one-life Contra), but he had good taste. He gained recommendations from his friends, and time watching him was largely enjoyable.
One day, he brought home a game that was quite different from the others. It was late; I was supposed to be in bed, but I wanted to sneak a peak at the new game. I went upstairs, and my brother was in front of a mostly black screen. It had four odd sprites on the right hand side, some uglier sprites on the left, a green bar across the top, and... text at the bottom. A lot of text. He was moving a cartoon hand around to highlight the words, making decisions, and not moving his characters at all. When he exited that screen, he was in control of a red-haired child in the middle of a green clump that resembled a forest. He entered a castle. The castle was... abstract. There were patches of grass scattered around, odd chunks that were supposed to be a wall, stairs in the middle of nowhere that led to whole other maps, rooms whose contents were hidden by white sheets until entering... it was all very unsettling.
I loved it.
In the next few days, I watched him play for hours. He somehow already knew all the secrets (I assume a friend had a guide), and I learned each one in kind. On that first night, after several slow battles, we learned a protip I'll never forget: you have to equip the weapons after you buy them. I learned about the secret magic shop in the 3rd village, the peninsula with the experience-giving Zombulls, the move-the-numbers game that you can play after hitting A and B repeatedly while on the boat, the backwards-talking brooms, how to approach treasure chests so you don't get in a fight, the weaknesses of every single damn monster, the advantages of different classes (my brother actually swore by a fighter / red mage/ white mage/ black mage party - he didn't know the usefulness of Black Belts), the location of the travelling caravan, the location of the airship, the best level-up spots, the location of the fabled Nuke spell, those creepy mechs that can use nuke on you (oh shit!), the ability to kill the 4th fiend in one hit with the Bane sword... After he beat the game himself, I started my own quest. I already knew everything - what level I needed to be at every major point, the quickest way to get the airship and the class advancements, the order of events, and where everything generally was. And you know what?
Final Fantasy was the first videogame at which I did not suck completely.
Of course, it doesn't really require skill to play - just knowledge, and I had more than enough of that. (I still do, in fact. If you want me to write up a brief walkthrough of the game, I could at any time. I've given them verbally to those who don't believe me.)
I expressed to my brother how much I loved the castles in the game. He told me that I needed to play Final Fantasy II. (This was how late in the NES's life this was, if you were wondering.) In FFII, you could totally check inside pots and stuff for items, and treasure chests look open when you open them, so you know if you've checked.
Heh. Well, yeah. An SNES eventually came. I watched Josh play through every level of Super Mario World. We once managed to rent FFII, and I watched him play all the way to the return to Baron, where Baigan halted his advances until we had to return it. (He always had trouble with bosses that could cast Wall. The Delta Sisters and Ashura gave him similar trouble, when we were able to play further.)
I rented it myself, once. I played all the way to the Fire Fiend. (I can beat the whole thing in one sitting now, as I'd be glad to demonstrate to anyone with patience.) My friend Todd watched as I took well over an hour to beat him. I had a kind of disease, during those early SNES days, especially in FFII and Breath of Fire: I loved to run from battles. In BoF it was even easier, since an item gives you temporary immunity from them. Therefore, I sucked at FFII, just as I had at every other videogame before it. But the fact remained that I could play RPGs. I could develop strategies for bosses, even if I couldn't beat regular enemies. So I proceeded to freak out during the emulation years with huge numbers of SNES RPGs, no matter how crappy. I've played too many of the things, and try to avoid them nowadays.
Given this history, it's no wonder that this rendition (found in the Something Awful forums; thanks, whoever linked that [link removed; you can IM me for it]) of Terra's theme from FF6 gives me a biting nostalgic feeling that makes me want to walk in circles on the greenest patch of grass I can find for a few hours. When I think of the Super Nintendo and its colors - its rich, rich colors - my eyes squint a little bit, trying to see the world in Mode 7 graphics. Whenever we rented Secret of Mana, I would just summon Flammie and fly. I can still do this for long periods of time. I enjoy those flat planets and the blue skies above them. (I always hated the second half of FF6; it hurt to see that beautiful world destroyed. It hurt to have to look at grainy colors and lose that beautiful overworld music all because of some clown.) And, given all that, it's no wonder I was in love with FFVII when it came out; the first realization of a dimensional RPG overworld, and it was so rarely gloomy that its energy just enlivened me.
I used to play RPGs for that beautiful point where I got the airship / dragon / time machine / whatever that allowed me to see the overworld map for what it really was - to learn everything in relation to everything else, and just listen to the music and fly around, battle free. (Perhaps this is why I enjoy Skies of Arcadia; the whole game tries to capture that feeling, except the battle free part, and while I sometimes miss flying over some physical patches of bright green, it's still enjoyable to just fly.)
Nowadays I don't suck at videogames. Why? Quite a few years after its release, my brother got me and my other brother a Playstation for Christmas. With it, I received Metal Gear Solid, a game I had watched Todd play all the way through. (I still didn't play games that weren't RPGs, unless they were ROMs and I could cheat.) Since I had it, it would have been a shame not to play it, right? So I did. And I found that I didn't suck at videogames anymore; I realized that all I had needed the entire time was patience, the ability to practice each individual game. I have Hideo Kojima to thank for my true appreciation of all but one genre of videogame. Thanks, Koj. I'll buy you a beer sometime. |
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