PocketWatch Romances

Archive for September, 2008

– I got my trainer yesterday! It actually was in on Tuesday, but the email’s sender was listed as “customer-service” and I almost didn’t see it — if it hadn’t been for the all-caps subject line catching my eye, I probably would have missed it entirely. I set it up last night, sans bike, and it looks great. I’m still not quite certain that it’s going to work (will the quick-release skewer really support my bike and my fat ass?), but I’m sure it will. If there was a weight limit, it would have been noted somewhere in the instructions, and I haven’t seen it, so. The copy on the site said the trainer came with a DVD. I was expecting a short ‘here’s how to set it up/ride’ kind of thing, but what came was actually a Robbie Ventura/Vision Quest Coaching training DVD, specifically intended for people using trainers indoors. Cool! Ventura is one of the few people who cover the Tour de France that I can actually stand to listen to for any length of time. (I think my ideal team would be Paul Sherwin, Phil Ligget, Robbie Ventura, Johan Bruyneel, and small doses of Bob Rolle.)

– It’s fall, which sucks. At least I have my trainer, now.

– I had a horrible dream earlier this morning. I don’t think it had anything to do with reading nearly all of The Gunslinger before I went to sleep, since it didn’t involve any of the elements of the book outside of a kid, but I dunno. Also: why do people think that gore = horror? Gore is horrible, yes, but mostly I find it disgusting and off-putting, not horror-inducing. If your idea of fun is making other people throw up, then I can see why you’d go for gore. If you want to disturb and horrify people, there are other, better ways to go about it. (Short Version: the description of Jake’s original death in The Gunslinger was entirely too graphic and, ultimately, utterly pointless. Why go that kind of trouble unless you want people to think you’re perhaps psychologically unsound? (NB: yeah, yeah, I know, the map is not the territory/the author is not the story but STILL. Your writing reflects you, whether you intend it to or not.)

– After reading King’s forewords to The Gunslinger, I wanted to write. It’s really weird; I still am not exactly all that excited about the guy’s fiction (I’m giving The Gunslinger a shot because it sounded like it might be worth trying; Ev said almost the whole series was good and that I should read The Stand, too. I’ll see.), but the little bit of his non-fiction I’ve read has been good. I’m inclined to check out ‘On Writing’, now.

– Since my bike’s going to be stationary, I’m thinking about rigging up some kind of table for my laptop so’s I can write/surf while I pedal pedal pedal.

– Right now, though, I think I’m gonna go back to sleep. Guh.

That Idiot Ivan just ate a small blob of fuzz/cat hair that was lying on my bed. He just leaned over and ate it! *Siiiiiigh* This is why we tell the cats that we don’t want to have to explain it at the emergency vet clinic.

Also, today is the last day that my aunt K and Fido are together, so think good thoughts for them, please.

done! All upgraded. Yay.

From a game I’m considering playing (as well as another one that I’ve already tried, not that I can remember which one it was):

If you are using Windows Vista, please do NOT install the game on the C Disk.

Why? What possible difference does it make? I don’t have any room on D, which is the system backup partition. I don’t have any external drives, except my USB drive, and I’m not about to install and run a game from that. I can’t imagine that most of the kids at which this game is aimed have computers with multiple partitions (i.e. more than 2) or external drives, either. Of course, I could be wrong, too, but eh.

For the record: whichever game I downloaded (I think it was Wonderland Online, which is not my kind of game) installed and ran just fine on C drive.

I’m just not a fan of cutesiepoo girly* “social” MMORPGS in which the big draws are the pet, fishing, home-decorating, and marriage systems. I don’t mind fishing as a component of the game, particularly if it’s a useful and integral part of it. In World Of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XI, for example, the fish you catch can be cooked up to feed your character and/or others — there’s always food up for sale at the auction houses. I’m also not opposed to fishing being the point of the game, as with Fishing Champ or OZWorld. For me, in-game fishing is more of a between-quest diversion.

Pets are also not a huge draw for me. Maybe it’s because I have actual pets, or maybe it’s because I have enough trouble looking after my character’s health and happiness, but for me in-game pets are more of an annoyance than anything else. In NeoSteam, every character gets a pet, no matter what your class. For the first ten levels, they’re not all that helpful; at level ten, you can evolve them to either a combat-oriented “Salamander” (which looks suspiciously like a small ball of lightning) or a healing-oriented “Undine” (which looks like a mermaid). Both the Salamander and Undine get an attack/heal power to start with, but they only use it randomly. That’s NOT helpful to me, thanks — if I’m going to go to the trouble to evolve my pet, remember to summon it and feed it, then I want it to do its job more than “randomly”. I don’t care if there’s some kind of limit; say the Salamander can only attack after the character has attacked, or only does 10 points worth of damage, or misses on every third attack or something. Limit the Undine to healing only after the character’s HP drops below a certain percentage (the higher the Undine’s level, the higher that percentage gets, i.e. at level 1, she waits ’til the HP is at 15%, level 2 ’til 25%, etc.), or to only healing 150 HP at a time, or SOMEthing.

Home decorating is one of the few things about which I am actually torn. On the one hand, my favorite part of playing The Sims is building, decorating and furninshing houses; on the other hand, I tend to play MMORPGs for the story side of things… Which makes home decorating less than a priority for me.

In Final Fantasy XI, the first place I encountered home decorating in an MMORPG, each piece of furniture has an element. Your character gets different enhancements depending on the dominant element; most of my characters have Earth enhancements which is great for assembling sandwiches, arrows, and other things that need to be bound together. Plus, with each piece of furniture, the amount of storage in your house increases by at least 1 slot, which for packrats like me is awesome.

Marriage… Most of the time, I just ignore this part. I think it would be interesting to see if there’s ANY MMORPG that will allow two male or two female characters to get married, because I don’t think there is. And that annoys me, not that it really makes any difference to my characters one way or another. It’s just something that I’ve noticed/wondered.

Making getting married one of the big draws of the game, though, is just kind of dumb. It’s like a quest, except that you don’t really get anything at the end of it… Well, okay, there is a game (Asda Story) that uses a “soulmate” system to allow people to level up faster (as if they’re in a group) even if one person isn’t online, but as far as I know, that’s the only one.

I think part of my weird problems with in-game marriage is that marriage is one of those things that gets sugar-coated and sweetened and drowned in happy-ever-after syrupy crap which kids (particularly girls) are fed from birth, and it’s not a healthy thing. Marriage can be fun, and can be the best thing that ever happens to people, yes. However, it’s also LOTS of work and it requires people to behave in ways that they may not be at all used to, which can lead to all kinds of problems when said people decide that they aren’t going (or don’t have) to change. In-game marriage, particularly in games marketed to younger girls, runs the risk of continuing to reinforce the fairy-tale stereotypes of marriage as being a perfect answer to relationship problems and as the perfect be-all end-all to which girls should aspire.

Nota Bene: I’m not saying this because I’m destined to be “that weird old lady with the beard and the cats” or because I was rejected by anyone and everyone I asked to marry me in-game — I’m writing this because my own fairy-tale-fueled views of marriage crashed and burned hard when my parents got divorced and I really don’t think that anyone else should have to go through that.

* ‘Girly’ in this case meaning games that are practically MMORPG versions of your typical shoujo manga series — all about the relationships and the cute boys and the drama, which I find tiresome.

1:
For some reason, I have this sudden dullish-stabby-throbby thing going on in my face, on the side with my formerly-broken tooth. And by sudden I mean sudden, like, minding-my-own-business-and-then-someone-hit-me-with-a-hammer sudden, not like building-all-day sudden. I took an Advil, but it hasn’t kicked in yet. I’ve also got the heating pad on it, but it’s not helping all that much.

2: I may be headed to Seattle soon. Like, tomorrow or Thursday soon. Not for anything fun, either — one of my aunt K’s kitties has cancer and she (the kitty) isn’t expected to last the week. I’ll call her Fido — Fido is one of the sweetest, silliest cats ever. She was a foundling, like most of the cats in our family; she had been abandoned by her family in the apartment complex where K used to live. After watching her creep around in the pouring rain for three days, my aunt said ‘y’know, this is just fucking wrong‘ and brought Fido inside. K already had a cat, who I shall call Pale; he wasn’t too sure about Fido at first, but after a few days he acted like he’d known her his entire life.

K’s not doing too well, and (of course!) this is the week that my grandparents left the area for the sunny southwest (which is something they’d been planning to do, and Fido’s diagnosis didn’t come until after they’d hit the road, so). Besides the fact that it’s just better to have someone there who’ll give you a hug when you need it, I personally want to be there because K was there for me after I got fired from my last job. Mom’s going to call her tomorrow and see if she wants someone to come down; I’m kind of inclined to just go and deal with her in person. So, anyhow, if you’re so inclined, keep us all in your thoughts, eh?

A little tiny Naruto fanfic snip over at Fun With Fiction.

…mostly just stuff, though.

The weather’s been crappy. I haven’t ridden my bike in I dunno how long — long enough I can’t remember the last time, anyhow.

—–

Haven’t been writing, or reading, or drawing. Mostly what I have been doing is playing games — I can recommend 9Dragons for anyone who likes martial arts and/or ancient China. 2Moons (semi-standard swords’n’sorcery) is okay — I mostly love the dialogue, so far — but it hasn’t really grabbed me. Neosteam is fun and different, at least in terms of world and backstory. Conquer Online 2.0 and Phoenix Dynasty are both interesting; CO has one very cool feature that I love: pathfinding. You select your destination from a list of places (armor/potions; leveling up; other places in the Conquer world) and sit back as your character runs there on their own.

9Dragons and 2Moons has more human translators, it seems, while the smaller games use machine translation. The results of machine translation can be frustrating or amusing or both; in Neosteam I occasionally find myself saying ‘Huuuuuunh?’ when I start quests. Fortunately, though, a quick check of the quest log clarifies things.

—–

Based solely on the previews of ‘It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’, I will never watch it. It looks entirely too disgusting and offensive.

—–

My birthday came and went. I’m now officially old. My dad sent me some money for a bike trainer, so I bought myself a CycleOps magnetic trainer. It’s supposed to be here sometime next week, which is great.

—–

and that’s about it for now.

What Would Sarah Palin Name You?

The woman named her children odd things, I know. However, here in Alaska, at least three of those names have local significance:
– Piper
= = While she may have chosen Piper for reasons beyond our ken, what comes to mind for me is the sturdy little workhorse of the Bush, the Piper Cub.
– Willow
= = There are lots and lots of willows growing wild and free up here. There’s also a small community named Willow about ten minutes outside of Wasilla.
– Bristol
= = Since Todd Palin is part Yup’ik, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to know that Bristol was named after either Bristol Bay itself or the Bristol Bay region.

According to an article that was published when Trig was born, his name is A) Norwegian and B) apparently a family name.

I have no explanation for Track, which is just a horrible name for a child. Particularly since all I can think of is either Tozier Track (which is an empty field in the summer, but in the winter is used for Junior Championship dogsled racing; it’s also the trailhead for the local dogsled trails) or the track on a snowmachine. Neither option strikes me as particularly likely, but you never know.

So the other day, there was a McCain advert on TV. This isn’t really all that significant, except that my mother and I were watching something (college football? A baseball game?) and the advertisement started off with the voiceover guy intoning, “The writing is on the wall…”

My mother, from whom I get my tendency to talk back to things like the radio and TV, said, “Yes, yes it is. And what does it say? ‘Mene mene tekel parsin’; you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.*”

That sort of thing is why I love my mother. I really need to remember to tell her about someone online coming up with ‘Pontius Pilate was a governor; Jesus was a community organizer.’, because I know she’d appreciate it.

* Daniel 5; the specific passages are Dan 5:25 and 26.

Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean”

This is an interesting article. Seriously nasty language within, though, if you’re at work. And yes, I was irked by the stupid little jabs about Alaska. Call me a humorless bitch, I just want people to get it right — I mean, if I slag all West Virginians as inbred hicks living in tin shacks with moonshine stills out back, that doesn’t reflect very well on me, does it? Nor does assuming that Washington D.C. is nothing but a sea of concrete.