Archive for: May, 2006

Sunken Temple Hijinks

May 29 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Gaming, Never Off the Record

Shadow Bolt and Arcane MissilesIt has been a big weekend for World of Warcraft around here. I ran the Sunken Temple instance for the second time. There’s so much less pressure when the whole gang isn’t killing the dragon for you. Which is not to say I resented killing all five dragons. That actually ruled pretty hard. But the first run, we started out with a crumb-bum of a twink healer and I felt guilty that we had to work our way down to Morphaz so I could get an arcane shard and everybody could die along the way about 12 times. This second time, though, we had a far, far better healer. And unaffiliated, too, which was totally crazy! I know I did my best to suck up in hopes that he’d join our Guild. I didn’t make any invite, but I tried to make overatures of water and healing potions.

Christopher also surprised everybody by giving up on his Rogue, who I have been playing with since he finally got me to make the transition from City of Heroes. He hasn’t really said why (and I have asked, though not pointedly) and he’s replaced himself in my quests with a Warlock. Playing a Mage and a Warlock together has been pretty different. On one hand, yeah, we’re throwing a lot of damage from way back. And yes, he’s got pets, but they don’t do damage so they’re not much good for tanking like the Rogue was. On the other hand, the Warlock can create a soul stone, so even if I were to die more frequently (and I think I might actually be dying less but I haven’t counted), I can just pop back up, throw on some Arcane Intellect, sway through Invocation and be right back in the fight. It’s also helped with instances, because now I’m not the only toon dealing area-of-effect damage. So once his Warlock throws a coupel fire AoEs around, I throw everything I have in there, as quick as I can get it done and not have to worry about pulling aggro.

Plus I like the way we look together. There was always a feeling of oddity when playing City of Heroes– why I am teaming with this slutty controller? Well, he’s my husband. And yes, I wish he’d put on some pants. But if he wants to fly around town in a g-string and a cape, who am I to stop him? Then the Rogue was a woman toon as well, and I didn’t think anything of it. That’s just how it goes. But today he said, “Some of it is just wanting to play a guy, you know?” I said, “I know. I’ve wanted that too.” And in this case I’m getting into the role play of it all, a little bit, in my head. We’re a pair of opposites that work well together. Man and woman, Warlock and Mage, Dark Magic and Light Magic. He throws curses and I lift them. I make bread and water, he pulls healthstones and soulstones. It gives playing a new, more fun dimension that I didn’t realize I was missing when I was just trailing along behind the Rogue, waiting for him to throw Kidney Punch so I could lay a Firebolt down before he went berserker.

And so this isn’t all gaming-navel-gazing, we have funny times:

Christopher: Is cheesecake really a pie?
Sarah: No. Who said that?
Chris: Someone in Barrens chat. You hear the most disturbing things in Barrens chat.

How to Run an Instance, by Some Assembly Required

Sarah: Do you want food, water, or a tank?
Chris: Yes.

Chris: Gotta love the endgame and the constantly diminishing standards. Need tank. Need sorta tank. Need anyone at all.

Chris: There’s the sheep. Where’d the other one go?
Sarah: We killed it.
Chris: Yay us!

Chris: Can I tank?
Laurassa: No, you can’t tank.
Chris: You let the other priest tank.
Skillzy: The reading says we need a real tank for the dragon.
Chris: Meh, we’ll be fine.
Skillzy: *cries*
Chris: You should have more faith in your bear!

Chris: That was a bad place to have lost Laurassa.
Sarah: None of us died.
Chris: I almost did.
Sarah: I know. I watched you run by screaming.

Chris: He’s got more DoTs on him than God. He’s never going to stay sheeped. Not that God has any DoTs.

Laurassa: If he doesn’t want to join our Guild after [the new good healer won some PROFOUNDLY PHAT PURPLE LOOT] I’m gonna rip his face off and feed it to Baby.
Chris: Either way, we win!

The moral of the story: Skillzy’s bear is pretty awesome. And if in the second kill of the instance you signed on as healer for, you win a need roll on an Epic, maybe join that Guild, especially since nobody bitched at you at all and went so far as to give you grats and pat you on the back for winning fair and square. Plus, the Mage is cute and has no problems being a vending machine.

8 responses so far

friendship {online:perfect}

May 24 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery, Never Off the Record

A day without Spark is like a day without sweet, sweet oxygen. He gets me and I get him. I told him I had to get ready to teach CSS next week and he was immediately supportive.

sparkx: ok {
i’ll write everything in css: to get you
prepared: and junk
}
sarahetc: {class.thanks}

4 responses so far

Gravity is a Harsh Mistress

May 24 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom, Geekery, Recovering English Major

I’ve been reading Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds, and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly. It’s a collection of essays, edited by Jane Espenson (who Christopher personally blames for making season six of Buffy, in his words, “lousy”). It was published before the movie, so the majority of the essays are speculations on backstory we now know or theories on backstory we’ll probably never know.

One of the essays, “Firefly vs. The Tick,” by Don DeBrant, started out like it was going to compare the interestingly similar writing styles of Joss Whedon and Ben Edlund. For those of you who were fortunate enough to see The Tick, either live action or animated, you know of what I speak. Dialogue that’s fizzy and shocking and thought-provoking all at once. Everyone I’ve ever known who’s liked The Tick has had his or her own special favorite line. And taken out of context they make absolutely no sense. Mine, for instance, is Arthur saying, “The don’t know salad! They don’t know fork! And they sure as hell don’t know left!” Little bit funny. Ha ha. But if you can imagine being 20 years old, stretched out on nasty dorm carpet, eating m&ms and drinking cheap beer with your friends, and watching Arthur, who has been kidnapped by terrifying space monkeys (DeBrant notices this coincidence) and taken to the past as a monkey himself and forced to teach other other monkeys how to set a table for the time traveling guests of their robot overlords, then it’s one of the most hilarious things you ever heard. Or it is to me.

DeBrant make the point that The Tick sets up several tropes of evil that are later revisited in Firefly, among them dinosaurs, mustaches, and monkeys. We’ve covered monkeys, but he rounds up Wash as the Edlund character:

The scene that introuced Wash, Serenity’s pilot, placed him at the ship’s controls. He was not paying attention to them, and he did not have a mustache. He was, however, playing with two small plastic dinosaurs, which he pitted against each other in a scene fraught with betrayal, horror and lots of evil laughter. He is obviously a very bad man, and we will talk of him no further. It is worth mentioning, though, that when the captain and Zoe first met him, he did have a mustache, and Zoe didn’t trust him. Six years went by, they got married, and the mustache disappeared. Coincidence? I think not.

Despite what I belive to be grave inaccuracies in his timeline (six years?), he has a sort of crazy point. Perhaps Wash really was the evil one, hiding behind facial hair and plastic dinosaurs, biding his time, waiting to unleash evil robot overlords.

7 responses so far

This Isn’t a Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory

May 23 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Confession

I check Ezpy’s blog every day and lately she has written some interesting, thought-provoking things. Leaving aside for the moment that her most recent entry on shopping makes me want to get up, go into the kitchen, get out my chef’s knife and stab myself through the heart with it, the entry prior to that has some guerrilla thought-provoking information. In the middle of a discussion about how to balance life between things personal and things community, she tells a little story about deluding yourself through therapy. She found an alternate method of coping that let her pretend wellness while continuing to actual increase unwellness. She refers to them as “food issues.” Most people have them. Lately I have been thinking that I don’t have issues with food. Food itself is the issue. All of it for any reason is a problem.

It would be imprecise to say that hunger has no meaning anymore. I can identify in myself six discrete stages of hunger, all but one of which I am capable of ignoring. I find though, that in all but that last and most painful stage, I have conditioned myself to act against what my body is saying.

Stage one is a vague bubbling feeling. I suppose it means that my stomach is empty and wants for food. If I even bother to notice this feeling, I usually don’t acknowledge it. If I do acknowledge it, it’s so I can remind myself not to eat. Then I feel good about not eating. This is the foundation of a continuing perversion of instinct.

Stage two is the same bubbly feeling, followed by a dull ache at the bottom of my chest. This makes me annoyed. That annoyance compounds my determination not to eat. My thought process: Hungry. Fuck you. This defiance is hurting no one but me, so I continue. My self and my body are two different things, and the latter deserving of more punishment than I can ever muster on my own. I feel endless contempt for my body, which is big and unwieldy and constantly prone to all manner of unseemly urges.

Stage three is a sharper, but fading, ache with slight wooziness. The uncomfortable physical sensations come and go and I find it harder to concentrate. This lapse in concentration often releases my hold on the precious willpower-supporting contempt and lets me say, “I am hungry. I could get a snack.” Then I don’t. I acknowledge the sensation, the contempt. I rationally examine this irrational action and decide that I should take yet more irrational action. Eating anything at this point would be failure and I already fail enough. This is one thing I can accomplish.

Stage four is headache. Given appropriate and sufficient distraction (another person or a nice story to read) I won’t even have to resort to taking aspirin. It’s just a headache; it doesn’t mean what you think. What it means is that my blood sugar is very, very low. What I think it means is that I’m worthless and if I could just lean to control it, I’d be at least one step on my way to being a real person.

Stage five is the shakes. Typing and writing are difficult. Driving must be done with both hands. Walking becomes more interesting. With the shakes comes a marked decline in concentration. It takes me a long time to comprehend questions and a long time to answer. Usually the answer I give isn’t very thorough. I can’t remember orders or lists anymore. I start making bad decisions: word choices, right-on-red choices, what to do with the rest of my day choices. At this point I’m no longer aware of hungriness. I am usually not aware that anything is wrong at all, other than I ‘m a little off. Unless I forget two or three things in a row that will impact someone besides me, I may never realize it. If they do impact someone else, I’m spared coping with the realization by having to decide whether or not the mistakes are immediately correctable and how embarrassing it will be to do so, of I can let them slide or makeup for it later. I also have to stop and mentally berate myself for being such an idiot, such a moron. Such a useless loser. After that, I have to question some more. Why can’t I be better? Why can’t I ever get anything right? Then I must choose. Continue in this vein until I cry or find something to distract me. Unless outside forces conspire to keep me from distraction, that’s what I’ll choose. Sure as hell beats feeling things.

Stage six is unignorable pain. I have to stop walking, talking or reading when it happens the first time. And once it lessens, I take several deep breaths. In that time, normal brain function ceases and survival brain goes into effect. Now I am hyper-oxygenated and controlled by my reptile-brain. If I am lucky, I planned for this and can go sit somewhere quiet and eat some calorically engineered non-food and be quiet in the dark while I repeat my resolutions of being better and vow to try harder next time. If I’m unlucky, I have to go get food. The less said about that the better. After all, it’s eating and eating is foul. If I’m blessed, I’ll be in a position to do neither. I’ll just have to cope with the pain and get back to what I was doing.

Inevitably I fail. Try as I might, I cannot stop eating. Every morning has the promise of nothing to eat all day except diet cokes and extremely diluted juice. Every evening is an orgy of self-incrimination and desperate prayer: please God, forgive me for my awfulness; please God, let me wake up better or not at all. I wake up so resolved that I forgot that being awake at all might mean I’m better and I don’t have to do this anymore. I could eat if I wanted to, if I were hungry. I could stop hating myself.

I guess that starting to eat when hungry would be the first step on resolving this issue. But that is an incredibly large step. How do I do that which I have been conditioned against my whole life? How do I overcome this massive prejudice against caring for myself? Somewhere in me there are a few molecules of worth and when I find them, I’m going to gather them up and guard them with the aforementioned chef’s knife. And then I am going to fix them a nice snack.

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Math, Affection

May 20 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

Between Thursday afternoon and right now, I had five diet cokes, three showers, three cosmopolitans, seven glasses of water, two conversations with Spark, one mightnight phone call and over 600 pieces of comment spam. And one legit comment from Pop that had more than one link in it and I almost deleted it because, hell, it was hard to tell her from all the fuckwads trying to convince me to play roulette while buying cheap Mexican birth control pills on my new Nokia mobile phone.

So now y’all have to fill out a little math problem to comment. I’m sorry. I truly am sorry, because I am no good at math. I frequently have to use my fingers. But hell’s bells! More than 600 spam comments.

I’ll mollify you by letting you know that I downloaded Audacity this morning and have recorded most of chapter one of Snow Crash. When I put forth the directive “read to someone you love” I didn’t think you’d make me prove my love by fucking podcasting. But that is how much I love Spark. And Poptart. And Denise. And any anonymous readers who I don’t yet know who need to be loved on and will get some love from me saying things like, “They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman’s March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping.” I’m going to read the whole damn thing because I LOVE YOU SO FUCKING MUCH.

5 responses so far

Utahraptor Stole My Title

May 17 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

Christopher and I have a new-ish ritual. Every evening he asks me to read him the day’s Dinosaur Comics. I’ve been hooked on it since Nicole first sent me an email. And I read the first one out loud to Christopher with such zest that he’s asked me to continue doing it. So every evening, he comes around behind my desk and says, “Is there a new Dinosaur Comic today?” So I read it, with great enthusiasm, enthusiastic yelling actually, because that’s what T-Rex deserves.

I love the way the comic itself works. It’s the same panels, over and over, every single day. It never changes. But the dialogue is so great. The author has managed to create these three unique characters, plus God and sometimes the Devil and has new, hilarious content pretty much every day.

Spark recently turned me onto Ctrl+Alt+Delete. It’s a four panel cartoon about gaming, also very funny. There are fewer injokes than Penny Arcade, but I’ll always love Tycho and Gabe for their strip about Serenity spoilers. Skullfucking, indeed. I should’ve broken down right there and read every spoiler I could get my hands on. But that is all water under the clown-fuck bridge. Point is: gaming comics are great and I like them and you might too, if you like to game.

And it took him awhile, but Spark also got me to read Questionable Content. I held out for the longest time, thinking it would be unsafe for work viewing, but I don’t think it is unless you count background art that reads “Coffee with a scone in it. Scone with a cookie in it. Your ass with a hamster in it.” I’m not a big fan of Winston or of Hannelore, but the rest of the characters I like a lot. And I’m so getting a t-shirt that read “TEH.”

What other good web comics are there? I know Dr. McNinja is great, but tend to wait until the story is finished and then read it all at once, rather than remembering to check for a new page every other day. All y’all let me know what you’re reading so I can read it, too.

Sub-discussion: I’ve recently been told it’s weird that Christopher and I read things out loud to one another for entertainment. We spent the first few weeks of our married life with him reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series out loud to me. I’d read it several times before, as had he, but it was still nice to hear. And he’s never technically read any Harry Potter. I’ve read them to him. To me this seems like a perfectly nice thing to do for someone you care about. We read to children all the time to nuture them. Why not adults?

In summary: Rec me comics. Read to someone you love.

12 responses so far

There Are No Hills in Iowa on Which to Wish

May 16 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Confession

My parents just got back from a trip to Iowa. My sister and brother-in-law are going for a visit next week. I haven’t been since 2000 and wild dogs couldn’t make me. A funeral might, but that’s it. Even my sister’s modulated, sorority-sister, using-the-word-“just”-too-much voice can’t make me feel like I need to go. “We’re just going to go for a visit,” she said. Driving over 800 miles is not “just a visit.” For us, it would be nearly 1000. It’s going to see people you figure are about to die. Or something.

I seem to have a very different concept of Iowa than my sister. Despite the fact that she left the state when she was 10 years old, I think she still considers herself an Iowan. When people ask me where I’m originally from, I tell them Iowa, but immediately add that I grew up in Nashville. As for growing up, it was split pretty well down the middle: Iowa until I was 12 and Tennessee until I was 22. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve actually lived longer than in the South than in the Midwest. And I’m from Birmingham, now. I’m from wherever Christopher and I are.

It has been important to me to think Southern. It has been important to me to fully aculturize myself. Moving cross-country when you’re turning teenager is very, very hard: you want to be unique and you want to fit in; nothing made me more unique than being from Iowa and nothing kept me more from fitting in. I didn’t understand customs or modes of speech or regional references. The first time I ordered a meal (at O’Charleys) and I asked for “coke” and the waitress said, “What kind?” I looked at her like she had two heads. What did she mean, what kind?

So my grandparents are getting very old. But I really don’t want to go see them. I don’t want to go and listen to talk of sickness and my cousins’ dubious accomplishments. I just don’t want to go. Last time I was there, I was ready to leave after three hours, but I stayed three days. They don’t know me and they don’t care to. They’re content to remember me as I was and not as I am and keep questioning me about why I don’t teach English “at the high school.” There are two high schools in Fort Dodge, one public and one parochial.

These people are my blood and I have nothing in common with them. I can hardly romanticize it anymore. I want it to feel exotic—I’m from Iowa! But I don’t. I don’t have any Midwestern sensibility left. I think they’re hasty and rude and I know they think I’m slow and superficial. I’ll revel in that and feel smugly superior, because I know it’s merely a knee-jerk reaction to behaviors they don’t understand. I feel more affection for the song by Dar Williams than the state all my progenitors came from. And they’re probably not long for the world and I feel awful that I don’t feel bad.

4 responses so far

Julia, Almost Six Months

May 14 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Never Off the Record

Julia and Rachael

Grandpa said this grass was different than the Yankee grass at home.

That turned out to be a very tasty pansy.

6 responses so far

IDKFA

May 09 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Gaming

Once upon a time I lived in a big house in a nice suburb and didn’t do well in school except at English and Band. I spent all my time playing the French Horn and reading until I started hanging around with some boys. Five boys, to be specific: three trumpet players, the horn player the chair below me and a baritone player I was used to spending hours and hours on the phone with.

Things were sort of formal at first. A few trips to the movies, a few afternoons spent in a basement, watching videos. One night around a fancy dining room table eating pizza off the good china. But little by little, I was absorbed. I was eventually the only girl in the boys club and to a woman, just one of the guys. And one night, I found myself sitting on the edge of a bed, watching those boys play a new computer game called Doom.

I was horrified. I thought seriously about cutting and running. There were pentagrams everywhere and I took my Christianity as only a converted Catholic with an overactive imagination can: seriously to the point of Gothic. Pentagrams and awful monsters and blood and screaming and it was all very pixelated and stupid.

So I sat. And I watched. And eventually they made my try it. And I sucked. And I screamed a little bit. So I went back to sitting and watching and occasionally asking if we could go do something fun, like play Mario Kart in the rec room.

And then there was more sitting and watching. Doom. Hexen. Wolfenstein. Remember Hexen? You could turn people into chickens, but then they could peck you to death, so you had to watch that. Some playing, but my heart wasn’t in it. Lots and lots of sitting and watching.

Years later, there I am, married to one of the trumpet players. I realize, possibly for the first time, what life will be like living with him: there will be reading and television watching. There will be cooking and cleaning and laundry. There will be making love and running errands, just like every other couple. But if left to his own devices, there will be gaming. And he will choose games over most other things and sometimes choose them over me.

So I sit down with a Miller High Life and load Doom 95 and proceed to play. And play and play and play and follow his directions cos he’s playing along side me. I shout, “Shit! Fuck! Stim pack!” He shouts, “Stop taking it with your face!” We develop an intimate form of communication all our own with words like, “trip” and “strafe” and “gawd, just get me a fucking chaingun and let me fuck it in the ass.” I, as a point of fact, is the one demanding the chain gun– graduate school work relegated to my office hours, cleaning put off until later, subscription to Computer Gaming World secured.

And then there were lots of other games: Nox (which will always be the first game I really played just for myself and I have Rachael to thank for it), and Diablo II. Quake II. Heroes of Might and Magic III and American McGee’s Alice. Deus Ex and Max Payne, and the sequel to each. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter and Unreal Tournament 2003 (and 2004!). Heroes of Might and Magic IV, but nobody likes to talk about that. City of Heroes. I played City of Heroes nonstop through fricking Hurricane Ivan. World of Warcraft. And in that time, there was also Doom III. I looked forward to that. Christopher and I have never fought over something the way we fought over the issue of CGW that had the previews. And I couldn’t watch more than 10 minutes of it. At one point, I had to scream and cover my eyes and leave the room. Too scary for me, who had a hard time coping with parts of Alice, which, by the way, they’re making into a movie.

Tonight we saw Doom, the movie. What a cheesy movie. What memories it brought back. When it finally gets to the end and the zombies start amassing and hording toward the nanowall and they’re firing round after round after round and the corpses are piling up, I said, “Yeah. This is Doom!”

Otherwise an unremarkable movie except for the first firing of the BFG when The Rock said, “Big. Fuckin’. Gun.” At that point, Christopher and I looked at one another and I don’t know what he was thinking, but I was thinking about all those afternoons spent watching him and those other guys play, listening to them shout triumphantly, “BFG9000!” And I asked, “What’s a BFG?” And they said, all at once, “Big fucking gun.” I’m so glad I didn’t cut and run. w00t.

13 responses so far

None of These are Madeleines

May 07 2006 Published by Sarah, etc. under Confession

Good things I smelled this weekend:

  1. Honeysuckle with dew, at night
  2. Fresh cut grass
  3. Sweaty husband
  4. My cat Gwen
  5. Tortugas pizza with extra extra fresh garlic
  6. Rice milk candles
  7. Grilling hamburgers with cheddar cheese
  8. My niece’s head, which as far as I’m concerned, is the best smelling thing in the history of the world.

5 responses so far

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