Posts by _LS_

  • I found something that you won't find very interesting. Move along.

    I never really got to know Sheena very well. As I recall, she was kind of a drama lama. But she was Ashleigh's oldest online friend or something like that.

    The two of them worked together on some online role-plays in the pre-TSR days. "Princess Zelda's Role Playing Game," or "PZRPG" was a big deal for them. Later, after TSR6 went down for about a year/year and a half, I found out that a bunch of the gang were hanging out on Sheena's forum, which was focused on PZRPG II. Then when TSR 7 came out we all abandoned it.

  • A communal story, written one complete thought at a time.

    So, we've all probably played "one-word story" games, or "write a story one sentence at a time." I've generally found them to be novelties that are more annoying than entertaining. So here's an experiment: lets write a communal story in indeterminately sized chunks. Try to aim for between one paragraph, and 100 words.

    -------

    "Ne-- --lp. --'ve r-n agr----." came the voice over the ship-to-shore radio. Darren looked at the speaker incredulously, as if he'd somehow catch it smirking at its dumb joke.

    "Say again, Reprieve?"

    "-- need so-- --sistance --re. We ra- -ground!"

    "Reprieve, I read your current coordinates as 35.138497 by -40.452347. There's no land around you for miles." A crackling static silence followed. When the voice from the Reprieve came again, its annoyance was obvious even through the distortion.

    "Sure ar- - -ot of tre-- -nd dirt --neath --- keel i- ---- isn'- -and. --- -ucking ge- ---eone out he-- ---eady."

  • The Best Times

    I really didn't like it. It was way too easy to fall off of it to your death. The specific stars weren't very fun to get. But I think the worst part is how hard it was to move around the environment. Everything was such a hassle.

  • Hotline Miami

    They just get everything right. The music is amazing, the story is amazing, the gameplay is amazing. The basic premise is that you're essentially a serial killer. Each level begins outside of a building, and your job is to kill everyone inside of the building.

    If they kill you, you hit R, and you're instantly outside the building ready to go in again. The game is crazy fast-paced. It's actually designed to make you get angry and sloppy. It's beautiful.

    Here's the review I wrote for Hotline Miami 2, which has a lot more details:

    ----------------

    There were times while I was playing this when I literally felt like I was on drugs. I don't mean that the game is super trippy (it is), and I don't mean it's an intense experience (it is). What I mean is that I had a physical reaction to playing this game that felt like some kind of drug I'd never tried before. I was outwardly calm, had no emotional affect, but on the inside I was on fire with some kind of adrenaline rush unlike any I've ever had before. But at the same time I was completely calm. I kept oscillating between them in my mind as I played. "Am I okay? Oh my god my brain is exploding. No I'm okay, this is weird. What's going on. HOLY SHIT MY HEART IS GOING TO FLY OUT OF MY CHEST. This is a really weird thing for a video game to do to me."

    I can break down into words why this game is good, and I will. But I can't give the game any higher recommendation than "it literally made me feel like I was on some kind of drug."

    Okay, so, here's the rundown.

    If you played hotline Miami one (which you ABSOLUTELY should.) you understand the basics of this game. It's a top-down bloodbath. You walk into a house, there are people in the house. You kill all of the people. Blood is everywhere. Sometimes you die. You hit the R button. Instantly you're trying again. And again. And again. The whole thing is so fast and twitchy. The game actually tries to make you go just as crazy as your character is supposed to be. The game WANTS you to run into rooms throwing fists and bullets randomly until for some reason it works. It's a twitchy, maddening experience. A successful run through a level can be completed in about 2 minutes. But each level will take you about 20-30 to get through without being shot in the face by a Russian mobster or a street hoodlum or a cop or whatever.

    Mechanically, very little has changed, save for a few things being tightened up. Which is good. The first game was one of the greatest produced in the current renaissance of Indie gaming. But, if I may be so bold, I believe the sequel surpasses the original.

    It took me 13 hours of play, which I squeezed into 3 days, to beat the game. I didn't want the game to stop, but at the same time I kept thinking "I MUST be near the end by now. There's no way the game could keep going." And yet it goes on, and on, until suddenly it doesn't and you're just not ready for the rush to be over.

    After the fucked up, drug-addled story told by the first game, a person could be forgiven for thinking that they knew what to expect here. But everything is on its head. There are more protagonists in this game than I was able to count. The game switches between them rapidly, and between segments in the storyline like it's fucking Pulp Fiction. Now and then you're a mental case getting phone calls telling you to kill people, just like in the first game. But you also fall between being a soldier in a fictitious Cold War brush conflict, a cop, a group of teenagers who just want a bit of the ol' Ultra Violence, and a journalist whose just trying to piece the whole thing together. Nothing that's happening to you ever makes any sense until you have a chance to look back on it with 3 gameplay hours of hindsight.

    The soundtrack to this game is going to be my favorite album for awhile. I don't have the kind of vocabulary a person needs to really describe music. But you will NEVER mistake this game's music for anything else. It's both incredibly distinct and unlike anything you've ever heard before, but also evocative of the mid-80s early-90s, when the game is set.

    The visuals cross over from being "graphics" to being "art." Pixel art games are a bit of a fad to be sure, but you can always tell the difference between people who are just trying to jump on a bandwagon, and people who have a legitimate passion for the visual medium of pixels. Again, my vocabulary for describing visual art is insufficient. But most games simply don't pack this much visual information into each individual pixel. And the colors are so bright and vibrant. It's glorious.

    Heads up if you do play it: the game can be used with controllers, but WASD and a mouse really is the way to go here.

    Play this game.

  • Jorbs

    Yeah, it's a bummer for everyone involved. Most of all for him, but certainly for the 6~8 employees who found a new job only to lose it less than a week later. But like I said in another thread, I've got a lead on another pretty good job. I'm hopeful that I can pull things together quickly. =D

  • "Maintaining a Relationship with Difficult Parents" by Libby Anne

    Geeze mang, that's rough. I mean, on the one hand, violence is pretty much never justified. So I'd wager you probably crossed a line there. But there's basically no good reason for a parent to ever kick a 14 year old out of the house.

    Libby Anne's blog in general is a pretty great resource. Though it's a blog written by an adult, who discusses things from an adult perspective. Her best writing is usually about how she's raising her children differently than the way her parents raised her. She might not be the best resource for someone who is still in the trenches dealing with their parents on a day-to-day basis.

    There's a subreddit called /r/RaisedByNarcissists that I have found useful. It's aimed at people whose parents probably have NPD. I've come to believe that my parents probably don't, but it has been a valuable resource to me none the less.

  • What are you thinking right now?

    Quote from Vengeance

    How hard it's going to be to find contact information for a job I had for like two months back in August 2009.

    That shit is the worst.

    After making a sandwich just now, I decided to eat it outside. It's a surprisingly nice day out there. Then I got a ladder, and climbed it, so I could see over the fence and look at the hills while I ate. It was nice.

  • "Maintaining a Relationship with Difficult Parents" by Libby Anne

    Libby Anne's blog, "Love, Joy, Feminism" has been a go-to for me for awhile. She's one of those people who can take issues that I'm in chaos over, and give them clear definitions. I don't necessarily always agree with her, but she has a personal history that resembles my own in some ways. She often writes on subjects that are personally important to me, but that I've never actually thought about. He blog is a really useful asset, and I thought today's post was pretty interesting for those of us who have a complicated relationship with their parents.

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyf…lt-parents.html

    ------------

    Maintaining a Relationship with Difficult Parents
    August 5, 2015 by Libby Anne

    Over the years, I have sometimes gotten emails from readers wanting advice on how to deal with controlling and manipulative (if not downright abusive) parents. As my regular readers will know, I have maintained my relationship with my parents in spite of the no good very bad treatment I received from them as I came of age. My parents’ actions—their efforts to control and manipulate and guilt me into being the daughter they wanted me to be—were emotionally abusive. Why did I decided to keep them in my life? How have I navigated my relationship with them over the years?

    The pain I suffered the last summer I spent at home was excruciating. When you are in a dangerous situation, your adrenaline spikes, giving you a fight or flight response. Children who live in abusive homes experience this daily—every time their abuser walks in the door. They have to be constantly on guard, constantly ready. My parents never hit me—and never threatened to hit me—but it didn’t matter, the effect was the same. The constant rush of adrenaline, that feeling of being imprisoned with your abuser—it was there. As a society, we have a much better understanding of physical abuse than of emotional abuse, but I would argue that the effects of emotional abuse can be worse and longer lasting.

    What made my situation so odd was that I had had a fairly good relationship with my parents up until this point—my mother was always up for baking cookies or working on a crafting project, and my father involved us children in his various carpentry projects around the home and was always happy to play a game of Risk—but things fell apart when I was in college as I exerted a will of my own and began making decisions they disagreed with. It’s not that things were perfect when I was a child—my parents expected immediate obedience, didn’t tolerate “backtalk” (and by that they meant any attempt to explain oneself), and practiced a heavy dose of corporal punishment—but they weren’t like this.

    When I left at the end of the summer, I told myself I wasn’t going back. But then, I still had ten younger siblings living at home, all under 18. I had been a second mother to many of them, and I loved them dearly. I went home for Thanksgiving, and home again for Christmas. I tried—so hard, I tried—but it was too much. That Christmas things reached a head when my father yelled at me in front of my siblings, calling me terrible things in an enraged voice that was so unlike my usually quiet father, and all I wanted to do was flee. I was 20 years old.

    (The rest is on Libby Anne's blog: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyf…lt-parents.html)

  • Well I need a new copy.....

    Geeeeze man, that's fucking awful. I have a hard time imagining what it would be like to lose your home and all your possessions like that. I'd be an emotional wreck. I imagine anyone would.

    Too bad about your SNES and LttP. Fortunately, neither of those is insanely collector's priced. At least, not if you don't need it mint in the box.

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