No. Are you really sure?

Blogger is a crule mistress, she often taunts me with my low page views and poor spelling (though that's probably more a Firefox thing). But her most evil act (if we personify Blogger as a weird cross between an Accountant and a Herald) is her habbit of asking: "Do you really want to post that?".

"No Blogger, I just spent 2 hours writing a thesis on the canonical connections between Pac-Man and Dig-Dug, and I want to keep it to myself."

The above is entirely true and a perfect representation of how the exchange goes, I have written long posts only for a safty mesure to question me and my self doubt to add another post to my ever growing list of drafts. Or even worse, the entier post is deleated save for the title when I go to save it as a draft.

Also as an additional note, the checks to make sure you made the right decision pnly ever occur in computer based activities: ebay, changing the setings on my PC and video game shop NPCs just to name a few. But in any other circomatance such a check would never happen, it'd feel so awkward and out of place. Just imagine you go into a shop to buy a pair of pants, if when you went up to the register and handed over your money the person behimd the register asked of you were really sure, if you were absoloutly aure you wanted this item...you'd think it was shoddy or that something was wrong with it. So why are fine with this check in electronic interactions? Just something to think about... Cause i've got no answer.

Heart of the Cards

About a year ago (as I tend to do every few years), I got interested in the Pokémon Trading Card Game. Since the late 90's when it first was a thing and I purely collected them cause it was as close to actually completing a Pokedex in real life. Then after a stint of Yu-Gi-Oh in high school I became interested in how the game actually played and started making decks from my mammoth collection. But the phaze had passed for most people so I had no one but myself to play against, so games became mainly theoretical.

So a year ago, I get interested in the TCGs again but the frustrations of regular gameplay are just too much, the resource gathering and luck of prize cards are just no fun, so I start to think how one could make a good card game without them, have it be fast and fun. Within a few hours I had the basic rules and about two dozen cards for what ended up being called: Meme King Gold.

The cards were based on internet memes and pop culture referances and the rules were based on a stylized internet argument. After brain storming with a fellow uni student and doing some play testing we ended up with about 120 cards, a full set of rules, 5 structured decks and no play testers. Lots of people liked the idea but didn't have the time. It was a great idea we just had no way to properly work it or get it out to a larger audiance or any audiance.

To date my card game love has since shifted to Magic the Gathering and Meme King Gold has been shelved indeffinatly (I'd feel bad not having the other guy who helpped involved, we sort of drifted apart at the end of semester).

As it turns out I'm a 16 year old girl and write poetry sometimes.

I'm always here, I'm always there,
To back you up when things aren't fair.
When your out so long, and your girlfriends say,
That legs just shouldn't look that way.
That your bust's too small, that your hips're too wide,
That beneath the male gaze there's nowhere to hide.

And you come home and tell me true,
That no sane man would ever like you.
And I sit here and point out flaws,
That under a microscope are worse than 'Jaws'.
But on a normal day under normal lights,
You're a total 10 in those black tights.

But still it stings that would would think,
My undying love for you is hinged on clothes.
That how you show off your augmented bust,
Or how you swing your hips is a must.
Rather the girl I met, I must love,
Her pants that fit like a gossier glove.

It's human nature to judge by looks,
To pidgeon-hole by if they carry books.
That glasses or a fitted bra,
Matter more than if she can drive a car.
That my love for you, and it alone,
Would make you feel beautiful.

Let me mark that on your map

I get lost sometimes, geographically or instructurally, so when someone gives you a cardinal direction but no distance or vice versa it just ruins me. In video games especially, I've walked from one end of the map to the other because I wasn't told when to turn left. Which is why maps exist.

But I'm going to tell you know of a game I played (yes another game, so original, just telling stories of when I fail at video games, but meh, it's my blog, you don't like it go make your own) called Tales of The Abyss which suffers from the wost direction ever! Normally in video games, when you leave a town there is a obvious road, one that brought you to the town you're in and leads away from it, the obvious thing is to follow this path when leaving to the next place. But in ToA this path rarely exists and to put further problems on top, the world map only shows places you've already been to, so you have no hint as to where this dungeon, town or geographical location might be.

In one instance I was told to traverse a wide open plane and reach safety on the other side, so I did. But nothing happened. I reached the capitol of the country with a message for the king, but the game wouldn't allow me to leave the instanced warzone, to I scoured the edge of the map, trying to find the door. I did eventually find it, it was an inter-continental bridge far to the east, with no sign on the map such a place existed, nor an actual mark on the map of such a nessesary spot. And I was penalized for it.

Another instance is upon getting a ship for the first time, I'm told to find a town called Sheriden, of course I've never been there and no one's mentioned it up to now and I'm not even given the hemisphere of the world it's in, it's time for me to hug every coastline until I find it. It took me days @n@

My current problem (the above are just some of the worst examples, others include trying to find a single mountain in a range of identical mountains to climb, finding a patch of Forest which was a dungeon and working out where the hell the Absorption Gate is) is finding either an island or a battle ship that's circling the world, as neither have been visited yet I have no clue where they could be, so yeah stuck on that, and online walk-throughs make it seem inherently obvious, so I must be doing my second super power and missing the obvious.

I need to listen to songs not written by Dragonforce

Lock up your daughters, lock up your wives.
Lock up your locks then run for your lives.
For the Devil's in the detail and the detail's always there.
You better bet your life to venture in the Devil's lair.

None can return from the edge you know.
Once you take that last step there's a path that's shown.
To the eye of the storm and the cusp of death.
Can you save our souls in time?

While the Lord of Pain has his minions fly.
We shall hide in the shade our deceptions lie.
With his back turned to nothing he will praise the sky.
We shall kill a God you and I.

A blade forged of life that has yet been spent.
Courage forged from tears we are yet to shed.
If we aim for freedom can you see our mark.
We aim beyond the sky.

Turn it up!

The days of sitting huddled under blankets late at night so I could play Pokemon with the sound on, nowadays I'm an adult and can do that kind of stuff during the day (cause I have working headphones now)and it's only been recently that I actually heard the full soundtrack of a handheld game. Normally I listen to the first 4-5 tracks (equal to about 3-4 hours: Title theme, town theme, battle theme, dramatic cutscene theme, boss theme) before I finished the first session of play then don't bother with the volume from then on. The exception being Golden Sun: The Lost Age, where I had working headphones, a somewhat rare commodity in my life (I tended to buy very cheep ones which don't last long), since then it's been a steady succession of more and more titles, from one or two GBA games, to a dozen DS titles, to pretty much every 3DS game I've played to date.

There are many games which have great songs in them that I just missed out on cause I didn't have the gear and someday (with help probably from speed runs and pirated OSTs) I'll hear them.

Duck Tales has such a beautiful soundtrack ;-;

Rehashing

I was recently informed, and by informed I mean: read on the internet, that James Masters played the villan in the live action Dragonball movie. Which, while a terrible movie, I might be tempted to watch ut again, if only to mourn the passing of James Masters' acting career.

Something else that might make me watch this tripe again would be a thing called a riff track (in short a re-dubbing of a film that in most cases is done for comedic effect or just ti mae it bearable) the only one of this movie I know is done by the group Team Four Star (also known for their abridged series of the Dragonball anime).

So that movie I might watch again, but nothing could ever make me watch Remember the Titans evrr again.

P.S. I watched that movie 4-5 times through out high school career, never again.

Dr Arc

My special talent, if it can be thought of as one, and as long as no one else has it, is that I can remember pretty much any story, mainly of TV shows I've watched. Stargate SG1 for instance, in my head I have several overlapping graphs: Earths technology over time, the over arching story points of each season and the series at large, and where each episode falls on each season's general story arc.

The story arc graph I've noticed is actually something almost every TV series from that time did. Drop hints or reasons to go do things this season then have very little on those hints for 5-7 episodes, then something is found that leads to something major that re-exemplifies the hints/reasons from the beginning of the season and gives them an end goal.

This goal won't be pursued constantly, normally the next episode is a search that turns up nothing. Wait another 5-6 episodes and have a few mentions but never find much. Then find something big. Act on it. Have the finale where it's resolved then rinse and repeat until all Goa'uld have been eradicated from the galaxy and the Jafa are free.

Supernatural follows this guide to a T, with much of the later seasons main plot arcs happening around Sam and Dean who only manage to step in at the end once they find a place to stand and fight. It's part of what makes it a great show. Have a few episodes of the Winchesters tooning about vanquishing demons then they either get told or find the magic bullet, then it's right back to tooning about until the climax. If you have a weekly show you don't want to have all the plot in one episode, because if anyone misses it they won't be able to keep up with the story (except for the finale, go nuts there).

A show not following this (and I think suffering because of it (as well as a few other reasons (bad directing, poor story telling, hand holding the audience and telling them everything rather than believing the audience can follow their story and pick up on subtle things))) is Doctor Who, who's most recent seasons have increasingly been trying to appeal to a broader audience and reduce the barrier of entry (by blatantly stating absolutely every single character development and story beat (last season's inclusion on the short intro to each episode with Amy's voice explaining specifically who the Doctor is is an example of this)).

But now I'm just off topic, my point was I can tell you the plot of any episode of many good TV shows just from the episode title and the first few seconds. Neat huh?


P.S. You may think I'm abusing those brackets, but no, that's just how I roll

P.P.S. It's either nested brackets or nested footnotes, pick your poison

How to Read Books: A 'What Army and I' guide

I, like many people, like to read books. Books with words, and if anyone is looking, no pictures.

For those times when there's someone else in the room and you're slogging through the dull adventures of the pros and cons of dating Mr Darcy, the following may help make it bearable until you get back to your Mr Men Anthology.

• Assume the author came up with stuff as it's revealed in the narrative. If someone's backstory was just revealed then it's cause the author finally worked out what it should have been.*

• If the story has a narrating voice assume the voice is actually biased toward the villain and sarcasm will become the main literary devices of the book. "The Hero reached out and snatched the shiny stone" sounds much more interesting if the narrator thinks he deserves said stone.

• Read all character's names as "Silence!"** as everyone becomes a lot more aggressive and assertive.

• For kicks and giggles, read the book backwards and see if it ever starts to make sense. See also classical books as twitter posts.

•  Following true Tumblr fashion you can always opt for the OTP rules and pick two, seemingly at random, characters and find any contrivance to insinuate a romantic relationship between the two, It makes the dull meetings at Rivendell all the more interesting to work out when Gandalf and Elrond might be sneaking away for a romantic tryst.***

 Following any of these simple formulas (or if you forget then just try paying attention to the plot, that always makes a book interesting) any challenging book thicker than your pride will pose no threat to your hipster/librarian cred.

*I write stories like this. More often than not if a character hasn't had their name revealed it's cause I can't think of a name and just play for time by building tension and intrigue. I managed to once introduce a character, build them up to seeming all mysterious then had them back stabbed and forgotten without ever having to give them a name beyond a title (e.g. The Count), his backstory was revealed later, but I had much less trouble writing him without having to have his whole story mapped out. 

**Optionally change names to pretty much any command, I just prefer silence as it makes the best G rated changes to the Harry Potter series. 

***God have mercy if you pick this option for any of Arthur Conan Doyle's Books.****

****BECAUSE IT WORKS WITH BLOODY EVERYBODY!!!!! IT'S NOT EVEN A GAME, IT'S ALLLL CANON!!!!!

It's Morphin Time!

My Lady Friend is going to a convention next week as well as a convention we both plan to go to together a few weeks from now, and something we've noticed while planning weather we should try our hand at cosplay is the dichotomy in how revealing the costumes are.

On one hand we have the die-had cosplayers who make 1:1 replica costumes of their character, if the costume is revealing so be it, they live for the thrill of people recognizing their character and asking for photos. Then we have the casual cosplayers, the ones who didn't have enough time/experience/effort to make a completely accurate costume and have gone for a interpretation of the character, they generally have the same drive, wanting to be recognized and get photos, feeling comradely in the people who recognize them.

Then there's people like this: NSFW Cosplay Here and Here, who have to have some other factor driving them to dress in such costumes. Maybe voyeurism, they might get excited from being so exposed in public and at anime/sci-fi conventions they see the ability to dress scantily with a large group and not be judged negatively, in fact often be applauded for their daring and talent in getting the costume accurate. Some people also have a habit of acting differently depending on their clothing, they might have found to act more confidently when not wearing much and like the chance to bee confident around other people.
 The last reason I can think of is people who are mildly obsessed with a character and will dress (and maybe act) like them irregardless of the costume.

I have a few problems with females who are forced in their choice of costume if they want to dress up. Taking a quick look at e-bay's female costume listings everything looks, for lack of a better word, slutty. Why does a Tinker Bell costume consists entirely of underwear? Did they not actually watch Peter Pan? I've never seen Halloween or other costume appropriate events as an occasion for showing off sexual appeal by finding creative excuses for wearing naught but under garments. I don't have a solution, I just don't like it, but that's just me.

In short Why can't we all just dress up as Power Rangers? Imagine a whole convention room of people all dressed as guys from various Sentai teams. Then someone outside tries to mug a passer by.

...

...

I'm not weird, that would be AWESOME!

Mirror Your Audience

In many stores, especially fantasy, there is a token character who follows the plot around asking questions everyone in-world should already know the answers to, but since thee audience won't know it; and we can't expect them to pick up on intricate details or political positions before some characters are introduced (it also is used often to add foreboding to a nemesis or antagonist, they'd seem a bit underwhelming if they only appeared at the end with no explanation as to that they were an evil villain who controls small island nations).

In The Lord of the Rings this duty was filled by the Hobbits, small folk who didn't adventure or get much news from beyond their borders, they needed to have all the customs and history explained to them, you may have noticed that the hobbits were all split up and got sent to all the different major countries Rohan, Gondor and Mordor, this while helping the plot, allowed Tolkin to give as much back-story to those countries as he wanted, because the Hobbits were inquisitive and knew very little.

A more recent and somewhat glaring version of this is in Guild Wars 2 (yes again, more Guild Wars, it's just really good an example OK), where one of the playable races is this trope. The developers of Guild Wars 2, Arenanet, set their second game 250 years after the events of the first four campaigns (six campaigns if you count the Beyond content for Prophecies and Factions), and that's a lot of lore and story details that new players are going to be missing, some of which is need to know stuff, so how do they explain all this story and lore to the player without it seeming like a history lesson? Easy: have a group of people who ask questions and are generally inquisitive. Enter the Sylvari. A race of plant people who are born fully grown out of a tree and upon awakening have only a general feeling that there is trouble in the world and they kinda need to help fix it. Inquisitive and child-like, the Sylvari are the perfect tool for explaining to the player any need to know lore or history.

But that's not the only way of telling story and lore surreptitiously to an audience, again in Guild Wars 2, we have the Norn, a race of essentially: Super Vikings, who's favourite past time as a whole is telling stories of their great battles and challenges. What better way to tell the player about a rather difficult foe than have a ten foot wall of muscle tell them how he battled with the creature for hours, fighting tooth and claw, and eventually ended the fight in a draw. You might have second thoughts about wandering the wilderness with such a fierce beastie on the prowl. To add extra atmosphere you could add some warning signs about the foe or some tracks, claw marks on trees, it's all about reinforcing an idea.

Guild Wars 2 comes out in a few days now, let's see if it stands up to the level of story telling I expect of it.

We'll meet again

As a rule, I don't like finishing books. After such a long adventure together with the characters, they're like old friends to me. Old friends I must now part with, their story is over and their world closes one final time. The first book I cried reading was Winnie the Pooh because it addressed this very issue in it's final chapter.

Some things help though. Fanfiction for one, be it prequels where it focuses on a single character or a sequal that goes over the normally skipped political upheaval that would come from many adventure book's endings (defeating a god or saving a world, many people's lives would be forever changed). I'm allowed to (as long as it's well written) revisit and once more be with my old friends: the protagonists.

Another thing that helps is books that are tie-in media, like the Guild Wars 2 tie-in books, Ghosts of Ascalon and Edge of Destiny (about which I'm still not sure, after reading both, which one is ment to be read first). Because after going through the effort of creating a lead up stort and a world for it to perpetually exist in I am firm in the knowledge that I can once again see my old friends from a distance as they live their lives and make new stories.

Easy(ish) steps to enjoying a story

I enjoy a good story as much as the next person, but sometimes...I want to enjoy it more than the next person...and the guy before me too, I want to enjoy it the most! And here's how I do it:

1: Never read the blurb
You might think that helps judge the book/movie (it won't work for games they have different rules) but more often than not it will just contain major spoilers for the first 2 acts of the story.
2:Judge the book by it's cover
You may think the title is important...but not as important as the fancy pictures on the fount of the book, and in thee instance you get a bad book you still have on you like the look of and can frame it in case of emergency.
3.Don't tale any recommendations
Peoplle want to give you terrible biases, and tell you which books you should read/movies you should watch. but they are terrible lairs and want you to read fifty shades of gray or twilight or something equally awfully.
4.Nothing written within the last 10 years
Books and movies are like some wines and need to age before they are any good for consumption, so put you books and movies into a dark cupboard to keep them from picking up obscure pop-culture references.. Know how all those great books from the 1960's were all the rage at the turn of the millennium, that is this principal in action.
5.Try to keep books/movies grouped by genera
If you don't then they'll bleed into one another and you'll end up with really odd films/books.

So if you follow these simple 6 rules then you too will....hmm? I missed a steep?

6.When in doubt watch/read a caper
 Because capers are awesome

Love a story that follows the rules

When I read a story or watch a movie or show, there are time when you can just tell how a scene is going to tun out. The bad guy set the meeting point? Ambush. Hero was knocked off screen and villain thinks him dead? He's just about to make a come back. And some times this ruins a scene for me. When there's no mystery it just becomes formulaic.

Except in one circumstance.

Which is when in the middle of a fight or some kind of trial....a remixed/extended version of the theme song starts playing. Because you know that things can only get awesome from here. It could be the change from normally quite a noisy scene to one that only has (normally operatic) music and characters talking that causes my heart to stir so easily. But I can't get enough of it.

Examples?
Last episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann when the rift to Earth opens
Kung Fu Panda when the light jangly music starts plays during Po and Kufu's fight
Doctor Who whenever "All the Strange Strange Creatures" starts playing

Post Credit Games

So you've saved the world and rescued the princess and everything is all done and dusted, credits roll and the title screen reappears. To some people that's the last they ever see of the game, beat it once it's beaten for good.

For people like me however, that's far from then end of it. Quite a lot of games now days offer some kind of new game +, a game mode where you play the game again with bonus features or extra restrictions (like keeping your level/stats/weapons/abilities and having a bunch of challenges added or scaled up to your assumed mastery of the game. Early examples of this were the second quest in the original Legend of Zelda (NES) and playing as Luigi in Super Mario. But sometimes that's not enough, and that's where player enforces rulesets and challenges come in.

Some common challenges include speed clears (beating the game as fast as possible), low percent runs (beating the game while completing as little as possible or being at the lowest possible level) and glitched (beating the game by breaking in game rules or abusing the game's engine to skip large portions of the game or cause any number of strange happenings). We'll use The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time as an example because it has been extensively abused and lots of skips and glitches have been found that can shorten the game down to as low as 28 minutes. If you were to do a speed run of OoT it normally includes completing all dungeons as fast as you can, to do so, you have to avoid all the side quests...or: you can utilize a glitch known as Bottle Quest where you abuse the in game memory and change bottled bugs/fish into extra bottles and plot related items which let you skip right to the end game dungeon (normally with only 3 hearts of life) which is a challenge in of itself when the final boss fight starts. A low percent run come in two types, low health and low items. Low health requires you to pick up no extra health and low items requires you to try and solve as many of the puzzles in the game without the recommended items (which is surprisingly possible).

All in all I've beaten Ocarina of Time around seven times myself, and only spending $20 on the game as a pre-owned title a decade ago and have got quite a lot of value out of it.

This was relevant because while trying to pass away time I started a no-NPC-Ally playthrough of Guild Wars Factions (never add NPC henchmen to our party) with a friend, we've both played the game for a while and thought a bit of a challenge was in order, so we'll see how that goes.

What's in my name

I've always tried coming up wit names that have a semblance of meaning, A character who dedicates themselves to defending others? Bastion. A character who wants nothing more than adventure? Name them after a character from myth: Wayland. And if all else fails just go with something that can be used as part of a slightly obvious pun, as is what I plan to do when Guild Wars 2 comes out in a few weeks and my first character (If no one's beaten me to that name) would be What Army (or a homophone for it). Because nothing would be better to me than playing with some friends and the line "You going to stop me? You and what army?" come up. Better than Christmas, Halloween and Easter all at once is a successful pun. As good as naming the player character Go Away in pokemon games or naming everyone Bob in an RPG and watching as everything becomes very confusing (probably best done on repeat playthroughs because sometimes the plot is good)