I Am Completely Serious

“…Meanwhile, Yuki goes to the ASB council room only to find it trashed again! But as the secrets of who trashed the room come out of the closet, Yuki accidentally gets locked in one.”

-ill-advised ad copy

Seriously, the angry mobs in Fullmetal Alchemist are not quality. It’s not just some deficit in the animation budget - these guys just have no concept of how to rage. They’re all holding these farm implements like, “What are we going to do with these? Are we supposed to garden? The other mobs always have these, I just never really saw what they did after. I only had this misting bottle - this is an urban area, you know, I don’t really farm so much.”

[/Eddie Izzard] Dad’s here, need to go now.

That is NOT what “sanctioned” means, you retarded fansubbers

AAAAAGH

there it is AGAIN.

At least look it up before you use it in the episode title.

“You have done the most sanctioned thing known to man! You have… repotted a spider plant! You have taken a brief nap after supper! You have built a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of matches! The laws of man are pretty much like totally okay with these things!”

(That wasn’t what “kindred” meant, either.)

Also, apparently scientific progress actually goes “zahhhh,” and flashbacks go “zasssh.”

…

Maybe the internet doesn’t really need to know my feelings about Fullmetal Alchemist. Maybe I should close this window and just watch it.

Nope.

In fact, in general, very little of the food that gets left in the library for people to take away after meetings could be accurately called “good.” This is shocking and saddening, and some action must be taken.

Action like probably “finishing the juice bottles anyway,” seeing as I have to pay for other juice.

Having re-read a bunch of Vorkosigan books again over the past couple days, the tiny angry mob in my head continues to demand another book about Mark. Also, Janet Kagan needs to go write some sort of book. She’s taken enough time off. She needs to get back the book thing. And Rosemary Kirstein needs to write faster. I am not feeling adventurous about reading material, and require that the world provide me with more stuff I already know I like.

My present class in Kingdom of Loathing is “Reindeer Threatener.” This gives me joy.

I misspelled Kingdom of Loathing in that sentence at first, it was like “loating.” I should write a competing game called “Kingdom of Boating” where everything is bad puns about boats, and have the Mr. Accessories - which will be called Captain Lord Accessories, because it will be about vampires in boats. Pirate vampires! - be $5 rather than $10. And you get 80 adventures a day instead of 40, and they won’t be adventures, they will be lurks. Because of vampires. And the Naughty Sorceress will be the Black Pearl. Everyone is always the Black Pearl.

The power randomly went off last night, unsettling the clock and making me late for work. Which was annoying, because I’d gone to bed really early and had no real biological need to sleep late for once.

The really big problem with a shared kitchen is the vermin issue. No matter how careful I am to clean everything up, I can’t enforce that on everyone else. So I can’t starve out the ants.

Mutter.

As I may have mentioned like once or twice, my 21st birthday will be on 6/6/06. When I first realized this, I immediately thought, “My first legal alcohol purchase must be absinthe.”

Then I remembered that absinthe isn’t, itself, legal.

So I’ve been trying to figure something else out.

Yesterday I saw some internet person talking about a wine called “Seven Deadly Zins,” which immediately jumped to the top of my list. When I went to the store today, I looked at the alcohol aisle (everyone in this town buys their dogs from breeders for $450, so it’s a pretty diverse alcohol aisle) but couldn’t find it. The best I could do was some wine called “Bogle,” and bogles aren’t technically infernal. I’m not sure they’re even unseelie.

Someone shoot me if I ever buy a dog from a breeder for $450, by the way, I think I’m probably headed that way.

And you’re all involved now.

IT HAS AIR CONDITIONING AND A PRIVATE BATHROOM AND SHOWER IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW.

Hahaha, I rinsed out my juice cup without having to leave the room just a minute ago. It was awesome.

On the other hand, I have a large pile of boxes, a fan, and this university-owned TV and VCR that I don’t want sitting against the wall, and I don’t think I can get rid of any of it until at least Monday. Mutter.

BLOOD EVERYWHERE

Remember my post like twelve days ago where I abused a crappy MMO, and said I’d have another one to review later? Yeah.

…

First off, the game is called “Gothador.”

Go ahead, get it all out of your system.

The game is very serious about this. The programmers are not at all embarrassed by this name, and in fact seem feel that it lends a certain solemnity and gravitas to the gaming experience:

“As he begins the story you feel yourself drift off into a deep sleep. Thoughts of war, blood and death slip through your mind until you finally awaken.

Something terrible has happened here.”

Something terrible. Something… warlike, bloody, and death-intensive.

There actually was a semi-reason that I put off posting about Gothador (ah-hee-hee-hee it’s still funny) this long. This was that it took me two weeks to work through the tutorial sequence.

Or rather, technically, three days of that were spent getting to the tutorial sequence. But let us not nitpick.

Where BiteFight wants you to repeat the same three or four brainless, poorly-spelled tasks over and over until you are the bestest ever at them, Gothador contains about three million pretentiously-worded (though still misspelled) one-time tasks, all of which are impossible.

There are two main reasons for this. First, absolutely everything you do in the game - taking a step, picking up an item, putting on pants - uses up an “Action Point,” and you get only forty of these each day. When I started the game (I believe the starting location is randomized within a certain area, though I could be wrong), I was, I think, about thirty-five steps away from the place where you can access the tutorial. Even optimistically, I’d have used up nearly all of my actions for my first day just getting over there. But one learns quickly the folly of trusting to providence… in Gothador.

(murfle snort HEE)

Second, the game does not discriminate between a naked level-zero player (you start out naked in the middle of the wilderness, and your avatar reflects this accurately) and a level-8-on-its-side player who’s wearing the Holy Grail for a hat. Monsters appropriate for a newbie to fight show up in the same places as crazy evil boss-type monsters, and there is no way to tell which is which except by the names and icons.

Sometimes it is kind of obvious. “Okay, so that thing’s called a “Planewalker,” and it’s sort of glowing blue. My feeling is that perhaps - speaking as a barefoot naked chick - it might outclass me somewhat.” Sometimes, however, they do not. “Okay, I killed a rat, so surely I can deal with this maggot - goddamnit! It was a maggot! It wasn’t even a fly yet! What’d it even do, gross me out so hard I died?”

This is why it took me three days to get to the tutorial - I kept getting killed by things with names like “Snoofy McWussypants” and “Annabelle.” Nearly every square has a monster in it, so I couldn’t really avoid them. And every time I got attacked, I died immediately.

When your character dies, you get a tiny message in the corner of the screen - which, if your monitor resolution is 1024×768 or lower, you won’t notice without scrolling down. You also get teleported to the nearest hospital. The hospital will be in a random gray square that looks exactly like the random gray square you were standing in just before you teleported, except with slightly different numbers at the top. You will not realize that you have moved.

The only thing that will visibly alert you to the fact that you’ve just died is the change in your health bar. The screen is so cluttered (JPG, 97 K) that you probably won’t notice. I’m not sure how many times I got killed, got sent to the hospital, failed to notice, took a couple steps, and got killed again. It was at least two.

(Also, you don’t automatically get healed when you’re sent to the hospital. You have to use an Action Point for that. It’s a standard video game thing that the hospital can fix being dead - however, I don’t consider that, as a naked dead chick, I ought to be required to “act.” It’s an unfortunate, misogynistic attitude which I’ve doubtless picked up from comic books and other such male-dominated media, but I think I’ve got to stand by it here. If I am dead and naked, I expect the Green Lantern or the hospital staff or someone to handle shit for me for a while.)

The reason for all this bullshit is to get people to pay money for extra Action Points and special items, which will presumably make the game playable. People who do that even get a special name - they’re “Gothador Supporters.” I imagine a negative political ad calling Your State Representative “a liberal activist, a supporter of a bill to put more pedophiles behind the wheel (drunk), and a Gothador Supporter.” Incumbent’d have to retaliate.

I ranted a lot about the graphics for BiteFight, so I guess I’d better mention them here, too. Here you go:

When there are graphics, they’re okay.

As previously indicated, most areas are just big gray blanks, but I’ve found a couple of towns (JPG, 31 K) and castles that aren’t too bad-looking - they’re just really boring. It’s what you’d get if Thomas Kinkade was into “Vampire: The Masquerade” and was teaching himself to use Maya.

The graphics that there are get re-used a lot, though, making the game’s impossible navigation slightly more impossible (I can’t remember the math joke that logically follows that statement - does it have to do with derivatives?), because you keep running into the same angsty little house and ominous little campsite everywhere. The designers also seem to occasionally use the wrong image - viz, this description:

Northern Caravan - You find an opening leading to the Frozen North.

That doesn’t make sense anyway (they think “caravan” is the same as “cavern,” I guess? But how does a cavern… how does your character even know - yeah.), but when the actual graphic for the place you’re standing looks like this (JPG, 4 K), the game has contradicted itself one too many times in one 1/9th of the screen.

And if they’d plugged in their generic campsite image instead, I actually would have accepted this. I’d just have assumed that, you know, maybe the caravan was carrying around a teleporter that gets you to the Frozen North. (I finished Final Fantasy VII - I can put up with a lot of confused text.) This, though, was too lazy even for me.

There’s also a message saying you need to be a Supporter to get access to this area. I didn’t really feel compelled to shell out money to learn the truth of the mystery of the caravan and Bleak House and the Frozen North.

And now I will give you two quotes from Kingdom of Loathing to make the pain go away:

“You’re fighting a decent lumberjack

Some necromancers, in a desperate final bid for immortality, perform dire rituals to become lihces. This one did it by accident, while trying to make some breakfast.”

Today I have:

* woken up in a very dry room

* made tea, then washed the cup

* shelved like a million books in a very dry library

* cooked dinner, then washed like a million more dishes

* sat down at the computer in a very dry room

All of my fingertips are peeling.

While I was dazedly carrying some of the dishes back to my room, I noticed the sign on the RA’s door saying “Resident Assistant” out of the corner of my eye, and thought it said “Robotic Assistant.” I thought, “That would be so awesome.”

Damnit, rice cooker, this is *not* a good day for you to break.

Some girl said “reshape the framework of our viewpoint.”

I was scribbling stuff I found amusing in my notebook the whole time, but I’m too tired to type it up suddenly and am going to bed.

My grades are not up yet (while other people’s are) because I forgot to fill out the teacher evaluations.

Jicky the Slightly-Self-Actualized Abomination of Science: It would be easier to make a sandwich if my hands weren’t all burnt - all right, there they go. I always have remind my self-healing powers…

Casey the College-Educated Berserker: …okay, look. Are you bored over there?

Jicky: I can’t tell. What do you want me to do?

Casey: Can you work a computer?

Jicky: I’m from space.

Casey: Do they have Windows in space?

Jicky: Yes, but one mustn’t open them.

Casey: …

Jicky: I’m really very sorry. I don’t know why I said that.

As we all know, my birthday is coming up. And I have an Amazon list, but it’s mostly for my own use, and I don’t keep it up very well, and also a lot of the stuff I’ve looked at and wanted in the past couple months isn’t on Amazon. So I’m putting that here.

• Digger volume 1, by Ursula Vernon
• Gunnerkrigg Court volume 1, by Tom Siddell
• Pokemon Adventures volumes 8-12, by Hidenori Kusaka and MATO, and yes I *am* still on this thank you.
• a 5ml bottle of Velvet from BPAL (down at the bottom of the page)

And that’s all I can think of.

Things are being changed in Kingdom of Loathing and people are VERY VERY CONCERNED.

• “They’re moving the cannon right next to Hangks to blow it up!! Hurry and get outta HC/ronnin before all you’re meat and or belongings are destroyed!”
• “it wont be moved
  it shall disapear forever”
• “WTF”
• “The scaffolding in the Right Side of the Tracks is a NEW BUILDING!!!! Look closely and you can its doors.”
• “The image name of the scaffolding is ohnoes1zomg.gif

  What’s that supposed to mean?!?!”

Some of them are ANGRY, even.

• “woah this sucks. >_> I bet tomorow we’ll get 1/64 of a cannon. >:(”
• “i swear. if its not gone tommorow… i mean its 1/32d of a cannon. you can just pick it up, put it in your pocket, and walk away with nobody noticing. just destroy it. it had it coming. its no use anymore. destroy it.”

Yet others, wiser, cut to the heart of the matter:

• “I hope it’s moving and for a new place to adventure for a limited time so that the items you get become rare”

I’m feeling kind of regretful that I let my two alternate accounts get deleted - I got bored and looked up KoL on eBay last night, and I could’ve gotten like fifteen bucks for my rare items. It just seems wasteful.

A couple minutes ago, a bunch of I-think-drunk-people stopped in on one of the girls down the hall, who was, at the time, in bed with her dude. The door was unlocked, and the girl and the dude laid off for a second and told them to come on in anyway. The drunk people had much to say about this as they left.

Following this encounter, the sex in the other room got audibly more energetic.

Yesterday night I dreamed that I was in a dystopian cyberpunk city, trying to decide what to have for lunch. I have very specific priorities. I was happy to find a place that had sushi, but got annoyed when I saw tuna roll and salmon roll were ten bucks, and California roll was eight.

I was trying to figure out what the cheapest thing that still had actual fish in it was (fish is one of my very specific priorities), and saw they had something called “sketchy fish” for six dollars. A sketchy fish was lying on the chopping board, and it was kind of squashed-looking and seemed to be made partly out of blue plastic. I decided that this must be the origin of the word “sketchy” meaning “ill-reputable” or “untrustworthy,” and was very pleased with my etymological insight.

So I had a dream about sushi and etymology. I am a gigantic tool.

(I didn’t eat the sketchy fish; I got distracted by a robot and had to run and hide or something.)