You'll probably see that subject line again.

I felt today the first flirtatious kiss of winter upon my nape. A chill, in the air; in the house. The temperature in the dining room was 18C this morning. I expect and prepare for a freshening outside as the days shorten even while they're still just longer than the nights. This is Canada after all. But inside, and first half September, it's not only unwelcome-it's always unwelcome-it's unexpected. Measures were taken; long sleeves adorned, fleece slippers retrieved from the lurking places of cats.

But I write today to complain of hunger. The hunger of "winter is coming." The furnace in the core of my self that banked for summer's heat is now remembering what it is to stoke and to demand fuel. The hunger that isn't slaked by a contented belly so much as by an inability to eat any more. The hunger that makes my jaws clench at nothing and my teeth ache to rend fatty flesh. And cheap chocolate. (That last bit may be triggering.) 

The hunger of eat, or die.

This is pretty much what I've been playing this year.

I played Dark Souls II through a couple times but got fed up with the non-Miyazaki nature of the storyline, which basically boils down to "jilted woman loses her shit." And some other random misogyny. Also while some of the levels are really great, others were really phoned in. Kind of like Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith in the first. So that was kind of a letdown. I really think Demon's Souls is the best of the three of them for environment. I'm really hoping Bloodborne (which is where Miyazaki focused his time instead of paying attention to DkS2) steers much more back in the DeS direction, and if there's a bit of Silent Hill horror in there that won't be a bad thing either. 

I bought Reckoning/Amalur/Kingdom whatever that thing that 38 Studios (the big clusturfuck in Delaware) made; it was $5 on sale and seemed like it might be a kind of fun sort of actiony RPG thing to pass the time with. I started it on hard mode, because I have low expectations for a US studio title. I wish it would actually get hard. I'm not even using magic. It's certainly got a big world, but it's just so effing boring after 60 hours. It doesn't have the drama of a Final Fantasy plot so it's mostly just grind through whatever step-and-fetchit quests you can tolerate and smack the baddies now and then.

Hohokum was very pleasant but doesn't have much replayability. It's kind of a "busy box" sort of game. Once you've pushed all the buttons and seen all the little cutscenes, there's not much more to it. I love the soundtrack, though. And the art style is super cute. I recommend this game highly as a diversion or something to haul out and get lost in when you're slightly altered. (I wasn't able to get the two apparently female figures to marry, though. That irritated me.)

Child of Eden I wrote about in another venue. Basically REZ, but with a video damsel to save, which really kind of ruins it for me. Not what I want in my techno rail shooter. At all. I'll keep poking at it, though.

I also played ThatGameCompany's Flower and Journey, which are mellow, score-less, exploration-driven, quest-type pastimes. They are games in that there are objectives and gradually increasing difficulty in completing them. But they seem to focus more on environmental enjoyment and just flying or wandering around in surreal, minimalist landscapes. Nice soundtracks and pleasant visuals, and some interesting play mechanics, but I didn't find them really compelling in any ongoing way. (Perhaps this is best signified by the fact that I forgot to write them up last night when I originally created this post.)

I just started American McGee's Alice (as a bonus pack-in to Alice: Madness Returns; I haven't played it yet) runs on the Quake III engine, which should give you an idea of how ancient it is. I actually died several times, though mostly from issues related to its remapping of a mouse view/keyboard strafe model to the controller. I started doing much better when I discovered the shoulder buttons would shoot as well, saving me from "claw" grip.

I also just started Mass Effect, which I've never played before and know very little about. Of course I'm playing as a woman; I always do when presented with a choice. I usually stay away from western shooters because of misogyny & patriarchy issues but reports are that BioWare did pretty well on this series so when the trilogy came on sale for $20 I decided to go for it. I'm just a couple hours in but it feels rather too linear for my taste. We'll see how it goes after 20 or however long it takes.

I picked up Trine 2 for a couple bucks, and while I have to say the visuals are really extraordinarily beautiful, the gameplay is wrenchingly dull. It reminds me of The Incredible Machine or Contraptions or other things like that where you have a bucket of tools and have to figure out what super secret combination of them will get you through the next screen. These kind of puzzles almost always devolve into "solve it our way or get stuffed." Yeah, sure, here's a sequence for ya, which number comes next: 6 21 3 11 15 6 _. I'll probably gnaw through it 20 minutes at a time just because I'm stubborn.

I loved Dragon's Dogma, almost everything about it, except that I think the damage equations are improperly coded with a logit rather than sigmoidal shape, so there's only a narrow range of player levels where you are evenly matched with your foes -- much higher than them and they are like paper, much lower and it's like punching granite. A sigmoid function, akin to what the Souls series provides, would provide many more opportunities for challenging interactions. I'd probably still be playing it if all of my characters didn't basically get to the point of "press X to win".  Special mention for the goblins in this game -- absolute best characterization I've seen in a foe in any game so far.

D mostly is playing Final Fantasy XIII-2, also known as "the RPG Westerners Hate Because It Doesn't Spoon-Feed You A Plot And It Has Non-Linear Gameplay." We're grooving on it pretty well, though I personally could do without the pseudo-Pokemon thing. 

When Mass Effect is done, there's ME2 and ME3, and when Alice is done there's Madness Returns, so my Winter videogaming needs are fairly well seen to, assuming I don't just burn through them all before the Solstice. I might consider Dragon Age Inquisition, but the previous titles have been problematic in some ways so I'll hold off until I know what I'd be getting into. Apparently Capcom is doing something called Deep Down but reports are it won't even have a female option for the lead so that's not going to work.

I'm looking forward to No Man's Sky, the procedurally generated galaxy explorer, and whichever of that or Bloodborne releases first will be the impetus for us to get a PS4 -- all of the titles I've mentioned I play on our PS3.

So that's kind of where I'm at for gaming!

Last night I mucked around playing Starcraft and watching games on YouTube for a couple hours. And then I uninstalled it.

Looking at how much time I actually spent playing, I didn't have a problem, unless you consider normal TV watching habits a much bigger problem. And it was nice being interested in a spectator as well as participatory sport for once.

But... nah. It's too much energy in the wrong place. And it's kinda played out, too. And my earlier efforts to set constructive limits— pushups between games, coding a One Post Wonder feature between games— were going by the wayside.

So I uninstalled the game. And then I watched half a movie with Roberta and worked on privacy locks for One Post Wonder for an hour and a half. Hooray for "default activities" that involve people and personal goals!

I don't expect to always be this productive. Relaxation takes many forms and not all of them seem purposeful or social. But hopefully my default activities on nights my daughter is home will expand to include things like picking up my guitar again.

Hey folks. So quiet and nice in here. Did everyone have a good day? Did you get some work done? Fit some fun in? Eat a good meal? I had some spaghetti and garlic bread. And a nice chianti. No fava beans.

Spoke to both parents today, coincidentally. That never gets old. Ever since they divorced (when I was like 12) I've loved those rare moments when I could say "mom" and "dad" in the same sentence. So... today I talked to Mom and Dad on the phone.

Side note: Some confusing things going on with posting. My last post's text showed up in the box when I hit "write". Here's hoping I didn't just edit over it by mistake. I am also seeing extra boxes under the main one and wrote a few sentences in them which then disappeared. Minorly, I miss having a spelcheck hadny!

I'm tired and still hoarse, so I'll leave you with a funny pic I just saw tonight.

xoxo

While I wouldn't say I go out of my way to pick fights, I do tend to get involved in discussions and situations that provoke feminist, queer-positive, privilege-examining, mental health destigmatizing, and similar responses in me. I try to encourage similar responses in others where it seems useful for moving some part of the general social discourse and awareness further towards equity.

At times it creates a bit of a hard-to-scratch itch that I don't seem to be getting very far except with The Usual Suspects, a collection of people who would fall in the "mutual respect and trust" and "many similar values" rings of friendship. And it feels like I'm repeating the same stories to the same handful of people with minor variations and not much changes.

Then they tell two friends, just like Heather Locklear in the 80s with her wheat germ oil and honey shampoo. And I may or may not see any second order effects. My experiences, analysis, and encouragements do make a difference.

Chief among The Usual Suspects is S, partner in thoughtcrime. As a tall, white, apparently on the high end of the middle class, midlife-ish guy with a record of community engagement, he has Audience Power. It turns out to be much more noticeably useful when he tells my stories, not only for the additional reach but for his astounding ability to get people to listen to him, engage with him, and treat him as a human being on equal footing rather than some uppity piece of property with teats. People responding to S are much less dismissive and generally not at all outright abusive, which some are to me on the same subjects with the same messages.

Still, it seems weird that for all my agency, I don't have a fulcrum on which to place my lever. And it does at times stick in my craw that the intersection of culture and biology gives a disproportionate amount of power and capacity to create change to someone whose overall politics, philosophies, and goals are aligned with mine. He's a go-getter; she's an abrasive bitch.

Egg farts.

Two more words: offended cats.

I have started and stopped writing several times so far tonight. I am all jumbly and can't think straight. Hate these kind of nights! GRRR. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow. Will not delete this one. G'night all. XOXO

Glad my friends and neighbors were able to enjoy the Philly 10K today. But I'm a little triste because I've given up running.

A quick two-mile run used to be my fave way to grab a little cardio before work. But this year I started getting "flat tires." My tendon (?) would just go boom, and I'd be hobbling for a couple days.

That happened twice in two months. Not especially painful, but a sign you're doing Something Wrong, yes?

So I stopped banging my bones against pavement, and it hasn't happened since. Bicycles, no problem. Dancing, no problem. But I need a new quick and dirty workout.Still, I haven't entirely abandoned contact with pavement. I remain kind of epic when it comes to walking.

When I first moved to Seattle I circumnavigated Lake Union on foot on my first full day in town, summiting both Queen Anne Hill and Capitol Hill. My first latté may have been a contributing factor.

So when my sister arrived in Seattle, and wondered how to get from point A to point B... I just said, "ya got FEET!"

So having trained under the red sun of Krypton– um, I mean on the hillsides of the Pacific Northwest– walking into flat Center City from flat South Philly is really no thang.

I just have to learn to treat my shock absorbers with respect.

The problem with readers (and I should know, I am one) is that it's almost impossible to recommend a book to one! Any real reader is in the middle of something, and also has a backlog reading list a meter high.

But I have a solution! I will be recommending a series of short writings, mostly fiction but some non-fiction too, probably. Rules are, must be readable in an hour and freely available (pub domain, CC, etc.).

I hope some of you will take a look, and maybe play along.

First installment - "They're Made Out of Meat", a Nebula Award-nominated short story by Terry Bisson.

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

I've been following #Gamergate and the Zoey Quinn thing when browsing reddit and other media.  Conspiracy from some group on 4chan to fuck with ZQ, maybe.  Conspiracy from ZQ to fuck with members of the games media to get coverage, maybe.  Out of control social media overreaction?  Sure.  

None of it is worth the attention it's gotten, but in my opinion some of the mess has a basis in reality.  Some games media sites do little more than accept money from publishers to write paid reviews, and that's fine as long as they disclose it or other conflicts of interest.  People who send credible threats to people over the internet should get prosecuted, but not in social media, rather in an actual court with lawyers and stuff.  

The rest of it's just overheated internet drama.  Fun to read about though!

And now for more Boots & Sol cuddling.  I hope they will never grow out of this.