Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
This is sort of my soul in the form of a New York Times article. It involves a coat that’s falling apart and an art project that goes wrong and mice and killing. It makes me so happy.
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
Thus far, I like the dialog and character designs for Rondo of Swords. But it is insanely hard. I can’t even get through the whole of the tutorial.
Conversation had on my fourth or fifth try on the first level:
Fuzzy-san: No, wait, you had another guy, on a horse -
Me: He died just now! I think in one hit!
Fuzzy-san: I did not even see that.
Me: It was one of the three guys in armor who are right behind me. And look, look at this, there’s like five more right behind them! And a bunch of wizards waiting to ambush me when I finally get over here - there’s more guys over here -
Fuzzy-san: These at the bottom aren’t wearing armor. So are they just some random villagers? Are they safe?
Me: They’re highlighted in red, so they’re just some random villagers who want to kill me.
Fuzzy-san: The one in blue is the important one, right? So if you can have the one in gray sort of guard him -
Me: Blue guy just died.
Fuzzy-san: Oh, he’s giving a nice death speech!
Me: Yeah. His voice actor’s okay.
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
I stand by previous statements to the effect that muscle relaxants are awwwwesome.
But I append this: If you’re just going straight to bed anyway, hot chocolate with Nikka whiskey also works.
(I’m not drunk yet - I’ve got to stay awake another two or three hours if I don’t want to wake up at 3:00 AM again. (My brain seems to accept 5:00 AM as “too-early-but-whatever,” but if I’m up at 3:00 I just want to kill stuff all day. I got really, really mad at a pretend video game frog earlier. Said some pretty uncomplimentary things.))
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
When I was in middle school or high school, Mamaw had a problem involving a bottle of prescription medicine that had expired. When Dad suggested that she get it refilled, she informed him disgustedly that the doctor who had prescribed it was dead. And anyway, it had been prescribed for Papaw, who died before I was born.
Today I dug out the muscle relaxants they gave me last year because I have managed to hurt my back again. As with last time, I have no excuse for this. I went to class and played Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time. That’s not even a strenuous Mario game.
Has anyone ever invented a way to read while lying flat that doesn’t tire your arms out? Or do inventing-type people, like everyone else, always forget the inconveniences of a bad back the moment they get over it, and only remember again the next time they pull something?
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I rescind the stuff I said about Golden Sun. It doesn’t have the worst dialog of any RPG ever. Luminous Arc does. Luminous Arc is what you’d get if you tripled the banality and length of Golden Sun’s dialog and threw in a bunch of disturbing lolicon character designs, and voice actors. This game should not have voice actors. This was a poor tactical decision.
I didn’t even make it past the opening cut-scene, I had to turn it off. There were five separate named characters with creepy lolicon designs, and they were all clearly important to the plot, and two of them said, “yes, master!” Another was in a maid uniform, and another was menaced by a Cardinal. And there were eight or nine other named characters, three or four different secret organizations (not counting the Catholic Church), and they were all clearly important to the plot. And there were four time-skips. During the opening cut-scene! Which I stopped at about the twenty-minute mark.
I need a new Phoenix Wright game. My DS is trying to kill me.
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
The price tag on one of my books says “This label can be peeled off cleanly.” This is true. I wish more labels were so thoughtful and honest about their intentions.
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Never eat anything I have made. Ever. Please. I am worried about lawsuits.
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There were some up north really early this morning, but if they hit Okazaki at all, it wasn’t even enough to wake me up. So don’t freak out if it ends up on the news.
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Heteronormativity-san, because he is apparently about twelve years old, enjoys shoving persons of the feminine disposition. He hasn’t tried it seriously on me for a couple months, because I’ve been known to kick. But today at lunch I passed him in the stairwell, saw that he was smirking for reasons that were doubtless extremely heteronormative, and made a face at him. So he pushed me, and threw me off balance enough that I fell down and landed on my posterior in a manner that I’m sure was very amusing.
After ascertaining that I was all right, he felt it necessary to explain the situation to me: “It wasn’t my fault! That was not my fault!”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” I’d been going down to the first floor pick up my mail, so I threatened his life again, and limped tragically on down with my hand on my abused posterior.
(Incidentally, I have since examined it and discovered extremely visible bruises. I seriously do need to hurt him about this.)
He was in the classroom when I got back up to the classroom a couple minutes later, so I hit him over the head with my envelopes. He wailed, “It wasn’t my fault! It was your own fault!”
And everyone else in the room (except Fuzzy-san, who was playing his stupid PSP like always) all said in pretty much the same moment, “It was Heteronormativity-san’s faullllt!”
It became obvious that he had run straight up there to explain to everyone that yes, I’d fallen down the stairs, and yes, he’d pushed me, but it wasn’t his fault.
So what we have learned today is that lack of fluency in a language leads people not only to express themselves like children, but also to behave like children! I am not ashamed. It was completely his fault.
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
we had another earthquake last night. The Japan Meteorological Agency site says there were intensity-1 quakes in a bunch of nearby cities at exactly the time I felt it, but either Okazaki’s seismographs didn’t pick it up, or it was too weak even to count as a “1″ here. When I asked today, no one else had felt anything. Maybe I’m a geomancer.
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
I don’t think you can! The door is still open! The service window is still open! The machine itself is still turned on! The problem is not obvious until you put your crazy moon country debit card in, and it spits it out at you and says it can’t process the card! It doesn’t say that it’s past ATM bedtime! And then you panic, and you think someone’s got into your card in the forty-eight hours since you ordered those Moomins books, and you’ve only got like 6000 yen in cash, and you email Mom because she probably knows what to do!
Actually, now that I’ve managed to find and use a non-closed post office ATM, I’ve realize there was one other symptom - the button saying “visitor withdrawal” didn’t show up when I clicked through to the English language screen yesterday, which it should have done, and did on my successful withdrawal today. Maybe they close visitor withdrawals extra-early during Golden Week, but leave the other options open until normal-early? It’s a mystery!
In related news, I’m thinking of taking the shower curtain out of my shower because it smells weird.
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
So take the sum of 5337 and 7793, then google it, and examine the second result.
…
This isn’t evil! I already own the books I’m using it for! This maneuver merely conserves fossil fuels by making it unnecessary for me to have the physical items shipped across the Pacific! I see nothing wrong with that! (There regrettably seem to be no torrents containing Moomins books, so my brain’s recent insistence on re-reading has led me inexorably to Amazon.co.jp.)
Anyway, I’ve just reread The Ship Who Searched, which is a collaboration between Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey in McCaffrey’s brainship universe. Brainships are spaceships with a very intelligent bodiless human brain attached to them, generally one of a congenitally deformed infant who would die if not kept hooked up to complete life support all her/his life. Brainships travel around space having adventures with a human partner, called a “brawn,” preferably of the opposite sex.
What will Mercedes Lackey do with this premise? She will make ambiguously freaky sex out of it. That is what Mercedes Lackey will do with every premise.
This was one of the books I read over and over and over and over when I was in middle school. I think I actually re-read this more than I did Dragonsong and the Valdemar book where the pantsless furry kept raping the Native American stereotypes. (Yes, I totally read the “Mornelithe Falconsbane” book many, many times. I am not proud.) Something about the combination of McCaffreyan benevolent autocracy and Lackeyan sexual dysfunction is deeply soothing.
That said,
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This is what I do with a four-day weekend.
( World of Warcraft Registration Error 202 )
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
Technological Advances I Could Do Without = scented toilet paper
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On YouTube I found a video of the Hemulen from Moominland Midwinter dying horribly. I have no idea what they’re saying, being as it is in Swedish Finnish, says the person in the comments, and all.
Also, this guy’s YouTube channel seems to have the entirety of the felt-puppets Moomin show. It is nice and creepy. “And the Lady of the Cold left the squirrel for dead, frozen stiff on the ground. Little My said, “Not to worry, we can give him a lovely funeral!” And so the horse of ice carried the squirrel away to their own frozen world!”
(It calls Too-ticky “he.” She’s a girl! She’s based on Jansson’s wife! Apparently people get confused because Swedish doesn’t have gendered pronouns?)
I walked all over Osu-Kannon today, and also I am in the middle of my routine bioform cleansing, so random places on my body feel cold and others feel like they have already fallen off. But I have acquired The Items. I hope the post office is open tomorrow.
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
BPAL’s “Catherine” starts smelling like Queen Helene Mint Julep Masque after a while. This is not a pleasant smell.
Today I reread Moominland Midwinter and my brain felt better.
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
If Anne Bishop wants her book to be about magic cock rings and some hot dudes named Saetan, Lucivar, and Daemon, then by Jove, that’s what the book’ll be about. And if she maybe wants Saetan and Lucivar and Daemon to have pretty wings, and incest, and venom sacs, and zombie priests, and accidentally end up roommates with an assassin-wizard-prostitute named “Surreal”? Then that’s just how it’s going to be.
…
I knew about most of this stuff going in and everything, and I’ve read Kaori Yuki and Mercedes Lackey and that Tanith Lee retelling of Snow White where everyone-including-the-mirror gets raped, but, I mean -
At one point it’s Christmas Time In Hell.
Saetan gives presents to all the dead children in hell and weeps because the children are dead and in hell, and he gets a present for the first time in a couple thousand years and he opens it on Christmas Eve because he can’t wait because a little girl has taught him how to feel joy again and I swear to god the book is absolutely not joking. This is an actual thing that Anne Bishop thought of! And felt should be in her book! The magic cock ring book! Which also has at least three separate castration scenes, possibly more, and one of them is on the fifth page and in another one the hero demonstrates his gallantry and angst by rendering the guy unconscious and stalking off to cover objects in ice! The ice represents his soul.
I had read all these reviews talking about how insane the book is, but none of them even bother to mention the part where it’s Christmas Time In Hell. I think they just forgot about it! Because it doesn’t really stand out that much, I mean, next to the thing with the rats, and the other thing with the hospital and the leg, and the main POV character being a two-thousand-year-old prostitute warlord who’s in love with a seven-year-old and oh John Ringo no.
I have no idea why this book exists and I am going to buy the rest of the series.
(ETA: The title of this book is Daughter of the Blood. I forgot to say that.)
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
I climbed up a mountain, and walked down the other side to find the world empty. The hedgehog men had all vanished. The velociraptors, too. I thought they must at last have gone home, numb with the final, cold realization that they were not, perhaps, setting-appropriate to the Serengeti.
Thinking this was part of some kind of scheduled event (though it completely threw me off that the music didn’t change - the music always changes when weird stuff happens in games!), I explored for five or six minutes before realizing that the items, NPCs, and other players were also all gone.
Then it shut down and told me I’d been disconnected.
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
One of today’s exercises involved a sentence construction for explaining a law or extremely important social custom. I claimed that in Kentucky, it is required that one always carry a gun.
Heteronormativity-san, mildly surprised: Really?
One Of The Other Americans: *snort*
The Other American + The Rest Of The Class: *clearly see no reason to doubt this*
Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.
Several new and bewildering comments appeared on the entry where I made fun of a Second Life build and the designer and one of her employees showed up to respond. I thought at first they were a real person, but now I’m wondering if they might be some kind of spambot. Turing tests are either funnier or sadder now that we have the internet to show us how often people fail them.