The Mad Bishounen

Batman Returns

Directed by Tim Burton
Music by Danny Elfman

Michelle Pfeiffer as feminist paragon Catwoman (no really)
Danny DeVito as environmental metaphor psychopath Penguin
Christopher Walken as Max Shrek, the mad industrialist pulling the strings
and some nameless schlub I don't care about as a dude in a bat suit I guess.

( 'Together They Fight Crime' hardly applies here )

Whoops, I kind of forgot I was going to update this thing. In that case, this will be a "jkefka's been off his meds for three days" ADD Extrrrravaganza post!

I haven't had a chance to take more than a day or two off my meds in a while, it's a good thing to do now and again. I wouldn't have taken three days except that deliciouschaos damn near had to sit on me to ensure that I would not simply spend my three-day-weekend working, and I began to think that when someone who's got the capacity to be even more of a workaholic tells you to stop working...well she might be on to something.

I've been very busy working on some projects for work and other projects for a professor from my undergrad who has me do some excel wizardry for her at regular intervals. Also staring into the abyss that is grad school and dealing with all the paperwork for same.

We got some pimp-ass bean-bag chairs (two of these things, in red and black) and have turned out living room into the ultimate gaming paradise we've always dreamed of. There are some pictures that aren't on my computer that may be posted later. Right now as I type this deliciouschaos is in process of breaking Disgaea over her knee like a dry twig. It may technically be my game she's playing, and my save file, but this particular brand of pure ridiculousness is her trademark.

EVE nearly imploded altogether and then didn't. The company that makes it has a capacity for poor communication that is beyond belief. Combine that with the introduction of vanity microtransactions and some anonymous dissatisfied employee within the company releasing a few memos that looked really bad out of context and you had a marvelous shitstorm that had a solid 10% of the player base cancelling their accounts in protest, followed by a week of frenzied damage control, and finally coming out with the very, very brief statement that could have fixed the whole mess when it started. "No microtransactions for in-game advantage, and no plans to introduce them." It took them over a week to figure out that's all the player base wanted to hear. If they didn't have the elected player representatives that act as "stakeholders" in development decisions that they flew to iceland on short notice to hash this out, they would still be up shit creek without a paddle. It's really quite mind-boggling.

Listening to Portal 2 soundtrack vol. 2. I'm very behind the times but I am constantly impressed by this soundtrack.

Oh, it's patriotism day, isn't it. I'm kind of glad I've spent the entire day indoors playing video games.

I think that's as far as my attention span can put up with this "writing" thing right now. Also, I made a delicious dinner off of one of my dad's recipes. The process of taking a few simple ingredients and producing delicious food is always kind of amazing to me, even though I've been cooking for years.

3rd Gym leader.

You meet him one city early when Team Rocket Plasma does some stupid shit and he helps bail the previous gym leader out. Then you run into a forest together and he's like "Go get lost in the woods! I'll just take the easy route and make sure none of them get out that way."

...thanks dude.

Then you do a similar song and dance when you get to his city, and finally he invites you to his gym.

Which is populated by clowns.

And has doors made of gelatinous honey.

And you fight him on a multicolored dais at the top of a purple velvet staircase.

Start gym battle

deliciouschaos: "...does he have a butterfly on his dick?"
Me: "I think that's supposed to be a belt buckle? I think?"

THIS GUY IS FUCKING CREEPSTERIFIC OKAY

Most of the people reading this do not play EVE, some of you aren't even gamers, and that is exactly why I feel this is a perfect place to present this. Before skipping over this as just another pile of nerdery outside your interests, please at least read to the cut.

EVE Online is a game that I personally find absolutely fascinating, as you might expect since I've been playing it for over a year. That said, it's something even most of my gamer friends know very little about. General knowledge about EVE consists of 1. it's an MMO about spaceships 2. occasionally stories about people stealing lots of stuff or thousand-player battles get into general gaming news 3. it has a vertical learning curve. None of these things are inaccurate, but there's a lot more to say.

EVE is part epic space opera, part case-study of applied Machiavellian ethics, part sophisticated economic simulation, part international melting pot, part game design how-to (and in some cases how not to), part role-playing design lesson, part sociology study, and more. A book could be written about each of these parts independently, possibly multiple books. Unfortunately, none of these are even remotely accessible or even apparent to anyone who isn't already playing the game. There's dozens of blogs about EVE, but they're all aimed at other EVE players. That said, I know people on my flist (and not on my flist) are very interested in some or all of these topics, and would probably enjoy exploring them as they occur in EVE. What's missing is a guide to EVE that doesn't require you to play EVE.

So that's what I'm going to try to write, and what I'd like all of you non-EVE players to read. If any of these topics grab your interest, or anything that comes up as I go, let me know, I can probably devote a whole series of posts to any of them. Let me know when there seem to be missing steps, there's a lot of EVE I take for granted after a year of playing. Most of all, ask questions, poke things that get your interest. There's something in EVE for everyone.

To kick off, behind the cut is a summary of the core features behind EVE, the assumptions you have to have before going anywhere.

( The most basic of basics )

I think that covers the absolute basics. I'm not entirely sure where to start on actually getting into the nitty-gritty, so tell me what's caught your eye so far. I didn't even mention the storyline and steered clear of most of the mechanics, but anything is fair game.

Walking down the street at midnight on a cold winter night eating locally-made ice cream, and then coming in to a warm house, all with the person I love.

These are moments of paradise.

La Pucelle: Beaten

Ending: Corny

Disgaea: SUBMIT TO ME

Your city has been covered in a paper-thin sheet of invisible ice, which has then been covered in water. You must brave a near-zero friction coefficient, psychotic drivers, tumbling southerners, and unexpected puddles over a mile of rush-hour sidewalks. Your challenge doesn't end there! Through the next eight hours you must brave continuing rainfall and dodge deadly ice chunks as they slide from the rooftops, all while moving around almost 1500 envelopes that need to be sorted and delivered by tomorrow morning! Welcome to...jkefka's day at work!

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

( And some EVE stuff )

"I find it so uplifting that a person's sexual orientation and ethnic background make them more of a hero than a white straight guy. Go ahead, yell at me."

Aaaaand unfriend.

Soon there will be four games available in America on the PSP that I want to play.

- Dissidia

- Dissidia XI2 or whatever

- Prinny: Can I really be the hero

- Prinny 2

Slowly, my resolve weakens.

(also I spent today home sick, which is pants, but I'm feeling better for it).

Happy new year, since I'm lazy and haven't made a post yet this year. OK, that's only four days, but still.

My though process two minutes ago: "Wow, that's a crazy pile of stuff I'm actually kind of excited to do and will probably take me the rest of the day. I should eat before I forget."

( Whoops, nerded out for longer than I meant to )

Huh, this ended up kind of long. Ah well, time to get back to work. Writing up results is hard when you haven't done it in a long time.

I'm creating a public checklist of tasks that will be accomplished today so I can be harassed if I fail to accomplish them. Today will be a day of grocery shopping, apartment cleaning, and ambitious cooking experiments.

This morning's cooking experiment: Omlette, with pastrami, cheddar, and candied jalapenos. Worked brilliantly, but would have benefited from the addition of mushrooms and using ham instead of pastrami.

Today deliciouschaos and I will:

Clean the bathroom, notably the bathtub and toilet [BAM]
Clean the kitchen, notably the stove and sink [*peel layer of grime off stove* "eeeeeewwwwwwwww"]
Move piles of books off kitchen tables and onto bookshelves [Good enough]
Clean out the fucking fridge [BOOM HEADSHOT]
Take out garbage and recycling [YYYYEEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHH]
Do a proper grocery shopping trip, to hold us not just the rest of this week but also next week [LIKE A MOTHERFUCKING ADULT]

Dinner either tonight or tomorrow is going to be a very hearty cabbage and beef stew recipe I got from my dad, using one of my holiday presents (A cauldron). Probably tomorrow, because it is a long cook. Half an hour to an hour of prep, as many hours of simmer as you can reasonably get. However, once cooked, it is literally a week of meals for two people, and perfect for those frigid winter days.

ETA: Clean the wussy-ass "rebellion" out of Crimea and sit there watching That Cutscene clapping like a happy seal [x]

OK, we're getting to cleaning now.

The more I play Sonic Unleashed the more it just boggles me. They have something wonderful, truly wonderful here, and they went well out of their way to bury it under crap.

I was massacring my way through the next werehog level in order to advance the plot and it was just a goddamn punishment. It was long, it was stupid, it was buggy, there were some absolutely bullshit jumping puzzles, or rather perfectly reasonable jumping puzzles ruined by bullshit grab mechanics, followed by a gimmick boss that you had to kill three. fucking. times. With quicktime events. It was a good thing I got all the QTEs right on the first pass or I would probably have thrown my controller in disgust.

Despite fouling up jumping puzzles, taking time to find the little medallions hidden in each level that are REQUIRED to advance the plot, and generally feeling like I half-assed my way through the entire thing I got an A. I don't even know.

I decided to keep poking around after that torture in hopes of finding a new Sonic level to cleanse my palette with. If not I could replay some of the old ones and try to improve my score, but really I had played each of them at least five times and, while I certainly had room to improve, I couldn't really until I'd advanced the plot and sonic a little further. In searching I discovered I had opened a new high-speed stage, and with great relief started it.

This stage is the best 3D Sonic level I have ever played, and I have played all the 3D Sonic games. EDIT: Except "Sonic the Hedgehog" on the PS3 because what the fuck time-traveling albino hedgehogs, and I haven't gotten Sonic Colors yet. I don't count that "Sonic and the Secret Rings/Black Knight" bullshit.

Let me put that in even broader terms: This stage stands among my favorite Sonic levels of all time.

It's huge. Vast. You start off at high speed and you stay there. There are bounces, bumpers, carefully placed "fuck you" enemies, actually fun rail-grinding sequences, pretty fantastic (and beautiful) set-pieces, higher-speed paths that require absolute focus to get, and more than a few instances where I would have said "that was AWESOME" if I wasn't busy dodging laser beams at a hundred miles per hour. It has something I didn't realize how much I'd missed, a jumping puzzle that was not homing-attack based, didn't rely on any of your bullshit superpowers, none of that. You. Moving platforms. A > B and certain death below.

Get going.

It's 100% pure Sonic goodness. First run was seven minutes. Second run was 5:50. I look forward to cutting that down even more.

Levels like this keep me going. I just wish I didn't have to put up with the werehog bullshit in between.

Dear dev team of Sonic Unleashed:

First and foremost, I would like to congratulate you on a job well done. The Sonic run-fast levels of Sonic Unleashed are the best 3D iteration of Sonic to date. For the first time you have provided evidence that you have learned something over the past decade, and put it to good use. The levels are fast-paced, fun, have multiple routes for the clever and quick-reflexed, and are not of the Sonic Advance "just hold right and you'll get there eventually" school of design. I have to work for my level completions again, and what's more I will have to work much harder to get good ranks on them. The bosses, at least so far, have also been excellent. The first run-fast boss required fast reflexes, learning his attack patterns, and like all good Sonic bosses as soon as you had him figured out you got him down to half health and all of his attack patterns changed. Bringing him down was very satisfying and took a great deal of attention, and working out how to bring him down faster will be more satisfying still.

Now, to talk about the God of Werehog portions of the game, let me introduce my compatriot Fred. Fred, the perceptive among you may notice, is a big stick with a bunch of nails pounded through it. You will all come to have an intimate knowledge of Fred's opinions of the terrible controls, poorly planned quicktime events, inconsistent ledge-grab mechanics, Prince of Persia rip-off jumping puzzles, made yet more frustrating by the afore-mentioned ledge-grabbing issues, and the imitation Zelda box-dragging puzzles. Most of all you will come to understand what Fred thinks of the fact that you have to play as many of these wretched punishments as you do fun Sonic stages, and often have to slog your way through one or more to get to the good stuff. It is my hope that you will learn that, when you have created something good, you should not proceed to mix it in with the most heinous of shit. At least in Sonic Adventure 2 you got to drive around in a kickass mecha when you weren't making a mockery of land-speed records, now you just get to play Kratos in a furry suit.

What the fuck, gentlemen. What. The. Fuck.

So we're psychologically bracing ourselves to go out and spend about $700 on nextgen systems and games (mutual holiday gifts ftw), and decided to take care of groceries first (since we sure as hell wouldn't want to afterward) and the following discussion happened in the car. Verbatim.

Me: "What the FUCK?!"
deliciouschaos: "AWESOME"
"A cow skull. On the front. Of a Volvo?!"
"I would totally do that."
"What the FUCK?!"
"AWESOME!"

Us, ladies and gentlemen.

I've been playing a lot of this game, lately, and I realized I hadn't talked much about the cast or the plot or even some of the funnier mechanics. So, a post about that seems like a good idea.

( Nippon Ichi is a weird company )
I will post more on this game if people are interested. The mechanics are crack on toast and the plot thus far has been kind of entertaining. Also I have some epic stories just from things that happen. Maybe I will post those.

So I pick up FFXII again after mainlining EVE for like...ever. I pick up some hunts, head to the Ridorana Cataract, go get into a fight, and I'm like "wait, this is the one that plays itself, why aren't the rest of my party doing anything?" Vaan, meanwhile, is enacting the fall of Rome with the Zodiac Spear playing the part of the Visigoths and Rome being some poor mook. I turn on the rest of my party's gambits and they start simucasting 1000 needles.

O_o

XD

and then I had to pause because I was laughing too hard to not die.

The beer may have had a part in this. DAMN YOUR ETHANOL TREACHERY.

This is mostly just to test the ability of DW to crosspost to the eljays successfully, but I also haven't posted much in a while so I figured I might as well.

The reason for the aforementioned lack of posting is simple: I have been crazy-busy. I'm succeeding myself to death at work. I got us access to huge subject pools, now I need to wrestle all the materials to actually run the studies and figure out schedules and WHARRGARBLE. So, that's been taking up my days (well, that and everything else I have to do). When I get home there are projects that have required my attention, and somewhere in there I have to apply to grad schools. That increasingly looks like a weekends thing, because I just don't have the brain to handle it when I come home from work during the week.

Gaming-wise, well, it's been EVE and Recettear mostly. EVE is as it ever is. I'm at a point where I have a great deal of choice in what I do, but my playtime has been restricted enough that I really don't have opportunity to do much. I'll hopefully get some time this weekend to really poke around and, I don't know, make my trade/haul alt an actual successful trader rather than just a painfully slow source of extraneous isk.

As for Recettear, well, what the hell is Recettear you ask? To any JRPG fan, imagine Persona 4 as executed by Nippon Ichi, and replace the murder mystery with an economics textbook. In layman's terms, you play as the owner of an item shop in a JRPG world, and you hire adventurers to go into dungeons and acquire goods for you, dungeons which are randomly generated and you have direct control of the adventurer. You only get to use one adventurer at a time, but there are something like seven adventurers to pick from and they all handle radically differently. It's a very good time, and it scratches that same capitalist itch as EVE, just in a completely different context.

I don't know why I love capitalism games so much. I think it's escapism for my repressed urge to go to business school or something.

Certain other projects have also fallen by the wayside (see: Special Topics), to be picked up in due course. I'm still not sure if I will be more or less busy when I get to grad school. I think on balance I might be as if not more busy, but because I'll have a flexible schedule I won't feel as busy. Hell, just being able to go to bed later than 10pm without paying for it the next day would be nice.

With that I should probably return to work...

My interest in EVE has once again waxed. It comes and goes, but right now I'm super into it. Conveniently, someone just wardecced E-Uni last night, while I happened to be online. There was an...interesting microcosm of how E-Uni works. Allow me to introduce two chat channels:

Chat.E-Uni: The general chatroom for the corporation. People talking about what-the-hell ever, evenly distributed across various professions and interests.

Command.iln: Despite the serious-sounding name, it basically functions as the chatroom for the more PvP-focused portion of E-Uni, the Ivy League Navy. The ILN tend to be more experienced players, too, and more of the upper echelons of Uni leadership hang out in command than chat for sure.

When you get wardecced, everyone in the corp gets a notification that the war starts in 24 hours. In the first few minutes after that notification, each channel responded thusly:

Chat.E-Uni:
"Awww"
"God dammit"
"Crap, so much for making isk"
"F&#$^ another wardec?!"
"Well shoot."
"Oh no, not again."

Command.iln:
"WAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"
"Oh HELL yes"
"WAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"
"Yay! Killing time!"
"Well, time to move my stuff back to Aldrat..."
"Warbeer!"
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"

( Some stuff you may or may not care about )


And this is why I'm in the ILN.

<<
>>

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Tomorrow I leave this blissful place for the miserable swamps of southern CT, so to ease the transition I'm going to spend one more night torturing myself with this dreck. Join me in bringing my vacation to a whimpering end.

( Maybe today we'll develop a plot! )

Audio/video posts for future chapters? Discuss. Be warned, there may be screaming.