Cranky. Old. Man?

The new Garbage album is steaming on Spin's website.

Edit: Also the 25th Anniversary Cast Reunion for Star Trek: The Next Generation is up on Youtube.

Man, the internet is just a GREAT today for someone my age.

So things are coming together in a good way!

My eeePC came in this weekend, and I am playing with it now. It's so tiny! And yet doesn't behave any different than any other laptop I've used. Plus webcam! Which is an odd thing to have finally.

I also got some lovely (and adult and practical) presents for my bday this year. Having a good stir fry pan is extremely welcome. As are the other things. My family knows me too well.

I've added another leg to my Epic Traveling, so I will be visiting Ladyfriend for this coming weekend, followed by flying out to Cali, and then finally ending up in Washington. The break I've wanted, so soon!

Though, ha ha, trying to figure out how to get to the right Amtrak stop in order to get out of Cali was fun and involved many checks through the google maps transit directions (which involved the right address, unlike this past weekend in Chicago...). But I found a route that involves basically zero walking and direct transit to transit business. Which is good!

And before you city people roll your eyes, keep in mind that I live somewhere where I can realistically bike from one side of town to the other in the same day. I occasionally forget just how many cows long distances in big cities can be. XD

I think grad school is going to be awesome now.

But how you play it.

There are two people that I interact with regularly IRL that I consider to be hardcore gamers. My mom and one of my interns. Intern and I got into a bit of a discussion concerning his (typical) teenage boy dislike of casual games (and how he automatically gendered it as "something 15 year old girls play" and how problematic that automatic assumption was).

My mom is hardcore because she doesn't just play a game, she plays it to completion and all the extras and would do it twice over if it let her. She doesn't just watch TV, she has a game in hand while watching it. She plays her Wii when she's waiting on laundry/slow roast/whatever. She used to unlock levels for my sister and me when we were kids playing computer games.

But my mom's tastes in games are the "cute" ones. She doesn't like gore, she doesn't like morbidity, she doesn't like "women wearing floss on their buttcracks". For her a game is pure happy escapism. Kingdom Hearts would be too dark for her. She's like this with movies too. As she puts it "there are too many things I've seen in real life to want to have it in my entertainment".

And that's fine.

I buy her Mario and LEGO games and gave her Angry Birds on her ipod touch and she's very happy with that. She was skeptical of Plants vs. Zombies until I showed her it was really meant to be quirky cute and she ate that right up. She doesn't use walkthroughs and will power her way through levels like a fucking boss.

Intern's favorite genre is actually rhythm games, like DDR. He doesn't like a lot of narrative and likes just pure gameplay that will take up hours of his time. He doesn't even watch movies, and gets impatient with anything that isn't interactive. And despite my lack of "hardcore" status, he'll actually check out games I'm playing (he said he actually really liked Monster Tale, which I'm still getting through because I am not as good at platformers as I would like to be, but I just really like the narrative so I'll deal with it). He plays anything he gets his hands on, except for MMOs.

However, he wouldn't assign "hardcore" status to my mom because half the games she plays (obsessively in a completist way) are "for kids" or "casual games". Or that she can't devote 5+ hours a day to playing because she has adult things to do in her life.

I very badly want this stupid attitude to just stop. I'd love to have conversations with other gamers where it doesn't turn into some "cred" pissing contest. We are all people that love something that is interactive and interesting and something that is still in its teenage years as far as media goes.

Can we just admit that once we get to a certain level of obsessiveness we are all in the same boat?

And while we're at it, can we stop with the whole idea of 15 year old girls being the worst beings on the planet in these discussions? And POC and whoever else resides outside the "normal" spectrum being completely invisible?

tl;dr: your gamer peen, I do not fucking care about, so let's just play.

I'm kind of a nostalgic person.

It's not a bad thing, and I'm not nostalgic to the point where I'm wishing I was back at another point in my life and "oh the good old days" and bullshit. I just have a healthy sense of time in all directions and since I over-analyze myself way too much it's always a good checkpoint.

Since my parents are moving they're giving me stuff I've been storing at their place due to just not having had time to think about it. Considering I'm starting grad school in the Fall it's as good a time as any to go through some things. Like sort out my memory box. I currently have two; one for childhood stuff that I don't have the room or proper way to display, and one for stuff since adulthood. The adulthood one is much smaller but packs a bigger punch I'd say.

I feel really good about my life, even if work has been driving me nuts as of late. Because I've always got forward momentum; I can only think of one very small part of my life that I felt like I had no forward momentum at all. And that wasn't the entire Lost Year, it was just a month in that year. Even then I felt like I was at least moving forward, even if just through time.

Moving forward is important to me. I don't drift well, I don't stand still. I like comfort and safety, but if its at the expense of my moving forward it becomes anything but comfortable and safe.

I'm just really glad I've always had this somewhat obsessiveness need to document, or at least have evidence of my life. I think that was my mom's doing, and I don't keep EVERYTHING that I used to, just the stuff that I know will make me think about something important, or happy, or meaningful.

I've had a lot of important and meaningful things to think on, and know that there will be more. So thanks everyone.

Onward!

Thank you for putting that up online for those of us that don't have cable, Nickelodeon. However I'm probably going to have to pirate/buy piecemeal the rest of the series.

I mostly wanted to say that Lin Bei Fong is exactly what I want to be when I grow up, pretty much.

There's really no other point to this, and I watched it like the day it came out, but I've just now had a moment to breathe and reflect on this.

Pretty much everything is awesome.

Congratulations! I am pleased to inform you that you have been admitted to the [school here]’s School of Informatics and Computing for Fall 2012.

Looks like I'm getting a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction Design!

Comment to this post, and I will list seven things I want you to talk about. They might make sense or they might be totally random.

Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

Questions from katmillia

1) what is your favorite project you've worked on and why?

I have a lot of favorite projects. XD But I'll go with my favorite project I did at work, because I need something positive. It was working on a game to tech computer science concepts, but due to budget restrictions we couldn't make a video game prototype. So we ended up making board game versions, and I worked with the interns closely on the original concepts for this (before it became board games) and also tested it with them. Some of them came out really good!

2) explain your favorite con memory to the crowd

SO MANY GOOD MEMORIES. To be honest, the one that sticks with me the most was how many little kids told me I was their favorite character when I was wearing my Princess Yui from Avatar: The Last Airbender costume last Otakon. I almost missed this one little girl, because I was thinking of food and climbing some stairs but Ladyfriend pointed her out and I smiled and waved at her and it was like her face lit up and I was really proud to be dressed up then. Kind of makes me wish I could volunteer to dress up for like, I dunno, the Boys & Girls Club or something. I just really like making kids happy ok.

Ha ha, I was supposed to put a drunk memory, wasn't I. Close second is getting a bar full of people we didn't know to sing the "Ceiling Cake" song. XD

3) tell us your thoughts about penguins

It's cute how they think they're birds but can't fly.

4) if you could be doing ANYTHING in 10 years, what would you be doing and where would you be?

Well, I'd be a professor for intro engineering classes by then. Most engineering professors could give two shits about freshmen, but I think that's the best college group to teach because you can still reach them and maybe talk the weirdos out of quitting the program. Engineering needs more weirdos and less boring white guys ok. I'd probably be in Ohio too, because I'd be living with my ladyfriend by then, and also because I am kind of done with Indiana. Professionally. This is a really boring and practical answer but then I am pretty boring and practical at heart.

5) if the zombie apocalypse started tomorrow, what would your weapon of choice be?

A javelin. I don't have the muscles to handle a bludgeoning weapon and I used to be pretty good with a javelin when I was in Track & Field.

6) if you were stuck on a boat for A WHOLE YEAR with 3 other people and one of them HAD to be rick santorum, who would the other 2 be and describe your first month at sea.

Latrice Royale and Pandora Boxx. Because the best defense against Rick Santorum is DRAG QUEENS. Our first day would be Latrice stowing Rick in box somewhere. Then the rest of the month Pandora would entertain us with song and jokes and I would learn the ways of being fabulous from Latrice and we would all become youtube stars.

7) come up with an explanation for where all the anvils went that isn't "they got melted down after disuse"

They ended up in all those self-storage boxes, until the original Anvil Person who saved them all died and the storage box went up for auction and the dudes from Storage Wars were disappoint. Then they got sold to interior designers, who then worked them into the Blacksmith Chic look, which will be big this fall.

Still rejecting me! Waiting to hear from backup school.

Looks like I'm going to have to do this shit piecemeal. Which is annoying as hell.

Anyone who doesn't think the system is stacked has clearly never been the "wrong" type of candidate.