Imperial Witch.

So I'm back at my apartment. Exciting! Except not really. Not really exciting at all.

( DRIVE BY LIFE UPDATES, now under a cut for extra skipability!! )

DILEMNA, FLIST: I just got a response to someone else's craigslist ad in my inbox. It seems that somewhere out there, there is an e-couple waiting to "hook up" by terms of modern parlance. Unfortunately, along the way the man misplaced a decimal in his would-be lover's email address, and now the conversation has fallen to ME. Should I forward it with a note? Just forward it and not say anything and hope no one notices? IGNORE IT AND PRETEND THIS NEVER HAPPENED??

Also, hi new people. I don't have any newfangled introduction posts or comment criteria, I figure: it's a livejournal, you can figure it out. But I do encourage you to participate in this meme I just made up.

Comment with the name of a fictional character. I will reply with a haiku about that character. Example haiku can be found here. C'MON, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.

So, I'm trying to articulate all the ways this secret upset me. (I KNOW, fandomsecrets = 4SRS. Just deal with it.) I'm pretty sure it has to do with the strange idea of a tru nerd elite, or self-fetishizing posters on the gamefaqs messagebords. One of my biggest problems as a non-target demographic gamer is the infuriating sameness of the marketing material I'm exposed to. I like videogames, therefore I must drink special flavors of Mountain Dew and enjoy large-breasted women in rather impractical underwear.

Recently I had a conversation in one of my history classes about Age of Empires and Resident Evil. About halfway through, he just stopped and said, "Wow. It's just so weird that you're a girl and you know what I'm talking about." Uh huh, really. I wonder why that is. Games are varying degrees of sexist, it's true, but they can also be empowering. There's nothing about the medium that's inherently boys-only, anymore than words on a page or pictures on a screen. Gaming could be universal-- GTA4's opening weekend was four times as big as Iron Man's. Yet games continue to be marketed to one specific and permanently adolescent group of males, which leads to things like the comments on this article.

And so Nintendo is doing the unthinkable and marketing their games to people who don't drink Mountain Dew. Now Wiis are being set up in retirement homes, and this is a horrible thing. It's tainting the culture, I tell you. The reason I've had a game system since I was four years old is my seventy-plus year old grandmother made a point of giving me one. She's been buying and playing games since longer than I've been alive, but a fifteen year old Halo fanboy who has never even heard of Space Invaders is a truer gamer. Like a comic book nerd clinging to four decades of gnarled continuity, rejecting all attempts made to update, change, move forward, reinvigorate a dying industry-- because he is a true fan. Like dozens of posts on RPG message boards condemning Wizards of the Coast because fourth edition D&D is too user friendly. Nerd culture is closed-off, circular. I could never be a gamer even though I've been one all my life. God forbid someone try to change all that, to prove that games aren't just for basement-dwelling, pimple-faced video store clerks. Sell outs.

Um, also: saw Prince Caspian and Speed Racer. No one will go see Indiana Jones with me, I am heartbroken!!

( Speed Racer: THE MOVIE, in one panel )

I also finished Neverwhere: my favorite thing by Neil Gaiman so far. I think I don't like him as much as I should. I've read a lot of his stuff-- Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, 1602, etc. -- and I've never really understood why people are crazy about him. I'm probably going to have to hand in some kind of membership card for saying this.

Stealing this from angelamaria. I haven't done a book post in a while, and really guys I read more than Twilight and sixties Jimmy Olsen comics. Really.

Below are the top 106 books tagged “unread” in Librarything.

The rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your TBR list.

Mostly I'm using underline as books I own but haven't gotten to yet.
( Blah blah blah I can't remember any witty quotes about books. )

So, I've been posting a lot lately and adding new friends and stuff, so I thought I'd make an introduction post. And so I was going to do that "ten things you should know about me" meme, but all I've done recently is memes, memes, memes. It's time for something else. And I thought, what do I want people to associate me with beyond all else?



Yeah, dragon-riding, mullet-sporting, ringworld-dwelling Macbeth is pretty much it. I mean, the only way you could have a post that better represented me and my interests is if there was endless fangirling of 16-bit treasure hunters or random pictures of antiquated naval hats, but hey, it looks like we took care of that problem.

( MACBETH SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT )

So, uh, that was long and image intensive!

In other news I am happily continuing my replay of Final Fantasy Tactics, now with added PSP cutscenes. I'm trying to use the storyline characters as much possible this time, with pretty good results so far, but then again, Malak and Rafa haven't joined yet.

I'm pretty sure the blurb on the back of the book says it all:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him-- and I didn't know how dominant that part might be-- that thirsted for blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

But in case you needed more, there's this post.


Edward Cullen: Naw, man, that's what I like about these high school girls, man; I get older, they stay the same age.

( I read Twilight so you don't have to. )

So I finally caved and bought a used PSP entirely for purposes of Final Fantasy Tactics and it's sooooo shiny.

And at rydia's instigation, I bought Twilight. I've read maybe half of it...I don't get what everyone sees in Edward Cullen. I mean, sure, he's really really ridiculously good looking, but this seems to be his only character trait besides the basic creepy vampire ones so far. And really, anyone who decides to spend their eternal youth in high school clearly has no imagination. I'll probably make another post on this later, clearly the SPARKLES must be dissected.

That's right kids, it's meme time again!! But first because it occurs to me many people are unfamiliar with the First Church of Lezard Valeth and this particular subject of my fangirl self. Who is Lezard? Why is his RPG religion better than any other RPG religion? Well, I think I can help explain. With SCIENCE.




Notice how his positioning on the graph gives Lezard a win level of over 9000.

(But seriously, Lezard is a recurring Valkyrie Profile character. He's like Harry Potter, but if Harry Potter majored in CREEPY STALKING and BECOMING A GOD instead of World Saving or Dropping Out.)

( ICONS ICONS ICONS!! Or: Emma hates me and likes to see me suffer!! )

( I did the interest meme again, in SERVICE OF PROCRASTINATION )

( In which I summarize recent events in Captain America )

Edit: From, like, everyone: Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll respond via comments. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on fannish stuff, favorite type of underwear, the less touched-upon aspects of my life, etc. And then, repost this on your journal so that I can start asking too.

I've been a bit MIA from all forms of internet life for a while now, and I can't say that's not going to continue for a while. Certain aspects of my life have been shot to hell and things have gotten complicated without getting interesting. But now that my soul is a mirror that only reflects the darkness, I don't really feel like wallowing in my own misery on LJ. That and my computer's internet decided it didn't want to work anymore. Which is crappy because I had made all these new icons. (I've decided my icons should match my journal.)

But Sark's on Heroes now, with Veronica Mars to follow, and this alone deserves a post.

( Save the cheerleader, etc. )

( Speaking of Sark, it turns out I really am a history major )

( That webdesign meme that's been going around. )

( Book memes are my weakness. )

Okay, I said I had this big plan to write about books I'm reading and that this would somehow be interesting to my friends list. Occasionally I contemplate joining one of those "50 Books a Year" things, but, um, well, I don't know, I just never do. This place lacks anything resembling structure, if you haven't noticed, and I strongly suspect that I keep it up only for the sake of my increasingly outlandish entry tags.

I had planned to do a sort of summary of recent books I've read, which includes Jane Austen's Emma, the first of the Captain Alatriste novels, a few tales from Henry James and, yes, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. (They were all good, but I'd rate Emma the best of the lot, followed by the Alatriste story-- I haven't been this excited about following a series in a while, and Perez-Reverte is one of my favorite authors still alive and publishing stuff.) But bisou recently wrote a kind of Harry Potter/life retrospective, and in addition to being a joy to read, it seemed like it'd be kind of fun to right as well. Now, Harry Potter really isn't that big a part of my life, but books are, so I thought I'd give a kind of bibliobiography.

( Me on books, or 'I swear guys I'm totally literate!' )

( And now for that HP meme that everyone else is doing. )

On the videogames homefront, the following is an actual conversation that took place tonight, when one of my housemate's friends wandered into the basement:

STRANGE GIRL: What are you playing?
ALEX: Shadow Hearts. Shadow Hearts 2.
STRANGE GIRL: Oh.
ALEX: The gay vampire wrestler is fighting the dominatrix.
STRANGE GIRL: Oh.
JOACHIM: ...No one can face the might of my rippling muscles!

Also, in regards to this post, I have successfully forced Captain America comics on to two of my friends, and the universal consensus seems to be that yes, they are good, and that Bucky is indeed badass. Take that, any semblance of my own coolness!

Right, okay, so sometimes I read comic books. Mostly just things by Brian K. Vaughan, i.e. Runaways, Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, that one Dr. Strange mini-series. My college has a comic book library and so I have passing familiarity with a lot of stuff just through random browsing. But I've always thought the great majority of super heroes were probably really lame. (The Ghost Rider movie has done nothing but confirm this.) When I was like 10, there was a Marvel vs. DC thing running, and my brother bought a copy of one of the issues, and I read it, and so Aquaman vs Sub-Mariner became my idea of comics. And everyone knows how lame Aquaman is. And if Aquaman is that lame, imagine how lame all these people I've never heard of are. I mean, superheroics are basically the professional practice of bringing a knife to a gunfight-- and while I for one am all for Exceedingly Stupid Acts of Courage, they require a real sense of danger to make them worthwhile, and everyone knows that no one dies in comics.

But when I heard they resurrected Captain America's sidekick as a Soviet cyborg assassin, I thought it spelled good times in the manner of the recent Fantastic Four movie. There would be over-the-top, nonsensical rivalries, and maybe Jessica Alba would be there pretending she wasn't hispanic. In any case, a good time would be had by me because I sometimes enjoy bad things more than good ones. I mean, the other comic book I own is Macbeth: the Graphic Novel, and that features the thane of Cawdor as a mullet-sporting rider of dragons on a futuristic ringworld still somehow known as Scotland.

( Nobody stays dead in comics except for Uncle Ben, Jason To-- crap. )

On another note, it's becoming clearer and clearer to me that I don't know what the heck I'm doing with this journal. I've never really figured out LJ.