My eyes are filled with gods

Wow. No posts since August … Apparently I’m officially back in hedgeturtle mode* (which demands a mascot, yes…must work on that).

Things that have happened since my last post, in no particular order:

• We drove 2,300 gloriously winding miles to New England and back, and saw mountains and fall foliage and stayed with Will’s grandmother in a lovely Maine fishing village. Sadly, the moose avoided us. This time.
• The new school year started, and we have a temporary but thoroughly awesome marketing and communications specialist on board for the new year. If they don’t let me keep him, I will cry great tears of fury and then the revenge plotting will begin. Just you wait.
• My personal laptop had decided its screen looks FABULOUS in rainbow-colored vertical stripes, and so it keeps acquiring more. And more. And we’re quickly reaching the point at which the pretty stripes are making it sort of impossible to read/watch anything.
• A new season of MLP:FIM has begun, and I’ve not seen any of them. (See FABULOUS rainbow-colored stripes.) Yes, I could watch them on Will’s computer, but I have to wait for him to go to bed and then sit in an uncomfortable chair instead of my comfy couch-nest, and I’m sure I could probably come up with something else to whine about if you give me a minute…
• A squirrel got stuck in our family room chimney a few weeks ago. It’s still there, as the critter catchers couldn’t get to it without either removing the back furnace or the fireplace itself. So huzzah for space heaters! Boo on  contractors and critter catchers not returning calls! [Filed under: The House Is Trying to Kill Us.]
• Samhain quietly came and went. Peace to all who observed third harvest, and spent time remembering their Honored Dead. Blessings also to the Honored Dead among us. May we make you proud, and be always mindful of those who have gone before.
• We spent fourth harvest (Thanksgiving) with Will’s family. It was both delicious and entertaining, as expected. I was most impressed by the small child who clearly preferred cheese over cookies. Cheeeese. Smart kid.
• I voted in our local elections and was cheered by the staffers and saluted by a veteran for taking the time to do so. (Next time I’ll ask where the cookies/massage line starts. I bet you’d get a lot more voters…) This particular vote was important to me, because I very badly wanted to see some city council members replaced — specifically those who kept blocking gender-based anti-discrimination policies in housing, employment, public facilities, etc.
• Collaborative yoga is on hiatus because we lost our teacher and couch-nesting season makes me not want to go Out There unless I absolutely have to. Also, hedgeturtle. I rest my case.
• We discovered a sushi/boba tea shop at the southern end of downtown St. Joseph. As much as I like Sweet Moon Tea, this other place is kind of awesome — they don’t use powders, but fresh ingredients. The taro was kind of amazing. If only I could remember the name.
• Skyrim and Saints Row: The Third came out. I have mixed feelings on both games, though SR3 might warrant its own post. I’m replaying SMT: Strange Journeys on the DS. Maybe I’ll finish it this time! A girl can dream.
• We are now in the “consume ALL the things” phase of the “holiday” season. November is almost over. Seriously. When did that happen?

That is all.

This site desperately needs an overhaul. Put that on the things to do list, Ghost Assistant.

*Hedgeturtle: My antisocial side when I’m in hiding mode — a cross between a hedgehog and turtle, all prickly and withdrawn. Coined during a conversation with the lovely Erin Palette.

As usual, vacation week did not go as planned. There were no trips to Indy or elsewhere, so hopefully we’ll get those another time. Early on, I passed out while making lunch and smacked my head on the ground, and then wound up with an eye infection on top of the mild concussion. So, lumpy forehead, massive headaches, and the most bizarrely perfect eyeliner-esque infection/bruise along the eyelash edge of my right eye, right down to a little semi-Egyptian flourish at the corner. (What gives? Seriously, I could never get eyeliner to do that when I was actually wearing the stuff…!) Mostly there was a lot of sleeping, although we did manage to get out of the house for a walk a few times. Friday there was a lovely trip up to Cafe Gulistan and a walk along the Union Pier beach. Lots of sunny, window-down driving. It was probably one of the best days we’ve had this summer, in all honesty.

The headache lingers, though it’s bearable this week. The eye seems to be healing well enough. At least it just looks like I cut my lid or something, rather than walking around with half makeup. Haha.

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MrFenris lives. I hope to have visual confirmation soon.

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Will played through L.A. Noire and continues to battle the frustration-fest that is Alice: The Madness Returns. I’m running through Kingdom Hearts Re:coded on the DS. Mostly it’s good and fun, but wow, do I suck at the platformer bits.  Also, it suffers greatly from magic camera syndrome at the most inopportune times.

I got about 90% through Okamiden before succumbing to frustration at a boss battle redux (the giant kabuki puppet) and walking away from it. It’s a cute, fun little game, although the inaccuracy of the stylus as a brush mechanism drove me batty at times, and I was terrible at mining the demons for organs and whatnot to improve my weapons. Ah, well, maybe I’ll come back to it and suddenly Renjishi won’t be such a cheating bitch. I can dream.  But seriously … how can you not look at Chibiterasu and want to plaaaay? That pup is the incarnation of all things adorable!

Ghost Trick has been enjoyable, although it relies heavily on timing, which is another of my weaknesses.  It has a sarcastic sense of humor that appeals to me, though.  9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors is also good, if a bit daunting. There are so many different endings — and most of them are pretty horrible.  The one big gripe I have with it are the long sections of cut-scenes. Multiple endings makes it theoretically replayable, but I’m just not sure I can sit through those again. The Unskippable crew would have a field day with the entire game.

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Yesterday would have been my dad’s 74th birthday. I don’t know why that seems vaguely impossible; he was close to retirement when he died, his thick, wavy black hair all shot through with gray when he forgot to color it.  He’d had reading glasses for a good decade by then, and had finally (grudgingly) accepted a hearing aid. He was in the midst of completing a second bachelor’s in computer science, despite having worked as a programmer for most of his life, and was working full time for a local payroll company. Still. He always seemed far too ornery to grow old like normal people do.

Yesterday was also my youngest brother’s 29th.  That’s more believable.  Even so, he’s been in Japan for four years, now, and has weathered employer bankruptcy,  Tokyo train commutes, negotiating rent and utilities red tape in Japanese, several pairs of shoes and many more socks worn clear through, terrible bosses, bizarre seafood pizzas at the Tokyo Shakey’s, a trip to South Korea, the 2011 earthquake and Fukushima meltdown, and, from a distance, Mom’s eternal fretting. I’m glad he’s having the experiences he is. But that doesn’t mean I don’t wanna give him a good shake so he’ll send Mom a freaking postcard. Sheesh.

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That’s all for now. Sleep time and all that.

We survived the weekend’s snow-dump, although Will did massive amounts of shoveling to dig us out. (Me, less so. He is my Snow Hero!)  Over the course of things, he did have to excavate his car from the main road and ended up sheltering it at his parents’ house while the snow plows did their magic, since there was no way for him to get it back to the garage. It was amazing the difference in the snow amounts between the two counties, I must say: our 2.5+” of snow to their 5 inches or so. Amateurs.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Finished the storyline of Fable III yesterday. All hail the Good Queen and whatnot. It is possible to accomplish all the “good and benevolent” options if you have a treasury bank of $10 mil or so, but the actual ending isn’t all that different. Except people don’t “boo” you when you’re walking down the streets, I guess. I’m happy to see there are more post-storyline quests available. Plus, I still have to find all the darn gnomes and keys.

I will not be commenting on the shooting over the weekend other to say I hope it functions as a wake-up call to the politicos, regardless of whether the shooting was actually politically motivated. We’ve become far too complacent with hate rhetoric and blame rather than compromise and solutions. This is not the America I wish to be.

That is all. Back to your regularly scheduled Monday.

From wegame.com:

Yes. Brain is fried, and all the bosses have fled for the afternoon. The cheese stands alone. (Mmm. Cheese.)

Well, okay, now I’m alone. My partner in web-content creation just handed me a bunch of stories to edit and post, and then she fled, too.  Le sigh.

Lovely winter wonderland outside, though. Lovely, and slippery, and frigid.  As if I didn’t already want to go home and build a nest on the couch…

So tired. Happy First Monday and all that.

We had delicious lasagna and garlic bread for dinner last night. Thank you, Lori and Patty (?) — it was very kind and generous of you to share with us!

I’m mostly recovered from The Plague other than that last lingering bit that refuses to let go. My boss, who says hers started the same day mine manifested, is still miserable. Perhaps the Cold-Eeze lozenges actually work? This is the first time I’ve been able to measure against someone else. Unfortunately, Will is exhibiting the signs, now, even though we were pretty sure he was in the clear after holding out for so long without so much as a sniffle. He doesn’t have the luxury of taking time off to recuperate, at the moment.

What did you do over the holidays? I coughed. And sneezed. And slept. And then when I was done with that, there were video games. The Scott Pilgrim game on X-Box Arcade is pretty hilarious. I still suck at platformers, but dang. I’m willing to practice that one as long as Will’s patience lasts. The Raskulls arcade game is also hilarious and amusing to watch, but I haven’t actually tried playing it yet. The humor is pretty meta and very much reminds me of Castle Crashers or Costume Quest. (We’ve not yet tried the new DLC expansion for CQ yet, but it looks like more of the same, except in a snowy/Christmasy landscape.)

Will convinced me to try Fable III a couple of nights ago so we could play co-op. He was running his second character — he’d already completed it with a Good Queen and is now replaying as her opposite — and I’d forgotten how entertaining his commentary is when he’s playing an “evil” character.

Mind you, I’ve watched him play II and now III and although I was interested in the storyline, I never really felt compelled to try either game for myself. Now that I have … well. This is going to be problematic. The last time I can remember staying up to play a video game until 5:30 two nights in a row was when Lowell lent me his copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne.  The only reason I managed to make myself go to bed at 2:30 last night was because I set an alarm.  Two alarms, in fact.

Yes. Alarms, plural. It’s been so long since I played an actual video game instead of a DS game that I’d sort of forgotten how badly I lose all connection to that natural alarm normal people have that says: “Hey, you know, I’m really tired now and I’d like to go to bed, please.” Instead, I play and play and play and at some point I decide to get a drink during a load screen, and happen to glance at the clock, and hey, it’s 4 AM. I ought to finish this task and go to bed. Oh, wait, but that’s a shiny thing … Hey, what’s that? I’ll just go take a quick look. Oooh, just a few more Hobbe kills and I’ll get an upgrade on my hammer.  Hm. Okay, just one more quest … Hey, I don’t remember exploring here yet. I bet there’s a silver key or a gnome up there …

Anyway, not so much of a problem if I’m on holiday break, but I had to go to work this morning, you see, so I very reasonably set an alarm to tell me it was 1 AM and I should stop playing and go to bed. And then I set another to tell me it was 2 AM and GO TO BED. I MEAN IT THIS TIME, DAMMIT.

After the second alarm, it still took me another half hour to drag myself to bed. And then I couldn’t get to sleep. Three 4-hour-sleep nights in a row leaves me functional but dragging. Which is a great way to start the first work week of the new year, let me tell you. Also, my hand is killing me again. It’s like I never left work!

This is one of many reasons I’m very, very glad WOW never really managed to click for me.  I probably would have played myself into an early grave.  /sigh

In other news, contractors are re-doing the plumbing for the upstairs bathroom today, and then commencing on gutting the main-floor bathroom for the remodel.  A usable shower on the main floor! No more terrible sunflower border and light switch! No more phantom window! A real ceiling! I think that’s an acceptable way to start the new year.

I’ve been camped out on the couch for the last few days, playing the silly minigames in Puzzle Quest 2 over and over again on the DS even though W. bought me a new game. I have the plague. Or so he keeps telling me. So matching colors is easier than paying attention to a new menu system, etc. Anyway, he was kind enough to bring home more tea and soup and bread and cheese, so I’m not complaining.

I did have to cancel our planned taco/Arkham Horror night with friends though, and I’m kind of bummed about that. This break’s kind of a bust, what with losing the first half to holidays and being sick. On the plus side, we finished Fable III and have been watching epsiodes of Better Off Ted. I’d forgotten how awesome that show was. W. had forgotten that his character Jules was largely based on Veronica. Hee.

Also tonight: finally remembered I could watch Hulu on my crappy laptop instead of flipping channels of crappy TV. It is an improvement. Watched some Castle, tried an anime called Ghost Stories (which was decidedly meh), tried Bleach again with no success, and saw they have Blade of the Immortal. I have a good chunk of those books, so I’ll have to give that a chance at some point. Tonight I settled on one I’d never heard of: Spice and Wolf. It’s a historical fantasy of sorts that seems to mix Japanese sentiment with a European setting similar to Scandanavia and the Balkans, where they managed to hold on to their pre-Christian practices long into the era of the monotheistic Church.  A peddler picks up a new partner — a wolf god of the harvest who has decided her village doesn’t need her anymore, so she wants to go home to the north woods. In return, she, being the wise and powerful wolf she is, will help him in his merchant business. I’m only two episodes in, but I’m loving it so far. I thought I’d find the anthropomorphic wolf-girl irritating, but no, not really. The characters are good, and they have to navigate the differences between Wolf and Man pretty early on. Most of the story so far revolves around the peddler trade rather than swords and magic. Holo’s commentary on Nature vs. the rise of the Church is pretty much right up my alley, and I’m already dreading the inevitable confrontation between Holo the Wise Wolf and the minions of the Church.

Holo: At any rate, how important they have become.

Lawrence: Churches have always been important.

Holo: No … around the time I came from the north, they were not that important, yet.  At least they did not exaggerate that the one true God created the world and that humans are borrowing it. Nature is not something that can be created by someone.

Holo had been tied to that village for very long time, of course. What a difference a few hundred years makes. The world around her little village changed, and so did she — but I don’t think she’s quite realized that yet.

I’m a little wolf inside a girl, you say
And off I’ll go from June to May
Oh whistling round the world

And now I need more tea, some NyQuil and another episode while I wait for the sleepies to drag me under.

The snow began this weekend. What an odd autumn/winter it’s been so far. A very mild October and November, all things considered, and legitimately cold and snowy as soon as December woke up. Somehow it feels like all this lake-effect snow and ice normally holds off until closer to the end of the month.

Had a series of unsettling nightmares this weekend. It’s been a very long time since I’d last had what a normal person would consider a “bad” dream that was worthy of being called a nightmare, let alone a whole set of them.  I’m used to threat dreams — dreams of killers and conflicts, of haunted or broken places and monsters (in all senses of the words), so the usual suspects generally end up being little more than interesting stories, or perhaps vaguely unsettling, at worst. When a dream is bad enough to qualify as a nightmare by my standards, there’s usually also a heavy warning element to it, as if the entire purpose of the dream is to get me to Pay Attention. Oddly, there was no discernible warning this time — at least, not in my dreams. Others in my house were not so lucky.

Also, there was a distinct lack of big black dogs in my nightmares. Somehow I find that more troubling than the dreams themselves, especially given the religious zealotry context of the first one. Where has the guardian gone?

In more useful news, I wrote a review of the last two issues of Sirenia Digest for Flames Rising. Despite being in publishing, slogging through an ungodly number of reviews and discussions during college, etc., I’m honestly not a very good reviewer. I fully admit this. But I do hope that it causes a few readers to check out the digest. I’m still kicking myself for waiting so long to subscribe. Unfortunately, I sent it in too late to feature last week, and this week is zombie week at FR, so I have no idea when it will run.

We went to see Megamind last night. I think that might be the first movie I’ve seen in the theater since the original Paranormal Activity — I honestly can’t recall seeing anything after that, regardless of my best intentions. And Megamind, despite being a Will Ferrell movie, was entertaining and did make me laugh in several places. And then, as soon as we had stepped out of the theater, I realized I’d already forgotten the entire movie.  So make of that what you will — a decent, if momentary, distraction.

I started up Puzzle Quest 2 again, with a different character class. The barbarian spells seem fairly useless so far.  This comes after finishing an unintentionally hilarious, poorly translated DS game called Lux Pain.  (The 6.8 rating on Gamestop is being truly generous.)  It’s a linear “RPG” in the sense that there are occasional dialog options you can choose during your conversations with NPCs, but I’m not sure how much they actually affect the gameplay, if at all. Otherwise, it’s mostly go to X, talk to Y, complete timed task via bizarre game mechanic. The spoken pieces never match the dialog displays, and in fact you’ll get a completely different read on the situation depending on which one you pay attention to — the truth lies somewhere in the middle, I suspect. There are a number of obviously female NPCs who are constantly referred to by male pronouns, as if the translation team for the displayed dialog never actually saw the game or interacted with the translation team for the spoken dialog. And the actual, underlying story still makes no sense even after finishing the game (although there were a few minor bits of coherency I’d totally steal if I were still running games). Ah well. That’s what I get for not looking up reviews before taking a chance on the game, I guess.

Kotaku.com posted the track list for for Rock Band 3. It boils down into three nearly-even categories for me:

1. Yay! Also, … what took so freaking long?
   INXS, Echo & the Bunnymen, Primus, Metric, “Been Caught Stealing,” “The Beautiful People,” etc.
2. Really …? You hate us that much? (Yes. Turns out they do.)
   Amy Winehouse, Huey Lewis & the News, Night Ranger, etc.
3. … Who? Wellllll … all right. We’ll try it. I mean, maybe you’ll introduce me to the next Silversun Pickups …

There are more than a few questionable choices, IMO, but I guess we’ll see. Some will undoubtedly be fun just by sheer dint of pushing the ridiculousity envelope.

Well, so far I like WordPress, so that’s a bonus. I plan to mod this theme a bit with my own graphics when I have time, but that will have to wait. Minor annoyance: WP didn’t import the tags with my posts, so I’ll have to go back and re-tag everything. Ah, well.

Also:Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is finally out.  I’m a little concerned that my DS screen isn’t reading input as well as it used to, but hopefully that’s just the fault of the obnoxiously engineered Puzzle Quest Galactrix.