So for people who don't sew, you probably are not familiar with sewing patterns. Traditionally, the way you picked them out was to go down to the fabric store where you would find a section of the store with some tables with these big catalog books. The books are put out by each company and have pictures of each of the patterns that are currently in print. You leafed through, found something you wanted, noted the number, and found the corresponding pattern in the filing cabinets full of the actual pattern.
What was always amusing to me about this system was the blatant knockoffs of whatever big movie came out that year. Simplicity is not the only offender, but they're the ones that stick in my mind the most. There's just something about the lazy level of obfuscation in selling what is clearly based on the Lord of the Rings but scrawling "QUEST FOR THE RING" or something across the page. They also have a somewhat more sneaky approach by having the main picture be something generic, but then showing you how a simple change of colors can make it into a beloved film character.
Oh look, you can be I guess Jacob Marley or some Victorian creepster or oh wait, is that Willy Wonka from the terrible film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Nah, couldn't be.
So now that I mostly buy vintage patterns at thrift stores/am trying to move away from printed patterns/have the internet I don't go down to the pattern section, or indeed even the fabric store, that much any more. But I remember a particular incident from my college years. I was leafing through the pattern books at Wal-Mart as I was wont to do, and I came across this gem:
It looks like a generic fantasy costume, but I assure you that this and the dude version are very specifically billed as "Warriors in Cyberspace." That's right, these are World of Warcraft knockoff costume patterns.
However, unlike Totally Not The Matrix and It Isn't the Joker You Guys plus bonus Not the Riddler, they don't still make this pattern. It was available for a little while, and then it was taken off the market. The Simplicity catalogs at the time all had the same page ripped out. I can't find any info on what became of Simplicty 4088 or whatever number the men's version was. It's just gone. I can only assume Blizzard made some kind of copyright claim.
I find myself endlessly inspired by this game which I realize is horribly frustrating and not actually fun in any way. That dog/cheese sandwich puzzle still makes me rage. But even though the puzzles are supremely complicated and many involve a time-delayed instant death, where an action (or lack thereof) in the early game ends up killing you later on, I have a hard time saying that they're unfair. Unlike, say, a Sierra game, all the information you need is somewhere in the game, you might have to examine a lot of stuff or consult the Guide a bunch, but the information is there. I also have this thing where the things I find interesting I also find very unfun, but a game being "interesting" in a way that actively makes it sound like a nightmare to play is something that I value. So I guess my new thing is doing stuff in list form. Here are the things that are interesting about H2G2:
-Footnotes. Just brilliant.
-The way that the game takes on the Murphy's Law quality present in Douglas Adams's work. For example, at one point you will have to use one and only one of the tools you had been painstakingly gathering, chosen at random. If you don't have all the tools, the one you need is always one you're missing. And no, you can't go back at this point.
-The way the game converses with you. This is actually the inspiration for a project I'm working on.
-The unreliable parser.
As a kid I managed to get as far as the time and space jaunting part using only my wits and the built-in hints. I think I may have beaten it in adulthood. Back then I had the ability to spend months on a game demo alone, which is something I thought I had lost but seem to have regained recently in The Binding of Isaac. I might see if I can't figure this out without cheating using my memory, also smartness.
I've suddenly realized that most of the things I've read lately aren't really that good. In a writing sense.
Let's take, for example, the Song of Ice and Fire series. What's interesting about it is the story. GRRM likes to wax descriptive in the food porn and the porn porn sections, but none of the prose is really particularly good. I never find myself struck by the beauty of the writing.
I guess it's kind of cheesy to say, but my favorite author is Douglas Adams. It's not for his plots (although Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency does work out so deliciously) but for the genius with which he puts words together on the page. He's kind of my un-motivation for writing a book, in a way, because I know that I could write something technically better than Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer, but even if I had a thousand years to practice writing I'd never be able to bust out something even as good as the phrase "black-jeweled battle shorts."
Also it makes me super angry when people tell me that they can't bring themselves to read the Hitchhiker's Guide because nerds have ruined it for them with their incessant quoting about the towel thing and the whole 42 business. This is another example of my ongoing distaste for nerds, which I should probably write a post about at some point. If you are one of these, try Dirk Gently. You've probably never heard anything from it cause most of the terrible sorts of nerds don't seem to get past The Restaurant at the End of the Universe for whatever reason.
And even though the same people who have ruined Monty Python and the Holy Grail do their best for the first Hitchhiker's Trilogy book, I don't think they'll ever ruin it for me. It's a book I keep coming back to when I'm feeling down, and it really seems to help. I read that a lot of people have told that to Douglas Adams, and he was working through a depression when he was writing it. I could use it now, but I can't find my copy.
But see this is the point. His writing sticks with me in a way that JK Rowling's and GRRM's just don't. The only parts I chance to remember are the hilariously bad ones. So many of the phrases in Riddley Walker are burned forever in my mind, like "sarvering gallack seas" and "lorn and lone and oansome." Or from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius": "One of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man." It's like eating frosting! The good stuff becomes a part of the general mish-mash that's floating around in my head and periodically resurfaces. I want more of this kind of writing, but I also don't want to get into "the canon" cause it's SO BORING. Have you ever been forced to read Heart of Darkness? Or To the Lighthouse? I want good books but none of the ones everyone's reading are really good in the way I'm looking for.
So I've just finished the third Song of Ice and Fire book, A Thing of Stuff. Some thoughts, of course spoilers:
-Going into this, everyone tells you not to get attached to anyone. Right now, the only narrator characters left alive are the ones I do like. Tyrion, Arya, Daenerys, Jon Snow, and Jaime are all cool, and I am holding out for Sansa's developing backbone. I did like some of the non-POV characters who have died, but besides Ygritte I don't really miss anyone. I guess getting into them is a bad sign going into the fourth book.
-Too much stuff happens off-camera. You'll be going along, and someone will be all "hey, did you hear that Balon Greyjoy died and now there's a big fight over his stuff?" No, I hadn't, actually! Not seeing Robb for like, pretty much the entire time? What is this? Also where even is Theon? I think he's dead but I'm not super sure.
-The titular song of ice and fire has been mentioned, but we still don't know what it is.
-The first one ended enough for me to take a break, but the second one just sort of paused, so I got the third one immediately. I think there's enough of a stopping point here to take another much-needed break. I really don't want to catch up to the unpublished point in the series, to be honest. I like having them in existence but unread better. From what I've read on Wikipedia there's a big jump from the first three to the fourth one, so it seems like a fine place to put the series down. Maybe check out the show.
-I've always hated the sci-fi/fantasy "kind of real person names but slightly different" thing and this series drives me up the wall. Also, whenever they mention Joffrey all I can think about is Geoffrey from Strangers With Candy.
-See also crap like "southron" and "ser."
-Also can we stop calling them "teats?" Please?
-When I was a kid we used to go to the La Brea Tar Pits a lot, and they have that room full of dire wolf skulls. It was pretty awesome. Those tar pits are amazing and if you're near LA you should go, cause it's probably better than anything you were going to do in LA anyway.
-Daenerys looks like the Lady Amalthea.
-I always read Jaime like the Spanish name, and I really hope Lysa isn't supposed to be pronounced like Lisa.
So I had an idea for a hilarious business today, as I am wont to do. We were talking about shooting ranges, and I thought it would be funny to open a derringer-themed shooting range. I've never been to a range period, so I don't know how they work. I have the feeling that mine would be the mini-golf to its regular, full-sized golf. The theme goes all the way. It's all Victorian looking and you have to rent costumes and derringers (unless you brought your own) at the door. There are different shooting galleries, like maybe with sinister men tying girls to railroad tracks or ladies on fainting couches (I want a fainting couch for the new house SO BAD.) The coup de grace is the Lincoln room, where you get to walk up to a cardboard Lincoln in a replica Ford's Theater and assassinate him as a cardboard cutout of Mary Todd Lincoln looks on in horror. There's a souvenir photo set up and every thing. (TOO SOON?)
Then with the Lincoln thing came a yet greater idea: a presidential assassination themed shooting range. There's the Lincoln room, the JFK room, the William McKinley room that no one cares about, and the Reagan room. As soon as you fire at the cutout of Reagan, a cardboard Secret Service dude jumps in front of him.
Getting to know people is so strange. They learn about the present you, but the way people drift in and out of your life, they never really know the whole you.
When I was in the eighth grade, I just sort of...stopped being able to deal with people. I didn't want to do school work any more, I didn't want to see anyone, I didn't want to leave the house. My parents let me do the homeschool thing for the rest of the year. No psychology was involved. I decided that if any of my friends really cared about me, they'd call me. For the most part, they didn't. (Although two of them did come by my house once. I served them pumpkin pie which I didn't realize had gone off. (Sorry!) I've lost contact with one and am "facebook friends" with another, but I'd like to say thank you for your visit, it meant a lot more than you know.)
So the short version is I decided to remove all my childhood friends from my life, and I started over fresh in high school. If they remember me at all, it's as an awkward weird kid with a dry wit and strange outbursts. I'm sorry to them, I've been suffering from anxiety problems for quite some time now. It's too bad that they won't get to know the me who is trying to get better.
The people who know me now mostly know the me who had figured out that something was wrong and tried to act normal. How successful the façade was I may never know.
And those of you who read this are probably my best friends trying to humor me, who probably know that I have the social anxieties. And I thank you for reading. I really am feeling much better these days.
I haven't posted in a while WHAT ELSE IS NEW? It seems as though the blog is transitioning from a nerd culture report to a crazy person's photocopied newsletter. I'm not sure I mind. I'm not quite well-versed enough in the unknown and bizarre to run a gig like the late, great Encyclopedia Obscura, and I don't really feel like I'm bringing much to the table comics- and gaming-wise. My instinct is to once again delete all that has come before, except that this time I feel that the writing is a couple tiers above terrible, and the post on Spy Groove brings in something like 90% of the traffic. Unfortunately, obscure MTV cartoons provide only so much mileage, and anyway I've only seen one episode of The Head. Does anyone remember the old Superlemons? The one that actually used the Meta-Cookbook review system? I thought not.
So yeah, I've had a lot going on recently. Coming up, probably a series of posts about going sane and having to rethink all assumptions.
A frequent element in my dreams is smoking. I have an overwhelming desire for cigarettes but am unable to get any for some reason. I get so desperate as to consider smoking half-finished ones I find in ashtrays. When I wake up, I think, hey, I can just go out and go buy some. Wait. Eww, I don't want to do that. My friend Kyle is getting all Freudian about it. Sidebar: when I was with Ben he was always a huge jerk to me in dreams and would try to get me to smoke, but I didn't want to.
I've been through some sad times lately. As flippant as I am about it to others, I really don't think I'm dealing with it very well. Usually, people say that you need to cheer up, do things that make you feel better. That didn't feel right to me. I don't want to slather over my feelings with a layer of cheap happiness. I wanted to do something to really express my sadness.
I settled on making a thousand paper cranes. I don't suffer any illusions that it will grant my wish. It's really more about the process. I make ten cranes every day, no matter what else is going on. I'm about 450 cranes in at this point. I think what it's come to mean to me is that by working every day at a larger goal I can really accomplish something. It's a small change, achieved not through huge effort but through persistence and patience.
Small changes, followed through with, are what's going to make my wish come true.
Here's the first hundred, pictured with the knitted corkscrew of doubt and the blackwork pomegranate of shattered dreams (and pants).
The names of people I know in real life have been changed to save myself the embarrassment of it getting out that I dream hooked up with them. They will have different soap opera names each time to add a level of obfuscation. So Chad from last time is not necessarily Chad from this time.
Dimitri and I were married and we lived in a huge mansion in Hollywood. We had a lot of children, who all had soft hair and pronounced smile lines like their father. Dimitri and I were both high-profile lawyers.
We were having a large party at our house. There were some men there demonstrating some fancy novelty cigars. During the demonstration I was seated next to an African man. When it was over, he got out his wallet, as if to pay for the show. I tried to explain that it was a free demonstration, and I saw a pink flyer with a strange symbol sticking out of his wallet.
Suddenly, the mansion was under attach by people waving banners with the same symbol on them. These sorts of attacks were a frequent occurrence at our house. We were often the victims of terrorist attacks due to our work.
Afterwards, I went to check in on the children. They were unharmed but very upset about the attack. They asked me why we didn't stop so that the attacks would end, and I told them that the people just needed to know that Star Wars was a good movie, and Dimitri and I were the only ones preaching that particular gospel. I showed them a clip of it, and they agreed that it was good, but they weren't sure that it was worth risking everything for.
The names of people I know in real life have been changed to save myself the embarrassment of it getting out that I dream hooked up with them. They will have different soap opera names each time to add a level of obfuscation. So Chad from last time is not necessarily Chad from this time.
I was the main character in some kind of survival horror game, a man trying to save his daughter. The game was developed by an American game developer in English, but it was loosely based on an anime. Very loosely. It was poorly designed and buggy. I kept getting stuck in the geometry and none of the weapons really seemed to do anything. You had to rescue other characters in order to proceed but it was very difficult since their AI and pathing was so bad. In order to get new abilities, you had to beat Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz in a jump rope challenge. At some point, a hint appeared in enormous stone letters on a building in the distance, but they crumbled to dust before I could read them. I waited patiently for the animation to loop so I could read it, but I kept getting distracted and missing it.
When I wasn't the character from the game, I was also me beta testing the game. During this process, I was wandering through a building crowded with people who belonged to two opposing factions. The occasional fight would break out, but mostly they stayed in separate rooms.
During the dream, I "woke up" and decided to log this in my dream journal. I was using a highlighter that had a bit of black ink on one side of the tip. I was writing it and trying to conceal what I was doing from a man who was my lover. I was afraid to tell him about my dream journal, but when the truth came out he didn't really care. I woke up and had to write it all over again.
So I'm going to try a little something different here. In keeping with my new effort to make this blog interesting, I've decided to write about some of my dreams. Now, I know what you're thinking. Nothing is more boring than listening to people's dreams. But you haven't seen mine. They are full color, crazy, story-driven productions. Once there was a musical number. The names of real people that I know in real life have been changed to protect my sexy feelings for them, and to sound more like a soap opera.
I was planning a trip back to my old college town, where many of my friends still lived. I called Chad to let him know that I was coming, in hopes of gettin' me a little, but he didn't seem that excited about it. He did mention that he had recently bought an old bar stool though. This was a big deal.
I made the trip anyway and was staying in an enormous, dorm-like structure. There were always a ton of people around, especially in the rec center on the first floor, where I was hanging in the pool with several girl friends. There was a TV on in the background, and Cassandra and a friend of hers were being interviewed about the stool and the re-upholstery job they had done to prepare it for its trip into space. The girls in the pool were all gossiping about my having had a tryst with someone before I had left college, but I wouldn't reveal that it had been with Chad. I let them speculate and ducked out of the rec center.
Across the hall, Chad and some other guys were playing a turn-based strategy game on an obscure old Sega console. He made room for me to sit next to him, and at the end of his turn he suggested that we sneak off somewhere during the other players', as the turns lasted for quite some time.
We climbed a fort made of cotton balls and there we started making out, but people were removing parts of the fort in order to get to a refrigerator somewhere within it. When it became obvious that we wouldn't be able to get any privacy, we returned to the game. They had started a new campaign in a map with different terrain, but he chose the same character as last game in his haste, which had a serious disadvantage, and he started doing very poorly.
We went back to a large compound of buildings that Chad's family was renting, hoping to pick up the making out where we had left off. Some of the buildings were very small, some had no obvious entrance, and all of them were in a state of disrepair. We went to the main building, which had been mostly restored. It was quite small and we had to stoop inside it. We spoke with the builder, who was quite large and couldn't fit inside, through a window. His dream was to make homes for little people, but he had given up on that when he realized that he would never be able to go inside one of his own buildings.
Later, we toured the launch site where the stool was being prepped for its voyage into space. The stool was somehow able to control the ship autonomously.
I don't enjoy newspaper comics. At best they are sort of below that sector of humor that Mission Hill explores so beautifully, the zone between laughing aloud and laughing inwardly. Most of them are just bland, sanitized exercises in telling the same running gag that's been going since the 1920s. But a lot of them make me irrationally angry. The worst thing is that if I get my hands on a newspaper, I can't even pick out the meh comics and leave Family Circus to its own devices. I am compelled to read the entire page from start to finish, except, mercifully, for the soap comics.
They do things in them, though. Things that are calculated to drive me up the wall. The first thing is the callous disregard of the comic's own setting, and the worst offender is BC. Now, I know that the cavemen worship Jesus and cavort around with dinosaurs. That's okay. The secret to BC is that it does not, in fact, take place in prehistory but rather in a post-apocalyptic future. Yeah, that's canon. And it even might make sense for the characters to reference figures from antiquity, like we do with ancient Rome and all that, but the rate and detail level at which they do so is just obnoxious. The other day a strip about campaign ads ran. Really?
The other thing is animal psychics. Red and Rover needs to get out of my newspaper and I am not playing around. It's a cutesy strip about a boy and his dog that has absolutely nothing else going on in it. It only runs on Sundays in my paper, so maybe they interact with any other living thing during the week. I don't know. It's a bit creepy, frankly. Anyway, Red talks in speech balloons and Rover thinks in thought bubbles in a conversational way in which it is obvious that they are responding to each other. Don't do this. Haul off and make it a talking dog. Garfield skirts this line as well. Also, remember when Garfield had side characters? These comics just seem to fall into their schtick and don't let go to explore new stories anymore.
There are times when I latch onto a trivial entry in the vast body of human art and achievement and over-analyze the stuffing out of it. Like when I say that Maniac Mansion is the origin of all that is good or interesting in video games or that the meaning of life can be found in Beetlejuice. These things just speak to me in a way that Wuthering Heights or Battlestar Galactica just don't.
Deadly Premonition is one of those magical things. I intend to give it a "proper" review at some point, but there is a lot I have to say about it and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface. No spoilers in terms of plot, but if you don't want to know about "the pickles" in glistening, agonizing detail then I suggest you go do something else, like reading a fine June 2009 article about Spy Groove or play an exciting game demo.
If you are not aware, Deadly Premonition is the incredibly Twin Peakes-esque story of an FBI agent, Francis York Morgan, investigating the murder of a beloved local girl in a small town. Only he's totally crazy and always talks to his imaginary friend, Zach, and also is menaced by spooky creatures. The first thing that struck me is that the player character is not the main character. You think that you're playing as York, but you're Zach, the guy he's talking to. This is a space that I for one love to see explored, but not enough to play more than a couple hours of Contact for the DS. Think about it really for a minute: this guy has been receiving otherworldly commands from someone with outside information about his situation who wants to accomplish certain goals but with a callous disregard for his safety. Of course York is crazy, but he's making do as best he can. It's like that movie I totally didn't see where that guy hears his own life being narrated. On car trips, in lieu of a radio, you can actually have York go on for quite some time about 80s movies and his fetish for women turning into cats. True story.
It's like a deconstruction of the medium. There are things in normal games that are bizarre since they're abstracted gameplay elements from real life, and since you realize that's what they are you just kind of ignore them, unless you're the author of a crappy comic about video games groping for the day's lame joke. For example, the Pay 'n' Sprays in the Grand Theft Auto series. You drive in, they paint your car in a matter of seconds, fixing any damage and erasing your wanted level, no matter how many military guys see you drive into the garage. This is absolutely absurd but not a problem for anyone. DP has a similar mechanic where you get a car wash, either by the sexy lady attendant or the gross dude, for about $15 that repairs your car. Thing is, absolutely everything that happens in the game is abstract or surreal or just off somehow, which makes "normal" sort of weird game things like this stand out as being wrong. You're actually thinking about how strange it is that the game does something like fixing your flaming squad car with just a damp rag for less than half of what you just paid for a pack of crackers. This is DP's triumph, that it calls into question the way normal games are done.
It's this close to being an actually, legitimately good game. Sure, the production values are super low and the least appropriate music is playing at all times, but it's still totally playable. I don't find the investigation and the shooty bits an obstacle to get through so I can see the next hilarious cutscene. I'm actually into it. The horror elements are genuinely creepy. But, as my boyfriend pointed out, every frame of animation looks weird like those Half-Life comics people make using Garry's Mod.
Oh yeah, "the pickles." They come in a can. Labeled "the pickles." And I know where you can get an infinite supply of them. Also, I picked up a turkey sandwich trading card and thought, aww yeah, I'm going to eat this sandwich only to be bitterly disappointed.
I think you need visuals to understand what I'm talking about here. This is the cutscene that convinced me that this game was something I needed in my life:
And this is the one that made me go down to the store and buy it:
There are some people on the internet dating sites that only post a picture of their rockin' abs. Here is my encounter with one.
Me: You sure do have some abs there Me: In lieu of a face The Human Abs: why thank you The Human Abs: hehe, well I do have a face The Human Abs: if you have an e-mail address you may see it Me: I think I'll just extrapolate from the torso The Human Abs: hehe that is perfectly okay with me The Human Abs: well you have a cute face, but you are lacking the torso Me: I was born without a torso. Me: It's pretty freaking tragic. The Human Abs: well you are lucky you have such a cute face then Me: You gotta work with what you got.
Choice quotes from messages sent to me on OKCupid, months after I had started seeing my current beau and updated my profile to reflect that.
"You sound awesome except that you don't like puppies. What's up with that?"
"you are yummy"
"i love ur eyes & smile.. i think you are very sexy tell me more about you."
"And then I see that you're seeing someone. Son of a. Perhaps sometime we will meet on the same stage while doing comedy. Or at a store. Either or.
You still interest me though. There. I said it. It has been said."
First guy, I have a phobia of dogs.
Second and third are the type of generic, low content messages that will never get you an internet girl of any reasonable quality level. It is also hard to believe that anyone finds the picture of me in my loud Wal-Mart children's hoodie holding the most hilariously bad painting known to man "sexy."
I kind of admire last dude for his hopeful transmission into the aether. I feel like if he thought he had a chance he would have sent a proper message, but he knows the score. They have a saying in Norway: those who holler in the woods are answered. I wish him the best.
If you haven't seen Eagle Vs. Shark, I highly recommend it. It's a romantic comedy from New Zealand has that sort of very awkward Napoleon Dynamite-style humor, but the story is a bit more sophisticated and it has actual emotional content. And it's got Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords!
Anyway, my boyfriend was the recipient of some pretty bad news recently on the job hunt front, and while pastries do not fill the same function as gainful employment I thought I would bake him something to cheer him up.
A little about me, I took some cake decorating classes in middle school--made it through Wilton level 3--and while I am super rusty I can still do an icing rose if I absolutely have to. The problem with cake decorating is I'm too lazy to do a proper job of it and cleaning tips afterward is not my idea of a good time. I decided to make the cake Lily makes for Jarrod in Eagle Vs. Shark since it's supposed to look like an unskilled home job. And here is the result of my efforts:
Obviously his name isn't Jarrod, but I think it's a pretty good likeness. For reference, and so I don't end up on Cake Wrecks for reasons other than being awesome, here is the original cake from the film.
When I was a kid, my dad was able to borrow Macintosh computers from work, so I was used to having a pretty nice (for the time) computer. I was also able to skip the awkward DOS phase of PCs. Unfortunately, being a Mac user invited the scorn of the other children. I never understood this, because the OS was pleasantly Windows 2000y, and the other kids said that there were no games and I was all, what?
Now I chew through games like a bag of Cheetos, always demanding content and progress, but when I was a kid I could spend months if not years on a demo alone. Back in the 90s, there was actually a pretty vibrant shareware community for the Mac. This was before the spread of the web, so you would get these discs (floppy and later compact) full of demos and sometimes full games, which you could then get the full version by mailing some dude a check. Yeah, really. I'm not totally sure where the discs came from.
I will probably write about such gems as Scarab of RA, Taskmaker, and Escape Velocity at a later date, but today I was compelled to post because I remembered this weird one called Weekend Warrior. You were on some kind of surreal game show with a cast of waaaaacky contestants to choose from. Here's the official site, Mac users without compatibility issues can play it for free. I thought of it because there's one level in which you have to grab some plutonium (or was it uranium?) and upon getting it the weird announcer dude says "now you're cooking with plutonium!" which is something that's always stuck with me, for some reason. I find that it has worked its way into my rolodex of catch phrases. It's always the weird quotes that stick with you.
As a kid I had access to many treasuries of science fiction short stories that were around the house. I enjoyed them on a sort of surface level, enough to revisit some of the stories certainly. It's been interesting to go through them again and apply the sophistication that comes with my fancy-shmancy college learnin'.
"Vintage Season," by Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, is about a group of time travelers taking a tour of seasons: the most perfect fall, winter, spring, and summer known to history, which leads them to take lodgings at a house belonging to the unsuspecting protagonist. But as it turns out, the people from the future are connoisseurs, who delight in both the beautiful and the grotesque. There's a pretty strong parallel, I think, between the way the future folk enjoy the tragedies of the past without feeling anything for plight of the people in the past and refuse to change it as doing so might jeopardize their own lifestyle and the way we in the first world often turn a blind eye and even profit off of the suffering of the less fortunate.
What's really always stuck with me are the descriptions. Sometimes I find myself remembering the way the folds of their clothes and the strands of their hair are always immaculate, like "an actress on the screen, who can stop time and the film to adjust every disarrayed fold so that she looks perpetually perfect," or Kleph's set of rosy covered cups. Also worth pointing out is the sort of stare-down between Kleph and the protagonist's wife, where the wife is dressed more fashionably with big padded shoulders and Kleph just kind of overpowers her with her unfashionable but feminine silhouette. I think it's interesting to note that we're not talking about some kind of atrocious '80s pantsuit here, but rather the fact that this story was written in the mid-40s. In the Depression and the war years there wasn't a lot of excess in fashion, and this sort of mannish, broad-shouldered look was in, so we haven't really seen women shaped like women for ten or fifteen years and Dior's New Look is still a few years off. I really like the statement that a strong showing of femininity will win out over how we try to contort or conceal it.
I've always thought that any given work is successful if it makes you feel something. It doesn't even have to produce the emotional response that it set out to inspire, like a B movie that makes you laugh instead of recoil in terror. And I think that Bureaucracy is doing that. It makes the player stressed out, which--given the subject matter--is entirely appropriate. I am completely tense and nervous as I play. There are many things to accomplish before my flight leaves, many of which I won't realize I had to do until after I've managed to get on it. I find myself dreading interacting with the characters. Fighting the parser to find the exact right combination of words that a character will accept is kind of a problem I have with any text game, though.
Which brings me to the next point. Fear. Most games have a sort of feeling that they produce in the player. It's this sort of "oh no, I'm going to die and have to do that complicated section all over again" or "if I do this, is it going to put me in an unwinnable situation?" You're hesitant to use items or even explore for fear of messing up the game somehow, even though failure is relatively easy to recover from. I'm finding that I need to relax and learn how to accomplish one goal, like getting some cash, without worrying about being able to do it before the time limit, and then once I've figured out how to achieve all the items on my pre-flight checklist work on streamlining the process.
We at Superlemons are pleased to announce the release of our first game, VAMPIRE BOYFRIEND. The challenge was to write the game in one week, which has been failed spectacularly as we are also pleased to announce the acceptance of a temp job. If all goes as planned, however, it should be coming out this Friday.
What is VAMPIRE BOYFRIEND, you ask? It is the text-based adventures of a teenage girl at a new high school, living with her father, attempting to get a date to the Winter Formal from one of several sexy, sparkly, studly vampire bachelors. It's a great time for the whole family as it is an abstinence adventure.
I am a statistician and I write this blog about games, my projects, and other nerd stuff. All reviews use the patented Superlemons Meta-Cookbook Rating System.
Posts
