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Dahne

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Think of the children [Jul. 8th, 2009|03:34 am]
While Toys R Us had none of the toy guns I was looking for, they did have, by the Spider-Man stuff and G.I. Joe, some nice action figures of The Comedian.

One great part of making a costume is the opportunity to say the line, "Hey Mom, can I use your chop saw?"
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Always keep in mind that cyborg limbs are awesome [Jun. 25th, 2009|09:53 pm]
Bionic Commando, the sequel to that NES game where you fight Hitler, is pretty disappointing. The swinging around is fun, once you and the controls reach a mutual understanding, but unmarked instadeath areas and checkpoints way too far apart go together like pickles and AIDS.

Whoever's in charge has a strange habit of going to the trouble of sending you a rocket with a gun and putting four bullets with it, then getting back to telling you that they don't like you.
I think we're not supposed to like the subcommander guy, but having him voiced by Steve Blum makes that hard. Though, at the very beginning, they send in you in a rocket and your cyborg arm in another rocket. I'm less convinced that they're oppressive than just really poor planners.

I'm kind of glad I returned it before getting to the end, because my brain doesn't need the damage from witnessing the plot twist firsthand. Even if you keep the sheer stupidity of the premise intact, all you have to do to at least add some heft is Companion Cube the hell out of the thing. If you're going to do something stupid, embrace it. Don't go in half-assed. It would have been easy, too. You're out alone with a bunch of bad guys (though special mention must be made of the voice with the ridiculous German accent and miles over the top Bond villain delivery, whose actor I want to give hugs and cookies) and some disembodied voices trying to outgrowl each other. Why not say hello to the old arm when you pick it up, in that half-joking way people talk to objects? Or give it a nickname? It's such an integral part of the game, it would be just natural to give it some personality. Jesus Christ, I'd develop affection for a dead goat if it let me swing around like Spider-Man.

But then, well, it's Capcom. You don't play Capcom games for coherent storytelling. You play them for parasite zombies commanded by a midget dressed like Napoleon and electric guitars that shoot bats. Bionic Commando proves itself a worthy inheritor of the grand tradition when the main character trips Bionic Legs Terrorist Girl and tells her, as she coughs on the dust of the bombed city, in a voice saturated with loathing and disgust:

"By the way, that's people you're breathing."
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As requested [Jun. 23rd, 2009|11:55 pm]
I've been meaning to pass this around for a while, because it is magical. [info]karose originally tracked down a copy and uploaded it, for which I shall love her forever.

Cam Clarke(aka Liquid, Blood Elf male, Kratos*, Leonardo)'s album of gay love songs

WARNING: Once you hear this guy singing Son of a Preacher Man, nothing is ever the same again. Pass it on.

*The Tales of Symphonia Kratos, not the AAAAAARIIIIEEEES Kratos. Though, oddly enough, he is Hercules in God of War II. Man gets around.
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Speaking of books, White Noise was bad too. [Jun. 20th, 2009|05:01 am]
All right, Thomas Pynchon. Come on in. Make yourself comfortable. Considering that one of the sex scenes included a 12-year-old girl, what I should be saying is, maybe you should take a seat over there. I realize it's been a while since I finished the damn book, but I've been feeling shitty lately and there's no cure like bitching about literature.

Let's talk.

First off, there's something I should establish about myself as an audience. I liked Infinite Jest a lot. I liked Serial Experiments Lain. I liked House of Leaves, though not enough to change font colors. One of my favorite games is the one where, at the end, the ex-President loses a katana duel and takes a dive off a giant robot aircraft carrier so he can die in front of a statue of George Washington in his tentacled exoskeleton, then the main character decides that he's tired of the player controlling him, walks past the vampire he killed a couple hours back, and goes off with his girlfriend who may or may not actually exist.

The anime series about kids with severe psychological issues in giant robots where the laser blasts were shaped like crosses because somebody thought it would look totally boss, they kept running out of money, and the thing that explains the most is that the creator had a mental breakdown halfway through? Loved it.

My only problem with Killer7? The load times.

The game where if you lie about your name enough times a guy with that name pops into existence, you can make a bit of extra money by letting a girl kill you and watch you wake up because she thinks it will be an interesting experience, and to get to a new area you have to help a pregnant alleyway? One of my other favorites.

What I'm saying here is that I don't have a low tolerance for weird.

If you told me about a book that goes off into tangents about immortal light bulbs and a guy who can have other people's hallucinations, my first question would be where to get a copy.

So why did I hate Gravity's Rainbow so much?

It's a long answer. )
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Iran election protest [Jun. 15th, 2009|02:47 am]


Moussavi's supposed to be holding a rally in an hour or so. There keep being rumors that it's canceled because the police will be using live rounds, or the militia will open fire. Reading these. Anybody have more?
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Heard back from Interac [Jun. 8th, 2009|07:33 pm]
They said no.

Fine. I didn't want to go to Japan anyway. I'd never be able to find shoes.
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Get off my pixelated Mode7 lawn [Jun. 6th, 2009|12:48 am]
I learned something important from getting bored and renting Call of Duty: World at War - I am hilariously bad at WWII shooters. If a gypsy fortune teller ever reveals that I have a past life who died at the battle of Stalingrad, all I have to do is find the one who said, "Wait, what am I supposed to be doing again?" and stepped on a grenade.

Also possible: shot by sniper while saying, "Do you mean the building's left or MY left?"




Another interesting difference between Western and Japanese culture: Western games have great confidence in my ability to understand things that are yelled at me while I'm trying not to get shot.




How come Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth DS hasn't gotten any attention? It seems to be a nice, engaging tactical RPG in the style of FFTactics before they took out the evil Jesus and put in all the stupid. The story's prosaic so far, but renaming the main character makes it more fun.

"I'm Sylphanos, cleric of the Tower of Wind."
"I'm Steve."




So Nintendo is coming out with an ill-advised peripheral, Kojima is making a PSP spinoff about Big Boss, and Square is bringing over a fighting game with Final Fantasy characters while they gear up to toss an FF installment into the MMORPG pile.

The theme of this year's E3 is Shit We've Done Before.

Remember Ehrgeiz? No, you don't.
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88:88:88 [Jun. 1st, 2009|12:38 pm]
I refuse to indulge in speculation on Kojima's latest tour de force of being a cryptic bastard because, judging by how each game has gotten progressively more heartwrenching, it's just going to be ten hours of a sad lost kitten in the rain.
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Progression [May. 21st, 2009|11:59 pm]
Before



After )
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Huh. So much for school, then. [May. 20th, 2009|10:22 pm]
Finished up my last finals week. Last good Japanese class on Monday, last bad Japanese class today. As in, last last.

For some reason, whenever I'm in the middle of a test that takes particular concentration, I become especially susceptible to sudden songs in the head. In the middle of deliberating "Hmm, what does 気の毒 mean?" my brain decides to shout, Lupin the thiiiiii~rd!

I think it helps.

Anyway, it's all pretty anticlimactic. Not with a bang but a skit about stealing money while a guy did card tricks. This is the point when I'm forced to admit that I've spent the past five (yeah) years acquiring rather less liver damage than you would expect and the ability to tell people their tattoos are upside down.

I get the haunting sense this whole experience was supposed to be more exciting than it was.

I'm not much for traditional rites of passage. Those days when you're supposed to suddenly feel different, and end up mostly feeling disappointment that you don't.

Our robes for graduation are very, very purple. I don't mind, because if Ozymandias can pull it off, so can I. Also apparently Willie Mays is going to be there.

I'm doing what I and my affinity for cool and dank swore I'd never do and going back to Southern California. It might just be a temporary stop, though. Hoping. Do a luck dance for me around the 30th.

Mostly I've been spending the past few days doing useful things like playing World of Warcraft and watching the epic Let's Play of Sonic 2006. The latter included an essay contest on the subject, "How the hell can Dr. Robotnik outrun Sonic?" My personal favorite is the theory that he posesses several "speed bladders" which "contain excess fast," but the winner is a thing of beauty.

Lupiiin, the thiiiird. Lupiiin, the thiiird.

It means pitiful, if you were wondering.
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Dahne's Journal, May 8, 2009 [May. 8th, 2009|05:30 pm]
Man in bunny suit going into Subway today. Picture bad. Camera phone old, out of date. Cell cartel run by crypto-Nazis.



Bunny man did dance at patrons. Was told to leave by Chinese man at counter.

The city is a strange beast, many-headed, neon-spotted, dozing in late sunlight. Will miss it very much.
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Eighties and comics - two vectors of weird that taste great together [May. 3rd, 2009|07:07 pm]
In preparation for moving out of the place where the landlord is skeevy and sometimes there is cow tongue defrosting on the counter (okay, admittedly, the latter is kind of badass), I've been going through some stuff. I came upon some cheap comic books I'd picked up at ComicCon and forgotten about.

Soon came the conclusion: Doctor Strange is awesome.

I wish Scans_Daily was still around, since it'd be great to share.

The context is that a guy who was mad he didn't get to be the Pope stabbed him, so he got sucked into the unreality of the Orb of Something Impressive-Sounding.

Picture under here )
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Against the - do you remember what day it is tomorrow? [Apr. 30th, 2009|02:12 am]
Further investigation into Gravity's Rainbow has revealed that Thomas Pynchon can bite me.

Unfortunately, it's just that kind of persistently annoying that I can't put down. I've put this much time into it, dammit, and it's not all bad. Granted, sometimes it gets pretty close. I've developed a sort of variation of OH JOHN RINGO NO - some things are just out and out hideous no matter how you look at it, and I've even skipped a few paragraphs, which happens about as often as a rabbi has salami and provolone for lunch. But other times, like when Slothrop (and can you think of a more irritating, ugly name?) hallucinates a long, extensively described trip down a toilet, it helps to step back and say, "Was that necessary, Thomas Pynchon?"

It's like a huge Jell-o mold: the texture is slippery and unpleasant, it's nothing your system recognizes as food, there's chunks of completely unidentifiable matter and some that you wish were, and you don't have any optimism about how you're going to feel after you finish the thing, but there's a shadow of something at the center that could be your imagination, and the only way to find out is to get through. And every once in a while, now and then - suddenly - there's pineapple.

It's also the first time I have ever seen the word "merkin" used in a literal descriptive sense, and not "can you believe this exists and there is a word for it?"

The point is, I have to take it in bits at a time, interspersed with the more conventionally palatable, and I happened to flip the damn thing open today and what does he start talking about but King Kong.

...

Dear universe: that's just plain creepy.

It's an extra-special day because it gives us the chance to look back and consider what state our country might be in today, if our President for the past eight years had been a different sort of man. A dual-katana-wielding man, with exoskeletal armor, robotic tentacles, and a friend who is a vampire for no especially good reason.

It would be a better world.
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The benefits of obscurity [Apr. 11th, 2009|07:12 pm]
I wish Take a Bow was in a different language so I could listen to it without wincing at the critical failure on the subtlety roll.

Turns out what I was actually looking for was Pruit Igoe and Prophecies.
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Books and errata [Apr. 4th, 2009|02:31 am]
[music |saigo ni warachau no wa atashi no hazu]

Heard a guy looking at manga describe the infamous Pizza Hut Revolution anime as Code Geese. Think I prefer it that way.




Whenever I use that trick where you boil pasta and then in the last couple minutes throw in some broccoli florets, so you drain them together and they're both done at the same time, I feel like the smartest person in the world.




In the Watchmen game, some of the NPCs taunt Nite Owl about "your little girlfriend Rorschach." Elsewhere, others tell Rorschach that "your girlfriend the Owl is next."

Seem a little fixated on this idea.




There's a certain class of people who consider possible salmonella an actual deterrent from eating cookie dough.




Wrongest Watchmen merchandise seen: refrigerator magnets, including one that says 'behind you.' Second place: Rorschach-mask-style ski mask sort of thingy. I know there's some awful adult costumes, but I really hope there's some for kids by the time Halloween comes around. If I don't get to hand a fun size Snickers to an adorable eight year old Comedian, I will be deeply disappointed in the apparatus of capitalism.




Anyway, I've just finished reading Infinite Jest.

A stray ooh or aah here is expected, but really, the length wasn't offputting to me. I can't stand to wait for more than four seconds without something to do - my god, the wonders public transportation does for compulsory literacy. I always have to be reading something, so just to have it be the same something for a pretty long time isn't onerous. Especially when you consider that the book is, believe it or not, a lot of fun. You kind of don't want to stop reading it. You may not know where it's going or have any idea how it's getting there, but there's not a lot of confusion about what's going on at any particular moment. You're just not sure what it has to do with anything else, or where it'll end up. Most of the time, whatever that is is entertaining enough on its own merits.

It's not exactly a cheerful story. I've heard somewhere that David Foster Wallace's intention was to write a terribly sad book, and it takes a while for it to sink in that he's succeeded. Instead of being an angstfest, it takes an unflinching and unapologetic look at what drives people who are coping (or, more often, failing to cope) with addiction, abuse, and, terribly tellingly, suicide.

I liked it a lot, and understand completely why somebody else might not.

It's funny in the way terribly sad things can be. Not really pretentious, either. There's something very honest about it. There's very prominent strands of weird throughout, slipping towards the nightmarishness toward the end so inexorably that it seems like there's no other way it could be.

There should be a word for fiction set in the near future and written just long enough ago that the discrepancies between invention and reality bring a special sort of surreal disorientation. A certain kind of anachronism. The book was written in 1996, and is set around 2008 (or, since the calendar has been subsidized a la football games, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment). There's a lot about a system of what they call entertainment cartridges, which is funny, because the way you choose what you want and get it disseminated to you (though I never caught exactly how) is eerily reminiscent of Torrenting, but they seem to be big, clunky things like VHS tapes.

I like the chaotic, flip-back-and-forth style of footnotes, though I can see how it might seem gimmicky. I fond of that sort of thing because, instead of trying to force you to read in a straight line, it acknowledges that that's not how your brain works. You bounce around. Of course, having to flip back to the end of the tome constantly was sort of annoying. That's one thing House of Leaves did really well, handling the shifts back and forth, though it sort of broke the efficacy by assuming that I cared who Johnny Truant slept with.

Be warned, this isn't one of those things where the end is the end. See, what you have to do is flip back to the beginning and read it over again, and you get all the bits that passed you by the first time, and it fills in a little. You have to do a lot of turning around and looking back, and pick out the moments of oooh.

Still, we're talking sub-Evangelion-series-ending levels of closure here.

Maybe that's what makes it stick in your head so much. You keep going back to see what you missed. And finding things, though not necessarily what you were looking for.

Just cause I feel like tossing them somewhere, some spoilery theories and opinions are

under here )

God help me. I'm going to be one of those people who likes Pynchon, aren't I.
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Deep thought [Mar. 24th, 2009|02:27 am]
I want to see a movie or game have a climactic showdown in the middle of a factory full of guys running around trying to do their jobs and keep the machinery from killing anybody in the midst of some maniacs having dramatic bullet time side-leap machine gun attacks at each other.
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SMELL LIKE GAY [Mar. 18th, 2009|06:18 pm]
I cannot adequately express how much I love [info]technophile for writing this. Because making Rorschach take a bath is a team effort.
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Another thing about Watchmen [Mar. 7th, 2009|11:28 am]
Inexplicable music. I can't say that anything about the crippling humanity of people in masks trying to keep their world together ever made me think of 99 Luftballoons.

There is a bit of nice, contemplative acoustic guitar that plays here and there that's driving me crazy because I know I've heard it somewhere before.
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First thoughts on Watchmen [Mar. 6th, 2009|07:39 pm]
The difference between the competent and the great is successful resistance to the temptation of going, "Did you see what I did there?"

But it was good, the only words for Rorschach are freakishly adorable, someone awesome sent me malaria and ebola in the mail and oh god I have Girl Scout cookies.

This is the best day.
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Adventures in translation [Feb. 26th, 2009|09:39 pm]
Berserk is at sea and it's been eight minutes since anyone got murdered, so they get attacked by pirates.

Now, mostly I've been pretty good at figuring out what's going on, even if sometimes my translation are a little rough. ("Okay, so he's pretty much, 'Hi, I just saved your asses,' and she's all, 'Look, he saved our asses! And he's pretty and didn't sell his soul to demons who are gonna eat everybody's faces or anything probably!' and this one noble is all 'Neck Ruff Guy does not approve of your shenanigans!'")

It's funny to re-experience reading as something you have to work at and not something that just happens. It can be pretty slow going, since when they're talking to royalty they use them some crazy-ass archaic ultrapolite forms and there's a ton of unfamiliar kanji. I was hoping the 法王庁教圏連合軍* would get destroyed just because it is a pain in the ass to read.

Sometimes I look up the scanlations online to clear up spots I'm not sure on. The only translation I can find didn't approach this part literally, though, and it's got me more than a little perplexed:

Cut for my scanner not living in vain )

*meaning something like Allied Forces of the Vatican Domain, and read hououchoukyoukenrengougun. Yes, really.
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