Well, this sucks.  I had an entire blog entry written, I hit the little button to add a photo, I got a pop-up thingie for installation, and WHAM, all my text went away.  Half an hour's work, reduced once more to its component electrons.  Now I get to sit here and try to remember everything I typed, including an entire recipe.  Frankly, this is so high on the list of Monumentally Irritating Crap that many of today's other annoyances seem paltry by comparison.  And no, that is not a good thing.  >_<

 

Most of what I was griping about here was Wild Arms 4, and how it continues to disappoint.  As I mentioned before, this otherwise RPG-style game has a jarring, obnoxious tendancy to descend into platformer action.  And the more we play, the more obvious it becomes that the platformer sections are poorly designed.  The game's camera is fixed, which frequently makes it impossible to judge distances: a bit annoying in RPG exploration, but a massive frustration factor in a platformer, particularly since the distances in question involve ledges, pipes, and spinny laser beams of doom.  There's nothing like playing the same hallway ten times because you can't tell whether any given dark spot is a shadow on the floor or a yawning pit of certain death.  Thank you, game.  Thank you for giving me an excuse to indulge in some primal scream therapy.  Thank you for breaking up all the chatty, predictable cutscenes with cathartic moments of overwhelming fury.  Thank you for removing all emotional attachment I might have otherwise developed for these characters by making me want to slam their heads repeatedly into the ceiling or throw them to their deaths.  You rock.

 

In other news, hubby and I have a habit of missing out on any given trend in popular media until the rest of the world is long since tired of it -- hence, our "discovery" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer two years after it was off the air -- and we are now cheerfully feeding this habit with a subscription to Netflix.  Movies we missed, anime we didn't bother to download, TV series that sounded vaguely good at the time but we never got around to watching: Netflix is paradise for the second-run theater crowd.  Our first happy Netflix find was the Film Crew movies.  Seeing the MST3K boys back in action, together again, was practically a dream come true.  I say "practically", of course, because my own dreams rarely involve grindingly bad B-movies.  But we're so very happy to indulge in more good bad cinema with our favorite commentators!

 

We've also started watching Eureka, as if you needed any more proof that we're a couple of geeks.  We saw the pilot for this show when it first aired, and thought it looked like fun, but we're monumentally bad at catching anything when it airs on TV.  Now that we can sit down to an episode whenever we like, we're both really enjoying the show.  Okay, yes, the characters are mostly one-dimensional or stereotyped.  But the dialogue is witty, and you just can't beat pseudoscience for amusing plot fodder.  We look forward to seeing more!

 

Now that I have this whole weight-loss thing truly underway, I wanted to set a few bribes for myself at various points along the process.  My original thought was that every twenty pounds, I'd have a bit more background detail added to my back tattoo (I'd love some pale blue, swirly cloud shading, for instance).  But after talking with George Long, the tattoo guru at Laughing Buddha, I discovered that the image would likely warp too much as I continued to lose weight.  He suggested waiting until I was quite close to my goal before I have any more tattoo work done.  Obviously, I'll take his advice; a tattoo is forever, so there's no sense in risking the outcome by being hasty!

 

But that does leave me with the question of what to do to reward myself for weeks of hunger and grumpiness.  Buying fancy new clothes is out, since I'm just going to continue losing weight until I hit my goal.  Obviously, going out for a gourmet dinner and decadent dessert would be foolishly counterproductive.  Considering how many unplayed games and unread books we have stacked up, shopping for new ones is more an exercise in guilt than a treat.

 

Frankly, I'm stumped.  Anyone else have some suggestions?

 

Well, I'm still not done with Beautiful Katamari (one item and two presents left!), but there's really only so much rolling a person can do before permanently injuring their thumbs.  So when my hubby finished replaying Neverwinter Nights, I leapt at his suggestion of playing a console RPG together.  If I was handed a giant cosmic whiteboard and asked by some divine power to stack-rank my favorite things in the universe from one to ten, "a comfy evening playing console RPGs with Bren" would be way up there.  And since our careers at Microsoft Games provide us with more money than free time in which to do anything with it, we always have a stack of purchased-but-unplayed games sitting around looking forlorn.  So with some vague notion that the games on the bottom of the stack weren't getting any younger, prettier, or more cutting-edge, we dug straight to the deepest geological strata and pulled out Wild Arms 4.

 

Two evenings and about five playing hours later, I can safely say that this will not be standing out as our favorite installment in the series.  As always, the story and world are intriguing, the characters passable, and the combat enjoyable enough.  True, the soundtrack wanders from genre to genre and style to style like a grab-bag of musical leftovers from other games.  No, the game does not include its original Japanese language track, and yes, the English dubbing seems to have been voiced by a handful of game testers and the producer's brother-in-law, recorded in a closet, and edited by drunken marmosets.  But these are sins we've reluctantly forgiven in other, better games.  Wild Arms 4, on the other hand, suffers from a major gameplay problem, and thus it annoys us enough that the other flaws seem all the more apparent.

 

Now let me preface this complaint by saying that some RPGs have very successfully managed to hybridize themselves with a second genre.  The Suikoden series, for example, features traditional RPG-style play interspersed with tricky tactical battles.  Mass Effect -- gorgeous bastard of a game that it is -- successfully marries RPG exploration and dialogue with shooter-genre combat.  Quite a few RPGs mix in puzzle, casino, card, or action elements: the Final Fantasy series is practically notorious for including mini-games from a dizzying array of genres.  But Wild Arms 4 eschewed each and every one of these potential secondary genres and chose instead to punctuate their RPG gameplay with... jumping puzzles.

 

Riddle me this: a mage, a badass swordswoman, an artificially evolved lifeform and a kid with a nanotech super-gun are trapped on a flying fortress and need to get to an escape craft.  Do they: A) blow a gaping, jagged hole in every wall between themselves and their goal, B) take the nearest soldier hostage and use his keys, or C) crawl like idiots over the surface of the ship, leaping from ledge to ledge and pipe to pipe, activating a ludicrous series of timed platforms, and frequently falling to their deaths?  If you think C sounds like fun, then Wild Arms 4 is the game for you.

 

Sadly, being the bad-guy junkie that I am, we'll probably finish this game anyway.  The villians are as colorful a bag of assorted freaks as you'll ever see.  But I reserve the right to grumble all the way through.

 

Because it's easier to stick to a weight loss plan if you humiliate yourself online by posting stats.

 

Miles walked: 1.5 (yah, yah, I know, lame)

Pounds lost: 3

Total pounds lost so far: 3

Pounds to go: 105

Nastiest thing consumed last week in the name of "healthy eating": Bacon Salt

Wow.  Here we are, only two weeks into the new year, and I've already blown that resolution about regular blogging.  How embarrassing!  Of course, not much has changed in my world since December 31, but still, that's no excuse.

 

On the upside, I've started working towards my "stop shopping in the fat section" resolution.  I started using our treadmill again over the weekend, and I have the amusing gimpy walk to show for it today.  I'll be doing another mile or so tonight after work, hopefully with less painful results.  Also in my immediate future is a lunch consisting of Healthy Choice soup, a small salad, and a 100-calorie pack of Cheetos.  I have to say that the latter is a brilliant idea: instead of making a "healthy" (and therefore tasteless) version of the finger-staining, cheesy-good snack, they simply packaged up a small portion of ball-bearing-sized regular Cheetos.  You end up thinking you've eaten more than you actually have.  And, as far as I'm concerned, the handful of tiny Cheetos is a self-bribe and necessary reward for my consumption of the salad.  It's not that I hate vegetables, it's just that I really love blue cheese dressing, and salad without it is a pathetic, naked thing.

 

I do, however, plan to try something rather odd today with my salad.  Over the weekend, while hubby and I were at the grocery store, buying the fixings for a week's worth of uninspiring diet food, an end-cap display caught my attention and left me gawking like a freakshow visitor in front of the dog-faced boy.  "BACON SALT", it proudly proclaimed.  "Because everything should taste like bacon!"  Further perusal of the product container taught me that Bacon Salt is "a zero calorie, zero fat, vegetarian, kosher-certified seasoning salt that makes everything taste like real bacon."

 

Ooooookay. First off, it seems... well, just wrong, somehow... to make a product that gives vegetarians and Jewish folks an appreciation for bacon.  But the real question here is how you can possibly make something taste like bacon without including any derivative of actual bacon.  The ingredients list on the container is no help: "natural and artificial flavorings" could mean anything at all.  Is there a laboratory somewhere in the heartland of these United States, filled with lab-coated professionals who scurry around with their beakers and their pipettes, tampering with the natural order of things in their ceaseless quest to create an artificial pig?  Or is this some alien technology passed down to Earthlings by the Alpha Centaurian equivalent of PETA?  And the biggest question of all: does it actually taste like bacon, and will it make an otherwise-naked salad bearable to consume?

 

If you'll excuse me, it's time for lunch.  And for the baconless bacon powder experiment.

 

I have fear.

 

Bacon Salt final analysis: tastes like salt and artificial hickory smoke flavoring, not so much like bacon.  In fact, I fail to detect even a hint of bacon.  I'm not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved.

 

But I think I'm going with relieved.

 

Can you really call something "Beef Pot Roast Soup" when it contains only four barely discernable pieces of beef?

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!

 

I seem to recall that one of my New Year's resolutions for 2007 was to blog more often.  Despite the fact that I haven't posted a thing since mid-September, I can still claim to have achieved this goal: after all, "sporadically" is still technically more than "barely ever", which is what I managed in 2006.  I shall hereby correct my wording for 2008's resolutions, and hopefully be a bit more reliable with the entries!

 

The status quo, the Columbia City Alehouse, and my new tattoo.

 

Seriously, I have a magnificent life.  Wonderful husband, awesome family, nice house, adorable cats, great friends, generally good health, and a job in the videogame industry.  The fact that nothing much changed in my little world between last year and this year is everything I'd hoped for and probably more than I deserve.  But just to make things even better, my hubby and I discovered a fantastic pub mere minutes from our house, with some of the best food and friendliest employees in town.  And of course I love the ink I got in honor of our fifteenth wedding anniversary.

 

Casual: Bookworm Adventures on MSN Games

Spelling game meets RPG, with added cuteness.  What's not to love?

 

Classic: Castlevania on Xbox LIVE Arcade

Haven't played a Castlevania game since the very first one launched on the NES about a zillion years ago.  Couldn't resist snagging this as soon as it was available on LIVE Arcade, and loved every second of it.  Even though I had to play it three times.  But hey, I got every single achievement!

 

Puzzle: Portal on Xbox 360 or PC

*singing*  "Now there's no use crying over every mistake; you just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake.  And the science gets done, and you make a neat gun, for the people who are still alive..."  If you haven't played Portal yet, play it.  Play it, play it, play it.  I'm serious!

 

Family: Beautiful Katamari on Xbox LIVE Arcade

Wheeee!  This Katamari Damacy pseudo-sequel is pretty much the same as the other games in the series -- including reusing most of the art assets from the previous Playstation 2 game -- but it has achievements, online multiplayer (cookies!), additional downloadable levels, and some of the King's most amusingly bizarre monologues to date.  I'm at 99% of the main collection, 93% of the extra collection, and still short three presents.  Not stopping until I have 100% in all of 'em!

 

Action/Shooter: Bioshock on Xbox 360

I know, I'm going to get slapped down hard by somebody for choosing Bioshock over Halo 3, but I just loved the whole concept.  From story to art to level design, it was positively brilliant.  And at times, it creeped me out so badly that I actually found myself shivering.  That's genius.

 

RPG: Mass Effect on Xbox 360

Wow.  This is the first year in more than a decade that my pick for favorite RPG wasn't a Japanese import game, and sadly, it's not even because the game I chose blew a bunch of other great RPGs out of the water.  The offerings from Japan were just underwhelming this year.  Add that to a dearth of domestic releases, and you get a despondent RPG fan trying to remember even a single stand-out moment from the year's gameplay.  In the end, I'm going for Mass Effect mostly because the dialog was exceptional and the game was drop-dead gorgeous.  Of course, the story was a thinly-disguised retread of Lost Universe, and the combat system was dismaying to those of us who suck at shooters, but hey, you can't have everything.  Particularly this year.

 

Strategy: *very embarrassed look*

Okay, this may sound improbable, but I actually didn't play any of the year's big strategy releases.  I kind of got into a rut with them over the previous few years, and burned out a bit.  The closest thing I played to strategy games this year were a couple of "guns or butter"-style casual titles and Westward, a cute little casual RTS.  On the upside, when I go back to playing the big stuff, there'll be a bunch of really good, now-discounted strategy games waiting for me.  Honestly, I don't see the downside.

 

Handheld: Rocket Slime on Nintendo DS

A simplistic, incredibly addictive little game from the Dragon Quest folks, starring an anthropomorphized slime.  You just have to love the Japanese.

 

Massively Mulitplayer: Ultima Online Kingdom Reborn on PC

I've been playing UO since the first day it released, ten years ago.  Not continuously, of course -- there are far too many great games out there to focus just on one -- but every couple of years, I go back and play for another couple of months until I've seen all the new content.  Couldn't resist checking out the completely rebuilt client this year, and despite the bugs and graphical oddities, I think they're on the right track to keep the game competitive for another ten years.

 

I was in the middle of writing this blog entry -- which I swear was going to be mostly game-related -- when I got the coolest possible piece of news; I am therefore hijacking my own missive to gloat about something.

 

It is an unfortunate fact that no American woman has ever medalled in two events on the same year at the World Veteran Fencer's Championship. Until last week, at the 2007 tournament in Sydney, Australia, when Ellen O'Leary of Atlanta, Georgia snagged bronze medals in both the sabre and foil categories. Ellen is an inspirational woman: she took up fencing as a way to be social and stay active after the loss of her second husband, and with a lot of hard work, she became really, really good at it. Within a few years, she was winning local tournaments, then traveling across the country to compete. This past year, she was the top-ranked US fencer in her age category. And now she's showing the rest of the world how it's done. She also happens to be my mother-in-law, and I'm damn proud of her.

 

 CONGRATULATIONS, ELLEN!

 

So, my husband came home from work a few days ago with a copy of Blue Dragon, the first big Japanese RPG for the Xbox 360. I've been jonesing for this game ever since it was announced: the very thought of its three visionary creators working together left my fangirlish heart racing like a hot kid after an ice cream truck. Game design by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the original creator of Final Fantasy. Character and monster design by Akira Toriyama, art guru of Dragon Quest fame. And music by Nobuo Uematsu, the composer whose all-too-catchy Final Fantasy themes have haunted my psyche for years. It's like... it's like when the 12-year-old geek in front of you at Wal-Mart is explaining to his equally nerdy friend that the world needs a movie in which Batman, Captain Picard, and a half-naked Dana Scully all team up to fight Darth Vader... only it's actually real. 

 

Anyway, these three haven't made a game together since Chrono Trigger in 1995; given how magnificent that one turned out to be, let's just say that I've been keen to play Blue Dragon. And from the very first scene of the game, which included a cute, none-too-subtle dig at what the Final Fantasy series has become (Shu, the main character, pulls out an improbably massive sword to face down the enemy, but it's instantly snapped in half), I figured we were in good hands.

 

Now that I've had a few days of playtime with the game, I'll say that -- while it's no Chrono Trigger -- it's definitely a charming and likeable adventure. It's very much a Final-Fantasy- or Dragon-Quest-style system, although a bit simplistic and definitely easier than most: multi-character party, turn-based combat, changeable classes which must be trained up separately, extremely linear plot... basically, a Japanese RPG. It doesn't advance the genre at all, but that's not necessarily... um, necessary. It's a fine example of the field. If you like Japanese RPGs, you'll like Blue Dragon. If you don't, you won't. Simple as that.

 

There is, however, one really odd thing about the game that bears mentioning: everything in the world must be made of gold, poo, or both. I'm serious. Walk up to anything -- a pipe, a piece of wood, a glowing flower, a chunk of crystal, anything at all -- and poke at it, and you're likely to be rewarded by finding gold. Check out a vase? Free gold. Somebody's shelf? Free gold. Tree stump? Free gold. How about that rock over there? Free gold. It's pretty cool for the first few screens, but eventually there'll be an unhappy moment when you realize that the game contains innumerable little random thingies and in order not to miss any loot, you're going to have to prod your way across the entire planet.

 

Oh, and the poo. Much as Dragon Quest has its slimes, Blue Dragon has poo monsters. The very first monsters you'll encounter are poo snakes, which are basically a large, coiled, deliberately cute animal dropping with a snake head on the top. Not too much further along the way, you'll be fighting poo hermit crabs, which would of course be a hermit crab sticking out of the bottom of the aforementioned large, coiled, deliberately cute blob of excrement. So why poo? Couldn't tell you. My best guess is that Mr. Toriyama got really drunk while designing the monsters and decided that if gamers would accept cheerful slime, they'd go nuts for animated fecal matter. And wait, there's more. Sometimes, if you kill a monster, it will leave behind "a small poo". This is basically a scatological treasure chest: squish it a bit and you'll usually find... yes, it's more gold.

 

Gold and poo, poo and gold. You know, I have two cats, and to the best of my knowlege, the only thing they crap out is solid poo. If they did start producing gold, not only would I clean the litter box every day, but I'd adopt about a dozen more cats. But then, if life was like Blue Dragon, I'd already have made my fortune by wandering around the neighborhood prodding every car, stone, tree, light pole, fire hydrant, mail box, yard gnome, sprinkler head, and graffiti-emblazoned garage door until money fell out.

 

In short: good game, with added weirdness. I have to admit that somewhere, buried deep in my soul, lives a thinly-disguised 8-year old who just loves a good, over-the-top poo joke, and she's getting a huge kick out of Blue Dragon.

 

Bren and I aren't really big on public entertainment venues. By and large, going out to a movie means paying an egregious sum of money to eat bad popcorn and listen to some inconsiderate jackass coughing like a coal miner for two hours. This is why our basement contains a big-screen TV, some Martin-Logan speakers and an exceptionally comfy couch. There's also a box of Black Jewell in the pantry. But every so often, the lure of a new movie is simply too shiny to resist, and we venture out once again. I've probably seen more movies in the theater over the past few months than I had in the four or five years before that and, indeed, practically every experience left something to be desired in the social muzzling department. In my parents' day, theaters had ushers who could remove disruptive kids, chatty adults, and the aforementioned phlegm-spraying disease vector; sadly, these have been replaced with a politely stern admonishment at the beginning of each film. Because, of course, just asking people to behave like civilized human beings instead of self-obsessed baboons is so effective.

 

Anyway, here are some recent movies in a nutshell:

 

Plot: totally enchanting, and it honestly made me feel just a tiny bit guilty about the rats we killed in our basement last year. In hindsight, though, if they'd been standing around the kitchen, whipping up something tasty for dinner instead of hiding out in the bathroom walls, producing nothing but feces and more rats, things would have gone differently. Entirely their fault.

Visuals: nothing less than magnificent. Pixar's technical expertise is beyond question, of course, but there's a big difference between making computer-generated imagery look realistic and making it look good. And this movie looked good. Particular favorites were the critic's coffin-shaped office and the fact that the rats, while anthropomorphized, still moved like rats.

Most memorable part of the movie: "I hate to be rude, but... we're French." That line nearly killed me. Given that this movie avoided the usual cultural stereotypes and showed Paris and its people in the best possible light, even a tiny and good-natured dig at European perceptions of the French attitude was unexpected and thereby much more amusing than it would have been otherwise.

Most memorable part of the theater experience: realizing the cruel irony of watching a film about a rat who eschews garbage and embraces the joy of fine cuisine while I was dining on stale theater popcorn with a foul coating of butter-colored grease.

 

Plot: pointless and predictable, but hey, who cares? It's a movie about giant sentient robots beating the living heck out of each other and causing as much collateral damage as possible along the way. The fact that it also had some sort of cliche'd little storyline with three times as many characters as it actually needed, although mildly annoying, was irrelevant.

Visuals: mecha-licious. For the true giant robot fan, the battle at the end of this movie was practically a religious experience. When I first saw the trailer for Transformers, I assumed that they'd pulled the usual Hollywood trick of including every one of the best effects scenes. Ohhhh, I was wrong. Better still, they didn't make you wait half the movie before pulling out the good stuff. It was probably less than fifteen minutes before the first mech appeared. Yay!

Plot: if possible, even more pointless than Transformers, but with the same caveat. The massive dragons-versus-military fight through the streets of Los Angeles at the end of the film made everything -- from the stilted dialogue to the ridiculous plot elements to the classically Asian unsatisfying ending and yes, even to the $10 ticket price -- absolutely worth it.

Visuals: oddly disjointed. The effects scenes were incredible, with giant serpents, winged dragons, and dark soldiers riding -- I kid you not -- some kind of huge, stumpy lizards with missile pods on their backs (imagine a cross between a shell-less tortoise and a Mad Cat battlemech). The flashbacks to ancient Korea were well-filmed and visually beautiful. The rest of the movie, though, seemed oddly amateurish. The overall feel was of two different movies that got all tangled up in the editing room and then spliced together. But I wouldn't have cared less if they'd accidentally mixed it up with Weekend at Bernie's, so long as there were plenty of dragon fights.

Plot: basically "meh", but a nice wrap-up to the Bourne storyline. I can't say I'd really been lying awake at night, wondering how it is that some shadowy government agency would go about turning an ordinary person into an amnesiac assassin, but it was nonetheless interesting to see how they explained it. Much like giant robot and dragon films, action movies don't really rely on plot, and that's a good thing.

Visuals: vertiginous. Those of us who suffer from motion sickness when trying to play first-person shooters are not designed to watch this film. I'm uncertain whether the cameraman was suffering from Parkinson's or was just too cheap to buy a tripod, but either way, I found myself wishing I'd skipped that stop at the pub for a pint before the movie started.

It might surprise some of you to know that, indeed, I am still alive. It’s not that I haven’t had time to blog; it’s not even that I’ve hit a case of writers’ block. It’s just that I haven’t done anything interesting enough to inspire a blog entry. I did spend about two months playing Final Fantasy XI before finally shelving it as a big, steaming pile of unrelenting boredom. I started Oblivion again, in the hopes of raising my gamerscore. I found a great recipe for pot roast (omit the rutabaga). We had our front porch rebuilt, and a new roof put on the house. Not really exciting stuff.

 

But one wonderful thing did just happen, and I can’t resist talking about it. On August 30, my hubby and I celebrated 15 years of marriage.

 

Bren and I have idly thought about getting tattoos for several years, but we never could figure out what sort of design we’d want to keep on our bodies for the rest of our natural lives. But when two old friends of ours, Dave and Monica, got each other’s astrological symbols tattooed on their necks, it gave us an idea. What’s the only thing that neither of us could ever get tired of? Us. So we each chose an image that really represented the other person, commissioned our magnificent artist friends to create original designs for us, found a good tattooist at a reputable studio, and made appointments for the day before our anniversary.

 

Of course, we also watched a few episodes of Miami Ink, to get an idea of what we were in for. I actually developed a bit of a fondness for that show, as it was fascinating to hear the stories of why other people were getting tattooed. Being a bit of a wimp at heart, I was also secretly relieved to see that people of all varieties were keeping their seats in the tattoo chair instead of fleeing at the first touch of the needle. However, now that my own experience with tattooing is over, I have to say that once again, reality television doesn’t exactly convey an accurate picture of, well, reality.

 

So here, for your edification, are a few of the insignificant little facts you might not learn on one of those tattoo TV shows:

 

Being tattooed feels like a hot knife slicing slowly through your skin. And that's just the outlining. Once they start shading, you’d think the tattooist has decided to dig for buried treasure in your flesh. I've heard people liken the experience to "bees buzzing under your skin" or "a thousand tiny kitten claws", but do not be fooled: getting tattooed frickin' hurts, and no amount of cutesy euphemism will make your time in the chair any less painful. Now, I'm not saying it's unbearable, and I would never, ever regret going in for my beautiful tattoo. I might even choose to have it embellished someday with additional work. But still, ouch. On the up side, the pain vanishes as soon as the needle lifts away from your skin, which is an odd sensation in and of itself. <geek> Come to think of it, that must be how Wolverine feels. </geek> Oh, and the next morning, you’ll wake up with a dull ache in the bone under your new tattoo. That'll linger.

 

You can't cheat by chowing half a bottle of ibuprofin before your appointment. In fact, you have to sign paperwork indicating that you haven't taken any painkillers in the past 24 hours. Ostensibly, this is to prevent excessive bleeding. But when you think about it, wouldn't somebody need at least a small streak of sadism to be interested in tattooing as a profession? I'm not saying that they get a thrill of satisfaction every time you wince -- suspect, yes; accuse, no -- but I am kind of wishing I'd scarfed an Advil or three and lied on the form. 

 

Your skin's going to peel like a world-class sunburn. Two or three days after the ink goes on, that entire area is going to start flaking, and the skin is going to itch. Ohhhhhh, yes, it will itch. And to scratch it means risking damage to the image. At this point, six days after getting my tattoo, I am ready for a straightjacket: not because the itching is driving me crazy, but to keep my fingernails from unconsciously straying to my back. Weirdly, my husband's tattoo hasn't produced a single flake. Which seems cosmically unfair. Or it would, but unfortunately my hubby falls into the following category, so my peeling pales by comparison...

 

You might be back in that chair a month later. Tattoo touch-ups are apparently fairly common, for a variety of reasons. Maybe your skin had a reaction to the ink or the ointment and the colors became spotty or faded in places. Maybe a blended color didn't look quite the way you'd hoped once the skin healed up. Perhaps your tattooist just plain bolluxed something up. The good news is that they can tattoo over the same spot and minimize or correct any problems, so you're not eternally stuck with it. The bad news, of course, is that you're in for another round of pain and peeling. Woohoo.

 

You can't give blood for at least a few months. In most states, they won't let you donate for a full year afterwards. When you’re O+ like me, the local blood bank already gives you enough polite-but-firm grief if you don’t come in five minutes after you’re eligible from the last time. I’m really not looking forward to the sort of guilt they’ll be heaping on me when I tell them I’ve just been inked.

 

You can cross “visit a public bathhouse” off your to-do list on that vacation to Japan. Turns out that most traditional bathhouses won't permit anyone with a tattoo to use their facilities. I assume this is because historically only Japanese gangsters had tattoos. Fortunately, tattoos have caught on among the youth of urban Japan in much the same way they have over here, so the stigma is slowly fading. Still, no matter how little your hairy gaijin self might look like a member of the yakuza, don’t expect to be welcome in any bathhouse outside Tokyo. Of course, I don’t know whether you were planning a trip to Japan in the near future, so hey, this might not apply to you anyway. My hubby, on the other hand, just flew over there yesterday for Gamefest Japan. D’oh! So much for that relaxing trip to the sento.

 

Finally, this is probably the most important thing about tattooing that you won’t learn on TV…

 

A lot of tattoo artists just plain suck. Even if you've never seen some of the eye-poppingly bad designs strutting around in nightclubs and on beaches, your sense of reason should tell you that not every tattooist has true talent. After all, the proportion of good to bad artists in the tattoo field should be roughly the same as you’ll see in any other genre or medium. For example, stop by a science fiction convention and take a look around the art show. Find all the book-cover-quality oil paintings. Not very many, are there? And yet you can't throw a cheap plastic spaceship without hitting sixteen cutesy dragons, cats with wings, or cartoon women with ginormous boobies and disturbingly inaccurate faces that look as though the artist was subconsciously channeling Picasso. Now check out a tattoo photo gallery on the web. If you're lucky, you'll see one or two magnificent, artistic pieces that really take your breath away. But yep, the rest of them will be mass-market flash, uninspiring or poorly-executed designs, and pinup-style women with ginormous boobies and disturbingly inaccurate faces that look as though the artist was subconsciously channeling Picasso. (Some things truly are universal.) Anyway, the point here is to be very, very, very careful when choosing your tattooist. Ask tattooed friends or coworkers for references. Visit tattoo studios and look at portfolios. Ask for a consultation with any prospective artist before you make your final decision. Life may be too short to overanalyze everything, but it’s also much too long to go through it with a crappy tattoo. 

 

That said, with enough research, preparation, and the right artist, being tattooed can be a great experience. In a society that puts so much emphasis on comfort and convenience, there’s a certain satisfaction to enduring something painful, not because you have to, but because you’ve chosen to do something meaningful to you. It’s also been fascinating to watch the healing process over the past few days. My tattoo started off very shiny when it was fresh; it almost looked as if it had been painted on. Now that much of the skin has flaked away, it seems more… well, you can’t call it natural, but it does look more like it’s part of my body. And it’s absolutely beautiful. Best of all, every time I catch a glimpse of it in the mirror, I’ll get the same warm feeling of happiness that I have whenever I look at my wedding ring.

 

(I love you, sweetie! Happy anniversary!)

 

NEXT TIME:

Bioshock, Ratatouille, and Mel Brooks’ new musical production of Young Frankenstein. Life is interesting again! 

Okay, I think I deserve some serious geek cred for this.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I started playing Final Fantasy XI (a game which I am still playing, despite its many faults, and I'll discuss that when I have a bit more time).  A few days later, I started to notice a nasty ache in my left elbow, the sort of inescapable background ache that I'd usually associate with moving heavy boxes all weekend.  Except without, you know, actually moving any heavy boxes.  A couple of days after that, it went from nagging ache to full-on agony whenever I tried to lift anything.  Heat packs did nothing to help.  Ice packs made it feel a bit better, but only for an hour or so at a time.  A velcro elbow brace and copious amounts of ibuprofin helped me survive the week, but the pain just wasn't going away.  So I finally made an appointment to get my arm x-rayed and looked at by our family doc.  The verdict?  Tennis elbow.

 

Yes, folks, I gave myself tendonitis by playing videogames.  And I don't even own a Wii.

 

If that's not hard core, I don't know what is.  Frustratingly, all I can do about it is exactly what I've already been doing: ibuprofin, ice, an elbow brace, and if it doesn't clear up in two weeks, some kind of shot.  Now, I've played a few videogames in the past that would almost be worth a full month of pain plus a possible injection; sad to say, Final Fantasy XI is not on that list.

 

Wow.  I mean, wow.  What a way to end the season.  I was crying like a fool.  Wow.

D'oh!  I missed the brainstorming meeting today.  But now I'm in a mood to share my opinion, and I'm afraid my language might slip a bit into the profane.  I'm very passionate about this subject, and I've always felt that most game designers are missing half these points and proceeding much too slowly on the rest.

 

You want to know what women want in videogames?  Here it is:

I don't usually like to blog in the middle of a work day, but this just begs to be posted.  ^_^

 

Over the years that I've worked in the videogames industry, a lot of friends, relatives, and occasional total strangers have asked me the same thing: "What's it like?  What sort of people do you work with?  Do you guys actually play games?  C'mon, what's it like?"  And I always answer the same thing: it's hectic, frequently chaotic, always geeky, and sometimes mind-numbingly stressful, and I would never, ever go back to doing anything else.  The people I've worked with over the past dozen years have been some of the most brilliant, witty, fun-loving and genuinely nice folks I've ever met, and yes, we do play games, mostly to relieve the stress.  But what stands out more than anything else about working in this industry (and one of the main things that endears it to me so much) is the wicked sense of humor that seems to be a prerequisite of employment.  It must suck to be a Human Resources representative at a games company, since a good quarter of all conversations around here would get you fired, sued, or at least recommended for psychiatric counseling at, say, an accounting firm.

 

Take, for example, this morning's IM from my hubby.  I shall preface it by saying that Bren is absolutely the sweetest, friendliest, and above all sanest man I know.  I've seen him flip upturned beetles back onto their frantically waving feet, and stay up late to care for an ailing cat.  He's also put up with me for the past twenty-some years without snapping, which should be worth double points on the emotional stability scale.  But today he's at work, and the evil ambience has worked its magic on him.

 

Just as a note, I've changed the names of his coworkers to S1 and S2.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love this place.  I really do.

 

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm late to a brainstorming session on what women want to see in games.  I need to scurry down there and put in my vote for "more mechs!"

I really need to keep a notepad next to my comfy chair when I'm playing games all weekend.  I know for a fact that there were several situations that would have made excellent blog-fodder, but now that I'm sitting in front of the keyboard, I can't remember what most of them were.  "Let's see... there was something about... ummmm... mushrooms?  Or was it orcs?"  It also doesn't help that I was imbibing heartily from a bottle of Blackthorne hard cider for part of the weekend, which had the dual effect of memory reduction and making stupid things seem very funny.  One of the bits that I do remember is absolutely useless, since it consisted of my Final Fantasy XI character sitting down in the middle of the road to heal and accidentally blocking a chocobo rider heading south: the resultant animation looked as if the chocobo was dancing on my head for a few seconds before continuing on.  Funny at the time, but posting it here with the headline "Chocobo Hit and Run" only sounded good while the cider was still active.  Same goes for the notion of making a bumper sticker with just a line of appropriate FFXI status effect icons on it (MNT down, blind, haste, and so on), to slap on the back of recklessly driven cars.  Not only would the application of such a sticker present nigh-insurmountable logistical difficulties in moving traffic, but it would be likely to get you shot, and frankly, it's not even particularly amusing when you're sober.

 

I do recall a few things that really made me shake my head.  While I spent four solid days slogging my way through the wilds of Final Fantasy XI (and achieving nothing more than level 12 and a sinking sense of disappointment over the game mechanics, by the way), hubby Bren was enjoying a European RPG called Gothic III.  The main story of this game involves a war between orcs and humans; the orcs have overrun the human kingdom and enslaved everyone, so Bren's been busy liberating cities for the past week or so.  The thing is, once you've tried dispatching a few orcs, you discover that there's a trick to it.  And o