Bright End of Nowhere

1) neboat got me addicted to Two Steps from Hell last week. I've been pretty much listening to them and only them since. It has the interesting property of making absolutely anything you do Epic. Highly recommend it for music while writing. (Two Steps from Hell is a group that writes original music for movie and game trailers. Brushing your teeth has never felt this badass.)

Current favorites are "Heart of Courage", "Black Blade", "Protectors of Earth", "After the Fall".

2) I seem to be writing an original fic. What is this I don't even

3) Finishing the Mass Effect series flipped something in my brain, and I seem to be desperately craving gritty space opera. Possibly, more accurately, a reconstructed space opera ('ware, TVTropes). Or sci-fi assassin/spycraft stories. I dunno. My brain is demanding something to chew on like those two (I've been reading a bunch of spycraft and information handling lately), or else I'm going to lose the battle against replaying the damn series.

This is slightly annoying because I have a giant pile of games right now, and other than Bastion, I haven't been able to convince myself to play any of them. Bastion, by the way, is excellent, and is currently the bonus game in the Humble Indie Bundle V. All the games in the bundle are excellent, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and proceeds go to the developers and charity (Child's Plan and the EFF), depending on how you want the split. In any case, if you're interested or curious, check it out. Or ask me if I think you'd like it if you're not sure. It's for an excellent cause.

So, on Monday this past week, over lunch, DMark managed to convince me to download League of Legends so that we all could play against the internet. (Because we actually tend to be pretty good at that) What is LoL? It's a PvP RTS sort of like Demigod: control a character on a team, level him or her up throughout the game by beating minions or other players, and then destroy the other team's base. Unlike Demigod, LoL is a) free, b) has 1 map, and c) has about 80 characters, 10 of which are free any one week (and then they rotate through the 80). So there's a lot of mechanically interesting characters to play.

In case it's not completely obvious, I'm sort of addicted.

(It might have been decided that there's a specific character that I have to play when she's needed, because otherwise, the namespace collision makes life too confusing on TeamSpeak. This would be the identical namespace collision I ran into for FFXII that had me twitching during cutscenes for the first 20 hours.)

Today, a bunch of us piled into a car and drove out for really good Chinese noodles and Gaming Underground, an awesome used game store with arcade machines and systems and screens to rent so you can play old school games right there. I was convinced to finally try DDR, and to my utter surprise, I found that I like it. I absolutely suck right now, but I like it and I was able to play without utterly fucking up my knee again. (This involves keeping a grip on the back bar the entire time so every jump and twist is supported by my arms.) So yay me. I CAN SORT OF JUMP AGAIN!

Speaking of gaming, I finally finished reading Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, which I bought back in March. (It took me so long because I mostly read it in 10 minute chunks on the subway on my Kindle, and there was a month I chose to read Black Lagoon manga instead) It's actually a really good argument about how aspects of games and game design can influence and affect the real world in very positive ways. From Chore Wars, the ARG that convinces you that chores can be fun, to Folding@Home, the protein-folding distributed computing program that comes on every PS3 sold to further scientific research, McGonigal gives examples of how positive games have been in small ways in reality. And argues the point that my generation is a generation of gamers, and that gamers have a huge, mostly-untapped potential to do a world of good. It's certainly an interesting read, and sort of makes me want to hand a copy to my parents who said that gaming would never help me in real life.

(And now, since apparently I can't deal with that much optimism, I'm reading what might be one of the most depressing books I've ever read. And my high school lit classes were awash in shining examples of depressing books.)

havocthecat mentioned at one point that it'd be nice to have a rec list for various anime. Since I've fallen way back into my old modes of operation, I thought this was a great idea, and went overboard.

Here's Vol. 1, with Vol. 2 to come at some point in the future where I think straight again. They're divided up into categories by length.

( Giant List of Anime Recs, Vol. 1 )

So, in the aftermath of term, my brain is starting to act...weird. A few weeks ago, I wasn't feeling the love for Stargate that I was kind of used to. I was blaming term, because it was seriously eating my life.

Now, it's seeming just vaulted over Stargate entirely and landed back into the old, worn things. I found myself looking for and re-reading old Final Fantasy favorites (and being more than a little gleeful when I found that an old favorite author posted something new).

I dreamed the night before my chemistry final that I was Small and Donatello the Ninja Turtle was sneaking into my room to help me with my math homework. (He was always my favorite.)

I think I'm trying to recapture that spark. Things are all tumbling in my brain and want to get out, because I've kept them holed-up and stewing for three months. I've got so many things I want to do. And the urge to game is not helping. (P4, I'll finish you, I promise! FFXIII and Resonance of Fate, why do you have to be so pretty?)

Anyway, three months is a long time. And there are fic I was in the middle of that I want to finish, so in an effort to jump-start that part of my brain, anyone got recs for something to chew on? I'm kind of in the mood for something long and plotty, actually. Something I can sink my teeth into.

I finally got around to reading The Kids Aren't All Right, by samdonne,an Iron Man fic I've seen crop up by name in a few places, but shanghairain threw the link at me when I had nothing better to do.

Fantastic fic. And, yeah, to me, this is pitch-perfect characterization and resonates a little too well for me, because while I'm no Tony Stark, I do know what lies ahead of me in terms of future employment. So it's really hard not to sympathize.

( What they got right, and why I've generally been wary of a lot of IM fanfic )

I'm beginning to think that there is something very wrong with my media choices. Either that, or I really am a masochist. About the only good movies I've seen lately are Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (with bonus RiffTrax). Other than that, I've watched Fantastic 4 (with RiffTrax; oh god, right in the SCIENCE), Superman Returns (there is no Earth logic), Star Wars 3: Backstroke of the West (RotS Chinese bootleg with mangled subtitles for added hilarity, with RiffTrax, the entire thing becomes vaguely watchable), and all those movies from my birthday Bad Movie marathon in October. Dear god, I was ready to watch the 1999 version of Beowulf again tonight. You know, the one with the techno music during fight scenes, the hero dual-wielding repeating crossbows and a sword with a circ-saw attachment (or something), set in some post-apocalyptic place. Maybe. Okay, the movie is so bad it's awesome, much in the same way that Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter was.

Anyway, the more I watch these things, the more I feel myself getting dumber, even with the RiffTrax and the additional snarking. Because, oh god, the bad, nonsensical, pseudo-science hurts SO BAD. It's like they lured Science into a dark alley, beat it up, stole it's lunch money, and left it in a dumpster somewhere. Please, think of the science.

Anyone got any good movie recs that won't make my brain leak out of my ears or scream/snark/throw things at the TV?

I've somehow managed to find myself rereading Utopian Entrepreneur by Brenda Laurel. (It was one of the required texts for a class I took 1.5 years ago.) It's a really wonderful little book, and it's a very easy read. As background information, Laurel is a Silicon Valley veteran who's managed to participate in four of the major computer tech bubbles of the last 25 years (those being games, multimedia, virtual reality, and the infamous dot-coms). She was also one of the founders of the late girl's software company Purple Moon, a company that actually made games aimed at the adolescent female demographic, not cheap marketing tie-ins to earn an exploitive quick buck. (I have issues with a lot of the so-called "games" intended for girls back in the 1990s. It's gotten a bit better these days, but it's still pretty bad.) Really, it's a really good read.

But I wanted to share one thing she had to say on storytelling:

( Brenda Laurel, on stories )