The lows are low, but the highs are home

This is post #200, and I thought I should do something good with it. So I’m finally writing this post. Except now I know I don’t need to write as much as I planned. But that’s the end of this whole thing, so let me start at the beginning.

        I finally finished Persona 4 this summer, and I started over and played through the beginning a bit. I was really inspired to write an amazing essay for Destructoid about the game, the journey of the main player, and just the themes of the game in general. If I were to do that, though, I’d have to replay the game and get quotes and refresh my memory on things to talk about, so I lost the will for it. But I’ll write a little bit and introduce the game. I don’t remember how much this stuff featured in Persona 3, and I have no idea how much (if at all) it’s featured in Persona 1 and Persona 2.

        Everyone in the Persona games has a basic alignment with one of the Tarot deck Arcana, and the main character is always aligned with The Fool. Igor, the master of the Velvet Room who opens your powers to you and guides you on your journey, describes The Fool as “zero,” “empty yet full of infinite potential,” one who could become anything at the end of their journey through life. What this means is that you can be whoever, and whatever, you want to be throughout the game - taking whatever personality you need at the moment to help other people out. As the infinite potential goes, your character is the only one with the ability to “change” Arcana in such a way - everyone else is restricted to their innate Arcana, but your main character simply starts as the Fool and can change Arcana like one changes a mask.

        Everyone also has an innate Persona that represents their inner strength, which is aligned with their Arcana. Some people go blindly through their lives, never coming to terms with the strength they have inside. Perhaps they’re carried along by negative emotions, and never able to overcome them. Maybe they’re too apathetic to reach their own potential. Throughout the game, you change masks as you need in order to help other people reach that potential. It’s just a part of your journey through life. You don’t take any credit, you don’t make a big fuss about it, you just stand aside and support them so they can do what they need to do. With your general social links, you just help people along and at Rank 10 things are more or less resolved.

        It gets a lot better with your party members, because they also unlock the powers of their Personas. Igor describes the power of Persona as (something like) a mask worn to face the hardships of life. Persona 3 had a different system for unlocking Personas, but in Persona 4 everyone had to face a dark, mutated version of their Persona in order to unlock their inner strength. This dark Persona represents the big conflict in their life, something they need to overcome in order to get on with their lives. A weak person might give in, but to accept their problems and acknowledge that this darkness is a part of who they are represents true strength. After facing this part of themselves, they unlock the power of their Persona, and join your party. It might not be perfect, but now they have the strength to face their problems - the strength of heart to face themselves.

        So I thought to myself that I ought to write about a problem in my life that I might not have otherwise faced, and challenge everyone to find the strength of heart to face themselves - if they haven’t already. At first I wanted to write about the breakdown of my relationship with Britt, then the end of my relationship with her (which didn’t end up happening - we’re all fine now), then about my general status with girls. Then I thought about it some more last night, and I thought about the problems the characters in Persona 4 had, and I realized that to claim I needed to face myself would be stupid. I’ve already done that. My big challenge, the jump I needed to make, was the initial overcoming of my depression and associated problems. I’ve already done that. Sure, I’m not perfect yet, but neither were your party members in Persona 4. They still had growing to do, and so do I. That’s just how it is.

        I’ll need a few more level-ups before I’m as good as I’ll get. Maybe at Rank 10 (maxed social link in Persona ¾) I’ll get a shiny evolution. But I’ve already reached Rank 1 (just after facing themselves), and I’m working my way up. So yes, I’ve found the strength of heart to face myself. Have you?

It is not - as it seems to many women - that men are bums who seek to deny women authority. Many men are inclined to jockey for status, and challenge the authority of others, when they are talking to men too. If this is so, then challenging a woman’s authority as they would challenge a man’s could be a sign of respect and equal treatment, rather than lack of respect and discrimination. The inequality of the treatment results not simply from the men’s behaviour alone but from the differences in men’s and women’s style: Most women lack experience in defending themselves against challenges, which they misinterpret as personal attacks on their credibility.

        A very interesting quote from an article in my applied linguistics class about gender differences in language. The author, a woman and an expert in her field (sociolinguistics), cited various examples of men controlling conversation - even men who knew nothing about linguistics trying to challenge her authority.

        Then she cited a study where pairs of men, pairs of women, and mixed pairs were videotaped while discussing the effect of television violence on children. Before the discussion, some of the subjects were given extra information on the subject - basically, making them the experts in their pair. Men, when confronted with a male expert, would often gain the upper hand in the conversation. When confronted with a female expert, the men would control the conversation and the woman - despite being more knowledgeable - would spend MORE time agreeing with the man than they normally did. And when the man in a mixed pair was the expert, he would control the conversation from beginning to end.

        I felt this was a very utopian quote, despite the whole gender imbalance thing. Or maybe even because of it. I wouldn’t say that being a utopian is “a male thing” - rather, I’d say that it’s all the more impressive for a girl to hold her ground against this kind of jockeying for position. And, I think, that it would be good for we Y-chromosome folk (men) to be conscious of our tendency to take control and quell it somewhat to level the playing field.

        Case in point: There are a lot of girls in the fencing club, especially among the beginners, and even moreso among the foilists. There are, by my count, three male beginners fencing foil and… five or six girls. You know what happens when two guys fence? Intense competition. I fenced a guy last night who’d been dominating in his bouts against a few of the girls, and destroyed him - the score was 5-1. We shook hands, and he told me I was the “king of parrying.” Funny that I didn’t parry once the entire time, except to counterparry (ok, the distinction is kinda important) his ripostes.

        When I fence the other guy, who’s less competitive with me but more aggressive against the girls, it’s more or less the same - we’re always testing each other to see who will win this time. But as I said, when he fences one of the girls, he goes nuts (which is poor technique) and tends to win because they back off. Case further in point: when two girls fence each other, it’s pretty much an even split.

        Case further in point, the girls fence each other on pretty much even footing. When I fence one of the girls, I try to give constructive criticism so they can beat me next time. I try not to use the same trick over and over, but if they do fall for a nasty one, I’ll show them how they can stop it. But, yes, I do try to control the bout. Why? Because the person in control is the one who gets to attack, and I want to practice and learn what works and what doesn’t. When I started fencing, I thought I could be a master defender and win through perfect reactions, but I lost every damn time. I know winning doesn’t matter, because it’s all for practice, but half-assed practice is almost worthless. So I go all out, and occasionally, that does result in a one-sided bout. I love to lose, though, because then I get twice as much experience. I can learn what they did well on the offensive, and I can learn what I did poorly on the defensive.

        However, I admit one failing in this - the extremely aggressive girls were told to fence sabre (slashing weapon, run at each other and swing), and the tall girls were told to fence epée (long pokey weapon, touch them before they touch you) so that left the submissive girls on foil. Also the girls who were too meek to insist on fencing a different weapon. So, yes, there are girls who dominate the dudes, and guys who don’t try to compete against them. Just not among the ones I fence with.

It’s like the Sunday Something, but slightly in advance. Yay! I just can’t contain my excitement for you to be excited about these things that are exciting. Plus I hate a cluttered bookmarks toolbar. that’s why Read It Later is perfect for me, because I never have to remind myself of the things I’m not doing.

        Extra Credits via Escapist Magazine - Brilliant, absolutely brilliant series of videos. They’re about six minutes in length each, and if you watch three in a row every day or something you should plow through them in no time. They are all worth watching, because each examines a worthwhile issue in an enlightening way. Let me backtrack - basically a couple of people with experience in different parts of the industry make a brief video each week talking about some aspect or another of video games. Some highlights include God of War 1 as a Greek tragedy, the psychological basis of any proper survival horror game, and the term “gamer.”

        I planned on only watching a few today, and ended up watching every single one. There’s only 15 actual episodes, with a few PAX 2010 videos you should probably watch and a few you may not bother to watch. They’re as good as any podcast or essay you might find on a gaming blog, but a fraction of the length.

        Winter Voices: Avalanche - An episodic strategy RPG, the first episode of which is currently available on Steam for $5. Further episodes are supposed to released every week, but it looks like they have a vague definition of “week.” At any rate, RPS tells you a lot of what you need to know about the game, and why you may or may not want to spend $5 on it. In terms of gameplay, the battles are metaphorical representations of you taking on your inner demons, your skills are coping mechanisms like Denial or Imaginary Friend. The game has some horrible flaws, but for $5? You’re not risking much.

        I have bought it, but I have yet to play it. I want to enjoy the games that I play, and I don’t want to waste my time with a bad game - hence why I tend to avoid flash games these days. I hope, though, that the premise and everything else can overcome the poor gameplay, and more than that I hope the gameplay gets better in later instalments. If it does, and you’re not convinced on this one, believe me - you’ll find out, and then you can buy Episode 4 and it’ll be great.

        “Another clever aspect of the combat is your character’s Memory statistic. When you’re allocating stat points after you’ve levelled up, you can increase your memory to boost the rate at which you gain experience (because you learn more from each talk and encounter), but it also causes the demons you wrestle with to grow in strength (your sad memories gain clarity).

        All it amounts to is a completely seamless dynamic difficulty slider. Want more skills and more complex battles? Crank up your memory. Or is your character breaking down as she runs out of energy during every single fight? If so, you leave your memory well alone. You try and forget.”

        God, this game deserves its own post. If that last paragraph isn’t some amazing game design, I don’t know what is.

        Touch screen material to run out by 2020 - That article contains a link to a much, much longer gizmodo article which I wouldn’t recommend unless you really like rocks and stuff, but the single sentence “modern touch screens are made with a rare material, which will only last until 2020 if we’re lucky” is all you really need to know. It’s a great reminder of how we treat our planet, though. How long have we really been getting into this touch screen stuff? I doubt the DS uses this particular material, but I’m sure the iPhone and your Droid phones and all that stuff uses it. So, at best a few years. And we’re tearing through this incredibly limited resource like there’s no tomorrow. Suddenly the post-apocalyptic world of your choice is ushered in by the demise of the amazing touch screen.

        You enjoying that iPhone? I really hope so. There’s only a billion of them in existence. Very rare. Rare enough to kill for.

(is that a bad joke about post-partum depression, I hope not)

        Alright so back from class, here’s how my weekend went after the party. This is some reaction to it, and some funny stories about Halloween.

        I slept in a bit on saturday, got up feeling like I sincerely did NOT want to be in my room. I figured I should sit in my room and study, but it was just not going to happen. My laptop was in the living room, by the couch, so I sat down there and booted it up. All well and good, then my mom gets up and is on her laptop and turns on the TV. Oh no. Television. Much as I hate it, it is there, and I end up getting distracted by it constantly. I spend a few hours doing stuff on the internet and talking to Britt about how busy I am and how I’m not keeping my promises to her and stuff like that. Savin’ it for another post. Wait for it. Anyway, eventually around maybe 1:45 pm or something? I got off my butt and went over to my dad’s so I could be alone.

        By 3 pm, I had showered and gotten my stuff organized, but no matter what I did I couldn’t really sit down and do any homework. My dad’s house just doesn’t have any place for me to work - I have no desk, the table is covered in crap, etc. I ended up accomplishing stuff by setting my laptop aside and using the piles of wood my dad had ordered as a desk. I knew, of course, that I could spend the weekend relaxing - but I needed to do work to keep myself busy while I was secluding myself, so I ended up taking notes on the fifth chapter of my linguistics textbook, doing the homework questions for it, and my french homework.

        Sunday, Halloween, I… hmm… I didn’t do much for most of the day. The most notable thing is, of course, trick or treating children. My dad bought candy - two boxes of 94 chocolate bars (two to each child) and two boxes of 24 bags of cheesies (do real people say that, cheetos seems like such an awkward thing to say - anyway, one per child) - so that’s enough candy for 130 children. We had 12 trick or treaters. Four children, eight teenage girls. One teenage girl said she liked my Born of Osiris hoodie and I said “eh, they’re alright” because alright is the best word to describe them. Other than that people just seemed to walk around in costumes without going to any houses. So now we have a disgusting amount of candy and I’m not sure what we’re going to do with it.

        My mom had at least 50 trick or treaters, when I last checked in with her, but according to my dad that was because she lives near a bunch of low-rent apartments - most of which are along the bus route that comes to Carleton. Huh. Well, kids. Around my dad’s it’s just old people and people with older kids. Does that mean he lives more in the suburbs than my mom? Ah well.

        Oh, and sweet story about the Halloween party:

        Near the end of the conversation with my coach and the two guys from Ottawa U, our hostess dropped by and flaunted her numerous assets for our benefit. But we would not be swayed from our riveting fencing discussion. After a brief lull later, one of the guys from Ottawa U remarked that we deserved a Darwin Award for spectacular failure to procreate.

        “Given the choice of finding an attractive female to talk to, or talking to a couple of dudes about fencing, we’re like ‘oh man you could try this, or try that’ and there’s hot women like right there! Right there! And we’re like 'fencing, awesome!’”

        edit: Oh and I watched The Trotsky (Canadian film) and the first three episodes of The World God Only Knows (subbed anime via Crunchyroll) while waiting for non-existent trick or treaters, and liked them both a fair bit. The Trotsky isn’t a must-watch, but I enjoyed it. You might enjoy it a tiny bit less if you don’t know french. The World God Only Knows is about a guy who’s pro at dating sims but has never even held hands with a girl, and he accidentally signs a contract with the devil to collect souls that are living in the hearts of girls by - of course - kissing them. If that premise sounds awesome, you should watch it. Otherwise I have nothing to say to you.

Alright, so now that I’m done recuperating, I shall post about the Halloween party I went to on friday - the first real party I’ve ever been to, to tell you the truth. It was the Halloween party for Carleton’s fencing club, and members from the Ottawa U fencing club were invited as well. I’ll try to run through the night in a relatively linear fashion or at least an interesting way.

        This was the first time I’d been surrounded by so many people for so much time in a while, the last being my going away party in July. That was 8-10 people, and this was 16-20 people I think. The going away party was at a friend’s house, on a farm, so it was pretty spacious. This party was in a four-room apartment. There was a bedroom, a kitchen (drinks), a living room? (candy), and a side room that might have been a bedroom or a living room or… something (dance floor). A friend of a friend volunteered to DJ, so there was plenty of loud music to be had.

        When I got there, around 8:40 pm or so, there were only a handful of people there. One of our coaches, the hostess, another beginner, a dude I didn’t recognize, and a girl I didn’t recognize. People trickled in as the night went on, and I introduced myself/was introduced to everyone by name and by weapon of choice. The only new people I remember are the ones who introduced themselves after we had been talking for a bit, which consists of the two people who were there when I first arrived. Other than that, I remember no names. I think I should feel bad about that, but at the same time, can you blame me when someone says “hey I’m x, I fence with y, see you later man” and then doesn’t speak to me again? I know the faces I saw, but the names just disappeared.

        I spent most of the night talking to people I knew and the girl (Emily) who was there when I arrived, mostly because they saw me doing nothing I think. I was getting pretty bored around 10 pm or something and considering leaving, then got into a deep fencing conversation with the coach and a couple of guys from the Ottawa U fencing club, and that lasted for like 1.5-2 hours or something. So that was cool. Then our coach left, and “left me in charge” because I was one of the few sober people. A little bit after that I was asked to drive a couple home (they drove me home after fencing on thursday) and it took until sometime after 1 am to get the drunk boyfriend out of the party. Every time we’d try to leave, he’d get in the middle of a ten minute goodbye, and then wander off to do the same to someone else. But that was some good bonding time and anyhow I left sometime after 1 am.

        So I was there for… about four hours, and I ate way more candy and chips than was absolutely necessary. Oh, and I was dressed up as Jack Skellington, from Nightmare Before Christmas! Man, that was an important detail. I’ll get some pictures up in a bit. However, getting my face painted and everything made my room kind of a wreck. When I got home in the morning I really didn’t want to clean it up, and I was really pissed off about it when I woke up.

        That’s an important detail because I was pissed about everything when I woke up. I slept in a bit, but even that didn’t help. Maybe I was tired, or maybe it was the overload of junk food, but I don’t think it was either of those things - because this is exactly how I felt the next morning after my going away party, and exactly how I felt every time I had people stay the weekend at my place in junior high. True, any time those kinds of gatherings happened (I don’t think they really qualify as parties) I ate too much junk food and stayed up late, but I just think it’s too much time around too many people that really got to me.

        Essentially, what I’m trying to say is that I consistently forget how introverted I am because it’s socially expected of me to do these things and then it destroys me for days. It’s like an emotional hangover, or whiplash. Or something? Insert your own good metaphor. The moral of the story is I don’t feel any better until I stop talking to people and seclude myself and generally I have a hard time doing work, which means a party on friday eliminates my productivity for most of a weekend.

        I think vael has expressed a similar effect before, or maybe that was me. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this anyway. I’m just not sure if it was my idea or not. At any rate, it’s draining for me to spend time around people. I don’t know whether I’ll try to explain that or not when the fencing club inevitably asks me how I enjoyed the party.

        I think this post contains everything I wanted to say, though perhaps with less explanation than I planned, but I need to go to class now so that’s how my friday way. I’ll post more things later I think. I just don’t want to have one humongous mega-post.

So my Hardcore character on Dragon Tavern (permadeath) just upgraded his equipment enough to stop adventuring cautiously. Today, he died.

Sad, sad day. Sad day.

I just got the title for spending 300 day’s worth of AP as well.

Sad day.

edit: For those of you that know the game, I took 31 hits from a single boss. I didn’t bother to check what my success chance was. It was my first adventure after returning from the tavern >.>

Also it’s like Echo Bazaar is just looking for excuses to throw nightmares at me. Not finding someone (Watchful challenge), thus not getting paid, gives me nightmares? Really? Explain that one to me, please.

I’m stuck on my ambition until I get Watchful 45/Dangerous 37, and I’m stuck on the Absconding Devil until I get Bohemian 3 again, so basically I guess I’m going to go be Dangerous because it’s the least dangerous thing I can do.

Derp.

Once, I posted an e-mail from Kingdom of Loathing. Now, I post a letter from Fantasy University.

Imagine if KoL were made by the Facebook-generation.

Ready?

“Congratulations!

        Your application to Fantasy University has been accepted!

        We are looking forward to having yet another bright young mind take advantage of the unending knowledge of the country’s finest and foremost Adventuring College (that we know of)!

        We hope you are looking forward to the challenges presented by a Class-A Adventuring Education, and hope that you will meet any and all challenges with the same kind of fervor and optimism we exhibited in preparing this form letter!

        Before you are actually accepted, there is one formality that will be taken care of by this magical letter. It contains a disclaimer form that must be accepted before enrollment becomes final.

        Agreement: I, Demi Victus, do solemnly swear that I will do my best to uphold the traditions and integrity of Fantasy University and will always remember that I become the property of Fantasy University and that any accidents or punishments that may befall me up to and including death, dismemberment, depression, apathy, illness, decapitation (real or imagined), fraud, theft, delusions, nightmares, food poisoning, Rapture, stolen organs, borrowed organs, hallucinations, leg trauma, lupus, being burned alive, water torture, tickle torture, plain old torture, spasms, night sweats, day sweats, pant sweats, restless leg syndrome, restless elbow syndrome, poverty, canings, heat stroke, heat exhaustion, plain stroke, extortion, blackmail (which is technically different from extortion), blindness, deafness, loss of an ear, loss of one or more shoes, dew crotch, being forced to watch bad comedians (you know, the really bad ones where half of you wants to feel sorry for them, but the other half can’t stop laughing at how awful they are), and jury duty are all considered perks of the University and must be enjoyed as such. Furthermore, it remains the right of the University to… Geez, does anyone even read this crap? I spend 24 hours a day down here in this well, shackled to this printing press, writing up legal documents for you people BY HAND, and for what? A few half-hearted chuckles? My humor is all I have to give, and I try so hard, but what’s it all amount to? You’re never going read this anyway, and that’s okay. My wife will probably run off with some romance novelist, who she’ll fall in love with after he writes her into every single one of his best sellers. That’s cool, I’ll chill down here, with the rats, and the constant trickle of dank sewer water. No really guys, it’s fine. I’ll just keep making you laugh throughout this entire game, as you never once question where such brilliant humor stems from. You’ll never realize that every joke you read is really told by one lonely guy trapped in the bottom of a well, and that’s a fate I’m willing to accept. Bye forever.”

So from what I can tell Echo Bazaar is user-created. There’s a button you click on the storylets you see that tells you who made them, which could just be all developers, or it might not be.

        I like the system of the stats, the storylets you unlock and the opportunity cards… However, what I’m most interested in is seeing what they have to make me coerce my grandmother into playing. Not every game is Demon’s Souls, where the gameplay itself is enough to sell copies. More on that when I get to my lodgings and see what kind of activities my friends can engage in there. Or something.

        Well, ok. Standard procedure, I said a thing on facebook and I got more action points. More on this as it develops. This is a game on the level of The Ruins Of, where I practically love it just for existing. However it’s too damn polished for automatic love and its status as a social game as opposed to a simple browser-based game (these are developed very differently - compare Echo Bazaar to The Ruins Of and you’ll get the idea) makes me want proof of its excellence.

        I will be back to declare a judgement on its excellence later. If it is excellent, I expect you to be my neighbours so we can perform various activities at each other’s lodgings. Or whatever.

So that Vanquish demo. It’s pretty nuts. Something tells me the final levels resemble a three-dimensional bullet hell game.

        I died five times during the demo. Short jog through a base, fight against a four-legged mech (legs are weak points, knock one out, shoot the core - if you’re lucky you’ll take it out after two, if not, three is fine), which then TRANSFORMS into a two legged version with electro-whip arms. Checkpoint is at the first part of the fight so dying against the second means starting it all over. Your health regenerates and all, so it’s not like you’re weaker by the time the second half comes along, but still. One thing that made me feel less like a failure is that your weapons upgrade themselves as you either pick up upgrade chips (probably dropped from specific enemies during missions) or as you pick up the same gun (if an enemy drops an assault rifle, you pick it up and gain ammo, and some work towards a gun upgrade). When you die, you restart with the current state of your weapons, so it’s like a short term new game+.

        So the game itself. You have an uber nanotech suit thing, titanium neuroskeletal technomagic armour stuff. It has a booster pack that for some reason requires you to power slide to use. So you press L2 and you power slide until your suit overheats. Then you can also do a dodge roll, and if you press L2 while doing that, time pretty much stops and you get to fire away until your suit overheats. When you do a melee attack, which are as effective as an EMP blast/titanium fist to the face should be, your suit will also overheat for a bit. You lose a third of your movement speed while your suit is overheating, so it comes at a cost. But I did a flying knee to the face and killed a guy instantly. That was cool.

        So this game is like style and then substance. First you do cool shit, and then they try to justify it. For example, you don’t actually carry any guns - your suit morphs into guns by replicating any guns you find. It can store three in its memory at a time, but it’s suggested during the tutorial that you can upgrade that.

        Did I mention there’s a turbo power slide button?

        Oh, and you get the slow motion effect automatically when your health gets low, and that’s really cool. An explosive barrel blew up beside me, and the physical barrel or whatever put me at critical damage, and then I outran the explosion and survived.

        If I can finish the demo without dying, I’ll buy the game. If not, I have no chance to survive. Make my time.