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Today is my birthday, and because this is a glorious holiday all about me and how spectacularly Aro I am, I am giving you the gift of understanding in the form of a definitive Aro music collection (brought to you by 8tracks because oh my god, why is every single music player plugin for WordPress so unutterably dumb).

So there’s something of a chicken/egg scenario here — am I the way I am because of my musical taste, or is my musical taste the way it is because of how I am? I am pretty sure that the answer is the former, as this first playlist is pretty illustrative. This is the music that was in my life before I was old enough to make my own decisions: the music my parents listened to at home or in the cars (and we did a lot of driving with a LOT of 8-track tapes) and what shaped my ideas of what good music even was.

LINER NOTES

Bad to the Bone, George Thorogood and the Destroyers
My dad loves heavy blues rock guitar, and it’s from him that I learned to appreciate it myself.
I Can Do That, Wayne Cilento (A Chorus Line)
My first exposure to showtunes came from my Mom’s 8-track OBC, and Michael remains one of my very favorite parts in musical theatre and one of the many reasons why it is so unfair I was not born a boy.
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, the Beatles
Abbey Road was one of my mother’s favorite albums. I still know every single note by heart.
Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In), The First Edition
One of my earliest memories is of this album, all shiny silver foil, and getting into a fight in first grade because no one believed me that Kenny Rogers was a hippie rock singer.
White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane
Mom and Dad used to fight over which of their cars got to carry this 8-track.
El Condor Pasa (If I Could), Simon and Garfunkel
Because this is my mother’s favorite band, SO VERY MANY of my early childhood memories are S&G-based.
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, Bob Dylan
Necessitating the conversation “mom, what’s ‘stoned’?”
Paint it Black, the Rolling Stones
This was the soundtrack for my dad’s Razorback unit in Vietnam, and the reason why Tour of Duty (for which my dad was a consultant) used a cover as its opening theme.
Heaven on Their Minds, Murray Head (Jesus Christ Superstar)
MOAR SHOWTUNES and I tell you what listening to this on 8-track was an EXPERIENCE.
King of the Cars, Lenny and the Squigtones
No one has ever heard this album but my family, and that is a crying fucking shame. It includes Murph on keyboards and Nigel Tufnel on lead guitar. I’m not even kidding.
Bat out of Hell, Meat Loaf
Arguably the most influential album of my entire life, and that is kind of creepy. I could write many many words about what this song, this album, and Jim Steinman mean to me, but nobody’s got that kind of time.
Lemon Tree, Peter Paul & Mary
Everything I know about relationships I learned from hippie folk singers.
White Room, Cream
“Man, remember when Eric Clapton had a sense of humor?” my father used to say.
Down on the Corner, Creedence Clearwater Revival
A lot of CCR is an acquired taste, because John Fogerty has an overinflated sense of his own talent. But man those riffs are fun.
Joy to the World, Three Dog Night
JER UH MY UH WAS A BULLFROOOOOOG
What a Piece of Work Is Man, Ronald Dyson & Walter Harris (Hair)
Hair contextually formed my childhood understanding of American politics, to whit: holy shit everything sucks and we’re all going to die. Also, Shakespeare.

And this one is basically I Love 1984-1994. This was when I started making my own choices about the music I wanted to listen to, with my own purchases and specific song requests. All you really need to know about this mix is that I had to physically restrain myself from putting Ice Ice Baby on here. PHYSICALLY RESTRAIN.

LINER NOTES

TURTLE Power, Partners in Kryme
This is the end titles for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles move. Which is still amazing. I know every word of this song, still. SHUT UP, DON’T YOU JUDGE ME.
Transformation #2, Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast)
I actually prefer the stage arrangement because it uses more brass and fewer strings but! this is still glorious, and I love love love the way Alan Menken uses low brass.
Les Yeux de Ton Père, Les Négresses Vertes
This is one long drawn-out idiomatic dis and it makes me laugh every time.
The Heart of the Matter, Don Henley
When I was thirteen and full of angst, I would listen to this album in the dark. Yes, that is exactly as hilariously embarrassing as it sounds.
Bust a Move, Young MC
When I go out for Actual Karaoke instead of Drunk In My Living Room Karaoke, 80s rap is my genre of choice because I am really, really good at it.
Bitchin’ Camaro, The Dead Milkmen
Trufax: I bought this album to impress a boy. His name was Tom, and he played the drums and wore an antique cossack coat. I was not made of stone.
Naturally, Huey Lewis & the News
Huey Lewis has been my favorite band since I was a wee tiny Aro, and I have actually seen them live more than once. This is an a capella track from Fore!, and no one has ever heard this song but me and an indie group called MY BRIGHTEST DIAMOND, who covered it.
Everything Louder than Everything Else, Meat Loaf
See above, re: Jim Steinman and my undying love thereof.
Fionnghuala (Mouth Music), Nightnoise
This is pretty much all that remains of my brief high school flirtation with “new age” music, because it took me a while (and many shitty shitty albums) to discover that what I actually liked was modern jazz, and record stores have shitty labeling.
Theme from Jurassic Park, John Williams
IT’S A DI NO SAAAAUR
El Tiburon, Proyecto Uno
My childhood best friend contributed many, many hilariously amazing meringue and salsa albums to my musical taste.
Silent Lucidity, Queensryche
I was sixteen. I have no other excuse.
How the Gods Kill, Danzig
My first concert! I was fifteen, and distinctly remember Glenn Danzig being the spitting image of cartoon-flavor Wolverine. I am also fairly sure Bruce McCulloch is riffing him specifically in Brain Candy.
One Night in Bangkok, Murray Head
It took me many many years before I heard this entire album and discovered that no, it’s not a euphemism, it really is about playing chess.
Axel F, Harold Faltermeyer
The Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack was the first album I ever owned. I asked for it for my birthday when I was seven.
Friends in Low Places, Garth Brooks
He used to be funny! This song is hilarious! My dad has never forgiven me for purchasing this album. I don’t care.
You Saw My Blinker, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince
“Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records!” Well he did, once. HILARIOUSLY. “Wrinkled old bat looking like a sharpei” finds its way into my everyday conversation far more often than I should admit.

Enjoy! And I hope that everyone has as lovely a December 2 as I will. ♥

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

If you at all listen to the podcast or perhaps frequent my screenshot blog or, god help you, my fandom blog, then you are aware that my life has been utterly eaten by Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third installment in the Bioware trilogy that in my house had previously been referred to as “pretty good, I guess, but certainly not Mass Effect.”

A lot of the reason behind that not-as-good-as-Mass-Effect feeling (and, interestingly, my original hesitation to pick up Inquisition at all) is because of Dragon Age II, and how much I absolutely haaaaaaaaated it when it launched. And when I say hated, I mean that as recently as this past November I told Elly not to even bother finishing the fucking thing, because fuck that and ps also fuck that.

The highest compliment I can give Inquisition is that it made me really want to replay DA2, simply because I’d only played it the one time (because I hated it) and I had made my Keep state import choices basically at random because I couldn’t remember a lot of the nitty gritty that went on (because I hated it) or, in some particularly important cases, hadn’t even played it — I never purchased any of the DLC (because I hated it).

Even knowing that I hated it, and would probably continue to hate it, I reinstalled DA2, trawled the Nexus for good-looking mods, and planned to hateplay my way through the story in preparation for yet another DAI playthrough where I, you know, actually knew what was going on.

Things have not gone entirely as I expected.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to unpack my feelings about this game, because oh my god they are complicated. So very, very complicated. What follows will be full of spoilers, if you have managed to stay unspoiled for the four years this game has played out and/or haven’t played Inquisition, because I apparently super need to talk about this.

In hindsight, DA2 had a couple of things working against it from the very start. The first is that it released almost immediately after I’d finished Mass Effect 2, which remains one of my fondest gameplay experiences; the second is that it was called Dragon Age 2, and not Dragon Age: Kirkwall or Dragon Age: Oh God It’s All On Fire or Dragon Age: Everything Hurts And Nothing Will Ever Be Okay Again.

So here is this game called Dragon Age 2 coming right on the heels of Mass Effect 2, and I figured I would be going for the same kind of experience because Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins were narratively basically the same game, except one has dragon zombies and one has space zombies. And man, I loved Origins. I loved it so much that Steam has I think something like 500 hours played, which is insane because I had more than one fully completionist playthrough EVEN INCLUDING THE SHITTY GOLEMS DLC. But perhaps more damningly for DA2, I LOVED Awakenings, the DAO expansion. I loved it SO MUCH.

The reason why this was a problem for DA2 is that two characters I absolutely loved in Awakenings feature prominently in Kirkwall: Justice and Anders. Without the benefit of hindsight or the context that the endgame of DA2 (and, for that matter, DAI) provides, Justice and Anders in DA2 are so catastrophically altered from their original incarnations that playing DA2 immediately after finishing Awakenings for a save import was the worst and most horrible thing I could possibly have done.

Even before that, though: environmentally, DA2 is A Problem. Schedule and resource limitations meant that every external map was one of only three different zones (1) Cave 2) House 3) Deep Roads), with just different doors and pathways accessible, and it was a total boring yawnfest nightmare. It should also be noted that the spiders in and around Kirkwall were so totally triggering to my Spider Problem that I had to mod the textures so spider models appeared as other random creatures (frequently upside-down, for added hilarity). After everything that Origins had provided in their vast array of different locales and preliminary worldbuilding, to say that being trapped in Kirkwall And Environs And By Environs We Mean This Dizzying Array Of Three Different Textures was kind of a let down is a little underestimated.

But I could get past that! I still play Atari and NES games for fun, so graphical goodness is not a dealbreaker for me. The dealbreaker, though, was that it turned out that DA2 was not like ME2 at all. It is also not at all like Origins. It is not like KOTOR. It is perhaps closest to Neverwinter Nights, if you’re comparing the Bioware pantheon, but when you’re walking into a game and expecting it to be a Choose Your Own Adventure Hero Cycle it kind of throws you off to discover forty hours later that you’d actually gotten a ticket on the Orient Express AND YOUR BROKEN HEART IS THE MYSTERY CORPSE.

And that was my biggest problem with DA2 and why I kept cautioning friends to avoid playing it: it both broke my heart AND hurt my feelings by making me feel stupid. I don’t expect narrative trickery in a video game, so when Anders opened his personal quest in Act 3 telling me that he needed sela petrae to make a potion, I thought hm, that’s odd, a potion made of urine, but whatever, Anders, we’re friends, I trust you, let’s get this shit done.

I also, in case you’re wondering, never twigged that Castlevania’s Alucard was “Dracula” backwards.

What I’m saying is that I am a sucker and I will fall for this shit in a game every time, and not seeing OH MY GOD THAT IS FUCKING FANTASYSPEAK FOR SALTPETER WHAT IN THE FUCKING FUCK GOD DAMN IT ANDERS coming punched me in the face and made me feel like a moron and I have apparently been taking that personally for four fucking years.

On a less significant to the history of Thedas note, there are only two times in my entire thirty-plus years of RPG gaming that the narrative has presented the death of a side character that seemed so horribly random and out of left-field that I thought I’d done something terribly wrong and frantically reverted hours of saves more than once to try and fix it: Gremio in Suikoden, who can at least be resurrected later if you know how to grind a JRPG, and Leandra Hawke, who can’t. Seriously, what the fuck, Bioware. That shit was uncalled for. I’m still mad about this.

So now I have played it again after spending hundreds and hundreds of hours on Inquisition and various linked Dragon Age media (I have even read the tie-in novels, you guys, I am in a dark place) and I tell you what: it is a COMPLETELY different experience.

Knowing what’s going to happen has removed a lot of the stress I was feeling whenever I thought about this game, and I don’t mean just Anders and Vengeance blowing the shit out of Kirkwall — there’s been such a lorebomb with Inquisition and the two encyclopaedic volumes of World of Thedas alone that it puts a lot of the things in DA2 into a much better, clearer context. I mean, the rushed final battles and WHY ORSINO WHYYYY is still a total shit sundae, but the Enigma of Kirkwall (pet theory: a giant city-sized series of spell sigils where the Magisters Sidereal performed the ritual to tear the Veil) means that all of the horrible bullshit makes more sense — there really WERE Magisters Sidereal, they really DID tear open the Veil, and it fucked up the world so egregiously and permanently that everyone is totally paranoid and demons and abominations really seriously ARE everywhere.

Also, the Calling (not a good novel, not good characters, god shut up forever Fiona, but still reasonable for lore-mining) strongly implies that when demons/spirits cohabitate within a Warden that spirit/demon ALSO picks up the Taint, which might explain why Anders and Justice were so completely fucked up and drastically fallen from their Awakenings version. God, poor Justice. I’m sorry, honey. You need a hug.

There’s a lot of nuance going on in this story, because EVERYONE IS WRONG. That’s pretty much the core of Dragon Age, as a series: people fuck up, and EVERYONE CAN BE HORRIBLY, TERRIBLY WRONG. I still don’t think I like it, because I prefer my escapist fiction a lot more uplifting than “no matter what you do, a serial killer makes a sex zombie out of your mom and also one of your best friends has been secretly plotting to blow up the city and start a civil war for years”, but I appreciate its place in the story a whole lot more now that I’ve seen the end.

So I’m no longer going to recommend people don’t play it — but make sure you’re prepared for some serious Jesus Grandpa. Also, if you want fake people to like you, never, EVER take Fenris and Anders in the same party. Ever. Also never take Sebastian anywhere. Fuck that guy.

And fuck those spiders, oh my god.

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

Friends, I have a confession to make: my name is Aro, and I am a whale.

I am that mythical shining creature that all game studios yearn for, the combination of high-limit credit cards and poor impulse control that can single-handedly make their games profitable.

I am the winner with sweet-ass gear bought with real-ass money that spanked your ass in PVP. I am that asshole next to the GTN with a black-white saber crystal, Revan’s mask, and a Command Throne. I am the fuckstick doing random versus pet battles with a dragon kite, a spectral tiger cub, and a rocket chicken.

I am the reason cash shops exist, and I am sorry.

… Well, okay, I’m really only a little sorry.

I’m sorry that cash shops can be intrusive, frustrating, and super grossly predatory; I’m not sorry that I have the means to buy my way out of the hellhole that is RNG oubliette.

Let me put this into perspective for you: random chance is so reliably cruel to me that it was a running gag in all the years I raided in WoW: I was only allowed to win one roll a month. That is all the game allowed me to do. Every month, without fail. I know this is not just confirmation bias because MCats kept really detailed loot records for DKP reasons and seriously, I am not kidding, ONE PIECE A MONTH. No more, no less. Like I would win a roll and someone would go “oh, that’s right, it’s April now.” I’m not kidding, Liore can totally back me up on this.

Therefore it shouldn’t be hard to understand that whenever I have the opportunity to circumvent RNG in a reliable way I will take it, every fucking time. Money is not an issue.

One of my favorite ways to do this is to convert real money to game money in SWTOR: I will purchase a cartel pack, and not open it. Of course I will not open it, there will only be shit in it if I open it, it’s RNG. I then sell that unopened pack on the GTN, and now magically have the credits necessary to purchase whatever specific item it is I’m looking for (like that Command Throne and black-white crystal).

This is also why, no matter how often people tell me how great it is or how nostalgic I get for my halcyon college days playing Magic, I will never, ever, ever ever ever ever in a million years ever, play Hearthstone. I understand and acknowledge my own limits, and recognize that if I try to get involved in a game like Hearthstone, I will absolutely lose my ass faster than you can say “just buy one more pack.”

Cosmetic and convenience cash shops are absolutely perfect for me. I don’t have the time or the energy to farm over and over for whatever that one particular piece of gear I’m looking for happens to be (fucking looking at you, Reins of the Blue Drake), and doing the same fucking collection quest for the 3485928347th time to level to story annoys the fuck out of me (fucking looking at you, THE ENTIRE WORLD OF TARIS), so if I can just BUY my sick-ass mount and a 12x XP bonus, I will very happily give you my credit card details and never look back.

Yeah, I feel a little dirty when I buy a powerup in King’s latest predatory mobile game, but fuck it, what else am I going to buy with that $0.99? Honestly, probably just another shitty kindle ebook (I have a vast collection). And yeah, free-to-play is never, ever really free.

Rather than rail against cash shops that will never go away — yes, I’m sorry, seriously it is all my fault — I think we’d be better served to demand just a little more truth in advertising. Call free-to-play what it is: “play the game for free, and buy whatever awesome hats you want!”

I’d do it. I’d do it every time.

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

Happy October!

I LOVE horror movies and have ever since I was little, but the way the genre has gone lately means that more recent domestically released movies tend more toward the torture porn style and I am not so fond of that as I am the creeping horror of straight-up ghost stories.

I also, like all right-thinking persons here in the future, love the shit out of Netflix streaming, and this is ALSO a great way to come up with some good scary movies on the fly. The problem is that there are a whole whole lot of REALLY, REALLY SHITTY movies on Netflix, and I am here to tell you that 90% of the time, when Netflix says it is a ghost story, it is actually a torture porn slasher, and that is no good.

So here is a list of movies that Netflix has given me that are actually good and decently creepy, even if not straight-up horror, that I had never heard of before.

Deathwatch, 2002

"" (Watch on YouTube)

I love this movie so much because it combines many of my favorite things: 1) ghost stories 2) period pieces 3) a plot that makes me feel smart 4) Andy Serkis. A company of British soldiers in WWI flee a gassing and get trapped in German trenches that are full of bodies and barbed wire and a handful of gibbering German soldiers.

The Hole, 2001

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Thora Birch and Keira Knightley are teenage girls in a posh private school who want to skip a school trip and spend a long weekend partying with their boyfriends instead, so the four of them hide out in a WWII bomb shelter on school grounds. POOR LIFE DECISION. Excellent use of lighting and cinematography and also people are terrible.

The Awakening, 2012

"" (Watch on YouTube)

An excellent old-fashioned haunted house story, which is MY FAVORITE KIND. It uses the setting to the maximum creep-factor ambiance, like a good haunted house is supposed to, and it’s so pretty that I really don’t care about anything else (but the premise is also great). A rationalist is hired to debunk a haunting story in a boarding school over holiday; spooky and beautiful are like chocolate and peanut butter.

Fingerprints, 2006

"" (Watch on YouTube)

(This has been recently removed from Netflix and trying to track down a legit stream was SUPER OBNOXIOUS). Fingerprints is a super tiny, super low-budget smorgasbord: urban legends + ghost story + slasher + amazing. In a small town, decades ago a schoolbus full of children was hit by a train and everyone died; now, if your car stops on the train tracks, the ghosts of the children will push you to safety. Maybe, anyway, because people saved are still dying. Obviously shot on shoestring, it doesn’t matter, because it’s GREAT.

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

So hello, subscription MMOs. We meet again.

I would really like to be able to tell you all about Wildstar. I’d like to be able to tell you about healslinging, which is shooting people in the face with love (seriously) (well, and sometimes also the back) (but always with love). I’d like to be able to tell you about how completely charming cartoony pulp wild west in space is, and how the slow build of lore (told through Precursor-narrated datacrons) makes reading the in-game database so much fun. I’d super like to tell you about how the delightful dynamic combat makes even Kill Ten Rats quests super fun, and how learning which effects have which telegraphed shapes is more of a delicious jigsaw puzzle than previous frustrations of learning just how wide a frontal cone attack is (frownyface at you, SWTOR). I’d like to be able to talk about how utterly satisfying it is to doublejump to the top of a mountain and see giant terrifying killer death robots rampaging through Archeology Excavations Gone Wrong hundreds of miles below you.

I’d like to be able to talk about all of these things, but I can’t.

I can’t because a month after release, even with rested XP and my authenticator XP buff, my “main,” Brittany Morris, Spellslinger Extraordinaire, is level nineteen (and even then only just barely).

It’s not because leveling is hard, or isn’t any fun. I actually really love exploring (Brittany is, of course, Explorer path) and the art design in the entire game is like a delicious chocolate chip cookie made of many tinier chocolate chip cookies, for an infinite recursion of joy. I love posing in double-whipped pistol stance and spraying bullets of love and also death in a wide swath in front of me and I love ridiculous zero-g jumpy puzzles and god knows I love building silly web apps for in-game data. It’s not even that I’m making a 200-mile move in two weeks with two tiny children and not nearly enough packing, though that’s the excuse I should probably be using. But no, the reason why I am still level 19 is because there’s a small problem with the leveling game, and the problem is this: at level 14, you get a house.

You guys. YOU GUYS.

Home Sweet Rocket, the Biergarten

Housing is everything I loved about SWG (oh, SWG, how were you so very very good and so very very bad ALL AT THE SAME TIME) with the added benefit of furniture and other delicious decoration available though quests and challenges and not just through two weeks of grinding out the architecture profession (but hey, architects do make some seriously badass shit). One thing SWG didn’t give me was the option of scale, which Wildstar does marvellously — you can have a teeny little mushroom garden or a giant Wonderlandian mushroom forest with the same items, just differently scaled. It’s GLORIOUS.

There are enough individual unique pieces of plain-old construction material (2x4s, wall panels, floor panels) that you can even construct your own house from scratch or buy a pre-fab house — for example, I’m using the rocket house, because OF COURSE I AM USING THE ROCKET HOUSE — and build out the inside yourself. So far in my experience the pre-fab houses are just big empty spaces, but you can put in walls and stairs and build out additional floors inside and it’s awesome. A real conversation in my real-life actual house went like so: “Honey, you should know it’s probably bedtime.” “I can’t, I’m fixing my staircase!” “It will keep until tomorrow.” “But what if someone comes to visit?!”

Because you can visit. Like SWG, you can set your house private, public, or neighbor-only, and those people you have authorized can come party at your house. No option for personal auction houses for crafted materials yet, though — ALAS (this is okay because I do not understand the Commodity Exchange at all anyway). I love visiting other people’s houses and seeing what awesome things they’ve done with painstakingly placed Algoroc Bent Trees and Neon Beer Signs, but I am admittedly terrified they will be there when I show up. Like hello, stranger with the open house! PARDON ME I AM JUST ADMIRING YOUR STAIRCASE I PROMISE I AM NOT A CREEPER

The tree house under construction.

My very favorite thing, and the reason why I spend 98% of my gaming time holed up on my plot, is that UNLIKE SWG, you don’t get just a house: you get a house and some land. You can plug a bunch of prefab things into it, like raid portals and crafting stations and zero-g jumpy puzzles that award you fancy dyes or plushies (NOT KIDDING, PLUSHIES, SERIOUSLY PLUSHIES) but that is not important. What is important is that any decor you can put in your house you can also put OUTSIDE your house, which means: TREEHOUSE TO THE STARS, MOTHERFUCKERS.

I haven’t made it to the upper limit yet (at least I’m pretty sure there’s a ceiling, there has to be a ceiling), and I’ve been too busy actually building it to decorate it, but you guys. 2x4s to climb up a tree to floating Escherian platforms hanging in midair is seriously the best thing that has ever happened to me in a game. To ANYONE. The only problem is this tendency I have to accidentally delete the piece of floor I’m standing on, which sends me plummeting to my death because I have done this more than once and my Explorer slow fall has a cooldown. Don’t do this, you guys. Send to Crate is THE WORST, take it from me.

Considering how expensive housing decoration is and how you DO get decor rewards from quests and dungeon drops, the common wisdom would be to level first and decorate later. I tried that! That’s how I got from 14 to 19. But every time I leave to go shoot some angry bees in Galeras (not kidding) I start thinking about how cool it would be to make a giant plushie petting zoo on the top floor of my giant treehouse, and I port back. I can’t help it, it’s like a sickness.

So I guess that’s all you need to get me to pay a subscription fee: giant plushies and infinite 2x4s (which would also make a good band name).

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

The Old Republic just ran a weekend-long 200% XP promotion for their upcoming expansion, sort of a ‘come level your mans so you can be all ready to level some more on the gay planet’ thing, and since one of the reasons why I quit playing was that my poor Marauder was drastically underlevel for her class quests on Corellia and also Corellia is a huge pain in the ass, I figured I’d spend my weekend on it and give it a try.

Just one problem: I hadn’t played since my purchased-with-CE annual subscription ran out.

But that’s not really a problem, right? I mean I’ve been playing other F2P games and enjoying myself — Guild Wars is so fun that I nerded out and wrote two actual apps to play around with its data, and I’ve been dicking around with TERA’s action combat and having a blast with how unapologetically over-the-top it is (while simultaneously berating myself for being a horrible terrible person) so surely I could handle SWTOR’s F2P option and finally finish my Sith story, right? Right?!

Oh my friends. How very, very wrong I was.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

The tiniest tyrant has very definite and defined opinions about music, and no matter how many times I tell her that when I was her age I listened to whatever was on the radio and I liked it, she knows that this is full of shit and the powers that be invented ipods for a reason. Because she is absurdly, terrifyingly technologically inclined, she likes to browse youtube and pick out her own playlists, which is inevitably hilarious.

First, the kid stuff (there is very little kid stuff):
Bruno Mars - Don't Give Up (gupname: "song")
Feist - 1,2,3,4 (gupname: "four")
Dan Zanes - Jump Up (gupname: "jumping," which is also her name for Insanity, which she also loves and is ridiculously good at)
The Muppets - Bohemian Rhapsody (gupname: "chicken")

Second, bits from her favorite show:
Keroro Gunso - Pekopon Shinryaku Ondo (gupname: "clap")
Keroro Gunso - Keroro-shoutai Kounin Netsuretsu Kangeiteki Ekaki Uta!! (gupname: "wai")
Keroro Gunso - Katte ni Shinryakusha (gupname: "yeah yeah")

And finally, shit that she found on her own and seriously y'all I have no idea:
Bruno Mars - Runaway Baby (gupname: "other song")
Lady Gaga - Bad Romance (gupname: "lady gaga")
Lady Gaga - Just Dance (gupname: "shoes")
Lady Gaga - Poker Face (gupname: ... ... "poker face")
Cobie Caillat - Brighter than the Sun (gupname: "sun")
Adam Lambert - Never Close Our Eyes (gupname: "eyes")
PSY - Gangnam Style (gupname: "psy")
Hyuna feat PSY - Oppan Ddak Nae Style (gupname: "other psy")
Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice (gupname: "christopher walken" seriously I am not kidding)
Train - 50 Ways to Say Goodbye (gupname: "show me")
Gotye - Somebody I Used to Know (gupname: "one")
LMFAO - Sexy and I Know It (gupname: "big")

Her taste is just as crazy as mine.

I am SO PROUD.

Gaming is an exceedingly important part of my life and my history. One of the only ways I can chronologically relate to my memories is by bringing up what particular game I was playing then and on what system, that’s how integral gaming is to my sense of self.

So naturally when it fell to me to mold and shape another tiny (and extremely malleable) human being into the image of my choice, introducing her to games as early as possible was one of my primary goals.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

So here are some things that I have actual personal and professional experience with:

marketing
video games
death threats

Here are some things that apparently some nice folks at Square Enix do not have personal or professional experience with:

marketing
video games
death threats

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

This weekend is Aro-mas, that magical day wherin we celebrate the amazingness that is the day of my birth.

Every year, I participate in my own personal tradition: enjoying my favorite things. I read the two books that have been my favorite since I was a tiny weester (Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising), watch my favorite movies (The Princess Bride, Dark City, and Coming to America), and play my favorite games.

There are only three games on this list — which is good because I am pretty much running out of birthday week time here — and it’s A Big Deal when I get to add a new one; there is a complicated series of totally and completely subjective rules known only to my deep lizardbrain subconscious that must be fulfilled before a game is inducted into Aro’s Personal Hall of Fame.

Because I like to share things during Aro-mas week, please enjoy the following rundown of My Favorite Games, presented in descending release order.

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Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

Just a few short months ago SWTOR was my go-to game. I don’t really know when it happened — everything was promising (because I’m no longer an end-game player), I was enjoying my characters’ stories, and in my head I was playing KOTOR3 with a chat client bolted on. And then, seemingly overnight, it all went away. I don’t even really understand how it all went down, for that matter; one day there were eleventy hojillion people on the fleet and I had fun chatting with people while I finished up my Sith Marauder’s story, and then all of a sudden I was struggling with a Class boss, frustrated at being underleveled, and no one was around for a cathartic bitch session.

What the hell?

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Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

Today is one of those days where my fingers are all twitchy because I do not want to beeeee at work I want to beeeee at home scaling mountains to spectacular vistas and making imaginary people fake love me. It’s been a month and some change, and I have four characters I play regularly with one at level cap, not just one but two helper apps, 50% world completion, and a burning, searing desire for MOAR EXPLOR.

I feel it important to once again note here that originally I did not even really want to play this game. It’s like I got suckerpunched with awesome. POW! RIGHT IN THE FREE TIME!

So with that being said, here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

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Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

One of the reasons why I am so pleased with Guild Wars 2 is that there was obviously some very definite thought behind the realism of various game skills and internal structures that delights me in a specific and particular way.

For example, Mr. Aro is a hobbyist chef, and because of this I recognize that whomever was responsible for building the Chef skills actually knows what they are talking about re: food. Every pie needs some lemon juice and starch, for example, which is a standard pastry trick; the herbs used in various entrees are correct and applicable to their real world flavors. I’ve found myself playing with the experimentation/refinement pane and going man, a loaf of tarragon bread actually sounds super delicious right now.

I’ve also tinkered around with Jewelry, which is a lot more straightforward than Chef bits but just as interesting: you have to have a stone to put in a setting to put in a piece (a band, a hook, or a chain) before you can craft a ring, an earring, or an amulet. Usually minutiae like this drives me around the bend, but for some reason in GW2 it delights me instead. I think it’s because somehow the ANet devs have managed to strike upon timesink tedium that doesn’t feel like needless grinding; instead for me it’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where I maybe can’t see all the pieces but it all still makes SENSE.

There’s a lot to be said for shit that just plain makes sense, y’all, I can’t lie. This is a game that counts a real-world economist on its staff and maintains its own virtual currency valuation histology, which absolutely blows my mind into tiny little diamond sparkles of delight.

All of this attention to realistic detail has really struck a nerve with me, and I’ve spent a great deal of my non-gameplaying free time taking all this wonderful and very specific data and putting my own real skills on top of them; in the really real world I’m a web developer and front-end designer, and I have not yet met a data point in GW2 that I haven’t wanted to build an app out of.

Good With Beer is a Chef helper that searches on both ingredient (oh my god what are the two recipes it says I’m missing that I can make with yams) and recipe (so this takes a bowl of spicy chili, wtf is that). Unfortunately the chef data keeps changing, assumedly for economy-balancing reasons, so some of the quantity data is out of date — looking at you here, dyes — but I’m constantly going through and updating the relevant bits.

The Dyealogue is a searchable and filterable catalogue of dyes, with color swatches at a glance and, where applicable, the separate cloth/leather/metal colors noted.

What I wanted to emphasize here was speed and ease of use; the GW2 wiki is pretty rad and Guildhead is super exhaustive, but having all of this data in a quickly-loaded and returned search isn’t something the big databases can really offer.

Also, they were super fun to write, and you bet they’re going on my professional portfolio. :D

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

So the pre-order early access/final pre-launch stress test for GW2 was this weekend, and I have a lot of Feelings. A lot a lot.

I was pretty skeptical about this game for several reasons, not the least of which was that I’d spent some time in Guild Wars 1 a million years ago when the earth’s crust was still hot and was bored stupid by it. It’s not really my kind of thing, playing a game where the story doesn’t mean anything to me because I’m so far behind the times. I’m into things like SWTOR and WoW, which have established worlds that I’ve already loved for years and I can eke out my own space within them.

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Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

So about a year ago, before my kid’s first birthday, I wrote a post about raiding with a baby. Raiding with a toddler proved to be slightly different (and, ultimately, so hard as to be basically impossible), but even without the classification of “hardcore” or even, really, “raider,” I still strongly identify as “gamer” — but also, now, as “mom.”

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Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

I need to start this off by being real: I was invited to speak on a panel at PAX Prime. The proposal was titled “Women in a Virtual World: How Gender Roles Can Affect Your Elf” and it was specifically by, for, and about women (who tend to be drastically underrepresented in conferences, and especially gaming spaces). My particular focus was to be about being gamingmom: balancing society’s view of “good mother” with “holy shit hardcore gaming takes a lot of time and effort” and how that momitude reflects in gaming spaces like MMOs.

When the panel submission was denied, I figured I would just spend some time talking here about what I intended to discuss at PAX. I have some public appearance issues anyway and actually getting to PAX would have been really challenging (I really super like my kid and I couldn’t have taken her with me, for example), so it was better this way, right? Right?

Well, yesterday (more specifically, last night) that all kind of changed.

This is because last night I learned that while “Women in a Virtual World” was denied, on the PAX schedule posted yesterday was “Wife Aggro, Career Obligations, and Time Constraints: How to Play While Meeting Life’s Demands.”

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Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

Here is a thing that I think the gaming community and also The Internets In General have difficulty understanding: “criticism” and “censorship” are not the same fucking thing.

Actually, hold on; before we go any farther I think I maybe need to say that again.

“Criticism” and “censorship” are not the same thing.

And, just as importantly: “disagreement” and “censorship” are not the same thing. As a corollary, disagreement is also not inherently bullying, harassing, or inflammatory, but that’s a secondary point.

The primary point is that big word “censorship,” which, with its twin the siren call of “free speech!”, is like a red flag to the bull of gamer folk.

There’s this misconception that any criticism of a game (or some other pop culture media thingie) is tantamount to censoring the people who have made that game (or other pop culture thingie) — or, even more specifically, that calling someone out for saying something douchey is censoring them.

Look, here is an extremely simple guideline: within reasonable bounds you are free to say whatever you like. Free speech has nothing to do with it (since “free speech”, the way it’s used in these kinds of discussions is primarily a legal construct of the United States dealing with government silencing tactics in public spaces); you are a person who is capable of saying things, therefore you can in fact say them. You open your mouth or write something down or your wee fingers fly across the keyboard and poof! Just like that, things are said. It’s like magic.

However.

Freedom of speech does not mean, even legally, freedom from consequences. You are totally within your rights to make a shitty game. Someone else is totally within their rights to call that game shitty. That same physical and mental ability that allows you to say something allows someone else to say something, too. Again: like magic.

For an industry that wants so hard to be considered an artful medium, the gaming industry and its proponents seem remarkably unwilling to accept even the kind of high-level academic criticism that is the provenance of art, and I absolutely cannot understand this. Perhaps it’s because I was a Literature student (of course I have a Lit degree, you can’t be surprised), but I find it thrilling that I personally would have no trouble writing papers on the nature of personhood as presented in Mass Effect or the themes of self-punishment and internal purgatory you find in Silent Hill or the reflections of morality in KO/TOR.

And yet.

Even game reviews on the big sites have become ludicrously softballed for fear of retribution from both our corporate overlords and the rioting throngs of lemmingtrolls, so when platforms pop up to talk about serious issues of critical theory — as one would with any other art — it’s like throwing chum in the water. HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST THAT PERHAPS KILLING THE BLACK DUDE FIRST IS PROBLEMATIC or BUT WOMEN DON’T BELONG IN CALL OF DUTY or or or. The implication is that pointing out something that is perhaps not the best of creative ideas is the same as denigrating the entire work and everyone who enjoyed it, and suggesting that some tropes are maybe not the best storytelling devices is akin to censoring writers and developers. Because I guess if you can’t, say, write a faux action girl anymore you can’t ever write anything again?

I write about issues in the gaming community and the games I love because I love them. If I didn’t love Warcraft I wouldn’t have stuck with it for so many years upon years, and I wouldn’t have complained about the lore disappointments if I didn’t love the world. If I didn’t love SWTOR I wouldn’t speak out about how distressing it is that the production team has been all laid off or moved on. If I didn’t want to love being a part of geek culture I wouldn’t want to fix the things that I see are broken.

Criticism — even when meant as just negative speech, and not academic work — happens because someone expected more, expected better. What’s wrong with expecting better? I always strive to be the best me I can be, and I expect the world around me to live up to that. Always expect better. Always.

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

So last week SWTOR launched patch 1.3, which not only does some awesome stuff with crafting but also adds a per-server flashpoint group finder, which makes me so, so, so happy. This is after there were free population-consolidation server transfers (though all of my servers were origins, so I lost some of my I Started Playing Two Weeks Before Launch For A Reason You Bastards names SAHD FAIS), and I am absolutely delighted to see other people roaming around Taris and Hoth and, frankly, everywhere. There are three instances of both faction fleets, and that’s better than launch. Seriously: so happy.

I know SWTOR isn’t for everyone. I still will probably never understand how WoW managed to be all things for all people for so long (and I’d bet a million billion internet dollars that every gaming company in the world would also like to know how they pulled that off). In fact, if I were still an endgame player it might not be for me, either. I think I set foot in an Operation once, ever, when my family needed an extra healer, and without time to devote to being the absolute best #insertclass I can just dicking around and hopping from alt to alt to experience the awesomeness of class stories is really all I need from a game. I am totally willing to pay a monthly fee for KOTOR with a chat client bolted on

If you’re thinking of picking up some time in SWTOR with 1.3, I will give you absolutely the best piece of advice I can: MAKE FRIENDS WITH SLICERS AND CRAFTERS. Unlike item mods, which are transferable from piece to piece (and accordingly Bioware’s version of transmogrification), augment kits appear to be single-use only and while you can rip the actual augment out of your MK-6 kit, the kit itself is stuck to your Republic Dancer Bikini. Even if you aren’t interested in minmaxing gear yourself just spending credits to get Slicing crits for purple tech parts will fund those white power crystals you’ve had your eyes on. It’s so great, seriously.

But my favorite thing, my favorite FAVORITE thing, is that the GTN (the auction house, for you wow friends still reading along) is now globally linked. There is no Republic GTN and Imperial GTN, it is all one giant GTN. This is so great, both from a story perspective (hello, this is a universe with an entire pistol-toting, starship-flying class devoted to making sure both sides of the Sometimes War get goods and services) and a quality-of-life one. Drops aren’t limited by faction, so it’s totally feasible for your Imperial Agent to turn up a schematic for a piece of armor class-locked to Jedi Knights. Selling that shit is a HUGE pain in the ass, and more often than not it just got vendored. This was even more prevalent with companion gifts: very few Imperial companions really gave a shit about Republic Memorabilia gifts, you know? But now: not a problem. It’s so great for crafting and even just general inventory control. And, as an aside: everyone knows that there’s no faction language block in SWTOR, right? Your Sith can chat it up with Jedi friends in Corellia because everyone either speaks Galactic Basic or has translator implants. Things that make me happy: THAT. Doing away with stupid arbitrary boundaries like that make for a richer world. You hearing me, Magically At Level 10 Pandaren No Longer Speak The Same Language?

In other news, this week you can follow me making a complete fool of myself on the Cat Context podcast, which you can pick up at lioreblog.com. ♥

PS: SO HAPPY

Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

For the vast majority of my life I was the only ladytype in a social group full of men because my hobbies were those considered by the western world to be traditionally masculine: I loved working on cars, playing football, the nutritional science of beer, live blues and metal, and, most especially for our purposes, any and all gaming. Like, I had a vast and profound collection of Activision patches and twice-weekly tabletop groups, gaming was such an important part of my life. And all through that time, I was one of The Good Chicks. You know the ones: just one of the guys, lolololol sandwich jokes, bitches be trippin amirite, etc etc.

My male-majority social groups were so important to me when I was a kid (and by “kid” please understand that I mean from my weester gamerhood through college and young adulthood) that I spent a lot of time pulling what Melissa McEwan calls the terrible bargain: even when someone said something shitty I wouldn’t call it out, because I couldn’t; saying something would cause a big fuss, my friends would all get mad at me and upset about it, and it would ruin the whole day. So I convinced myself that I was just being crazypants hysterically oversensitive since obviously no one ever meant anything by it, and I sucked it up and moved on.

This happens a lot, even now. All the time.

Here’s the thing: lots of people I care about say shitty things, including me! Lots of people in the world do this, sometimes because they don’t know any better — and they don’t know any better because we are conditioned to strike the terrible bargain every time, so they so rarely hear that these uncool things are hurtful and should be stopped.

So there is some background: keeping my uncomfortableness to myself, swallowing concerns, and of course stridently insisting that I was certainly not a feminist, not like one of those women. Lots of things happened to evolve my feelings and actions on the matter, but there was one seriously majorbig turning point: I had a daughter.

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Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

So there’s a thing that’s been going around lately, and I have been SO GOOD and sitting on my hands and letting other folks Fight The Good Fight and say the things that need to be said because, as with I am sure many of you, there is a part of me that feels maintaining community harmony is more important than dealing with the unpleasantness of and fallout from confrontation. THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER.

Then it just keeps getting worse and worse and bigger and bigger and finally there comes a time when my poor bitten nails cannot scrabble for purchase on the rapidly slipping shreds of my self-control and my head starts to spin around and flames come shooting out my eyes and sdflkasjdflk ARO SMASH.

Dear my friends: now is that time.

Now first, let me say that all references to “you” in the ensuing rantscreed can be substituted with “ebola” or “penguins” or “Bud Light Lime” or “that asshole over there who is certainly not me in any way.” I am not talking to any particular individual. I kind of think that goes without saying, but since I am attempting to lay down some edu-ma-cation ’round these parts I figure it will be better to clarify right on the outset.

I want to talk a little bit about Geek Social Fallacies, and specifically GSF1. In case you are afflicted by a case of Internet ADD and/or tl;dr, allow me to sum up: as “geeks” tend to identify themselves as members of their own marginalized group, the community of fellow ostracized, marginalized geeks in which they often find themselves becomes superior to the individual ostracized, marginalized geeks therein. In other words: CONFRONTATION BAD! Remember that thing up there in the very beginning? I struggle with this shit all the time. The sociological theory at play here says that group harmony and the feeling of belonging is so important that it’s a far greater sin to call someone out for being an asshole and encourage people not to hang out with assholes than it is to actually be an asshole in the first place.

Y’all, I love me some Nicely Nicely and everything, but that is bullshit.

Therefore, what follows is a small collection of boats that I am going to actively capsize, because I just cannot take this much bullshit in my life.

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Mirrored from Dragonsworn.

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Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europa vincendarum.

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And a Merry Aro-mas to All

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I have complicated feelings about Dragon Age II.

A Formal Apology

Curating the Netflix Horror Queue

Deathwatch, 2002

The Hole, 2001

The Awakening, 2012

Fingerprints, 2006

On Wildstar

Reflections on the free-style Old Republic

Musicshare: Music to Soothe the Savage Gup

Raising a gamer

Death threats? That sounds like a great idea!

Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens

Where’s the awesome, SWTOR?

So let me tell you about my characters.

Putting real skills to use in virtual space

Let’s have a little talk about Guild Wars 2

On being Gamermom

The trouble with “wife aggro”

The boy who cried censorship

Meanwhile, in SWTOR…

Exposing myself as a feminist gamer

Sit down, you’re rocking the boat: on *isms and Geek Social Fallacies

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