A Window, A Light...

Because of the lack of a standard work schedule, I don't really internally mark the difference between a weekday and a weekend, or between one week and another - but it's still been a fairly difficult week. Castillo and Sterling's shootings spark the same justifiable outrage in others and in myself, and after that there's the calvalcade of posts to social media which, for me, only serves to exhaust. This time it's going to be different, says everyone. If you're not talking about this... well, there are the posts talking about taking care of yourself, and there are the posts suggesting that if you're not talking about it you're letting people down. There are the well intentioned posts about how to be a good ally to the black community, and less well intentioned posts. Then there's the news about everyone else who's been shot by cops - this year, last year, in recent memory, and who haven't been reported widely yet. And then, there are the police who've been shot in protests, news about protests...

There's a bizarre sense of both urgency and an asynchronous reporting, as if all of this comes all at once, all the time - creating a sort of timeless, endless chamber of dead faces, still shots in videos I refuse to watch literally stained red with blood - where I know that with the ease of a button push I can see someone (now dead) die in what was real time.

Welcome to the real life cyberpunk dystopia. I won't say future - it's been here some time, now.

Pokemon Go is out, and I hear it's fun. I also hear that people are causing all kinds of weird accidents where a giant, memetic francise has finally tied itself in with its biggest digital partner so far - real life. We were all walking around looking at cell phones (me too, they're useful and I like them), and now we still are, but we're red, blue, or yellow team. Well, not me. I want to see the appeal, but I've never been big on Pokemon. Want to do me a favor and release one for Persona, anyone? Get that blocky city map from Persona 1 back... pick up herbal suppliments at Lush boutique or buy gear at, like, your local Pay Less. Really finally synergize your branding potential. Buy Accessories (not accessories) in the form of bejeweled keychains at Hot Topic and gain stat bonuses for your summoned demons - it's only a matter of time.

I'm pretty tired today and need the day off for yard work, house work, and personal writing.

I've been meaning to finish Persona 1 since I just had the Playstation 1 disk and was dating Violet seriously. I don't mean that I've been meaning to start Persona. I mean that I've been meaning to finish my playthrough. I've started twice. It's not that great a game. I  have it. I'm slogging through it now. I'm getting fairly close. I suppose I've clocked about 30-40 hours off and on over the last year or two. I guess there's probably about 30 to go. It doesn't take up time in a normal, meaningful way; I play it when I'm sipping coffee and scrolling down tumblr or when I'm checking RPG.net to see if they have anything to say about WoD or Exalted (and that's about it, these days). I play it when I'm sitting on the toilet. Or I did. With the end approaching, I designate time, as if for a chore. It's on a list.

Persona's an interesting game that spawned an increasingly successful franchise almost despite itself. The characterization presented in the first game is weak, the graphics are uninspired (it's a fairly early Playstation title, so that's no surprise), and the plot is perfunctory - mostly a setup for random monster battles and dungeons that appear to be designed at random. The combats were initially weirdly balanced to the point that they appeared buggy. It was re-made as a PSP title with cleaned up graphics, fairly impressive video scenes, and cleaned up mechanics. It's a legacy title; it's what you buy to fill out your collection with the re-made Persona : IS and EP, which are significantly more worthwhile from a player's perspective. I'm slogging through the game to have beaten the entire collection (hopefully, at some point) and almost out of what I would consider respect for the series. But why respect, of all things?

Persona offered something that other games didn't offer and at a level of complexity that its future titles would not bother to model. It was one of the few games where it wasn't just possible to communicate with your enemies (simple as their AIs inevitably were), and not just expected, but mandatory. Talking to enemies convincingly renders their spell card unto you. When you have their spell card, you can either mash it up with another monster's spell card in order to create better personas (basically a spirit grafted to a character which renders bonuses, some weaknesses, higher stats, and a bevy of powers you can swap in and out) or, as long as you carry it and don't fuse it, they act as a get out of jail free card during fights. The monster you have a card for shows up, you talk to it and show it your card, and it recognizes your contract with it, then leaves - effectively allowing you to skip the fight.

Summoning new persona for new powers is complicated, involving a large chart full of signs for good matches, poor matches, normal and strange matches. There are a list of mythical beats and characters a mile long, each associated with one of the Major Arcana of the tarot. The personas have levels and improve with use, and at a max level you can trade them in for difficult to find items.

You can buy guns, bullets, melee weapons, and a whole set of armor (greaves, boots, helmets, and body pieces, and they're all expensive), spell items, healing items. You can gamble in a casino where you play the games your character sits at. People at diners will help you remember your objectives in the story. Your last two characters are recruited manually from a list of secret characters. There's an entire side quest that takes over from the main quest that you can undertake without ever touching the normal quest, with a totally different plot and character.

Basically, there's very little plot - it's the video game equivalent of a complicated RPG dungeon grind. People misunderstand what Persona is about - game one is hardly about the plot at all. It's literally a mashup of a ton of complicated, intermeshing mechanics where the goal of the game is actually to grind at a furious pace, building the biggest, most badass team you can while taking these brand-new, never seen before mechanics for a trial run. Once I realized the purpose - that the game is basically a huge Excel spreadsheet with graphics for people with a special brand of obsessive-compulsive focus, it made perfect sense to me. It's fun, just not the kind of fun you find in gaming much, anymore. It's practically a dead format that would have made much more sense on a PC during the early days of computer gaming.

It's close to both Persona 2 titles in how it plays where Persona 2 games are much more sophisticated in terms of plot and smoother mechanically (though they remain huge, intense grinds) and almost totally divorced from Personas 3 and 4. I find it to be a very interesting phenomenon.

Now. We're going to need to get to the grocery store, today and hopefully we'll manage to even see Pacific Rim. (I've heard good things from most people, I've heard reports that it was bad from friends of friends, but I'm ignoring that.) The upcoming days menu looks like steamed asparagus with poached egg and grated espresso-rind cheese served with either herbed roasted potatoes or buttered sweet corn, garlic hummus with rough-chopped parsley and roasted onions and pita chips, chicken and wild rice soup with parsley or kale, salad with tomato and half a turkey sandwich, and rajma masala served over jasmine rice.

I'm excited to let you know how the movie was. I also totally have to make it to the library. My books are a day over due.
Additionally, I'm killing time doing yard work until Katie gets home. Our mower is broken, so I'm literally weed whacking my overgrown backyard into submission foot by bloody foot. Wish me luck.

Plenty of stuff to talk about these days. I skip the politics because everything I wrote sounded kind of sanctimonious, but it boils down to not being terribly surprised that the Democrats took a bit of a beating in the 2010. Yada yada political discourse, but really, in 2008, everyone was pissed and angry about the economy. They said that they didn't care how the economy was fixed, as long as it was, but that came with two large, unspoken caveats - 1, people feel that not everything is fixed, so everything is terrible and 2, when people said that they didn't care, what they meant is that they were not paying all that much attention. Because not everything is fixed, the problem is obviously the leftist agenda or something, not the fact that problems take time to fix.

Liberals really wanted to believe that the whole country had seen what we consider to be the errors of their ways, or something. Which, if it was gonna happen, isn't going to occur in these two years. Similarly, the GOP is claiming to be speaking the will of the American people. Seriously, everyone, that's about as true as saying the whole country has turned liberal. Surprisingly, it's not that simple. In fact, it turns out that there's a huge swath of political ideologies out there ranging from outright insane to very reasonable. I know. Weird.

So, that's it. My revised political rant. Tired of the media playing this and everything in the direction that it is being played. Media, baby, please. We are trying to have a civilization here.

Um, I am pretty sure I had something else going on in my life.

I'm gonna do this NaNo thing, and probably going to fail because I have a lot going on at the moment. I will go ahead and give it a shot, though, and if you count the total number of words I blog, maybe I'll come out on top. Does that mean I should blog less and spend that time writing. Maybe. Maybe. Or maybe I'll just frigging compile these entries and say it's a compendium. Victory.

I'm stuck in Persona, right at the last boss. I had kind of bungled the final approach and my groups Personas have weaknesses which the boss exploits pretty reliable (or just Mental Charges and busts out Megidolaon like it's made outta Spell Points). I have a character which summoned Satan himself to boss around like a chump and I am being taken out by the Goddess of Difficult Morning Driving (aka fog, which is probably metaphorical or whatever).

This is somewhat frustrating.

I hate grinding. I feel that time grinding takes away from the pacing of the game, and the final fight against the boss should be a kind of dramatic, fast-paced endeavor slightly different then the attrition-oriented meat-grinder that embodies walking through countless hallways and double-checking enemy weaknesses. However, I am not a proud man. My new plan is to walk around easier areas and just build up a ton of cash and use it to summon and re-summon Personas until I have something approaching ridiculous levels, a ton of mundane items, and something approaching an optimal spell list. If I am above cheating in a game, it is only barely.

My Minecraft client was updated, and on startup I couldn't get it to load so I had to delete the .dll and restart. Because I was far too lazy to save my saved games, I lost them and restarted. On beginning again, I decided I'd play on Iron Man mode, but being blown up by a Creeper 20 minutes in made me reconsider.

I started a second world. That's for Iron Man. Since I get reckless when I get bored and bored when I'm not doing something every second, I expect to delete World 2 pretty constantly. The new World 1 is even more impressive then the last one, but very dangerous. Large outcroppings coat the grass underneath them in shadows deep enough to spawn zombies and skeletons in the middle of the day. It's fun to play in.

Persona 4 is almost wrapped up, but I'm under leveled near the end. The game's got something of a reputation for being a grind fest, and I inevitably abuse the push system to blow through most of the game's dungeons, forcing me to power level for a bit near the end. Checking guides always tells me that I should have been able to easily max out my Social Links with time to spare, so I feel like I missed something kind of obvious, since I've got a lot of loose ends in my stories. Like other Personas, I'll probably vow to come back to it later, and leave it sit for an extra long time. Persona 3, I'm looking at you. To be fair, they are huge games and I've got game's I've never even opened sitting in my to-play roster.  

I want to wrap up Persona 4 and give games a rest for a while. I've been doing some writing I'm really happy with. I say something like that a lot, and never post anything. If I can change that, I will. Most times, I write something and shelve it, then come back to it later, but never think to post it at that point. My last essay didn't get great reviews from readers (it was pretty mediocre), so I'm a little hesitant to share.

I pretty much blew my day, given that I didn't even waste it in the way that I had kind of hoped for. On Sunday, I spent the majority of the day indoors. When I wasn't scrubbing the bathroom - which to be honest, I didn't do a whole lot of - I was primarily playing Persona 4, and thinking of the story interaction that would be possible between the cast of Persona 3 and 4. There's an easter egg where the cast of 4 goes way out of there way to another district to visit some girls, and the background is the city in Persona 3. Meanwhile, Persona 2 has tidbits and cast members from Persona 1, and three tacitly mentions lore and obscure happenings from 1 or 2. That implies a continuous world.

A world I am geeking about, occasionally.

But instead, I lost a dungeon early on, made dinner then sat down to play Civ 4.

For like, 5 hours. I'm not really sure. Now it's like, 11 PM. You know, damn. I did not even do my normal writing tonight.

So, anyway, I do have the Mage game going. The first game was really well received, and it's probably going to be bi-weekly, because I really don't want the pressure of a weekly game just at the moment. I've pretty much got Civilization out of my head now, too, since I'm really not very interested in playing it right now. I'll probably go ahead and uninstall it while I'm still sane.

OTOH, I won that game, and I feel like I can just go ahead and check it off my to do list. I wanted to win cultural victory, and I won the space race while waiting for my three cities to hit Legendary culture.

Um, I also made sesame tofu with mushrooms for dinner tonight. It was pretty great, and I know how to make it even better next time, but it was really just a lazy replacement for butternut squash soup, so really, just being tasty was enough to pass.

I've been in a good mood today, largely in part to yesterday since nothing has actually happened except me going into work today. I'd been fretting about my account balance because I didn't keep up with balancing my checkbook like I ought and I only have internet access at work. If I can't tell how much money I have, I basically just immediately assume I have none at all and freak out regardless of the actual situation.

Historically, this is accurate. It is almost entirely accidental that I am doing just fine at the moment. I stood at my counter with a pen and a list of bills going over my static monthly costs muttering 'this has got to be a mistake', except I was concerned that it looked like I had more then enough money to cover all my bills. Like a whipped dog, when Dame Fortune reaches out to me, I snarl and recoil. XD

So, I went to work, ok'd the prospective Ladytron concert this weekend, and went home to finish Persona 3 FES for good. Vi felt strongly negative about it, primarily for its mechanical issues. I don't want to push it, but I don't see it, so I curteously disagree. The dialogue is a bit heavy handed, repeating several points that I feel would have been just fine to have left unsaid, but it still holds up really well. If I consider Final Fantasy Tactics and Persona : Eternal Punishment to be crown jewels of video game plot, FES doesn't reach the very top, but it's still very good.

This afternoon, around 2, I got a call in from the local game shop telling me that they got Exalted: Infernals in, and I'm very excited. I don't run a second edition game, but Infernals never made it out for 1E, so while I wasn't strictly obligated, I've been interested in this project since the Infernal wiki was posted. This is going to make it a lot easier to add them to my game, which I will.

It'll be a nice relaxing evening for me again tonight, probably full of reading and cleaning. Tomorrow is payday, which is just in time to walz in to pay rent. Because I'm weird, that makes me really pleased.

The weekend was really productive for me. I didn't go out after all, since Saturday looked sporadically rainy, plus kind of chill. Even if it might make for some good photos, it's not really the weather I want to be tromping around in when I'm on the edge of a cold like I feel I am. Sleeping causes problems when I lay flat, so now my pillow is propped up with my cheaper comforter and, incidentally, I managed to get most of a nights sleep before work. The first thing I did on Saturday morning when I got up (after coffee) was write up a list of stuff I felt needed to get done, so the kitchen, bathroom, and house in general got pulled together over the course of the day.

Anyone checking my Facebook may recall my mop-related irritation, where I discovered that my roommate not only doesn't have a mop, but the swiffer floor thing she has doesn't have 1) batteries, 2) mats for cleaning, 3) cleaning solution. I settled for sweeping, but you can be sure I shook my fist to the heavens.

I managed to get an appreciable amount of Persona 3 time in, and I enjoy the time management issues in that adding a level of difficulty to the game that Atlus' grinding issue doesn't. Well, Atlus has a thing about random encounters and tough fights where the simplest solution is typically to level until the fights have more leeway. This is the opposite of my anti-grinding philosophy where I try to fight bosses well before the game assumes I am really qualified (except in FF Tactics, where my chief loves are the story and random battles, so I tend to crush fragile bosses beneath my booted heel). I got through Persona 2 and Digital Devil Summoners without too much trouble by exploiting the combat system, and it's basically the same in this one, so I'm not worried about my chances. Basically, I haven't been playing long, but I'm still having fun.

Fallout 3 still has a place on my roster, officially making it so that I've gotten way more out of the game then the person who bought it. My second playthrough was almost totally designed to get the Ninja perk just so that I could, and while specializing in Melee has been fun (and still pretty effective, all things considered), the Ninja perk really isn't as dramatic as the Death's Sprint one. When you've got maxed out gun perks combined with a Reservist's Rifle and you refill your VATS spectrum every time you off someone in the system, the air quickly becomes full of flying heads. I hesitate to imagine what that must look for those poor Enclave soldiers, when some goon in battered combat armor destroys an entire platoon of elite, power-armored troops from the neck up in the space of about a second. What finally stopped me wasn't the barrage of plasma they intended to send my way, but the fact that my rifle broke in mid-shot from a full repair.

I lacked the Exalted books I wanted to make full preperations for my next game, but I did get to play a small session of Burning Wheel over a combination of Skype and Cocinella. When we weren't drawing dongs on the whiteboard, that is. It is really gratifying to talk to friends I haven't seen in months or talk to in person. IM is good, but the tenor and type of conversation really changes. I wasn't in the same room as anyone, but it kind of felt like I was for a while.

My expenses for the last week consist primarily of utilities costs, which have gone up. Gas went up this month, which is basically what I've come to expect. I put off buying a table again, because I'm not comfortable spending when I've got other possible expenses coming up. I really think that my bed is going to be my next  purchase and I'm still not sure if I'm going to end up buying a new air mattress or if I'm going to end up buying the futon mattress. The air mattress is starting to show wear, since I'm not sure, but I don't think they're supposed to be used nightly for so long.