28 January 2011

Impending Doom

I've never been very into gaming. I would play the occasional Smash Bros with my brother or my friends and I used to play a LOT of Super Mario 64,  but I was never very into any other games, except Pokemon. Until this Christmas.

When finals ended about a month ago, I turned my brain off completely. I just stayed at home and didn't think about school or the pressures of life at all. Christmas came, and it was lovely. My brother received a game that he put into the X-box and immediately began playing. I watched him for a bit, not particularly interested. As he continued to play, he asked me if I wanted to try it. I agreed and he helped me start a new game.












Then I realized I was starving, and from the dark of the downstairs I emerged to find nourishment.



But the moment I entered into the light, there was an entirely new feeling.





It was dread.

Thoughts like "I've been playing this game for 6 hours....I need to earn real money at my real job...I don't actually have magical powers nor am I a warrior princess..." began to fill my head. The impending doom of reality was lurking all over.



I ate and returned to the video game lair downstairs which I had usurped from my brother earlier that day. He had taken back what was rightfully his, and I was left with nothing but my real, non-heroic life.

"Unless..." I thought. I made sure nobody was using the computer and sat down, feeling new excitement building. The disc went in and the familiar music and start-up screen of The Sims began.

(This game was made for escapists with God complexes. For real. "You want food? Well, you can't have any. I'm going to make you go swimming and then delete the pool ladder so you'll swim until you die." I guess that was only really in the original one. I was never able to do that easily though. I would always feel so terrible when their hunger and energy got into the red, and I knew the cold hand of death was growing closer to snatching my virtual people away from mortality. One of my roommates used to always threaten me by saying "If you don't come home and hang out with me I'm going to make you on The Sims and then kill you.")

After playing for a while I started to feel like interacting with real people was as simple as pressing a button that said "Chat" or "Invite Over" or "Ask About Day." Suddenly I was measuring my moods by color. Such abstract things like the visual measurement of the state of your bladder and energy are "in the red" and always seem to have little status bars attached to them. "Man I'm tired. I must be almost all the way in the red!"





Throughout the game-play my little person gained promotions at work, had kids, became a four-star celebrity and had an awesome house. Soon, she reached the top of the career ladder and became a full on ROCK STAR. Her guitar skills were at level 10 (whereas in real life mine would be at about a 4, going off of the Sim's scale) and she was playing gigs all around the town. Her lifetime wishes were fulfilled and her life was totally awesome.

But the feeling of impending doom and dread never quite left me. It lurked in the corners of my mind, occasionally prodding me with worries and reminders at how much time I was wasting.







After becoming a gamer for two solid weeks I learned some things.

1. Where do the hours go?! The earth goes around the sun a bunch of times and winter turns to spring and California is swallowed by the sea and you don't even notice. You are sucked into an  unbeatable tornado of gaming.




2. You cannot live in a virtual world. Happily. When you go back to your real life things seem volatile. Maybe it was just me, but I kept coming close to a sort of existential breakdown.




3. Normal human interactions become foreign and strange.



Moral of the story is: Don't avoid your real life. But don't let your real life get you down.




Love,
Hannah

27 January 2011

Tucker

I'm a total jerk to one of my best friends, Tucker. I'm surprised he's still my friend. Maybe it's just because I owe him 70 bucks still, and he'll de-friend me once I pay him.

See? I'm a jerk. But he takes it. He takes it all. Even when I call him Tuckles. Tucker's the best.

24 January 2011

DaisyDisk has shed a lot of light.

So Sean downloaded this thing called DaisyDisk. It's probably the best thing I've ever seen in my entire life. It's a visual representation of what is taking up space on your hard drive. I used it on Mr. Terabyte and now I know exactly what I do with my life.

Besides having a folder called "teapots" and 16 gb worth of "Bones" episodes, it also turns out that 2.6 gb of my hard drive is taken up solely by David Bowie. U2 is a close second with 2.4 gb, followed by a the Cure, Elvis Costello, New Order, Sinéad O'Connor(?!) and the Decemberists. I'm still trying to understand why I have SO MUCH Sinéad O'Connor.

After seeing this I decided to go into iTunes and check out my play count, which has never been entirely accurate since my attention span rarely allows me to finish a song. But even with that, I have still managed to listen to "Atmosphere" by Joy Division a grand total of 345 times since August. Following this with 61 plays is "Sprawl II" by Arcade Fire. I have listened to that one Joy Division song 284 more times than any other song in my library. Have I mentioned I have over 10,000 songs? WTF.  I don't even remember listening to it that much! The only reason I had it on repeat for most of last summer was because of how well it was used in the final heart wrenching scene of Control. But seriously...345 times? That means that with all of the times I've pressed "next song"  I've probably listened to this song about twice as many times.

Anyway. Back to DaisyDisk. It turns out I also have a LOT of pictures of castles (almost 1 gb) and 7 gb of The Sims.

If the fact that I even wrote this post hasn't already given you an idea of what I do with my free time, than the contents of my hard drive will.

COMING SOON: "Impending Doom"



also...follow me if you aren't already.

13 January 2011

12 January 2011

The Creepiest Pokemon

When I was younger I loved Pokemon cards. I'd trade with the boys at recess (and they usually successfully ripped me off by offering me the cards with the coolest pictures) and I watched the show regularly. In the past year I started playing the games again. It wasn't until recently that I realize how creepy some of the pokemon are.

So, here's my list, in no particular order.




 1. Mr.  Mime.

I would never, and I repeat NEVER, allow this creature to survive if I ever ran into it. If it pops out of the dark at me and starts doing it's Light Screen or whatever, I will not hesitate to end it's entire existence.



 



2. Jinx.

First off, What is it? Is it female?  If all of the Jinx's wear that weird bra thing, it suggests they are all female. How do they reproduce? Maybe they are both. I feel like it would try to take advantage of me in my sleep.








 3. Charmeleon.

Okay, this one might not be as self explanatory as the others. For some reason Charmeleon has always made me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it's because he looks like a pre-pubescent teenage version of cute little Charmander. He looks like that kid who would try to convince a weaker-minded kid that the dog poo on the grass is chocolate icecream.







4. Manky.


NO. JUST NO. I don't like it when you pop out of the grass at me while I'm trying to catch something worthwhile on the way to Saffron City. You're almost as bad as Pidgey. 











5. Hypno. 

Oh. OH. Look at him! "Come on over and I'll show you a cool trick....yeah, that's right. Go to sleep. Yessssss." And then he's really a sociopath who hypnotizes people into submission and then has his way with them. 

I feel like he should also be wearing some pants.







JUST PLAIN CONFUSING:
I think by the time they got above a hundred they started to run out of good ideas for pokemon.

Porygon.

 ???





Other creepy pokemon:
These didn't make the cut, but they still make me feel weird when I look at them.
-Electabuzz - IT HAS MAN ARMS.
-Mewtwo - yeah, no.
-Machop - ....
-Gengar - he reminds me of Danny DeVito.
-Likitung - if it weren't for the massive slobbery tongue, it'd be cute.

04 January 2011

Sometimes Dogs Are Icky.

This is another post about my dog and poop. A couple days ago my puppy consumed cat feces that he found on our front lawn. This is a day after he ate the snow he had just peed in. Gross.

Last night my parents gave me a ride home from my friends house. Usually my parents have the dog with them in the car. When I got in,  my dog was SO HAPPY to see me.




He was jumping all over and licking me and just being all around happy. I was happy to see him too. He's adorable. Usually.

My Dad noticed he was licking my face.

"Be careful, you don't know where that mouth has been."
"Yeah, I know. But he ate cat poo yesterday."
"Well..."
".....Wait, did he eat it again?"



Yes, he had eaten cat poo AGAIN. And he was licking my face. 

 


THE END.

So I just realized I forgot a part of this story. Late last night, Finn threw all the aforementioned cat poop up all over my parents bed.