| Ends and Beginnings |
[Oct. 17th, 2011|04:04 pm] |
Things are happening in my life right now, and I felt like I ought to acknowledge them here. Maybe to give them some sort of a realness, and to help me organize them in my head. Writing is a terrific way of making sense of one's thoughts, and of processing things that have dwelled within you for a long time.
So, let's realize, organize and process!
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 21st, 2011|02:46 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | life | ] |
| [ | Music |
| | Iwasaki Tarou - Gattai Nante Kuso Kurae | ] |
Huh? What? Blog? Nonsense, I have no such thing! Or have I?
I've been so incredibly tense these last few weeks that I decided to pick up on blogging again. Some therapeutic navel gazing and introspection would probably do me a world of good. It's not like I share things about myself that much in public anyway. Or, rather, I do, but only inane little things that hide the fact that I don't actually let the, uh, real me get out too much these days.
...
Hahaha, that sounded all kinds of awkward, I know! Still, I think recommencing the blog-engine will be a good thing, for a lot of reasons! Vroooooom! |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 1st, 2011|11:00 am] |
I've come to the startling conclusion that some people I know aren't nearly as smart as I've given them credit for. They're not outright stupid, but their inflexible mindsets and permanently fixed viewpoints restrict them enough to make them act like they were. Which, really, is pretty much the same thing. |
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| Of cards and good taste |
[May. 11th, 2011|12:33 am] |
I just became the guy who doesn't want to sign a well-wishing card for a mother and a father, congratulating them on their child who was born today.
You know why? Because this world needs some godsdamned decency, style, tact and taste. Also, less heteronormativity and less strict gender binary.
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| Werewolf Discord |
[Jan. 26th, 2011|10:16 pm] |
(I've never drawn wolves. Or dogs! Pretty much the only animals I ever draw are cats and fucked up penguins, so this is a nice change. Wolves are pretty cool creatures after all, so why not! Also, I like to think werewolves as being more like, you know, wolves. Not furry and burly bipedal antropomorphs. Pencil, paper, Photoshop and an hour.)
I’ve been playing Werewolf rather much these last few months. It’s been fun and I’ve learned a lot about the game, but things have not always gone as smoothly as one would wish. I decided to write this to clear things up for myself on exactly how and why certain changes to the core mechanic lead to unbalanced rounds.
First of all, I won’t go into the details of the basic game mechanics. In a nutshell Werewolf (or Mafia as it’s often called) is a game about group dynamics, guessing, acting, bluffing, theorizing and, often, mass hysteria. Wikipedia has a good roundup of the basic rules and also lists some of the game’s multiple variations.
Basic Werewolf works well because it has very simple core rules which allow for a deep and elegant playing experience. Now, the games I’ve been playing lately are not vanilla Werewolf but instead are based on a card game called Lupus in Tabula. Lupus in Tabula itself is a very balanced game that works efficiently because it has clear instructions on the ratio of Villagers, Werewolves and special roles.*
The problem is, the variant I’ve been playing borrows the special roles from Lupus in Tabula (with some modifications thrown in with the mix) but not the distribution of the roles nor the other instructions given on how to run the game. The rest of the variant is pure homebrew Werewolf. That means the rounds become extremely unbalanced as no guidelines are used to control the amount of special roles. Everyone likes a special character, so why not give almost everyone some neat skill, right?
Um. Wrong. It breaks the game. It makes the Werewolves’ task nigh impossible, the best proof of which is that the Wolves have won, I think, only a few of the numerous rounds played. Far fewer than they would have in the standard Lupus in Tabula or Werewolf.
The reason the special roles break the game is they make bluffing and lying too difficult for the Wolves. Basically, the Wolves lose their hiding places when everyone is special. If the majority of players are Villagers, the Wolves can claim to be Villagers as well. But the more roles you have, the more complex things get and the more difficult it is for a Wolf to keep their cover story straight.
I’ve tried to address this problem to the other players but so far it’s been to no avail, the counterargument being that since no one knows for certain which role you are playing, the wolves can just lie, and their lies are all the more effective because there are a lot of roles for them to choose from. I disagree.
( Read more... ) |
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| Article update and a RPG character |
[Dec. 12th, 2010|01:46 am] |
Article finished. I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but I think I've made my point anyway. Not a revolutionary point but I'm happy with it. I found heaps of stuff to support my thesis about how love is an important component between players and their characters. Not in every player–avatar relationship, of course, but enough to make it worthwhile to acknowledge it: Thinking about love, identity and identification can often reveal things about us and our avatars that we might otherwise miss. Like what happened with me and Final Fantasy X's Yuna and Tidus. (Hopefully I'll get a post written about that some day.) Aside from making points and establishing arguments, the thing I most liked about in writing the article was to notice how effortlessly Queer and Gender Studies fit together with Game Studies. Lots of converging points in the theories and ample overlap between research topics. If nothing else, the article showed me that if I ever wanted to further my career in the academia, there's a very fruitful (and largely untraveled!) path I could follow. Overall, I'm glad the bulk of the text is now written. In a couple of weeks I will get the critique and comments from the editors, after which I'll revise the text before it gets sent out to peer review. And after that I'm off the hook. Exciting ^^' ( And then... ) |
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| Public service announcement |
[Nov. 9th, 2010|12:30 am] |
Lots of thoughts bubbling in my mind but there's not enough time to make a post about them. Big deadline coming up (and I'm most likely going to blow right past it, unfortunately) and writing for the project the said deadline is for has taken away all my energy and spare time. When I'm not at my day job, I'm writing so as not to miss the deadline. When I'm not writing I'm clearing my head with a brief spell of The Internets, playing a video game, reading Sherlock Holmes stories or watching anime. I could use that time to write a post but since it occurs usually between 12AM and 2AM, by that time I'm too tired to actually write anything coherent. And of course writing for the whole evening leaves me sort of spent typing-wise anyway.
So. No posts for a while longer.
After I've wrapped things up with that damn article I swear I'm going to write a blog post. Several! All the time! It'll be like a National Blog Writing Month over here! But before that it's a couple of weeks of radio silence here. See you on the other side! |
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| Privilege and comfort |
[Sep. 26th, 2010|10:09 pm] |
You know what privilege is?
Actually, it's a lot of things. But one thing it most certainly is is the option of Not Giving a Damn.
Privilege is wondering (and not understanding) why people get upset when gay rights are trampled. Wondering what's the big deal if gay rights aren't advanced. Stating that gays have it pretty well in our country because they are not stoned to death or anything. Saying political discussion about gay rights is not helpful right now because there are so many more important things to discuss. That's privilege.
It's the privilege of not having to deal with the issue of marginalization, and the privilege of having the standard rights of our society apply to you by default.
A Queer Studies article I recently read had this interesting tangent about privilege as a form of comfort. Or comfort as a form of privilege. That when we are comfortable, we don't feel the need to change the state of things. "Why should we? After all, we're feeling very comfortable."
And indeed, a straight white person in Finland, regardless of their sexual activity and personal trajectory in life, can feel very comfortable in regards to their rights concerning the whole tangled mess that is human relationships. Marriage, adoption, children and social acceptance are all there for them, available by default. Comfortably wrapped around this Default Person, making sure the sharp pointy edges of the marginal don't reach them.
Privilege is the comfort of not having to think things through because they aren't really that important, and the occupation of a perennial state where you can keep pushing difficult topics and decisions to the unforeseeable future because they have no impact to your life.
Simply put, privilege is, among other things, being blinded by your own comfort.
(And let's clarify a bit! Most of us have some sort of privilege in our lives, and we shouldn't really feel bad about it! In fact, having privileges is, from a purely selfish point of view, a very good thing. But what we should do is to keep track of our privileges. To try and understand them, and act knowing how they affect us and the world around us. We should stop assuming that the world shaped by our privileges is the same world everyone else lives in, and that the position we occupy is the one where everyone else is, or has the option of being.) |
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| Shoes |
[Aug. 12th, 2010|10:22 am] |
Motherfucker! Boy howdy, am I annoyed.
A female coworker arrived to the office today, wearing these cool steampunky shoes. They had some some heel but not enough to actually stand out, and neat kind of strap-and-button strips wrapping over the top. Simple and classy.
A (female, this is important) coworker exclaimed that the shoes were very beautiful. Another chimed in and said they were very pretty. I added that I'd noticed the shoes too, and that the pragmatic but elegant design was really neat. At that point I was cut off by a coworker (the in-chimer) who laughed and said "Oh stop it, you're a man. What do you know about shoes?"
Just like that. Interrupting me.
Yes. What do I know about shoes? Other than that I've used them fuckers for 26 years. Why would I be hindered in shoe-savvy by my penis? Too busy jerking off to inspect the finer details of shoes, eh? And it's not like I tried to offer some totally whacked out opinions about the shoes. My comment was, according to the two other coworkers (female, I should add, so they SURELY KNEW ABOUT SHOES HURR HURR), spot on. So it clearly wasn't that I was spewing some shoelogical nonsense. I was cut off purely because men can't talk about shoes. And certainly not fancy lady-shoes! Because men couldn't POSSIBLY understand!
Raargh. |
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| Persona(l) matters |
[Aug. 6th, 2010|02:12 pm] |
Was supposed to post this a while ago but didn't. Let's remedy the situation!
Life keeps chugging along. I’m mentally preparing for the upcoming excavation treks to the National Library and the Helsinki University Library (and possibly Aalto University Library as well). I think I’ll wait after Ropecon though. Have to finish writing (well, start writing and then finish, technically) one article and one review before that. And it’s not like I’d be able to do anything very omg-serious-productive anyway in this blasted heat.
Anyway! My current job is even less stressful than I had anticipated. The amount of work I do here in a week would be probably correspond to something like half a day’s work in my previous occupation.
That is to say, I do have my hands full here. It’s just a different sort of “hands full”. In my previous work if something needed to be done, it needed to be done RIGHT EFFING NOW. Or preferably it should be done already! Here I have a lot more leeway. I have to produce results but the timespan I have for that is a lot longer, and the tasks are mostly very easy, so unlike in the previous job, I don’t have to learn an entire new skillset before completing each task.
Funny. But also a nice change of pace.
Slower pace means I have time to do stuff other than work. Mostly it means I write articles or, soon-ish, study like hell and write an essay. So, um, slower pace means more work, actually, now that I think about it.
Uhh...
Maybe a better way to put it is: Slower pace means I can sometimes take a break from work and do something else entirely! That was not an option before, when I either worked or tried to unwind from work, with no in-between states.
Taking breaks means I can do things like creating a new gaming blog! Ok, not purely a gaming blog. But a mostly-gaming blog! I launched it a while ago to see how it would take off. And it did, somewhat. Please check it out!
I pondered over which blogging service to use for it and settled for Blogger. It seems to be the de rigueur for video game blogs, and so far it has worked pretty well, but I’m still a bit worried that there’s some hugely important setting I’ve overlooked. Maybe everyone else sees the blog lime-green or without entries or in 3D. It’s impossible to know! So if you see something weird, please notify me!
I’ll probably do cross-posting between Fly Again, Hero and Persona Matters, so you won’t miss out on much even if you don’t check it regularly, but I do intend to keep the more trivial game-related musings exclusive to Persona Matters.
I have no intention of fading out Fly Again, Hero*, of course, I just felt that there was a need for a blog that’s a little less about me and my mundane thoughts and more about something in particular. And I like having an address I can give to people without having to think “Oh, god, my latest entry was about a headless corpse.”
I would hate to make this journal friends only, but I do admit I’m a bit reluctant to tell about Fly Again, Hero to random people. I’d feel self-conscious about pushing my personal journal to almost-complete strangers. It doesn’t require much in the way of google-fu to find one’s way here if you have read my writings anywhere else, or have the savvy to track me down via other journals that link here and are advertised more widely. But if you know what to look for, then I trust you deserve to read these pages. If not, then maybe the contents of this blog would be Too Much (or Too Little) Information anyway.
Anyway! Persona Matters! Please visit!
* In fact, I think ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) aonekosama’s impending Japan Tour of Awesome will somewhat increase my rate of posting. I’ve noticed I spend horrible amounts of time in front of a computer when I’m left alone.
Drawings will most likely also make a comeback. Not having anyone to speak to and Do Stuff With directly shows in my output of uploaded drawings. I have an insane backlog of over a year worth of journal comics and doodles. Not much digitally drawn, though. Somehow the last two years have been almost exclusively about physical media. And even more specifically about drawing with pens. I can’t even remember the last time I used a pencil. I should, but for whatever reason I don’t. Maybe we’ll see a pencil renaissance sooner or later. |
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