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And so after a headsup from me and a moderate tube journey, the lass swans blithely into a shop in London and buys her copy of Mass Effect 3 Collectors Edition over the counter. Which should keep her out of mischief for a week or so...
    • Rae Just... how?!
    • Peter  How? I did some online research and found that CEX was one of the shop chains that are selling ME3 CE over the counter. Mam'selle took a tube trip over to Uxbridge and Bob's your auntie (after the gender reassignment surgery)
    • Aaran Nice work chap!
    • Peter  Merci mon brave! She's currently bunkered in her room dreading encountering spoilers for the game. I can't even flick thru the game art book in case I inadvertantly drop hints as to what is to come...
    • Aaran Dude, harsh. If your feeling brave you could make up some spolers and "accidentally" drop them hmmm. Shep gets shot in the eye and looses a leg half way through the game and spends the rest of the game looking like an angry pirate?
    • Peter Nahh, wouldn't do that. One of our differences is that I don't mind spoilers for films, games, things like that - I like the artistry of the narrative anyway. But she relishes immersive experiences so much more if shes clueless about whats coming next... and I can get behind that.
    • Rae Peter, she would kill you. She would kill you dead.
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But there is no way in hell I'm going to miss Iron Sky. Nazis on the Moon! Flying Saucers! President Sarah Palin! It's a film that breaks plausability with the poster, so it's going to be one of those films where I go "Of course you're going to defeat the Nazis with Zombie!FDR in a killer wheelchair and his personal army of ninja bears, how else could it be done?"

So, who's with me?
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Paramour got teary-eyed when I presented him with ten meters of dull grey ethernet cable. Then we went out for dinner and came home to watch toy story 3 for the 4th time (cried, again). It was cool.
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If you've ever been to a meeting or a conference open to the public, You'll know what I'm talking about. It happens every time. That one person who asks an obvious/irrelevant/stupid/insulting question and will not shut up and keeps talking about it for five minutes while the speakers pretend to be taking it seriously and everyone else is quietly facepalming. This one took the cheese for not only being insulting, but also completely incomprehensible. It didn't help that this was at the tail end of a six hour conference which had mostly entailed four historians sniping at each other (mental note, never put an Israeli historian, two German historians and an opinionated English historian in the same room) and no air con, so everyone was pretty much falling asleep in their chairs.

I have no idea what the question was, only it started off with the guy trying to prove that Jews are a biological race, wandered into Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene and finally ended on the note that the Wannsee conference house was next door to a house by a famous Jewish expressionist painter. It took about ten minuters, during which I had the honour of seeing one fo my tutors doing a massive facepalm. Watching the historians trying to find a coherent responce to the words salad was also entertaining.

Seriously, that's the third time in a row that our conferences have been gatecrashed by at least one idiot. Can we have some sort of door policy? Screen for morons or something?
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Okay, I've finally got the point of the game where I'm running out of palces to go and am realising I have to get back to the main plot soon. So it's a good time to say what I think.

It is awesome.

Not quite Mass Effect awesome, the plot isn't that high and the endless choices you have with your character kinda ends up being pointless because there's no way for the game world to interact with your choices (again, unlike Mass Effect). However, the fact that I have to go all the way up to my FAVOURITE GAME OF ALL TIME to find it lacking is a damn good sign :)

I'm not sure if I can say it's better than Fallout 3. It's better in many ways, but I love post-apocalyptic settings and had Mirek to play with (before he moved to ME and refused to come out), so it's a purely personal bias. Objectively Skyrim is better.

I also give it major pointers for not being a totaslly derivatve setting. Yes there's elves and dragons and stuff, but the fact that it's been set in a very particular part of the Elder Scrolls world means it's got a lot of originality, in this case, the world of vikings.

I love vikings.

It feels very real. I mean, there's all these people and they have their own politics and stuff. The people who aren't Nords (the viking people) have to deal with discrimination (the situation of the Kajiit people is very reminiciant of attitudes towards the Roma), there's a civil war taking place between the Empire, who are pretty politically dodgy and allied with some even worse people, and the Stormcloaks, who are pretty cool freedom fighters, but a bit 'Nordland for the Nords'.

 But the bit I liked the most was with the situation of women. This is why I love vikings. For the period in IRL, if you had to be a woman anywhere in Europe, you could do worse than vikingland. Women could hold land, could rule, could fight. And Skyrim really takes than and goes with it. None of this 'it's medieval times so we can treat women like shite' from so many video games. Women rulers, women soldiers, women fighters, pretty equal opportunities while still have enough limit so we can see the society's perception of a woman's role: not half bad, but not there yet.

Also, the only skimpy costumes I can think of is that of the forsaken women, and seriously, pay attention because this is the only time I am going to use the equivelancy argument: The forsaken women wear fur bikinis, the forsaken men wear fur loincloths. All this tells me if that they like sporting beachwear in arctic climates. Normally I hate the equivelancy argument, but in this case it stands. Men and women are poisted the same, they fight the same, the camera doesn't pan to portions of their anatomy (unless you want to point it there yourself).

Also, you get female undead. The undead are these withered lurching zombie tomb-guardy things, and yeah, it makes sense to have female ones. This is just about the first time I've seen that happen. Fuck you Bioware and your 'how can we make female aliens? Give them boobs and lipstick?' No. Fuck you and the EA horse you rode in on. Skyrim has female guardian-mummy-zombies. What's your excuse?
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That's the first time I've translated anything that directly insults the person I'm translating it for.
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Show stuff like this, and watch your female demographic explode.
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Week 1: Goldhagen.
Week 2: Weikart.
Week 3: Katz.

WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??!

(for the uninitiatied: Goldhagen is a hack, Weikart is a creationist and Katz was so desperate to disprove the gypsy genocide he accidentally disproved the Holocaust)
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Telephone: *ring ring*

Me: Hello?

Who The Hell Is This: Hello, is this Mrs Manson?

Me: No, I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.

WTHIT: No, it's the right number, is this 147c?

Me: No, you have the wrong number.

WTHIT: No, it's the right number!

Me: Whatever. Fuck off.

*hangs up*

*Three seconds later*

Telephone: *ring ring*

Me: *oh crap* Hello?

WTHIS: Hello, is this Mrs Manson?

Me: No it isn't! You have the wrong number!

WTHIT: NO IT'S THE RIGHT NUMBER! HOW CAN IT BE THE WRONG NUMBER!

Me: I don't know and I don't care! It's not my problem! Go away!

*hangs up*

*Three seconds later*

Telephone: *ring ring*

Me: *I can't believe this* Hello?

WTHIS *sing-song voice* Helloooo Mrs Maaansooon-

Me: Is that you again? What the hell do you want! This is the wrong number!

WTHIS: You climb walls for a living.

Me: The Fuck?

*hangs up, pulls the plug from the phone*

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS I DON'T EVEN
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1999: South Park the Movie released. Showed/implied Saddam Hussain dying.

2004: Team America World Police released. Showed Kim Jong-il dying.

2006: Saddam Hussain died.

2011: Kim Jong-il died.

CONICIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

*please be making new comedy movie showing Ayatollahs being run over by bulldozer*
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1999: South Park the Movie released. Showed/implied Saddam Hussain dying.

2004: Team America World Police released. Showed Kim Jong-il dying.

2006: Saddam Hussain died.

2011: Kim Jong-il died.

CONICIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

*please be making new comedy movie showing Ayatollahs being run over by bulldozer*
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http://neo-prodigy.livejournal.com/1016512.html#comments

No seriously. Ignore the god-awful pun in the title and look. It's damn funny.
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http://neo-prodigy.livejournal.com/1016512.html#comments

No seriously. Ignore the god-awful pun in the title and look. It's damn funny.
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And Lo, the Skull Bearer felt herself lonely, for Paramour was out of town and the television was down, and the Skull Bearer went onto Youtube, and laughed her arse off at videos you should really watch because they are hilarious. And then there were garlic and herb flatbreads with dips, and vanilla pudding in chocolate sauce.

And all was right in the world since the Skull Bearer came from a family of psychotherapists and had been through this shit already.

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