| I am a ridiculous person. |
[May. 19th, 2012|12:34 am] |
slowest weekday at work since the holidays. I should totally write.
after texting her with my filthy, fucked-up thoughts about a woman in the office cafeteria (leopard-print shoes), Aly told me I should write some really filthy, fucked-up porn, and I've actually had a filthy, fucked-up, cyberpunk body-horror porn pitch ready to go for a while, but my dad reads this over on LJ, and he's a gentle soul, so when I do it I guess it'll go behind a cut. and I will do it, but I don't think that'll get posted until I've done something he and my mom can actually read without wishing they could perform a 107th trimester abortion. although if I didn't get quietly poisoned after that crying-while-puking-while-turned-on conversation with Sean and Pam on Facebook a couple years ago ("HI MOM HI DAD THE ARISTOCRATS"), I'm probably safe from the long parental knives.
anyway. hi Mom. hi Dad. this isn't the fucked-up horror porn.
I work for a company that has a full-scale Sysco-stocked Aramark-run cafeteria, like a good-sized college, that serves breakfast, lunch, and early dinner, and since I never went to college to speak of, this was a novel and joyous experience for the first six months of my job. the food isn't always great, but it's cheap and it's plentiful and if the selections of the day are ill-advised, there's a grill counter for cheesesteaks and a salad bar for salmon and spinach and fuck you sometimes I like to eat a little light, okay? I've got a tempermental stomach. don't judge.
and to make it even better, every Thursday, a local BBQ restaurant and a local Greek joint alternate taking over the lunch counter. the BBQ joint brings pulled pork, chicken, and brisket, and the Greek joint does gyros, souvlaki and spanakopita. they're both really good.
this Thursday, a Greek week, was a particularly shitty day, I just wanted to be writing or cleaning and organizing or driving needles into the palm of my hand with a tack hammer or basically doing anything I actually gave a damn about. by the time I got down to the cafeteria, the Greeks had temporarily run out of gyro meat, so a bunch of people were clustered around the counter in the fashion of starved dogs, staring mournfully at the empty space where the gyro trough usually sat like we'd never be fed again. (chicken souvlaki? Greek salad? fuck your eyes.)
my gaze was drawn from my comically-oversized fantasy novel and locked onto this overwhelmingly adorable woman in hip-hugging jeans wiggling from side to side in unselfconscious boredom and hunger -- not unlike a child vaguely needing to pee, but more sexy and less impending terror of performing clean-up duties -- and I found myself doing that thing where you are looking at their butt but you're not looking at their butt, don't be absurd, you're standing there reading a comically-oversized fantasy novel, you've obviously given up on ever fucking again, but you're totally looking at their butt with occasional surreptitious glances at their copper penny hair framing their pixie-like features, and their half-exposed toes in leopard-print heels, and for those endless four minutes I forgot all about the gyro in my desire to stick my face in her ass for half an hour.
and then she got a gyro with everything on it and attacked it like it killed her parents and I had to sit with a convenient Linux sysadmin blocking my line of sight so I wouldn't get caught lustfully watching her lustily eat.
god I can't wait to see her on BBQ day.
(this one was for Aly, who received the text message play-by-play of this instance of degeneracy, and Jamie, for the butt-lookin'.)
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/734992.html. |
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| oops |
[May. 17th, 2012|11:27 pm] |
today work was pretty much nonstop horseshit saved only by pictures of fishnet-clad butts showing up on my phone and then I went to dinner with my coworkers where I ate all the food and drank all the sangria and now I'm going to bed feeling like an unacceptable jackass like I always do after being social. so I have nothing for you today.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/734754.html. |
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| not write clever today |
[May. 17th, 2012|12:17 am] |
ran really hard into a wall today. not literally, just on the doing-any-goddamn-thing front. did I write? did I clean? did I gym? did I hell.
earlier today, I thought about writing about the things I actually love and why, which quickly degenerated in my head into a grade school essay written on wide-rule paper ("I love Dungeons & Dragons and comic books and puppies and kitties and hedgehogs and food and pretty girls in various states of dress and undress") so while I may tackle a purely positive post at some point, apparently my subconscious isn't ready to not mock me for liking things. that seems like the kind of thing I can chip away at in short bursts of activity while I'm at my job, which is where I'll be from Thursday to Saturday. historically, going to work has a tendency of derailing my projects. I don't know how people manage to serve two masters til their work pays for itself.
I thought about using some writing prompts. so I looked at the Livejournal "question of the day" post prompts which bored me to sickness, and abandoned that for now.
I dug out my copies of Lynda Barry's "What It Is" and "Picture This" and pretended I was going to skip this exercise in favor of reading them; instead I'll read them after the exercise, because reading about creativity instead of actually creating something is avoidance at its finest. I really like those books, though, and you'll probably see me work from them at some point. Lynda Barry is, after all, Queen of the Universe.
like many gamers, I swear by the power of randomness as a prompt for creativity. or I'd like to. my gaming crap has been gathering dust. I love dice and tables and the results I get from them, and letting my imagination fill in the unspoken bits. I could get countless posts out of working with various RPGs and tables, I'm sure. this ongoing project could definitely benefit from some form of gameification if I'm going to get past the "oh god it's ten pm and I haven't written anything and I have work tomorrow" stage.
here's what I'm going to do next week: I have this copy of Games Workshop's quirky early '80s superhero RPG, Golden Heroes. basically a Gamma World variant that was cooked up when GW thought they might be able to score the Marvel license, then quickly made generic (in a weird British superhero comic sort of way) when that deal fell through, you'd roll your character's superpowers on a table, come up with your character concept, and then have to justify the powers you'd rolled to fit them into that concept. if you couldn't justify a given power for the character's concept, you couldn't keep it. the character creation example shows several entirely different characters created from one set of power rolls, most of which don't use all the powers rolled. starting Sunday, I'll use Golden Heroes to create seven superheroes, one per day, from the same set of randomly-rolled powers. I'll even make the rolls using the nearly thirty-year-old dice that came in the box.
so that ought to be some nerdy brain-stretching fun, and if it's productive and entertaining enough, I can see doing some similar rpg-based projects subsequently. I don't want to turn this into an all-gaming all-the-time blog, but it would be foolish not to use the tools and toys I already have. I don't know if this will be all I do next week, but at the very least, it'll make a good warmup.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/734595.html. |
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| of course, once you start, it can be difficult to stop. |
[May. 16th, 2012|01:57 am] |
day three, and that needle looks really, really good. I bet I could take one day sort-of off, not even off, really, just take a nap and then start writing when I get up. good thing my bed is covered in stuff from cleaning.
I guess this is me, clearing out a lot of the mental backlog I've had for a while. all those times over the years I said I was going to blog more frequently, this is the stuff I was going to write, refined through the psychic distillery into its brightest, cruelest form.
but that is the point of the exercise, really: to make breaking the addiction into the new addiction. truly, there is no zealot like a convert.
I can't say, well, I'm going to start blogging again, but I want to get started on a Monday, all good things should start on Mondays, I'll have more readers on Monday, everyone firing up their browser and sucking down that first coffee of the week, no, no, fuck no, fuck you, fuck that, no, you have to start now. you have to do it now. I'm learning that I can't ramp things up slowly, I have to start when I get the urge to start, or it just won't happen. case in point, yesterday I said I'm going to write today and I'm going to go to the gym today, that was at nine in the morning, and the next thing I know it's seven in the evening and I'm taking a nap, even though I'm all like "are you serious? taking a nap at seven in the evening? that's not a nap, that's going to bed early, and you haven't written, unless you count that extensive forum post where you invited people to pay to hit and/or make out with you, and you haven't gone to the gym, and by the time you wake up, it won't be too late to go to the gym but you know you still won't."
Mark plans; God laughs.
so I don't love my job; what do I love? I love this. the words spilling from the brain faucet. this is the only thing I've ever truly loved doing and I hate that I love my fear more. from my mind to my hands to your eyes. I'm a creature of text, as I said. this is how I show that I love you.
many times I've found myself in a hole and said, the only way I'm going to get out of this hole is to write my way out of it, and then I've found that the hole isn't so bad, I don't need to escape this, I can make something out of this hole and then the hole won't be a hole anymore, it'll be home. but it doesn't matter what you hang on the walls or how big the TV is, the hole is a hole. get comfortable enough, and they won't even have to dig you a grave. they'll bury you in it if you let them.
people say to me, and I do not fault them for this, "you're as good as X. you should write a novel. you should do stand-up. you should do spoken word." and I totally appreciate that. I don't praise myself a lot (understatement of my year, perhaps), so I'm a sucker for any external praise. but people say that without realizing the work that went into being a Neil Gaiman, a Henry Rollins, a Louis CK, a Cat Valente. Gaiman was a freelance journalist long before Good Omens and Sandman; the only reason anyone wanted to hear Rollins speak before he was Rollins was because he was that dude from Black Flag; CK hustled for a couple decades and had multiple false starts before he truly broke; and from what I've managed to infer, Catherynne Valente wrote herself out of a truly miserable hole. people don't know, or they don't remember, that every path to success is individual; that whatever path is taken must, in fact, be traversed, not bypassed; and that not everyone succeeds.
praise is also poisonous. many professional writers will warn you not to show off works in progress, because the praise you get for your work in progress is, to your sad, love-starved writer's brain, just as good as the praise you'd get for a finished work, and so there's no real sense in continuing the work. I've had more false starts this way...no, I know, it's okay, it happens to lots of writers, but it still makes me feel inadequate.
at a convention where he and Neil Gaiman were guests of honor, Gene Wolfe once said to me -- okay, to be fair, he said this to an audience which I was a part of, but it spoke to me -- (paraphrased) "you can't compare yourself at the beginning of your career to a Neil Gaiman at the height of his powers, because you won't win that fight. you'll just put down the pen and never go back to it. just compare yourself to yourself." which is great advice, though hell if I take it. I compare myself to bad writers all the time. fucking hell, man, if these hacks can make a career out of it, even my garbage is better than their gold, I should be able to crank it out on the regular, make my seed on a couple of shit screenplays and never go back to a regular job again if I don't want to. but it's not enough to be good, you have to actually do the work. this is why the dull, plodding kids got the As just as often as your hardworking genius friends and you squeaked by with Cs by the skin of your teeth and the grace of your guidance counselor.
the truth is, once I get started, writing is the easiest thing in the world for me. I have thoughts, I make them into words, I put those words on paper or on the screen, you read them, at least one of us is pleased. what's hard for me is starting. because what if you're not pleased? what if I'm not? what if I expose too much of myself, and you don't like me anymore? the biggest struggle, recently, has been realizing that I am just too fucking emotionally remote. doritos and comic sans and the like. it may be saleable and sympathetic but by god it's dull. there's words I want to get out, that I've wanted to get out for a while, but I guess the mental sphincter isn't quite loosened up enough yet. I'll get there. I promise.
true confessions time: I wrote most of this earlier on Tuesday, shortly after finishing the last entry, and I think I'm going to bed now. it's not cheating, I swear.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/734436.html. |
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| I do not love my voice. |
[May. 15th, 2012|02:20 am] |
day two of trying to break my addiction to not-writing cold turkey. I guess this is like that second day where you don't drink or smoke, but you look at that bottle or that pack of cigarettes really fucking hard.
I've got a minor case of the over-its at work. not that I'm not enjoying the work, learning things, or enjoying the learning process, I just don't re-enact that one musical number from Annie in my head every morning ("I think I'm gonna like it here!") anymore. and I do feel some crankiness and disillusionment over being part of the great and awful machine that perpetuates two of the worst parts of the internet: the content sweatshop, and the comments section.
obviously I wasn't really made to work for a living. I burn out too fast and I care too much about things that have nothing to do with what I'm being paid to do.
I should explain this not-writing-as-addiction thing. I saw this post on the blog of an artist I respect, talking about her neighbor, a veteran of AA, framing her artist's block as an addiction to not making art. and he said, when I started AA, they made me do ninety meetings in ninety days, and she decided that's what she had to do. and I decided that's what I have to do. this slowly-ramping-up-into-things doesn't work for me. I have to write every day, for ninety days, and post it, so you all can keep me honest. if I scribble an idea on an index card or a sticky note, I'll take a photo of it and post it. I'll post excerpts from my notes file(s), from my game designs, from stories and novel outlines and even fucking forum posts, that's writing, right? I'll do anything short of typing FUCK one thousand times and posting it. new material, every day, for ninety days, and beyond, world without end, god fucking dammit. I want a coin at the end of this.
you see, I am afraid of my own voice. I hate my own voice. I'm not in love with my own voice. not enough to scream LOOK AT ME! LOVE ME! at the top of my lungs, like a performer has to, every day, louder than everyone else, to make a living.
I looked over last year's comedy routine and hated it. it made me sick. I mean, yes, fine, you all liked it and thought it was hilarious, but I look back and it's so fucking disconnected and impersonal. doritos and comic sans, for fuck's sake. I can't go on stage with that, not with Bill Hicks on one shoulder and Patrice O'Neal on the other yelling PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART in both ears. five, ten years from now, people are going to be talking about Patrice O'Neal like they talk about Hicks, and it will be long overdue. Patrice was one problematic motherfucker but goddamn if he didn't play from the heart and I have to respect a man who made Lisa Lampanelli miserable. "I wasted more tears on him than some boyfriends," she said. good, you suck, quit, disappear. I've heard funnier women than you in line for coffee in suburban fucking Maryland. I've heard funnier women than you at the DMV. I've heard funnier women than you at the free clinic. put those glorious bitches on TV.
but I can't in good conscience talk about snacks and typefaces when this world is as sick as it is. I want to say: do you ever feel like everything is a lie and we're living in that era where history repeats itself as farce before it repeats itself as tragedy and you know there has to be a better way to live but you can't quite see the shape of it? me too.
I would say: I work in IT, which is probably self-evident. I've been in IT on and off for over ten years, almost five straight now after bouncing between IT, customer service, and retail. I spent nearly four years on the overnight shift maintaining the shittiest, sleaziest, reddest of red-light web sites, the people who don't even make their own porn, they just scrape images from other people's sites and make money off redirections and ad impressions, the people whose sites show up when you misspell "pussy-gushing vinyl fuck nuns" with two "n"s or one "s" and end up with a recurring $50/month payment funding Chechen insurgents for the rest of your life across three different credit cards.
and I would say: about a year ago I rejoined the daywalkers and got a job with a company you've definitely heard of, where I support the infrastructure that perpetuates the two worst parts of the public web: the content mill, and the comments section. but the food in the cafeteria is cheap and filling and sometimes there's free beer and it's not like I was doing anything else with my life.
and I would say: I used to go in to work at seven at night and go home at seven in the morning and I'd get stuck behind the same pickup every morning with bumper stickers that said "NOBAMA" and "DON'T RE-NIG IN 2012" and "I'LL TAKE MY GUNS AND MY FREEDOM AND YOU CAN KEEP THE CHANGE" and you know what, I'll take the hospitals, schools, and the fire department, and that guy can keep his part-time job at the Citgo and give me a full tank on #12.
and I would say: not that I'm in love with the president. he seems like a better human being than the last one, not to damn with faint praise, but he's still a product of the same system that puts them all in place and gives us the choice between the terrible and the horrible every four years. Coke or Pepsi, Domino's or Pizza Hut, Republican or Democrat? it barely matters. the same policies will be perpetuated. the same people will be assassinated. and they'll all go to dinner at the same expensive restaurants together and have a good laugh about it.
I would say: we had eight years of a hand-puppet of a man whose most distinctive trait was a smug disinterest in the world beyond his nose, put into power by naked judicial fiat, who at the bidding of his masters used a rubberstamp legislature to expand executive power and by now we're so traumatized we don't know what legal government looks like anymore. and now we have one faction of government who have made it their single and solitary goal, at any cost, to delegitimize the other faction, to block it at every turn, to pull that football away from the poor, hapless, bald-headed political party. and then they'll all go to dinner again and have another good laugh about it.
I would say: they have made the business of running a nation into a spectator sport. they've made it into a football game and who wins it, not what happens afterwards. FUCK YEAH MY GUYS WON. congratulations, they raised your taxes without raising taxes on the guys who make a hundred times what you do, and they denied you health care and consumer protections, and the books in your kids' schools are twenty years out of date when they're not "teaching the controversy." FUCK YOU, FAGGOT, WHAT ARE YOU, SOME KIND OF SOCIALIST. well as a matter of fact...
but I do not love my voice. not yet.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/733962.html. |
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| I think you think I don't like you... |
[May. 13th, 2012|03:16 pm] |
...and that might be true. there are people I don't like, and I don't make significant effort to hide it from them, though I don't see the point in antagonizing them by bringing it up all the time. if you really don't like someone, and you're not forced to deal with them due to external circumstances, I've found that the best way to deal with them is to just ignore them. and there are a lot of people I don't like. it's safe to say I don't like most people, or more accurately, I'm indifferent to them at best, and more often mistrustful of them.
but more likely is that I do like you. I like you just fine. I like you a lot, even. I enjoy your company and value your perspective and our time spent together. I'm not purposefully avoiding you. well, I'm not purposefully avoiding you because I don't like you.
some people, having had problematic relationships with their blood families, find solace in fandom or The Scene, creating families-of-choice that play the support system role in their lives. I'm glad that's worked for the people who it worked for, but for me, fandom and The Scene are the problematic relatives. I never felt well-served by those communities and I never felt strong loyalty to or from them. people in them, definitely, but not the communities as a whole. I've never bought into anything wholeheartedly enough to receive that sense of belonging. I probably come off as very standoffish because of it.
the fact is that I'm kind of introverted and anxious. a lot. I don't leave the house much, and I don't invite people over because I haven't developed the knack of having people in my living space. I got into a bad habit of hiding from people and the world when I moved back in with my parents in my early 20s, and whereas it might be fairly common now for people to move back in with their families at that age for whatever reason, in the early 2000s it was a mark of failure. it may still be a mark of failure, but that mark seems more common now. always ahead of the curve, that's me. that's part of why I'm so interested in van living, because I figure that I, like most Americans, will be unemployed and unemployable within a decade or so and I'm just trying to get a head start on survival techniques.
so I lost a good portion of what you might consider my social years to unemployment and shame, and by the time I moved out again, I'd gotten used to not Going Out and not really having A Group of Friends, and doing the things I enjoy on my own and on my own time.
which isn't to say that I miss the Good Old Days of Going Out and getting hammered and dancing til dawn, because I don't feel like those days were necessarily so great in retrospect as they may have felt at the time. and I don't necessarily want to go back to clubbing and parties and conventions. I've seen what happens to people who spend their later years trying to re-enact or prolong their youth. it's not pretty, and while I don't judge those people harshly, I'm not comfortable with it and don't feel the need to do it myself.
I am SO incredibly boring these days. I don't really leave my apartment if it isn't for work, books, or food. I work in IT, and my job title has the word "analyst" in it. on weekends I trawl used book stores for eye-catching paperbacks, graphic novels, and vintage roleplaying game manuals. speaking of which, tabletop gaming is one of my favorite hobbies, which has been described as half an hour of fun packed into four hours, with requisite paperwork offering all the joy of double-book accounting, but that's okay, because my anxiety often flares up so badly that I can't really participate in it, so instead I just hoard the books.
much of my anxiety is abject terror of bothering people and intruding on their time and their space. in my mind, my time is flexible; yours is sacrosanct. in my mind, my door is open at all times; yours should be knocked upon politely, and quietly, so quietly as to not be heard, and then you don't have to feel bad for not answering, because I didn't knock loud enough, and I don't have to feel bad for not being answered, because you were obviously too busy to hear, and that's fine, I can dig it, you're probably working on your novel or painting or music or coding project, or taking a crap, or banging, you lucky so-and-so! my point is that you, that is, the you-in-my-head, have a life that has progressed perfectly well without me. that's awesome.
you could always call me, but as soon as phones became more capable of transmitting text and images than speech, I stopped answering most calls. I'm on a phone plan that provides unlimited texts and internet and five hundred call minutes a month, and I've got over five thousand rollover minutes. I'm a creature of text, both consuming and producing it. asynchronous communication is more my speed.
my point, and I do have one, is that I don't hate you. I love you and I miss you and you're often in my thoughts. I hope this finds you well.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/733899.html. |
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| happy goddamn April |
[Apr. 11th, 2012|02:43 am] |
here is March:
I had the honor of being part of John & Steph's wedding party. the ceremony was lovely (and quick!), the food was delicious (and plentiful!), many friends were seen and partied amongst, and a good time was had by all.
spent a week in Islamorada with Claire, Jose, Caitlin, Jon, Midori, and Derek. the three couples took the bedrooms, leaving me to sleep on the couch in Claire's living room. this may sound shitty, but as the living room opens onto the screened-in balcony, I got to sleep in open air pretty much every night, so I'm pretty sure I got the best room in the house. if we do this again next year, I'm planning on dragging the futon mattress out to the balcony and sleeping out there, surrounded by citron candles and slathered in bug repellent (see below).
for the most part, all I did was take outdoor naps, eat rich and novel food, and read. I finished Shadow & Claw, the first half (two-fifths?) of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun cycle, which for all its problematic aspects, is still one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read.
also I petted a manatee.
spent Friday night in Hollywood, FL, which can best be described as Niagara Falls but warm. checking into or out of a hotel makes me feel like I'm wearing grown-up drag and scamming someone. I can't possibly be thirty-four -- I'm fifteen and pulling the most convincing con job ever. but as somewhat sleazy hotels go, the Ramada Downtown Hollywood was one of the nicest I'd ever been in. I didn't have much time to check it out, but the room was clean, the shower functional, everything in the room worked, there was an outdoor bar and pool area and colorful art on the outside walls and a more-than-passable Japanese/Thai joint next door. I could not possibly complain and wouldn't mind spending more than a single night there.
did a little evening exploration, and from my very limited experience I decided that the entire Miami-Ft Lauderdale metroplex is a Saints Row game waiting to happen, and downtown Hollywood is the post-intro area. as I walked around I thought about how Alex or Christian (for example) would find a bar, start drinking, and have new best friends by the end of the night, but by now you know that's not me: if a town has no bookstores, comic shops, or game stores, it doesn't hold much interest for me after I've secured sleeping arrangements and decided where to eat. so I went back to the hotel and read N.K. Jemesin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which was a really good first novel. I'm interested in seeing how the rest of the trilogy turns out, and how she develops as a writer.
spent most of Saturday at the Ft Lauderdale airport. it turns out that you can't check your bag and move on to the gates until a minimum of three hours before your flight, and so I sat in the lobby of the airport for four hours and read Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer. Published by White Wolf's Borealis imprint back in the mid-90s, I've seen copies of this book for years and after Jean recommended Spencer's work to me, I picked up a copy on a recent McKay's run. My expectations weren't astronomically high, but it felt like Stephen King trying to do Clive Barker and while it kept me occupied over seven hours at the airport, I don't feel compelled to hunt down more of Spencer's work. sorry, Jean!
I suffered almost no reflux the entire week I was in Florida, and I've been doing a little better on that front since getting back. I did, however, get eaten alive by some sort of mutant spider-skeeter that left my arms and legs covered with hives that still haven't entirely gone away. either that, or I've developed an allergy to living on this godforsaken planet. true story: self-care is comically low on my list of priorities. I blithely ignore things that I castigate my friends for not going to a doctor or ER for. it turns out that the answer to the classic children's riddle "why did the Argent cross the road?" is "when the pain of his hives made him whimper like a beaten dog in the middle of the night as he scratched them uncontrollably!" Marianne had suggested a Zyrtec & Zantac cocktail, which worked miraculously once I actually forced myself out of bed and down (and across!) the street to the CVS to buy the necessary pills, during which I counted my blessings: living within walking distance of a 24-hour drugstore; not having to choose between OTC allergy & digestion medication and eating decently until my paycheck arrived; the ability to walk the streets of my neighborhood at 4:30am unmolested by cop, criminal, or wannabe; that I could share my thoughts about a thoroughly banal experience with several hundred of my closest internet friends while having it.
and so, leaving out the boring, repetitive, and/or work-related parts, that was March.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/733333.html. |
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| like my job, need a vacation |
[Feb. 29th, 2012|11:01 pm] |
so I like my job, but it's hard to deny that the shifts are a bit crazy. we have the choice of either four ten-hour shifts Sunday through Wednesday, or three thirteen hour shifts (with a free "bonus hour" to make it up to forty) Thursday through Saturday. I'm working the latter. this is the direct opposite of my last job, where I worked one six hour shift (1-7am) on Wednesday, then three twelve hour shifts 7pm to 7am on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday overnights.
let's just make it clear right now that I don't miss the overnights. they played havoc on my health and my social life, and even though I still don't go out very often, "not very often" is more far frequent than "twice a year at best and dinner at my parents' every Sunday." in the past few months, I've been out at night about half a dozen times, a couple of times even on a work night! it's pretty much been glorious each time! there are people out there! my god, there are ladies out there! WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME~~
from late November to mid-January or so I worked ten to twenty hours overtime just about every week. for my skill level, I think I did really well over that span of time, some of which was worked entirely solo, and I'm proud of myself. all that overtime led to seriously fat paychecks and utter burnout. and the burnout is showing, I know that it is. when I burn out, it shows up as illness. first I had to take a mental health day early in the month, but the next week I finally succumbed to what I'm guessing was norovirus. there was intense stomach sickness and a weird lower abdominal pain bad enough that I called in sick to work and drove myself to the ER at four in the morning. they took my blood and gave me an IV and a CT scan wherein nothing was found. the pain lasted another two weeks and change, and actually got worse for a little while, which initially made me think it could be another kidney stone in the making, but now that it's faded I feel safe chalking it up to the agony of vomiting. up til the age of about twenty-one, kids can and do vomit ten times their abdominal volume and then run off to ride their bikes while playing Nintendo. then some time in your thirties you catch a bad stomach bug and the pain of having vomited once lays you up for over a week. to be fair, it was pretty explosive, and I'm way out of shape.
but I've digressed a bit. my point is that I am burnt out and I need to get out more and I definitely need a goddamn vacation. fortunately, I'm doing those things! tomorrow I'm planning on going to the Red Palace on H St after work to watch Pam's last burlesque performance in the DC area, this time for sure as she and Christian are moving to Chicago on March 16th. it sucks (for me, though not for them) that two of my favorite people are leaving DC, but it's awesome that I now have two more incentives to visit Chicago for the first time. Saturday, I'm going up to New Jersey for John's wedding. I've never worn a tuxedo, and I've never been a groomsman -- Saturday, I'll be doing both of those things! I'm excited! and then I'm going to Key West from March 11th to 17th with Claire, Caitlin, and Jon, same people as last year, but joined this time by Claire's boyfriend Jose, along with Midori and her man Derek. I expect another glorious week of lazy, sun-drenched excess is in the offing.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/732967.html. |
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| I don't care about video games |
[Jan. 18th, 2012|07:12 pm] |
recently, I beat two games.
I beat Batman: Arkham City. I enjoyed playing it as much as I played its predecessor, Arkham Asylum. as a Batman simulator, it's second to none. as a Batman story, I spent a lot of time gritting my teeth through the problematic plot and script and wincing at the hideous character designs. Paul Dini was one of the minds behind the timeless Batman animated series of the 1990s, and I think he may be one of those writers who benefits from a strong editorial hand, because left to tell an "adult" story, the misogyny is turned past eleven and the knob broken off. Arkham City's Batman is cruel and smug, and its Catwoman is cold and repugnant in her crass, oversexed sexuality. oh, and her sequences add nearly nothing to the game, story- or gameplay-wise. totally dull and pointless.
and then I beat Saints Row: the Third. it was an absolute joy to play, the promise of Grand Theft Auto III finally realized, so absurdly over the top it was like an Adult Swim cartoon come to life vs GTA4's mean-spirited "satire" and fun-annihilating side missions. where Arkham City presents the world of a superhero as a relentlessly grim, sweaty, mud-colored misery hole, Saints Row 3 paints a neon-colored story of cartoon supervillainy in bright colors, loud explosions, and stupid-smart hilarity. and as I completed the thoroughly mad final mission -- and it is thoroughly mad, by the way -- I realized it was the perfect capstone to my thirteen year love affair with video games.
my first "real" job was at Babbage's. my attempts at temping were pretty unsuccessful, as I had no idea how to behave around adults during my late teens and early twenties. I'd moved out of my parents' house when I got what seemed like a decent temp contract that I promptly lost, then I subsequently ran out of money and needed a job, so I got two: one at Waldenbooks, one at Babbage's, both in Montgomery Mall during the 1998 holiday season. then as now, I was obsessed with books, comics, roleplaying games, and video games, and this gave me a direct line to all three of those things. if I'd been at all clever, I would've just gotten a job at B. Dalton or Barnes & Noble, which would've given me a discount at Babbage's/Gamestop and access to B&N's ordering system, but I didn't figure out that trick until hitting the reset button on my life in late 2002.
before 1998 I was mostly a PC gamer. I got my first PC at 14 with the bulk of my bar mitzvah money, and came up through adolescence during the golden ages of EA, Lucasarts, and Microprose, cutting my teeth on Ultimas IV through VII, Wasteland, Neuromancer, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit The Road, Pool of Radiance, Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Star Control 2, Civilization, and other classics of that early to mid-90s era. current-day PC gamers probably think they have it hard when they have to update their video drivers on the regular, but I learned the ins and outs of computer use and abuse trying to squeeze that last stubborn kilobyte out of my computer's whopping 2MB of memory particular games to run, and the thought processes I learned in doing so are probably why I have a career in IT now, such as it is.
but I think what really did me in was discovering console emulation. this is when you have software running on your PC or Mac that tricks software written for a video game console into thinking it's running on the hardware it's supposed to be running on. long story short I figured out how to play Legend of Zelda and Chrono Trigger on my PC, which even in the late 90s could emulate a SNES or Genesis near-perfectly, and that was pretty much the end of me. I bought a Nintendo 64 when I moved out and a Playstation when I started work at Babbage's and here I am today.
fast forward to 2012 and at some point between now and back then, I stopped enjoying collecting video games. I developed a terrible habit while working for Babbage's, which a lot of people working video game retail probably do: there are always far more games than there is time to play them, of course, so I ended up reading lots of game reviews and speaking as if I'd played the games myself. and of course I bought lots of games as well, and never got around to playing them, either. I still have the copy of Final Fantasy Tactics that I bought when I got a Playstation, and it's never been played. and I kept doing this, across multiple generations of consoles and handhelds. I have more games now than I can ever hope to play. I'm not overwhelmingly interested in getting rid of them, but I'm equally uninterested in buying games just for the sake of having them.
I also stopped enjoying reading about video games. following the video game press hasn't been important to my livelihood for almost a decade, or entertaining for about half that long. my interests and the interests of the gaming mainstream don't really converge. the annual release, triple-A, big budget titles are sports games and military shooters. I like turn-based strategy and RPGs, quirky puzzle games, and clever actioners. I like single player games, the mainstream loves online multiplayer. I like games where you push virtual toy soldiers around a virtual tabletop and choose options from menus; the rest of the world likes games where you shoot aliens or brown people in the head. I believe in social justice and being nice to people who choose to spend their time with you; they believe in screaming racial and sexual slurs at the top of their lungs at strangers. not my scene.
so my handhelds mostly replaced my consoles. I've been carrying a handheld game system of some sort pretty much everywhere since my call center days at Erols Internet, where I'd bring my Gameboy Color to play during downtime. the GBC got replaced by a Gameboy Advance, then various iterations of the DS, and even a Playstation Portable. handhelds lend themselves to single-player games in the genres I enjoy. the games are less expensive than full-blown console games. they also generally require you to be in the same room when you play with other people, which tends to cut down on the gross behavior, at least among my extended circles.
and then I got an iPhone, and then I got an iPad, and those mostly replaced my handhelds. I was used to playing phone Solitaire, and I'd even wedged some Java games on my Nokia phones (Doom RPG ftw!) but the iPhone was a whole different world. when I bought my iPhone, I'd promised myself to stick with free games and apps only. then I bought Must Eat Birds! for a dollar, and that was yet another end of me. suddenly my DS and 24-game folder was just dead weight in my bag. suddenly Touch Arcade replaced Joystiq and Kotaku on my blog roll. suddenly it wasn't as fun to browse at loud, tawdry Gamestop or Best Buy, staring at walls and walls of games that don't even look like fun, searching for a way to burn thirty to sixty dollars.
I just realize now that I prefer, and have always preferred, smaller, quirkier games to the big budget triple-A titles. I buy XBox Live Arcade games more frequently than full retail releases. I buy the pay-what-you-want Humble Indie Bundles. I buy iOS, GBA, and DS games. there are games coming out that I'm looking forward to. I'm not quitting the hobby any time soon. I still love video games. but I don't care about them anymore. maybe it's because I love them that I don't care about them anymore.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/732909.html. |
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| fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster |
[Jan. 2nd, 2012|11:10 pm] |
played Arkham Horror with Megan and Phil today. each of us took two characters. I had Dexter Drake, the stage magician, and "Ashcan" Pete, hobo with a shotgun .45. we played with the Dunwich and Innsmouth boards, the Lurker at the Threshhold expansion, and Miskatonic Horror.
- I should explain: Arkham Horror is an automated board game that creates a story in the Lovecraftian mythos. the story emerges as you play the game. by "automated" I mean that parts of the game play itself, and you play against those automated bits. gates open, monsters emerge from them and roam the city. as things get more out of hand, the game environment changes -- certain locations become inaccessible, certain goals become more difficult to achieve. you cooperate with the other players to uncover clues, destroy monsters, close and seal the gates they emerge from, and eventually defeat the machinations of, or be annihilated by, the Elder God behind these events.
- the Colour out of Space came into play very early in the game, and nearly ended the game before it started. it's a monster with immunity to both physical and magical attacks and causes Sanity loss every time it moves.
- Dunwich only came into play towards the end of the game, Innsmouth and Miskatonic U. not at all.
- four out of six characters ended up making pacts with the Lurker. there's very little reason not to.
- the last time I played "Ashcan" Pete, he was a combat monster, shotgunning his way around the board with impunity. this time, he only got one good combat in, freeing Dexter Drake from Arkham Asylum by blowing away three monsters who had blocked him into that dead end. he had no clue tokens left by the end of the game, and was devoured by Nyarlathotep the Black Pharoah as He arose.
- Dexter was the last to go, using his blood pact with the Lurker to trade all his stamina for power tokens. he managed to knock all but the last three doom tokens off Nyarlathotep's track, then ran out of clue tokens and died.
- I'm not sure the expansions really add that much to the game if you're not playing on the regular. it's complex enough as it stands, but with the expansions we were using, there were relationship cards that told us how we knew each other. there were individual subplot cards that could provide benefit or penalty upon completion of their conditions. I felt almost as if they were distractions from actually completing the game. on the other hand, when Dexter Drake failed his subplot condition and was revealed as a Phony (as opposed to reaching his true potential as a Sorcerer), I felt a little more invested in the emergent narrative. but I didn't feel any of the extra stuff was necessary, and not a lot of it came into play. maybe I'd need to play more often and get bored with the core game to feel the need for expansions.
Talisman, on the other hand, has such a simple and repetitive core mechanic (roll, move, draw a card, do what it says) that it should always be played with the Reaper expansion and anything else that increases chaos and novelty on the board.
when I mentioned to Megan that the D&D boardgames are also cooperative, she expressed some interest. ONE OF US ONE OF US HAHAHAHAHAHA I mean I'm looking forward to breaking out Castle Ravenloft and giving it a shot in the near future, along with Seismic and some of the other unplayed dust-gatherers at my place.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/732578.html. |
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