Games for Girls?

Okay, here is a prime example of meaningless segregation: Ultimate Games for Girls 5. It insinuates that games otherwise are for boys, which is absurd. Further, if any boys wanted to play these games, they'd be emasculated for it - not really a great marketing tactic. Now let's take a good look at the games they think are for girls: Family Restaurant, Let's Ride, Fetch, Miss Popularity, and Pet School. Dig in, everybody; it's a veritable buffet of stereotypes! What kind of message does this send to girls? Games for girls: Fetch. Seriously. Family Restaurant - because if it's about food preparation, it has 'girl' written all over it - especially if 'family' is also involved. Hey girls, 'Let's Ride'! (I can't get over this). I can't believe that people buy this, but they must, because this is the 5th one they've made! I know the gaming market is generally geared towards boys, but this is no way to try and balance things out. I suspect games would be far more popular if they weren't geared toward specific crowds. Look at the popularity, for instance, of the Nintendo Wii - there's nothing divisive about the Wii; in fact, I think that they're trying to be as inclusive as possible. But this 'Games for Girls'? Come on, people, don't stoop to this! The games themselves may or may not be any good, but for goodness' sake, don't package them in such an ridiculous manner. Don't reward this kind of nonsense and maybe they'll stop doing it. That's my hope, anyways.

Keeping Up

It looks like I've dropped the ball (again) on this blogging thing. I know I was going to try to update more frequently, but honestly, sometimes I just don't have anything of merit to post. I've been filling my time with Christmas shopping, Christmas parties, Christmas concerts and Christmas decorating, which there isn't much to say about - the concerts and parties have been good, and the shopping and decorating have been a bit of a hassle, but nothing in particular jumps out that's worth mentioning because the only people who would care are the very same people who were in attendance. And of course, I can't talk about the shopping, because there are secrets involved, and don't be fooled - there are no secrets on the internet.

When I'm not Christmassing it up, I'm still playing LotRO (and I'm Christmassing it up there too). I've been trying to act with Christmas cheer and good spirits, and I've been trying to be generous and thoughtful to those I encounter in Middle Earth - moreso than usual, since 'tis the season and all. I have my own goals and ambitions, some with self-imposed deadlines, that I've been frantically working towards, but if someone needs me, I've been shelving that to go help them, and sometimes that works toward my own ends too, whether I knew that it would at the time or not. Things have a way of working out in the end.



This is a picture of the Bards of a Feather, the virtual band my character is a part of. This outfit is specially designed for the holiday concert line-up we have planned. In LotRO, you can play free-hand by hitting certain keys on your keyboard (this is customizable) while in 'music mode', or you can play music files that are written in abc notation. The musicality of this is somewhat limited in that there are no provisions for dynamics - everything is played at the same volume. Even still, quite a number of songs have been formatted into abc notation, and the results can be quite nice. I've tried my hand at transcribing various songs, with varying degrees of success, but for this Christmas season, I took it upon myself to create an original arrangement of Jingle Bells - the next step, I guess, would be to move into original composition. Technically, I've already done this, but I would like to do this for multi-part arrangements. It's very exciting, and I'm feeling inspired, so perhaps with some of my Christmas time off, I can set to work on this.

Division

Last post (earlier today) I had a happy little note to post. Nothing of substance came to mind. Now, however, I have found something (and what has it been, an hour or so?):

Introducing: Blackbird, the web browser made for people of a specific ethnic category. That's gonna fix everything, right? Instead of everybody being equal, here we have yet another instance of one category of people being propped up over everyone else. They do this sort of thing with minorities a lot, in an effort to ... I don't know, validate them? They take a level playing field and add division - this bothers me to no end. For instance, they made a women's television network. What for? All that does is imply that every single other station out there is a man channel, which is certainly not the case. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's hypocrisy, and that's what this sort of thing is - using segregation in an attempt to eliminate segregation is more than just stupidity. This Blackbird thing encourages its users to separate themselves from the internet even as it posits that the idea is to integrate them into the internet (because until then, they just couldn't manage, right? Please). It's almost exactly the same as the regular browser on which it's based, except with the added feature that the name reminds them of the colour people call their skin, and with features that point you to donation options for charities and the like that also focus on people who share their ethnicity of the intended users.

Why do people still, in this day and age, focus on completely superficial attributes when making judgments about other people? Why do we place extra importance on people who are a certain ethnicity when considering making products or founding charities? Why can't we just treat every stranger the same, and every person we know anything about according to his actions and merits?

Fortune Cookie

I had the good fortune to eat Chinese food for lunch today, and the even better fortune to have gotten from my cookie, well, the best fortune ever:

Your good nature will bring you unbounded happiness.

First off, the fortune flatters, and secondly, it tells me I deserve something precious. I always like it when my food is nice to me!

(Yes, I know this post is vacuous, but it's the best I've got today, and I want to try being more consistent with my posting habits. Plus it made me happy!)

Vegas, Baby!

So... we went to Vegas this past week, and we had quite a fun time. First we went to Edmonton to visit family, and then from there we went to Vegas for a few days. On our way to Edmonton, we saw a whale from our airplane window (which actually does make sense, as we had to switch planes in Vancouver). Once we were in Edmonton, we rented a car and proceeded to immediately get lost. We were doing fine (for being on the wrong road), looking for 34th Ave, when the sequence of off-roads started looking something like this: 32nd Ave, 9th St, 4th St, 10th St... At this point we decided Edmontonians can't count, and turned around to look for sanity. Once we were correctly on track to our destination, we saw a sequence where 19th Ave was between 23rd and 34th - this was also confusing. After consulting the map, I was able to verify that yes, this is actually what they meant when they were labeling their roads. Anyways, enough about Edmonton - this post is supposed to be about Vegas!

Because we don't have passports, we had to cross the border by land rather than by air, so we flew to Vancouver, hopped on a bus to Bellingham, and flew to Las Vegas from there. We had to taxi from the bus depot to the airport, and the taxi was very late (watch out, this is a recurring theme). We did make it to the airport on time, though, so we were okay. When we checked in, we saw the airport was packed full of people (and that room did not smell nice). It turns out that there was another flight to Vegas scheduled for earlier that day that ended up just never showing up. Fortunately there are laws saying that when our flight arrived we got first dibs on our seats, but our flight ended up being cram-packed with very angry people from the other flight as well - and not everybody got on our plane either. We ended up being late, but at least we got there! This is where we stayed:



This building makes me feel very very small. The effect is magnified whenever you step inside - it's pretty much hollow inside, so from the lobby you can see the top of the pyramid, more or less. We are such party animals, we went straight to bed. The next morning we ate a humongous breakfast at a buffet, and then set out to explore. We visited a lot of casinos that day, including the Excalibur, New York New York, MGM Grand, the Bellagio, Paris, and the Flamingo (which was oddly balanced, demographic-wise - it seemed like everyone there other than us were old). We also went to the M&M store, which is four storeys tall and features a free 3-D 'movie', which kind of hurt my eyes since at first it's either out of focus or just hard to focus on.

We stopped inside all these places to see the attractions. At the New York New York, there is a giant outdoor roller coaster, which we went on:



We found that there were a lot of people trying to sell us time-shares, which was okay the first time and really annoying the other fifty million times. You start to recognize their shtick pretty quickly, and my boyfriend had a great time thinking of different ways to rebuff them. They pretend they're interested in where we come from, whether we are married, whether we at least live together, how long we're staying, et cetera. They offer you dinners, tickets to the shows, and/or gambling money, as long as you're willing to spend a portion of your day at their time-share presentation. We didn't want to waste our precious time in a high-pressure sales situation, especially considering how insistent the advertisers were. We did, however, find a place that sells tickets to shows half-price, so we did go to one, which I thought was passable, if a bit uncomfortable at times, considering topless girls are not my thing. The price was right, though, and the drink was very good.

The second day, we were tired from all the walking around from the first day, but we decided to do it again, this time pushing ahead even further so that we could try to score free tickets to the Mac King comedy show, an endeavor which we were unsuccessful at. We did a lot of gambling along the way, which was fun because we tried the table games. We did best at roulette but ultimately lost all our money. We had all-you-can-eat sushi at a restaurant across the street from the Bellagio, so we got to watch the fountain show quite a few times over the course of dinner. By the end of that day, we were very tired and worn out, so we sunk into another round of roulette, this time taking advantage of the free cocktails that kept coming around. We won twice on 23 red, which was cool because we always made sure to put a whole chip on 23 instead of using the kitty-corner wallpaper tactics that we used on other numbers.

On the way home from Vegas, we had to go through Bellingham, the cesspit of lost time, again. This time, our bus showed up around an hour late, causing us to miss our connection (which may have been the bus that would later get in an accident with a couple of trucks, but we didn't know that at the time). Luckily there was another bus leaving for home that night, so we got on that one, which had to turn around partway through and go the long way around, since the short route was closed. We did eventually make it home though, hungry, sore and worn out.

Let's Get Political

Warning: longish post - allow me to bribe you with a video. :D

The BC provincial election will be held in May 2009, which is decently far away. We've just come out of a federal election and a municipal election, not to mention the hugely publicized national election of our neighbours to the south. Me, I'm all electioned out - I'm tired of people vote-grubbing. Already, though, our local MLA's office has been phoning everyone with surveys about issues for the upcoming election.

Ever since the first day we broke out the calendars for this year, American politics has been prolific in every facet of media. After all, picking a new president is hugely important. The US basically has a two-party sytem. Sure, independents can run, but it is widely agreed upon that votes for independents are wasted votes, which is terrible, in my opinion. Many people don't subscribe to either polarized party, but have different stances on different issues. Some people agree with one party or the other on most issues, but may not be as extreme as the parties try to be in their efforts to be as opposite as possible from each other.

In Canada, we have a handful of different parties, which presents its own problems. Other than the Bloc Quebecois, which is centered on looking out for Quebec, we have two parties which are actually decently well aligned and one party which is fairly different, as well as the Green Party, which don't even themselves expect to win. This past election seemed to be all about being 'for' or 'against' the Conservatives, who were at the time also the current ruling party. The problem is that most Canadians were against the Tories this time around, but their votes were scattered among the other three parties (with the exception of Quebec, of course), so the Tories won again.

That election also featured the smallest voter turnout in our country's history, and there's little wonder about why - it happened near the tail end of America's campaign period, and who wants to pay attention to Canada's mostly on-topic and somewhat boring, under-publicized, under-the-radar election when you can watch scandal-rife, entertaining, outrageous politics from next door? You could try and find the Canadian stuff - there might be something on one or two TV channels , or you could watch what's going on in the US on 30 or 40 channels. The radio stations are happy to talk about American politics and only spent marginal amounts of time outside their mandatory Canadian content quota talking about our own election, instead choosing to squeeze American politics into their Canadian time-slots by talking about how they would affect our nation. Our election was also called with short notice, and the camaigning took all of 37 days, by a Prime Minister who was vocally against calling early elections (and yet we let that hypocrisy slide - or at least, 42% of us let it slide by not voting at all, and substantially less than half of the remainder let it slide by voting for them anyways). Here is a cute summary of what happened, for all those who missed it:



When it came time for our municipal election, just after Obama's victory stateside, many of us were just not interested, which is too bad. Municipal elections, in my opinion, are such a breath of fresh air after all the divisive party politics. In the city election, the candidates are not party-affiliated - they are all independents, so we have to choose based on their platforms and qualifications. Further, we vote for 8 of them, plus a mayor. This is excellent, because it means the candidates can't get ahead by pulling their opponents down - they have to prop themselves up instead. It becomes a decision of 'why should I vote for you' instead of 'why shouldn't I vote for your opponent'. The downside is that people have to actually inform themselves about the candidates instead of lazily subscribing to a red vs blue mentality. It's far better for us in the long run, but voter turnout is always the victim because of it.

So, back to BC politics - right now, I frankly don't care. Don't come to my door, don't phone me, don't put propaganda in my mailbox. Give me a breather.

Kinships in LotRO

The other night, the LotRO kinship I'm in (kinship = guild in MMO language) promoted one of our recruits to a full-fledged member. We've recently taken to making an event out of promotions as it gives us an excuse to see each other 'in person', as well as making the recruit feel welcome and a part of everything. We all don our matching unofficial uniforms, the officers change our display titles to 'Officer', and the leader changes his to 'Leader'. Then our leader beckons the recruit(s) in question to the top of our 'stage' and gives the recruits a graduation-style speech, whereupon they become promoted. Then there is much congratulating, cheering, clapping, and general celebrating, during which the leader continues his official duties by 'giving' the recruits the unofficial uniform too (in LotRO there's a cosmetic outfit system where you can equip an item cosmetically and then even when that item is no longer in your inventory, you still are wearing it - we keep a couple copies for the kin that we share around). Then we celebrate some more before visiting Matilda, our inn-league keg.



The more of us that are present for these promotion ceremonies, the cooler it starts to feel to be a part of it all. This most recent one featured our biggest turn-out yet, so I captured the moment above. It is really neat to be part of a kin that seems to be so unique. I haven't seen any other kins doing a uniform the way we do, and while I can't claim to know for sure, I've never heard of any other kin making a production of promotions, either. Our leader commented yesterday that other players all seem to blend together with their different outfits, whereas we stand out by all dressing the same, and he is absolutely right (plus, our outfits are really sharp!). When we roam around the countryside, crawl through dungeons, or charge through a busy city, we turn heads with our matching outfits. Players will often send me tells complimenting our outfits, and sometimes the comments reach the public chat channels. On explaining this all to my boyfriend, he commented that our kin sounds like what a kin is supposed to be like. I've also gotten some comments to that effect from several of our members. It feels really good to be a part of such a group.

/em raises her glass to the Guardsmen of the Free Peoples.

Renovations and LotRO

Okay, so I know I stopped updating this pretty much right after I started it, but for whatever reason, I couldn't access this page for a while, and then forgot about it altogether. See, I got rather occupied with a project:



I wish I could find my 'before' pics, for the sake of comparison.

"But Ana," you say, "surely that didn't take two years to do!"

It's true, it didn't take two years to do, but it did take longer than originally anticipated. We were fairly close to on schedule for the basement, but things slowed down significantly with the main floor. There were a lot of little things that kept slowing us down (such as three layers of wallpaper on the ceiling, some stuck on there with glues that are so old modern glue solvents don't work on them), and our money supply dwindled until we could no longer afford to pay for help. It turned into a drag instead of a fun project (at least, it did for me).

As we got nearer completion, I fell into Middle Earth via Lord of the Rings Online.




This is one of many beautiful sights to see in the Shire. That's my main character standing outside of the hobbit hole she used to call home. The game, with all its sights, its mostly very pleasant player base, its storyline and the gameplay itself have captivated me for a year now, and with the newly released expansion, Mines of Moria, offering over 500 new quests, new gameplay, new players, new player classes, new crafting, and many other new things, I think it's safe to say it will hold my attention for quite a long time to come, especially considering there was still so much for me to see and do before this expansion was released.