You have no idea how utterly terrifying this revelation is.

Before that, I should probably mention that I finally got around to seeing How To Train Your Dragon last night. It’s a gorgeous movie, and extremely well-paced. I had some serious issues with the voice acting– seriously, why does every Viking sound Scottish? Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson are great actors, but c’mon, there’s a freaking limit. And I have to wonder why Hiccup sounded like he was thirty-seven. But, in truth, all that was forgiveable by the fact that it was just so wonderfully written for the most part. The progress of Hiccup and Toothless’ friendship never feels forced and never feels one-sided; you can see that they’re genuine friends by the end of the film. The rest of the village children… not so much; Astrid in particular does a personality-180 at such dizzying speed that it completely wrecked her character. Still, the final battle was suitably impressive, and its resolution a nice change of pace from most other kids’ fantasy these days. I’d heard rumblings that there was to be a spinoff television series and possibly more movies, both moves I’d greatly support.

Speaking of well-written children’s fantasy, apparently Season 2 of Wakfu is also well underway. So that’s good. It’s appalling to me that there’s been no talk of a North American localization for the series, even as Square Enix is handling the MMO. Appalling, I tell you.

Anyway. Last April, after Tekkoshocon was over, I took on what I called the “Rush to Judgment”– a pair of posts where I went through a dozen anime series’ first episodes, and wrote down first impressions. This was the second Rush– the first one had been for video games, which unfortunately didn’t work out so well. Anyway, this weekend I’ll be doing a new Rush with ten series I haven’t seen the full first episodes of. It’s worth noting that, of the twelve I watched last year, I only got through three full series (Baccano!, Slayers Next, and Ah! My Goddess Season 2), so a 25% rate isn’t that bad.

The list for this year is as follows:
Day One: Key The Metal Idol, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Strike Witches, Nerima Daikon Brothers, Gao Gai Gar
Day Two: Slayers Try, Haibane Renmei, xxxHolic, Squid Girl, Shattered Angels

The posts should be up on Saturday and Sunday; I’ll likely be liveblogging them, so if you catch the first RSS feed update, be sure to come back later in the day.

Next, I set out my list of games that I was going to try to get through during 2012. I’m shooting for a goal of 40 Clears again, and I hope to get through one or more of them before the Tekkoshocon Flyer Rally on the 14th. I’ve also set up ten additional “Extra Credit” games. The thing is, fully 25 of the total games on the list are long-form RPGs or SRPGs, so I’m not entirely sure how I’ll manage to get even half of the number of expected clears. I have a backup, though, what I’m calling the “Trump Card”: Demon’s Souls. If I manage to complete that nightmare of a game, I’ll call the year an unqualified success. But first, though, I’m starting to get deeper into the new Professor Layton title.

As an addendum: there’s someone in my apartment complex with a 3DS as well. The only reason I know this is because I managed to get a StreetPass tag from this person when I left my machine at home in the charging cradle. This is a remarkable coincidence, I think. I kind of wonder if I know this person… probably not.

Finally, in addition to the nerdery nonfiction writing, I’m also going to take some time to revise some of my older fiction outlines in order to prep them for eventual rewriting. I took a look back at the very first NaNo I attempted to write, a fantasy story, and found that, while it was flawed, it was still salvageable; I just need to think back about some of the ideas that I’ve had in the meantime and see which are worth welding onto the original plot, and to see what bits that I patched on are no longer necessary. I also want to take another stab at fleshing out the sci-fi universe I was working on, and seeing if it should or already does fit in with the universe set forth in “A Civics Lesson” and “Frangible Time”. Actually, writing that last chapter of “Frangible Time” might be worth doing, too– likely in February.

Anyway, that’s the plan for this weekend. Things are going to get very busy very fast with regards to the rest of my activities, so this may be one of the last few weekends I get to myself before Tekko prep causes all hell to break loose. I intend to enjoy it.

ANYWAY. Today’s the last day of my vacation, and I realize that aside from going home and coming back, I haven’t done much of anything that I really meant to accomplish over the break. Now, granted, what I did do was important and good. But the cleaning, the cooking, a few errands… they all are left to today. Back to the insane, hectic, unstoppable grind.

Bring it on.

Write.

For being the thing that I say I do, I haven’t done a whole hell of a lot of it, and you have no idea how frustrating that gets for someone who has convinced himself that it’s what he does. Fortunately, I have a plan…. and I’m going to stick to it.

Part of why I’ve had trouble getting into a mindset for writing heretofore is because overall I’d been fighting some depression that had started to creep into me a few years back. It’s easy to say “get over it”, but until you step back and get some help for it, it can be impossible to “get over it”. Depression– the real, chronic kind, not post-con ennui or mere letdown at a poor turn of events– the big D is not something that you should fuck around with on your own. And yes, it warrants the F-bomb, because it can get fucking scary if you let it progress. So, get help if you have a funk that lasts more than four months. All joking aside, I’m not kidding here. See a doctor, or a priest, or other appropriate figure.

OK, PSA over, back to self-flagellation. I’d been depressed, and now I’m not. I feel motivated, more optimistic for the year ahead than I have in a very, very long time. That in and of itself should frighten the hell out of everyone, but the fact of the matter is, it also gave me an idea. I’ve been meaning to do a nonfiction book for a long time, and I honestly think it’s time that my preferred subject matter– nerdery– gets a close look at from the inside.

Think about it– 2011 was the Year of the Nerd. Steve Jobs died, and got a crapton of attention; Dennis Ritchie also died and should have got more. People weren’t just interested in the new Apple release this year, they were positively frothing with delight, when ten years ago knowing how to use a computer was akin to a sentence of life as a decaying cat lady or lonely old man. The Internet was no longer for porn, as somehow Zynga made it about annoying your friends with game requests. And technology news wasn’t released to the back pages or the end-of-hour Jeanne Moos pre-emption spots; it was front and center and two days late, judging by how many times my mom asked me about stuff in my sphere of interest.

But being a nerd is about more than that. I figured out a brilliant definition of how to tell if you’re a nerd: you’re a nerd if you like something openly. Somehow in the last thirty years it became uncool to like something. Doesn’t matter what– with few exceptions, if there was some aspect of culture and you liked it, and expressed that like, you were a nerd. You might as well be that nine year old kid in his Star Wars pajamas. That’s changed lately.

I’d have to say it has a lot to do with the work-life balance, and how it swung way out of whack since the 70s. People became increasingly focused on their jobs around the early 80s because of intense competition. This meant that there was less time for things that weren’t job-related, and you got people who could literally not function outside of their jobs. In social settings or leisure time these people were chained to their desks, metaphorically, and that’s why you have the stereotypical hyper-competent power-suited always-on-the-job überdork parents from countless 80s movies. Thing is, though, that’s a ludicrously unhealthy attitude to take, and while it’s obvious now, back then it was seen as the only way to get ahead.

Now, companies take great pains to make sure that they aren’t burning out the employees they’re not planning on laying off. The competitive nature of the market hasn’t changed, and the workload has done nothing but steadily increase. What’s changed is that the shortsighted nature of business has fallen by the wayside in the more successful companies, and there’s a chance for employees to actually have downtime and enjoy it. And, that dovetails nicely with how the workplace exists– a successful employee will feel more comfortable sharing his interests with coworkers. The myth of the interchangeable cog in a cubicle has been well and fully smashed in this day and age. Every piece is shaped differently, and effective managers don’t force their employees to change– they put the pieces together in the way that works, even if it’s not what worked before.

So, my plan both with some of the blog entries here and some other writing internally is to start gathering notes for that one-day nonfiction book I’m working on. I want to define what being a nerd is; why some people are seen as nerds, others aren’t, and still others embrace it; why being a nerd is a good thing; how being a nerd can be taken too far, and how it shouldn’t be; and the eventual plan for the elimination of the word and concept from the culture.

That last one is ambitious, but necessary, I think. Because as time goes by, it’s become obvious to me that everyone is a nerd for something or another– some hide it well, some don’t hide it at all, and still others don’t know what they can be a nerd about. But we are a planet of nerds, a whole great big species of them. We define our literal existence as separate from animals in terms that make us the biggest goddamn nerds in all of creation– “we’re smarter than them”. The word “nerd”, then, is kinda stating the obvious. It’s time we threw it away.

The problem with just ignoring comments on the blogs has become akin to that which has plagued the comics companies– the inmates are running the asylum, and gaming news blogs are increasingly inflammatory. It’s not a matter of targeting one platform for ridicule, but the fact that the tone of the blogs have become dramatically more negative over the past few years. What makes it worse is the tacit approval of this trend while at the same time people decry that sort of behavior from mainstream news. I’ve even seen that behavior in the same damn comment– approving of the game blog’s bias while denouncing Fox News. This profoundly disturbs me.

However, there’s another aspect to it. I took a look at the trends for the games that I bought, and found that in many cases, by the time I got around to playing them, they were in the bargain bin. This was after buying the game at or near their launch date. I defend doing so in the past by supporting games that I wanted to do well, but it’s to a point where I don’t think it’s really worth the extra expenditure. Things happening in the foreground and the background are putting a little bit of a strain on my budgeting, and something’s gotta give.

The fact that my backlog is currently longer than the list of games that I’ve completed in my entire life to date only had a little to do with it. The fact that I even have a backlog notwithstanding.

So, in 2012, I’m declaring an amnesty program on my gaming purchases. I’ve been talking about this plan in certain circles, and I’m pretty much ready to set it in writing. I’m not going to buy any video games for myself in 2012 with two exceptions, and I’m limiting myself to a strict interpretation of my “paint it first” plan for miniatures figures. Board games won’t be restricted, per se, but there’s not much that I really want right now short of the next expansion for Super Dungeon Explore (which might actually count more as a minis game). I’m also shooting for 40 Game Clears again, even though I fell short this year. And, regardless, I’m unsubscribing from the gaming blogs’ RSS feeds on the 1st.

Note that I said “for myself”. My work with Tekkoshocon is as a purchasing agent and asset locator– my whole job right now is buying up games and equipment for the game room, under the expectation that I’ll be paid back later on. So, any buying I do will strictly be for the Tekko crew, and there’s some tricks up my sleeve that I can use to try to mitigate how far in the hole I get. More on that later.

But I did also say that there were two exceptions, and I think they’re reasonable: my birthday, and the end of summer. I’m restricting those to used games, though, and only if I’ve beaten at least 10 games since the last buy.

This is going to be a really hard thing to stick to, because there are actually a few games that I’m looking forward to in 2012: Kid Icarus Uprising, Metal Gear Rising, and others. Plus, missing out on immediate E3 news and the WiiU launch is going to sting. But, if I do stick to it, I’m confident I’ll be a lot less stressed about being up-to-date. Besides, being a year behind will save me money for other projects, and even if I don’t stick to it, I’ll have made a significant dent in the backlog, and won’t feel so overwhelmed by it.

That’s the plan, and we’ll see if it holds. Ciao, folks– more in a day or two.

And before anyone asks, no, I am not wearing a maid outfit. Yes, I know what that paragraph sounds like, but just trust me, petticoats aren’t my thing. Well, they are, just not wearing them. Not wearing them myself. This paragraph has just gone somewhere dark and horrible.

……y’know what, just go watch the maids, OK?

….writing is somewhere in there, I’m sure of it.

Anyway, today I ran into both the bad and good side of digital distribution. The bad side was that I’ve pretty much exhausted everything I’d want to buy off of the Playstation Network’s PS One Classics line, at least until a few more of the actual classics show up on there instead of random crap that nobody even bought on disc (I’m looking at you, XS Sports Series). Ironically, it’s often easier and cheaper to seek out the actual disc, and in some cases the ease is even greater than initially expected. Case in point, today I randomly came across about a dozen or so import games, and managed to pick up a decent number of them. These are ones that there is no way in hell that they will ever come over via PS One Classics, especially considering they’re all RPGs and half of them are by Namco Bandai, who hates North America anyway.

Of course, my faith in digital distribution was restored in that I managed to download a copy of the riotously funny Z.H.P. for PSP. Any game where the final boss is named, in what passes for “all absolute sincerity” in a Nippon Ichi game, “Demon General Darkdeath Evilman”…. That’s a game that you just have to play.

…..I think I’m hooked. Again. The only thing that could be better would be if there was an actual tabletop game based around Gundam models.

Guess what kind of day today was.

For a while I was feeling more than a little guilty that I had Game Clears up on the blog, indicating that yes, I did in the strictest sense “have time” to write and I was simply choosing not to out of laziness or selfishness. It’s in my nature to feel that if I’m not being “productive” then I should feel guilty, stemming from my theory that if I have the capability to do something, then I also have the responsibility to do it. The problem, of course, was that every time I would sit down to write for the blog, the writer’s block I’ve been suffering under for a while now would reassert itself, and I would wind up staring at the blank page for a while before giving up and playing a game.

Of course, I do have to relax at some point. I can’t be expected to be “on” constantly. If I choose to do so by gaming, well, then more power to me. I have to break myself of the mental block that says “relaxation = selfishness”. It’s going to be a long road, but the first step is accepting that those game clears should be proof that I’m not going completely loco.

Anyway, let’s talk games for a little bit. Portal 2 has been the big one, and even though I finished it before I wrote the first draft of this post, I still find myself going back and getting a chuckle out of some of the more funny aspects of the game. What I found most interesting was that Valve rewards humor on the part of the player, as well as giving the player something to laugh at by him or herself. Wheatley is funny, but when the player is rewarded for doing something stupid-but-funny, that’s even better.

One thing I’m finding to be even more fun about the game, and which extends the replay value of it dramatically, is the co-op campaign. There’s an entirely different dynamic between GLaDOS and the two robots Atlas and P-Body, and that can even be extended to the players. I’m going through it off and on with Chris LoBue, a partner of mine in BM&G, and we recently unlocked a hilarious interaction gesture where one of the droids takes the other’s “head” off and plays with it for a moment, inviting retaliation. It’s slapstick at its finest, and it reaffirms Valve’s choice of using robots for the co-op and not human characters.

That said, someone needs to patch in support for a third robot based on a cube, and then Valve can do the whole Three Stooges bit up properly.

So, after that, there was… Hmm, well, I suppose I could talk about the 3DS. Yes, I did get it on launch day, and no, I don’t regret it for a second. You’d be surprised how much fun I get out of something as simple as StreetPass and Find Mii, but that’s the standout feature of the system so far in my mind. It simplifies the whole interaction between gamers, and it’s the natural evolution of the tag modes that were pioneered in titles like The World Ends With You and Animal Crossing. The simple addition of real-world interactions to certain games is the hidden revolution in the machine, and I only hope that this becomes the breakout feature of the device in the way that the original DS’s touchscreen advanced portable gaming. To steal Microsoft’s phrase, it’s good to play together.

Nintendo is doing a great job of engaging with the playerbase this time around as well, too. The NOA Twitter feed highlights the various city-based StreetPass gatherings and clubs going on around the US. Granted, they haven’t gotten around to StreetPass Pittsburgh yet, but we’re still a small group. That’s actually symptomatic of the rather weak launch that the 3DS has had in the past two months. I’ll be the first to say that it was a little underwhelming– there were really only two titles that were worth picking up, and one of them (Bust-A-Move Universe) will only be worth picking up once it’s in the bargain bin, if a better version doesn’t come out before then. It’s annoying that the software isn’t there to support it yet, but I’m confident that that’s going to be fixed very soon.

It was a little annoying, too, to hear that the 3DS eShop has been delayed until the pre-E3 show– but not nearly as annoying as the mind-games Capcom is playing with Mega Man Legends 3. The big problem there is that the game still has not been given a green-light for full production, according to Capcom’s Dev Room initiative. The official word is that, depending on performance of the Prologue Version– the paid beta that was supposed to be released alongside the eShop– the game would either be scrapped or funded in full. In effect, Capcom is holding the game for ransom.

Now before I continue, I want to clarify something: it could be argued that BM&G is also holding a game for ransom, in that we can’t produce Point of Descent without funding. It’s a tricky parallel to navigate, and while it’s flattering to put an indie developer working on their first game on the same level as an iconic studio such as Capcom, that’s simply not the case. We’re going to continue work on Point of Descent regardless of how our Kickstarter and 8-Bit Funding pages do (I’m sorry I’m not being more subtle about that). Capcom, on the other hand, can throw away resources on a “failed” experiment and not risk ruin. The problem, of course, is that Capcom isn’t just throwing away money, but also reputation. They’ve been on rocky shores in that regard before, and I think it would be very wise if they just went ahead and announced at E3 that they’re just trolling us all and that MML3 is definitely coming out. It’s not like Capcom’s a stranger to being a lying creator either– witness the shell games they played prior to the official reveal of MVC3.

Anyway, E3. It coincides with a major Apple event, too– WWDC– but we’ll get to that in a little bit. This year will see the unveiling of the Nintendo console that will likely be in ludicrously short supply next year. (I learned my lesson and will be putting down a pre-order as soon as I can.) What has me puzzled, though, is that there haven’t been too many rumors about what Sony and Microsoft are doing. This could be a great opportunity for the both of them to steal the spotlight a little bit. One would imagine MS, at least, is showing something worthy of buying live airtime on Spike TV for their pre-game on June 6th at 4:30p EDT. Sony has taken a bit of a bloody nose this past month, but they’re running their own show the same day at 9p EDT. Nintendo is set up for the 7th at 12p EDT, which is conveniently when E3 proper starts.

As an aside: Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I think Sony and MS have made a HUGE misstep here in scheduling their pre-games the day before Nintendo’s. I draw this thought from The West Wing. See, that show, believe it or not, had some pretty good insights into information control. One of the big tenets was that you want to make sure you get the most press time available. If you want to bury a story, you drop it in somewhere between major announcements so that it gets relatively little attention compared to the big stuff. By placing their shows in such close proximity to Nintendo’s, MS and Sony are trading the lingering effect of being last for the bombastic effect of being first. They’ll get the big initial drops, but Nintendo ultimately will have the most eyeballs on its work because it’ll be in a prime position to react to the other two pre-games.

In the end, though, it really boils down to what games are being shown off, and going by some of the less verifiable rumors I’ve been hearing– which I’ll not lend credence to here, as they come from some really sketchy sources– I think we’re all going to be very, very happy with all three consoles’ output this year. Just trust me on this one.

Moving on to Apple. By the time I get this post up, many of the Apple Stores around the world will have gone into lockdown mode in order to prepare for a major revamp of some sort. Nobody really knows what it is, except that it involves “gigabytes” of encrypted data being pushed to store servers; it might be as simple as giving iPads to employees to use instead of iPod Touches for POS terminals, or it could be a surprise launch of OS X Lion. We’ll know for sure in the morning. The rumors of a new iPhone hardware unit to be announced at WWDC on June 7th are pretty tantalizing, too. But what is probably the biggest news is the formal announcement of iOS 5.0. The mobile OS is slated to include a huge number of improvements to the everyday-use-case of i- devices, with the chief among them being a completely redone push/notification system. Apple, I think, didn’t expect push to be as big or as quickly embraced as it has been, and the initial implementation is starting to show its seams. Granted, there are also a lot of other things that need some spit and polish among the iOS guts, and a few things that are being driven by the (healthy and appreciated) Android rivalry. I would like to see some form of lock-screen widget implementation so that I could see weather and notifications at a glance, and I would be shocked beyond measure if the new notifications platform did not include an option to set truly customizable alert tones.

I mentioned in an aside up there that the rivalry with Android is “healthy and appreciated”. I mean that. The fact that the two operating systems are advancing and pushing each other forward by leapfrogging features means that, no matter which one users pick, they don’t miss out– assuming a long enough timescale. I’ve been an iOS user for going on three years now, and I’m not about to look back at all. Point of fact, I look to Android to see what features will be in the next major version of iOS. About the only thing I’m really unhappy with is the slower pace of releases from Apple compared to Google, but at the same time, not having the dizzying splintering going on that the Android landscape has is a definite plus in my book.

One other thing before I leave the Appleology pulpit: Apple and Google are both learning from the OS wars of old. They may have differing platforms and opposing goals, but both of them are very careful to rely on industry standards and are working towards interoperability. That might just be reflective of the current culture of interoperability in the computing world today, but it’s a breath of fresh air from the not-as-long-ago-as-I’d-like days when floppy disks came formatted in Mac and IBM flavors.

I suppose, really, the last thing to go over in the life-dump is the aftermath of Tekkoshocon and what my next steps there are. I was asked to help out with the RPG room for Tekko, and I did so. I make that sound so banal, but in truth it was probably one of the best times I’ve had in a long time at a con. There was stress, of course– comes with the territory of helping other people have a good time– but in the end it was worth it. Since then, I’ve been working on getting the video game room for The Sangawa Project together, and that itself has been an adventure and a half. At some point I’m going to have to go back up to Sharon to try to clean out Budd Street Video of some rare titles. That show comes just a couple of weeks before Otakon, which… I still haven’t registered for. Lisa Ortiz is a pretty big draw, but it largely depends on whether or not I really want to get into the Dealer’s Room. Which I probably do, but I may have to see how things go in the interim. Otakon probably isn’t going to have an attendance cap again, but if they do, I’m sure there will be enough notice to get things going in time.

That about covers everything I’ve wanted to mention. I’ll try to wr– oh, for cryin’ out loud, I promise that all the damn time and I never deliver. I suppose that if you need to get a fix on me, you could just keep an eye on my Twitter feed. If something big does happen, I’ll set aside time to write about it. Beyond that, I’ll try to keep this place up to date with the Game Clear notices and suchlike as I relax my way through this life. Ciao, kids.