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So, I haven't been posting or reading much lately. Mostly due to a fairly comprehensive meltdown of late - not least affected by being out of ADHD meds and having run out, briefly, of antidepressants as well. And other stuff.
So, some brief comments:
1) Obama is awesome and I am glad I never quite stopped believing in him. More on several aspects of this later.
2) I bought the first season of Earth: Final Conflict and have been watching it with Chas. Man, so awesome, so many ways. My father has seasons 3, 4 and 5 on DVD, but season 2 still hasn't been released as far as I can tell. I am attempting to download it, but have only got 2.3% with an eta of "infinity" at the moment. This is sad for me.
3) Recently had some books arrive though. The Wipers Times, Tokyo Vice, Yakuza, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5, and The Have I Got News For You Guide To Modern Britain. Also my first issue of my subscription to Private Eye arrived. I have much reading to do.
4) I've taken up playing EVE Online. I'm enjoying it a lot; today though, had a surprisingly awesome moment just in game culture experience. See, EVE Online is a complicated game which requires a lot of reading and working stuff out and so on just to play it at all, and it's very sandboxy and undirected as well. It's got a steeper learning curve and a more grownup enjoyment curve than World of Warcraft (which, by the way, I played for several years and loved, and only quit when I wasn't really playing it with any of my real friends any more; I'm not saying WoW isn't actually pretty awesome), and produces a different mentality. (As does the fact that it's one game universe, and "content" is player-generated outside of game mechanics.)
A little while ago, someone in the Rookie Help channel referred to [an unwise activity] as leading to "getting gang raped". This sort of thing is, sadly, common in gamer circles.
He was immediately called up by the Interstellar Services Department rep (think moderator-type person in charge and on staff) to watch his language.
When he replied with "Huh? What did I say?" the ISD simply told him to reread his sentence, think about it, and, if he still didn't understand why it was offensive, contact the ISD for private conversation.
This? Is awesome.
5) Also awesome: I have ADHD medications (in adequate supply) for the first time in a number of months. I can think. I can breathe.
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woooo
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Jan. 29th, 2010 @ 04:31 pm
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So, I've been quiet for a few days, and have also not at all been reading LJ/DW, so I don't know what's going on in anyone's life unless I live with them. It's been a spectacularly rough week or so here, so.
Among other things, an irritation this week has been computer issues. My laptop Destiny is, for the time being, dead; total hard drive failure. This has been a contributing factor (along with some developments in hardware) to my buying a new laptop - not least because the i7 quad-core processors are now available on laptops at a non-hideous price, and now I don't need to get a desktop in order to be able to process video from my video camera, and suchlike tasks.
I am typing this from the third laptop we've brought home, because the first two had faulty drives too. (So far this one is fine, but it's from the same shipment, so I'm still slightly wary.)
On the bright side, this laptop is completely awesome. Among the seriously nifty features is that the processor's clocking is adjusted automagically to be at the level needed for current operations - thereby saving power when the computer doesn't need all that grunt - and it comes with a little desktop widget that tells you how fast the processor is running at the time. Base level is 1.60 GHz.
Now I just have to install everything and set it all up...
Meanwhile, I hear that Apple has called their tablet the iPad. methinks someone is too attached to a naming convention.
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So, I just bought a new laptop. (Because it does what I was thinking of buying a desktop to do.)
And I find myself feeling like I should have just got an annoy-a-tron from thinkgeek. It would have been cheaper.
Because the damn thing beeps intermittently for no apparent reason - usually immediately after the hard drive has just crackled like it's being accessed for something.
I put the machine to sleep when I found myself feeling very much like throwing it against the wall.
Anyone know anything about this?
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So, time to start working on going through pictures and displaying some.
Today's photo: the gateway into Arbroath Abbey. Now in ruins, Arbroath Abbey was founded in the twelfth century by William the Lion, consecrated in memory of the English saint Thomas Becket, and fell into ruins after the sixteenth century. The buildings were raided for stone for the building of the town.
The Abbey was the site of the signing of the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, and was where the Stone of Destiny turned up in 1951 after it was stolen from Westminster Abbey.
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First of all, thank you to everyone who commented on my previous (locked) post. I will be replying to your comments when I can handle doing so. I really appreciate your words, truly - I just, wound is raw, you know?
Summary for those who can't see that post (with apologies): Last Saturday, the one remaining cat I thought of as "my cat", Spike, was put down due to suffering from kidney failure. Fortunately, his decline was sudden and rapid, and until only hours earlier he had seemed happy and relatively okay.
I've been grieving, because I loved him. And it was too soon after Tabitha's (sudden and horrible) death, so even though I knew it was coming (he'd been diabetic for a couple of years, he hasn't been eating lately, he'd been losing weight fast), I still wasn't ready.
Or maybe no-one's ever ready to lose a pet who's been around half their life.
It's not the only reason I haven't posted/communicated lately; if nothing else, this was followed fairly closely by my getting sick, and I crashed out for a couple of days while my body shut down and rebooted.
There will be posts of substance soon, I swear. I have many comments to make on many topics, I just am still booting up, so.
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So, here's the thing:
I have a mole on my back, near my shoulderblade, that a while back started intermittently being all itchy.
A couple of times of late I've noticed it stings a little too.
This is unnerving, because there's a chance it might be nothing, and there's a chance it might be skin cancer.
The thing being that if you get it caught early, this is Not A Big Deal, and if you don't, this kills you.
I haven't had it checked yet.
And it occurred to me, recently, that this is more-or-less suicide by stealth, or at least an attempt at suicide by stealth, combined with a little bit of the irrational fear of being told it's bad that killed my paternal grandmother.
So I decided, time to kick that crap in the face and get it sorted.
I looked up skin/mole clinics. There's a MoleScan near me - getting to it by public transport involves a bit of a walk, but it's not too bad. I called them.
I went immediately to hold. After a couple of minutes, someone picked up the phone, but it turned out she'd picked up the wrong line, and had meant to leave me on hold.
A couple more minutes passed.
I decided they could go to hell, hung up, and scanned the list again. There's a place called the Skin and Mole Clinic in Joondalup that - due to it being located across the road from where I used to work - I happen to know is readily accessible by public transport despite being a long way from where I live, so I called them.
They get my custom on the basis that they picked up the bloody phone when I called. I have an appointment in a week and a half. I will get my mole checked out. If it is sketchy, it will be dealt with.
And I may write an irritated letter to MoleScan's head office.
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So, there's a kerfuffle.
HP's automatic face-tracking software tends to suck at tracking dark-skinned faces. There's a video. The camera tracks the white person, breaks if the black person comes in.
Here's how I see it:
This is, ultimately, because of racism.
But it's only a rather indirect symptom, in this case.
See, the camera is controlled by the software that drives the face recognition algorithm.
The odds are, the software was tested by the team who were writing it. And they would almost certainly have tested it on themselves, because why bother getting other people in when you yourself have a face to practice on?
The first reason racism is to blame is because it's less likely that the team included a dark-skinned person, because of institutional racism.
The reason this can show up so easily in this situation is that you are dealing with a camera - and a low-grade webcam, at that. The Angry Black Woman points out that adjusting the settings can make the difference to the camera successfully tracking dark-skinned faces, and that different shades of skin tone can make a difference.
For those of you who haven't spent much time playing with cameras or thinking about how they operate: cameras function by the detection of light. Dark-skinned faces reflect less light. That's why they're darker. This means they are more challenging from the perspective of automatic camera controls (and good photography in general).
So here we come to the second reason racism is to blame.
Let's imagine, for a second, that we lived in an alternate universe where black and white roles in history were reversed. The modern world in this alternate universe would have systemic advantage to black people and white people would be second-class citizens.
Now, in this alternate universe, someone is writing the same face-tracking software. They come up against that same issue - darker-skinned faces are harder to track. They realise this instantly, and they adjust the program to compensate automatically. Because they immediately factored dark skin into their plans, instead of just not thinking about it and casually overlooking the substantial segment of the population for whom their program would be rubbish.
This HP webcam thing is not about HP computers being racist (the guy is mostly kidding, but still), or about HP programmers at any point being deliberately racist; this is about a systemic problem with overlooking the existence and importance of people whose skin is darker than beige.
(In the original video, it's also, to an extent, a problem with the guy being backlit, but the camera manages to compensate pretty well for that on the white woman, so it's not actually an excuse.)
HP are not the problem. The problem is in society. This is a symptom.
(Meanwhile, yesterday a Maori who is also a total world history buff told me to go see the movie Avatar. I said I wasn't sure I wanted to, because I'd heard it was hideously colonialist and offensive. He said not to think about that stuff, and just enjoy the movie.)
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By the way, if anyone's actually wanting a Dreamwidth invite code, let me know.
So, in an entertaining inversion, for the past couple of days Chas has been playing Demon's Souls on my PS3, and I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins on his computer.
My Romance Status: I was at the point of occasional kisses with Morrigan, but I was getting frustrated with the fact that she is, essentially, a giant bitch who gets pissy with me every time I'm nice to someone in front of her. And then we met Zevran, who's all friendly and charming and nice and has had such a hard life and he just needs love, and who actually likes you more when you just talk to him for a while, and who doesn't get pissy at you all the time. So my character fell into bed with Zevran almost immediately. So we've spent a lot of time talking, and had really a lot of sex because Zevran likes you slightly more every time you do that, so Zevran totally adores me and eventually, I swear, I WILL convince him that there is more to life than sex and death and THERE WILL BE GAY LOVE.
When I made the case to Chas that it totally wasn't wrong to drop Morrigan like a hot rock after making out with her, because we never actually TALKED about anything to do with Our Relationship because she wouldn't let me, and therefore there were no promises made even implicitly, he agreed that it was okay, but only because it's Morrigan and she's a GIANT BITCH.
I may play the game through again as a jerk, in which case we'll probably get on better, but it just doesn't seem consistent for my current character. Maybe if I play as a mage. Or an elf. Both categories have grounds to be grumpier people.
Apparently it's not that strong in later parts of the game, but the gameplay experience does have one thing I find very cool: if you play as an elf, it can offer grounds for gamers with societal Privilege to empathise more with the experiences of minorities.
Because in the Dragon's Age world, people are racist towards elves, and it seems to be a thing where people who play as an elf are angry and bitter towards the bastards who treated them so shabbily. This could be good for people who wonder why minorities seem so angry about stuff - being able to empathise with it and see that no, it's actually a completely reasonable way to feel.
Of course, this could make playing an elf unpleasant for people who have similar experiences in real life. It could also be cathartic for some. DA:O isn't really pretending that the origins are fun - playing as a city elf could be inherently triggering for some people, too. Games aren't always nice.
Note to self: Posts should be forthcoming on Florence Nightingale and why she deserves to be lauded in part for being such an awesome person with severe disabilities, and also why she's emblematic about how common perceptions of historical figures can be viciously skewed by the kyriarchy; on Demon's Souls and its reception and what it says about games and gamers; on revisionist history and why people are stupid.
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Man, sometimes I forget what default screens for DW and LJ look like, and how much I hate them, and then I go to these sites on Chas's computer when I'm not logged in, and gah.
So, my primary computer is currently largely unusable, in that I dropped it and the plug is broken off in the socket and oh hey you can't actually connect it to power. It has about two hours' worth of battery left, at a rough guess, so at some point soonish I will be turning it on long enough to yank data, then turning it off again.
A phone call to the Asus support line revealed that they are closed until the 3rd of January. Wonderful.
Fortunately, I have a PS3 for gaming, a EEE PC for emergency personal internets, and Chas's computer for Sometimes I Want A Non-Tiny Keyboard. Plus some of what I was planning to do in the next few days involves no electronics at ALL.
I have, since Christmas, been struggling with a fresh bout of quite severe depression, for a few reasons.
On the list: my cat is dying. Also on the list: there exists in my circles of acquaintance and occasional interaction a person who is enough of an insensitive tool to respond, on the afternoon of Christmas Day, to my observing aloud that the cat - who, you understand, is diabetic - has lost weight with the statement: "That's because he's dying." It's like this person actually wants to encourage my loathing and disgust.
His death is now featuring in my nightmares.
Still, my suicide attempt on Monday was somewhat abortive and in any case thoroughly unsuccessful, and while my psychologist is currently on holiday, I do have an appointment booked for when she returns. Things will be okay.
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A few days ago, all over the world, PS3 fanboys felt a pang of grief and horror, and didn't know why.
This was why:
Dean gave me some sparkly kitty stickers. Naturally, I promptly applied some of them (plus a butterfly, a flower, and a love heart with a flower IN it) to the sleek black menace that is my PS3.
I like how my girly PS3 sits against my ungirly game stack - my sparkly kitty stickers go so well with Demon's Souls, Assassin's Creed II, Battlefield: Bad Company, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Need For Speed: Undercover.
The "girliest" game I have is a tossup between Lego Batman and Guitar Hero: World Tour.
Meanwhile, in category: This May Be A Sign Of Recovery, I want to start writing a roleplaying campaign again.
(I also want to get back to working on writing fiction, and stuff like that.) When I go to my parents' house today (to return their car) I may retrieve a couple of my gaming books.
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Certain things really depend on context sometimes. For example, this week I sent a present to a fourteen-year-old girl I've only met once.
But she's my cousin, so that's okay and not creepy. She's interested in photography, and has a real talent for it. When we spent some time together in Scotland she tried out my Good Camera. I can't provide her with a high-grade camera to play with more, but I can - and did - send her a good book about photography so she can learn more of the principles behind it.
According to her grandmother, she was very pleased with it. This pleases me. (Her grandmother gave it to her for me, because I didn't have Cousin's address, whereas I had my great-aunt's address and know she sees her regularly.)
(It's more-or-less coincidence that it arrived on Christmas Eve, based on when I got around to ordering it, but hey, Cousin can have an extra, surprise Christmas present.)
I hope everyone has a good day today. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope your celebrations are joyful and if you don't, have a good day anyway.
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Winston Churchill would not allow himself to stand close to the edge of railway platforms, lest he be seized with a suicidal impulse and throw himself in front of a train.
Knowing this makes me feel much better about the fact that I do the same thing.
Every particular about yourself, no matter how good, or how terrible you feel about it, is something that you share with someone else. What makes each person special and unique is the combination of characteristics that no-one else has shared, the memories and connections they have formed.
This is a big deal to me right now.
Florence Nightingale was plagued with terrible nightmares pretty much every night. This didn't stop her achieving things in life - it doesn't have to stop me.
I'm still playing Demon's Souls really a lot. I discovered a game flaw that resulted in my starting over again, but I don't mind, because my current game is turning out pretty brilliantly. And my fondness for my character build was reinforced last night when I was invaded by a Black Phantom and won handily by the power of my character's versatility.
The invader was heavily armoured behind a tower shield. I met him in a room with only one entrance, a staircase rising from below - it was around where I was when he invaded, and was the place where I could be safe from the line of hostile-to-me crossbowmen nearby and sure I would know where the phantom was coming from.
As he appeared at the stairs, I hit him with a shot of Soul Arrow, a ranged damage spell, then backed off and switched to my sword. He came up, and we fenced briefly - I took one hit that , then dive-rolled past and around him and sprinted down the stairs. I wear light armour so I can move fast, much faster than he could. This gave me a few moments - I cast a miracle to heal, then switched back to spells and cast Warding, a powerful protective spell.
By then he was advancing down the stairs. I dodged past him again and to the upper floor, where we engaged. A slash of my falchion hit him as a powerful blow from his massive sword hit me, but thanks to Warding, he did only light damage. It left me bleeding, but not yet badly wounded.
He started to run, I assume to wait until my Warding spell expired - thirty seconds, perhaps, and I would be weaker again, and my mana could not be infinite. But it was too late for him, and I was too fast. He had made only a couple of steps before I, slashing rapidly at his back, had dispatched the Black Phantom from my realm.
Booyah. For this success I gained White Soul Tendency, a sign that I have achieved an innately good act in vanquishing the black phantom that sought to steal my very soul.
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There is stuff I want to do today.
But I also want to play Demon's Souls. Like, a lot. It calls to me.
Solution: When I have to make myself take a break anyway, for lunch, and am at a convenient stopping place for doing so...
... pass the game over to housemate.Dave. Demon's Souls isn't a great game to play for just a few minutes. If I'm going to let Dave play, in order to feel like I'm being at all fair, and to let him actually try to get somewhere, I ought to let him play for a good long chunk of time.
Which means that I *can't* play for a while, and will instead just have to get stuff done.
I have defeated the first two bosses in the Palace of Boletaria and Stonefang Tunnel. I also made it far enough into the Shrine of Storms to get the Talisman of God, which is pretty awesome - I'm kind of multiclassing it, and can cast two miracles now as well as my two spells. (Other than that, my character is kind of dex-based.)
Gametraders is awesome, really, because they are selling Demon's Souls. The game has no Australian release date and may well never get one. But because PS3 games aren't region-locked, imports work fine.
So they're stocking and selling imports. Basically, Gametraders will sell you good games.
(If you're in Perth, I recommend Gametraders at Carillon Arcade if you can get there. The guy who runs it is incredibly nice, and the shop struggles a bit sometimes despite having good prices and good service and not being one of the Evil Empires. Just don't rely on the Gametraders website to find out what they have in stock, because tragically the website is terrible, and he can't do anything about that, it seems. Call and ask. He's awesome and helpful and makes a policy of stocking good games even if they have to be imported.)
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Right, it's a Japanese game. It explains quite a bit, really.
*looks at collection of PS3 games*
All the good action/RPG games are Japanese.
Except the ones that are French.
And Japanese games have the best music. Western game designers just don't seem to go to the place where you get a seriously good composer to put together an awesome original orchestral score.
They really, really should.
I did just discover a Point Of Annoyance in Demon's Souls. Apparently, with a soul level of all of 13, I was nonetheless high enough level to get invaded by a Black Phantom - one who somehow had massively more hit points and/or armour than I did and was able to hit me with plague *and* poison.
Thereby losing my newly-recovered body.
I knew I was going to die soon, but I wanted the chance to do something in body form....
I'm currently watching Dave get wtfpwned by something that looks like a hybrid of a mindflayer and a medusa in the opening section of the Tower of Latria. (Dave and I have both beaten the first Demon Lord, and gone no further. In his case because after he'd done that I wanted my PS3 back and he stopped playing, in my case because it took me all day today to manage it and then I was about to turn off the game and got attacked and killed by a Black Phantom. The fact that I couldn't actually quit once the Black Phantom turned up was also annoying.)
However, Dave has now given up on killing the medusaflayer, and -
- no, it caught up to him and just whumped him again.
LISTEN FOR THE BELL, DAVE. YOU CAN HEAR IT COMING BY THE BELL.
Tension and reason to be cautious and fearful, this game has it. Which is pretty cool.
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So, the Wikipedia entry on the White Horse Discourse has an explanation of the problem and secondary explanation of the difficulties with translation of it and the historical to contemporary relevance of the concepts it explores.
It also as a picture of a white horse with its head down and the caption: "A white horse suffering an identity crisis," with the words white horse linking to the section of the "White (horse)" page headed Horses that appear white, but are not.
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So the thing about Demon's Souls is that it's an odd kind of semi-multiplayer game that is very very cool.
Other players appear in your game, as phantoms - you can't interact at all, BUT you can see them, which can give you tips about what's ahead. You can see them fight, you might see them run into side-passages.
And when they die, they leave behind a bloodstain. Touching the bloodstain lets you see the last few seconds of their life - so you can take a guess at what killed them, and perhaps avoid the same fate yourself.
You can also leave messages for other players, composed from a list of set phrases. The messages show as glowing glyphs on the ground, which subsequent players can read.
If a message was helpful to you, you can Recommend it. A recommendation on a message heals the player who left it, if they're online, and much-recommended messages persist longer in the world than overlooked ones.
Earlier I was playing, and I left a couple of messages around. One of them, a little distance before I got jumped by three skeletons, was: "Beware the enemy's ambush."
I stopped playing for a while earlier, and housemate.Dave is playing. I cooked and ate dinner, then came back to the couch, where I'm watching Dave play. (I was cooking for a while, because Dean is sick, and I cooked her dinner, but I cooked her something somewhat different from what I cooked for me.)
I saw him fight those same skeletons, then call up and Recommend the message - the one I left.
Obviously I'm not playing right now, since Dave is using my game on my PS3, so I don't get healed, but I still find myself having a little moment of squeeful delight that my message was recommended, after being helpful.
And he didn't even know it was my message. It was just a PATENTLY GOOD MESSAGE.
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So, according to the Gametraders website, the closest copy of the PS3 game Demon's Souls in one of their stores is in Queensland.
I wanted the game, so I was thinking of ordering it from Amazon, since PS3 games aren't region-locked.
However, when I stopped in at Gametraders Carillon this afternoon, they not only had it in stock, but they're giving copies of the Artbook and soundtrack for it with the game. (And the soundtrack is really really good, so I'm rather pleased.) And in buying it there I was supporting a nearby shop with a very nice owner.
I was pleasantly surprised by the character customisation options. Your character is supposed to be fully customisable, and here's the thing: it really, really is.
One of the first things you choose is gender. Your choices are Male and Female - but the thing is, what you're ACTUALLY deciding there is more or less "does your character have breasts, because it affects which armour will fit". In the appearance edit, you can alter facial features to be as masculine/feminine as you want. You can go for pure androgyny if you want. You can choose how you look.
Another option is Origin - in this fabled land wherein the story takes place, do you come from North, South, East or West?
If you're from the North, you look extremely Scandinavian. From the South, you look southern African. From the East, Asian. From the West, Caucasian.
And since you have controls for affecting every facial feature really thoroughly (it has a slider to decide the brightness of your character's sclera), I think from there you could replicate the appearance and ethnicity of your choice.
It feels inclusive, to me. I don't know whether other people would be less happy with it, but it at least feels like they tried. (Although the range of available hairstyles is surprisingly limited given the rest.)
As for the gameplay: Well, I've pretty much just gone through the tutorial, so far. Word around the web and in the game store is that it's best described as unforgiving, but in a really cool way.
And the soundtrack is excellent.
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Because seriously, Leonardo and Ezio are so gay for each other.
And yet, this is a meticulously-researched piece of fiction inspired by historical events - the in-game database will tell you the known historical facts about people who appear in the game. Database profiles of characters will tell you things about people's lives that differ wildly from what happens in the game itself, because the database is telling you about the Real World. It's brilliant.
There's some background story happening which involves a seriously hardcore conspiracy taking place across centuries of history - which is also meticulously researched. Thomas Edison is a vindictive asshole. Henry Ford is a vicious anti-Semite. There is betrayal and murder lurking throughout the last millennium.
And meanwhile, Renaissance Italy is beautiful. And the game is rich with detail and options, and with tenets of a philosophy that is almost a marvel in itself.
It is a video game that contains prostitutes, but it's the anti-Grand Theft Auto; the courtesans are your allies, your character addresses them with courtesy and respect. A man murders a prostitute in Venice. Your character hunts him down and kills him in return.
Ezio is a nicer person than Altair. Altair was an arrogant bastard. Ezio is not. Altair did nothing out of altruism; as Ezio you can, if you wish, steal money from the wealthy and throw it to the poor. (But as Ezio, you don't have to steal money at all; you can earn some, and invest your earnings in renovating the Villa Auditore and the town of Monteriggioni, and become wealthy from the visitors this draws, and the return on your investment in local businesses. Early investment in the villa's income is actually incredibly lucrative.)
Like the first Assassin's Creed, AC2 is partly a collecting game. But it's not arbitrary, not even slightly - Ezio has reasons for picking up everything he collects. And he doesn't get by by grudgingly tolerating people with good reason to hate him, Ezio makes friends and helps people.
You can avoid killing a lot of guards you might otherwise have to slaughter with creative distractions. (Up to and including my having bypassed one group of guards by throwing coin on the ground, getting the guards distracted and obstructed by the crowd of people delightedly scrabbling for the money.) Instead of having desperately poor beggars getting in your way and frustrating you, you can get rid of the minstrels who do something similar by throwing them money - where the poor slump against a wall in miserable states, you can throw them money that visibly cheers up their lives - they exclaim happily that it's their lucky day, gather the money, and walk off with heads held high.
I choose to believe they're off to invest in some better clothes and find a job and build themselves better lives.
In Monteriggioni, your investment in the town and the renovation of all its institutions and facilities results in a visible improvement in the cheer and quality of dress of the town's populace, as well.
AC2 just lets you feel like you're making the game world a better place.
And it's just more fun. The side-quests are less repetitive, and they're more optional - the gameplay incentive for doing them is to make money, and you can make money through investing in Monteriggioni and then just collecting your income. The areas you can explore are much bigger, sooner - it comes as a shock every time you come up against a section of the game world that's locked off.
You can have your clothes re-dyed in local colours, just for the hell of it, too.
And the characters, Ezio and the NPCs alike, are all more real, more interesting. Even the character who, at introduction, I felt I was going to hate thoroughly, I started to like almost immediately.
The most challenging sections of the game, so far at least, are the puzzles. Some of them are genuinely challenging to think about and solve. A lot of games that include "puzzle" elements tend to have solutions that are blindingly obvious. At least one of the puzzles in Assassin's Creed II gave me a genuine warm, glowing feeling of achievement for having worked it out.
This is awesome.
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... because I am on my way to doing an extremely passable impersonation of someone who's been violently assaulted, and the explanation is one of those really implausible ones that sounds like an excuse for domestic violence.
"So, how did that happen?"
"Well, a glass fell off my windowsill and landed on my head."
"A glass."
"It's a really heavy glass."
"Uh-huh."
"And it landed just over my eyebrow, with, like, a corner..."
"A corner. Of a glass."
"Yeah. You know what I mean, like, an edge. A small surface area at point of contact."
"Go on."
"Anyway, yeah, it landed on my head, and there was this comically massive lump -"
"A massive lump?"
"Yeah. Chas said he'd only seen lumps like that on television and thought the makeup artist should be fired because it was so unbelievable."
"Chas saw it pretty soon, then."
"Well, yes - no, not like THAT! This was a few minutes later. And he was trying to joke around a little because I was crying, so -"
"You were crying."
"My head hurt. It was really painful!"
"No doubt."
"A GLASS FELL ON MY HEAD."
"Of course it did."
This is much like how my parents were relieved that I was such a friendly child, because it meant they didn't have terribly awkward questions to answer about how I was such a bruised child. (Basically: ADHD combines with mediocre physical co-ordination to produce many, many accidental minor injuries.) Or there was the time my mother had a nasty black eye, because she'd been hit by a book... that my father was holding... (They were coming around the same corner from opposite directions. Both of them were apparently being somewhat inattentive. My father had a book. He's taller than my mother. You can see where this resulted in a black eye for her.)
And then on Saturday night I put a very heavy glass on my windowsill. On Sunday morning I went to close the window, knocked the glass off directly onto my face, and started the day with a shock of cold water splashing over my head, whereupon I touched the place that hurt and found my head started about an inch further away from my skull than it was supposed to.
So I spent Sunday with an all-day headache playing Assassin's Creed II and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, because obviously I must combine a very recent game with one as old as KOTOR.
Assassin's Creed II continues to be awesome. I'm barely into the actual plot at all, but I've thoroughly renovated the villa and town, because it's there and now it's all pretty and BETTER. And since my villa now generates almost eleven thousand florins every twenty minutes, I also now don't actually have to worry about doing things to make money unless I feel like it.
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So, I have recently found myself disagreeing with someone in the comments to someone else's locked post (hence no link). The point with which I have been taking issue is the assertion that people in a position of privilege can/will be better-placed to fight -isms because they "can see the problem more clearly" and are "better attuned" to cultural boundaries than in-group members will be.
I feel my latest comment is a tad incoherent in places and would welcome some constructive criticism on how I'm presenting my central thesis, here:
Oddly, I just found a partial explanation for what I think you're missing in something I wrote about RaceFail in March:
... at the end of the 18th century, radical movements for social and political change changed from being the hobbyhorse of a few wealthy intellectuals (yes, I'm guilty of gross reductionism, shh) to the product of widespread working-class involvement, thought, activism, argument. The lower orders, as they were known, began speaking up, demanding representation, demanding rights.
This was a problem, and was met with repression, where the previous advocates of universal suffrage and suchlike had been tolerated calmly. The old advocates were eccentric aristocrats. The new radicals were workers. Lower-class, absent all the privileges held by the wealthy and titled.
The lower orders talking about politics, reading "The Rights of Man" and trying to claim they deserved respect and all that stuff? Arrogant presumption.
I think there's still something like that today, with some people's reactions to minorities advocating for themselves; while people might think they believe that disabled people should be accommodated equally with he abled, that homosexuals deserve the same rights in their loves as heterosexuals, that people who aren't white should be placed on an equal footing with people who are (including recognising that centuries of oppression have left their mark, and merely removing active barriers is not enough to put them, as a population, on that equal footing, because someone born in poverty to illiterate, alcoholic parents is not in a position of equality to someone born in better circumstances, and while it is not a firm rule for individuals of any race where they will fall on the socio-economic spectrum, on balance of population majorities, some groups are currently at a disadvantage that needs to be remedied)...
Pause here because that sentence got away from me a little, and I have a lot of reading to do and haven't time to edit it properly.
Yes. While they think they believe all that stuff, and probably sincerely do, some people seem to find it something of an affront when members of that minority group express their own opinions, voice their own experiences, insist on the respect which in theory most of us agree they deserve but only some of us notice they don't get. The idea being that "we" know whats best for "them"; it's probably an intellectual (as grouping) bias, in that intellectuals tend towards believing that We're Right.
And it can feel like a terrible shock, I guess, when you think you're being ever so kind and wonderful, and discover that actually, no, the person doesn't want your help, exactly, they want independent equality.
The thing is that that attitude is condescending. Like a wealthy landowner condescending to talk to his gardener; it's understood that it is an act of kindness and charity for the master merely to acknowledge that the servant is human, with experiences beyond his role as The Gardener. For the gardener to initiate the conversation would be presumption.
The unprivileged demanding equal status with the privilege is presumption almost by definition; it is denying that the unprivileged person should just "know their place", demanding that their place be moved, presuming equality to be their right.
It is not possible for the oppressed to be liberated without one of two things:
1) The consent of their oppressors
2) Bloody, violent revolution
Now, being that most minority groups are not in fact aiming for a bloody, violent revolution, it is necessary for the ending of systemic -ism that the privileged consent to end oppression. This is what activism does - attempt to establish that the -ism is a Bad Thing and that therefore if you embrace it you are a Bad Person. No-one wants to be a Bad Person so they try not to do the thing.
So privileged people are the ones who need to change. They will feel like they should be a part of this. All of this is fine.
However, the idea that they should be encouraged or even permitted to take a directing, decision-making, authoritative role in the breakdown of their own privilege is untenable, because it inherently reinforces the privilege. If you say that white people should have a strong role in breaking down racism in a way that gives them authority in the struggle itself, then you're doing it wrong, because that's reinforcing their position in a hierarchy that should not exist.
This is why the privileged need to be allies. Because it's the first step in establishing that sometimes, they're not in charge.
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