Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 26

Being a target for hate…

This won’t exactly qualify as a rant, but hey, I did just say I needed to do something besides reviews all the time, right? Right. So today I was having a pretty good Sunday. I slept in, got a little housework done, walked the dog and cat, had a lovely lunch, and even got in a bit of time on the exercise bike to help cut down my increasingly jiggly ass. I’m less than six days from my 40th birthday, and in spite of a shit start to this year, I still feel like I have a lot to be grateful for, chief among them is my husband surviving his bout with this infection.

But in the middle of my day, a long-time friend sent me an article on Facebook in which a romance writer declared that if she found a trans woman in her gym locker room and still carried a gun, she’d kill them. Not if this person was threatening her, mind you. Simply being in the locker room and being “visibly trans” is enough to warrant a death by a firing squad of one.

I told this friend I kinda wished I hadn’t known that, and she said it was best to know my enemies. I replied back that with a list as large as I had, it was hard to keep track of who just hates me, and who really wants me dead.

And you know what? It’s something I can’t think on too much because it’s damned depressing. This isn’t like people who hate me because of something I wrote in a book, or something I said online. That’s easier to process, the idea that I offended someone and now they don’t like me anymore. I get that, and while it bums me out a little, I can handle being hated for my opinions. But this is a hate that stems from my very existence being offensive to someone else. How very abstract and unsettling, you know? Here’s this group of a few million people who would like to see people like me killed because we don’t conform to their expectations.

Lately, it’s become cool to promote hate of trans folks because “you don’t want a man in your bathrooms with your children.” But this line of thinking completely ignores the fact that there are female-to-male transsexuals, and by making this law, some people are actually making sure there are in fact men going to the women’s restrooms. To these people, trans people are only deluded men mutilating themselves to gain access to women’s spaces for some nefarious deeds. Like, I’m not going to the restroom to pee. I’m going in there to scope out some potential victims. And this is just stupid. When I go to the restroom, I don’t even look at anyone else in there except to make sure I don’t run into them on my beeline path to a stall. I’ve never stopped off at the counter and asked, “So, come here often?” Usually, the only thing I’m thinking is, “OKAY BLADDER, I HEAR YOU AND I WILL OBEY, SO STOP HURTING ME.” (And this reminds me that I really shouldn’t try to hold onto pee until it becomes painful.)

I’ll tell you something else. Despite my tendencies to write about sex in quite a few of my books, sexually, I’m a boring flavor of vanilla. Yeah, okay, I’m bi and attracted more to personalities than I am to looks. The kinkiest I usually go is oral sex and maybe sometimes a little anal sex. I don’t do role play in costumes, and the idea of bondage makes me queasy. I had a girlfriend ask me to tie her up, and I freaked out over it. We had to compromise and have her hold a rope around her own wrists, biting down on the rope to keep it tight because just holding it for her turned me off. I don’t like whips and chains or paddles and ropes. I’ve never thought about dressing in latex for a pre-sex warm-up. I have no desire to be sexually humiliated by a dom, nor do I have any desire to be a dom commanding my subs around. I’m bland as a glass of 2% skim milk.

But there’s people out there who think I’m some sexual deviant simply because of my choice to transition. It’s not enough for them to disapprove of my choice. They want me dead because of who I am. And who I am is a happily transitioned person who leads a pretty boring married life. But to these people, I’m somehow corrupting society by simply existing, and the world would be better off if I was dead. That’s hate I don’t understand. It has nothing to do with anything I have done to them, or anything I’ve said or wrote. The theory of my happiness with myself is enough to warrant a death sentence.

I’m crazy, folks. I don’t mean “ha-ha, I’m a wacky person who might do anything.” I mean I hear voices, and I sometimes talk out loud in response to those voices. I’ve been comfortably crazy for a while, meaning I know when something the voices said is a Very Bad Idea, and I’m able to say, “No, that is a Very Bad Idea, and I won’t do it.” I believe my craziness is the result of multiple head injuries sustained in childhood, and as I know it’s there and I can respond to these voices with a somewhat rational rejection, I don’t feel I need pills to rein my crazy in. I do on occasion lose my cool, resulting in hurt feelings and alienated friends, and that sucks, yes. But that’s the limit of my crazy. I don’t wish death upon people I don’t agree with. I sometimes check up on the blogs of people who hate me, and when bad shit happens to them, I wish I was on better terms with them to send a message and tell them I’m sorry for their troubles. Maybe send them a few bucks if I have it, because that’s all I can do. Except I can’t anymore because they hate me, and they would reject my help. But I can’t change that, so I won’t dwell on it. They may hate me, but I’m not returning the favor.

Again, I’m crazy. Certifiably, hearing voices crazy. So what do I call these people, who in most respects are perfectly sane and rational about most topics? What do I call people who at the mere mention of someone like me suddenly become angry and fearful? I can’t call them crazy because this isn’t the result of a brain chemical imbalance. It’s the result of a socially ingrained belief that some people are not really worthy of self-determination. It’s the widespread idea that anyone drifting outside of socially defined gender roles needs to be culled lest it somehow imperil the so-called fabric of society. It’s not insanity. It’s something more insidious, a mindset that even the most rational person can hold.

I’m tempted to say “Well I’d call those people assholes,” but the thing is, if this one topic never came up at all, I might find them to be pleasant company. Being an asshole is making a choice to be abrasive to lots of people for no reason. This is something completely different. In many ways, it’s worse than being an asshole. The asshole, I can at least understand, you know?

At the end of the day, I can’t process it, so I often just try to think about other things. If I woke up and acknowledged the fact that millions of people who don’t even know me would like to see me dead, I might not even make it off the couch. It’s simply too much hatred for me to process.

So I don’t. I write my stories, and I play with my dog and cat. I play video games and read books that help me look away from the sharp and hateful edges of my reality. I thank God for my husband, and for my relatively quiet and happy life. I spend time talking to people who share similar hobbies and interests, and we talk about stuff that keeps us happy productive little cogs.

But sometimes reality intrudes, and then I’m reminded of this simple truth that some people hate me. Oh, they don’t hate me directly. They hate the idea of me, the idea of a happily transitioned person who doesn’t conform to their constricting definitions of gender. And because they hate me so bad, they propose laws to make me a criminal for doing something we all do, take a leak in the restroom of my choice. They spend their time fear mongering about what I’m really plotting now that I’m “behind enemy lines.” And yes, they think actively about killing me and others like me even though our life choices have nothing to do with them and will never interfere with their lives in any meaningful way.

What do I call hate like that? How do I quantify it, and other similar forms of hate? Prejudice feels too mild a word. Calling it a phobia seems a bit much, but it does seem to be a reaction based on fear and ignorance. I don’t have a proper label for it, and I can’t think too much on the idea without becoming depressed.

So for lack of a better term, I choose to call these people misguided. I think they are taught by elders and peers to hate what they don’t understand. Maybe there is the chance that one day, they will see that they have been led astray. I truly hope that they learn how wrong they are before they act on this hate and ruin their own lives by committing an act of violence against someone else. Because I have attacked someone before, and I can say from personal experience, that weight never leaves your soul. There is always the reminder that in a moment of anger, you did something you can never take back. I know how that feels, and I wouldn’t wish that feeling on my worst enemies. So I pray that one day these misguided people learn to think different, before it’s too late and they do something they’ll regret forever.

Blogger writes words…you won’t believe what happens next!

Am I the only one who’s sick to death of these god-awful “you won’t believe what happens next” headlines? Like “Man starts playing guitar, but when the woman driving starts singing, you won’t believe what happens next!” Uh, I won’t believe that she sings well? Actually I do believe that, and I do believe this is one of the most irritating link baits I’ve ever seen. I do believe I’d like to find the guy who started this idea, and you won’t believe what I’ll do to him in revenge.

So…hubby is finally home. It’s been ten weeks since he first went away in an ambulance, and he was transferred through three hospitals since then. I’ve done more traveling in the last two months than I did in the last four years, carrying clean clothing and other supplies to hubby over those weeks. For any healthy person, this would be no big deal. But for me, having MS, it meant that many times I just wanted to collapse and stay down. But my husband has always supported me through sickness and health, and I was determined to honor my vows even all I wanted to do was hide under my covers.

Hubby is still not at 100%, and just a few short tasks can wipe him out. I think he wanted to hit the ground running and get back to helping with housework and cooking, but that’s still a ways off, and even working in the office is likely to drain him once he goes back. So for at least the next few weeks, I’ve still got to handle quite a few of the jobs he normally did himself.

But, now that he’s home, I’m reducing my outside time and adding in some much needed napping to my schedule. This should help eventually clear my brain fog problems, and with enough rest, I hope my right shoulder stops making crunching noises every time I raise it over my head. (The joint is swollen, so that’s why it’s crunching. As for why it’s swollen, I have no clue. My left arm is the one bearing weight all the time, and the right does next to nothing. It’s a mystery.) The brain fog makes it hard to write or to edit, so for a little while, I’m doing neither. Which likely means my plans to release A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing in April will not go down as planned. A May release is also looking iffy, but we’ll see how it goes.

Obviously, with the hospital drama and related financial problems, my budget for buying games is a bit gone-ish. About the only new game on my mind is Project Cars, which, unless I missed an update, will not be out until May. So there’s not likely to be any new game reviews for quite some time. I do have a huge backlog of books on my TBR pile and in my Kindle, so the book reviews are still coming.

I will say, the next couple of reviews are likely to be negative, as I seem to have hit a slump of books I’m not enjoying much. Some folks might just give up and move on, but I figure I can learn something even from a book I don’t like. Plus, there’s always the chance that they can get better later. Even if they don’t, I’ll finish them and hopefully move on to something that works for me.

I don’t really do movie reviews, but I recently got to see Birdman, and I thought it was pretty good. It was nothing at all what I was expecting from the trailer, and while I normally might bitch about that, this time it left me pleasantly surprised. The film has a lot of dreamlike qualities, and the way the camera moves often feels like it was all done in only a few takes. Many of the transition have the camera pan up to the skyline above for a night to day time-lapse shot, and then it pans back down and continues moving smoothly to the next location. There’s also this weird sort of trick going on where everyone walks maybe a block from the theater, like every other location is right there in the same block. And then there are times when the camera pans to one side to show the drummer playing the soundtrack…like I said, it all feels very dreamlike. I thought I understood what was going on through most of the film, but then there’s the ending, which makes me question the other scenes. It’s a nifty trick, in my opinion, and I’m looking forward to getting the DVD to see if there’s maybe some commentary to explain what was really going on.

Some of you may be wondering what happened to the rants. Like did I stop being angry at all this stuff? No, I still get mad, but lately, I don’t feel much like spending energy writing these thoughts up when I could be doing something more creative. Plus, about half the time that my internal monologue is winding up on a topic, I shut it down by thinking, “I already wrote about that ages ago.”

Having said that, I feel like I ought to at least attempt a rant now and again to break up the monotony of the reviews. It’s not like I’ve got a whole lot of new releases planned to break things up with some good old-fashioned book begging. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to that, though. Probably in a few weeks, after I’ve had a few naps and have recovered somewhat from all these trips to the hospital.

That’s about it for now. I do want to thank everyone who sent kind thoughts and prayers during hubby’s time in the hospital. I really appreciate it, and I don’t think I say that enough.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my blog, and I’m sorry updates have been so slow lately. At least y’all know it’s because I was busy dealing with a crisis, and not a lack of interest in keeping the content flowing.

Game review: Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles for PS Vita

Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles got on my radar after watching James and Mike Mondays play the original Japanese version, called Rondo of Blood, and I looked it up on PSN and found a Vita port of the PSP version. Castlevania used to be one of my favorite franchises, and I’ve played it on the NES, the Game Boy, and the SNES. After that I drifted out of console gaming and spent most of my free time playing PC games instead. But lately I’ve had the urge to play some good old-fashioned 2D platformers, and this seemed like a perfect game for me. And after playing it through, my verdict is a bit mixed. I don’t think it’s a bad game, it’s just…

Okay, first of all, I think my main issue is, Super Castlevania has spoiled me on the Belmont moveset. I loved being able to whip in any direction, or to drop my whip and let it kill enemies below me, or to flail my whip around and use it as an improvised shield against enemy fireballs. Coming into this installment, I was really hoping the game would have more than just whipping side to side and jumping. But no, this is sort of a graphically upgraded Castlevania with an updated story. Oh, and also, instead of Simon Belmont, it’s Richter. But for the most part, it’s pretty much the same game with better graphics and upgraded music. (Note: I can’t say better music. This is good music, but the original 8 bit version was so good that I still like listening to it. So it’s not better, just upgraded.)

The thing is, during the second level, you have the chance to unlock a second character, a twelve-year-old girl named Maria Renard. Maria has a double jump. She “shoots” magic birds that can hit enemies twice like the boomerang, and instead of the stock sub-weapons Richter gets, she has magic spells that summon various mystical animals. Maria can slide and dodge roll. Maria can unlock secret areas that Richter can’t get to.

Maria is fucking awesome.

But, here’s the thing. This little girl makes it all too clear how pathetic Richter is. Richter’s version of double jumping makes him back flip, which is always worthless at best, or fatal at worst. His whip isn’t nearly as useful, and even using the “super weapon” mode, Maria’s magic always makes his stuff look bad by comparison.

So why play as Richter at all? No, how is it that a Belmont, a member of the family line who trains ALL THEIR LIVES to fight monsters, is consistently shown up in his own game by a little girl? It isn’t that I didn’t try going back to Richter after unlocking Maria. I did. But I liked Maria so much more for all the extra moves she had, and for her spells. So aside from a few experiments in the level select menu, Maria became my default character for the rest of the game.

With Maria, I was able to unlock secret levels, take down bosses much more easily, and rescue all the maidens. I find it very interesting how this isn’t really a Belmont game to me. It’s all about Maria, and part of me likes this. The real hero of the game is a little girl who the hero and big boss underestimate. That’s…really cool. She’s got a nice outfit too, pink pants and a pink vest with a blue belt and a white blouse. It’s rather snazzy.

But I keep thinking, “If Maria has all this awesome stuff, why can’t Ricther at least whip up? Why can’t he have a double jump that doesn’t suck? This is a Castlevania game, so why is the Belmont outclassed in every respect by a child?”

In the end, I decided that it’s a minor quibble, and I’ll give Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles 4 stars. It’s not quite good enough to get that fifth star, but it is a fun, challenging game that I love to flop back on the couch and veg out with.

On making Spider-Man another race in the movie canon…

So lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of topics pop up about who should play Peter Parker in the next movie, and the biggest debate seems to be “why does Peter Parker even have to be a white guy at all? Why can’t we just change his color?” I have a different question. Since we already know the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is based off of the Ultimates comic lines, why does Spider-Man have to be Peter Parker? Why can’t we have Miles Morales be in the movies instead? Wouldn’t that be a great explanation for why old Peter wasn’t in the last Avengers movie? Because he was already dead? YEAH. And then we could do a story introducing Miles in a post Peter Parker production. Perfect! Then everyone can be happy. The people who want more diversity get a new Spider-Man they can identify with, the “respect canon” fanboys get a character who is well established in comics canon by now, and Marvel gets to smell like a rose for being creatively diverse.

But you know what doesn’t sound so good? Race swapping an established character. Allow me to put it in a way that most of us have seen most frequently. Did you like it when the Avatar movie whitewashed most of the cast? Does it annoy you when a character who is clearly described as dark-skinned in your favorite book shows up as a white person in the movie? Hell yeah, you do, and that reaction is completely understandable. But it’s also the same reaction some of you are ridiculing when it happens to an established white character. Like, “oh relax, it’s just fiction. These people can be whatever race they want.”

No, they really can’t, and I’m not just talking about some fanboy hysteria, either. Peter Parker’s whole story would have to be rewritten to take another race into account. This is not entirely impossible given how often the comics companies pull a “cosmic event” that reshuffles all their alternate Earths and decided on a new reboot for everyone. There could very possibly be an alternate universe reboot where Peter Parker can be any other race. Except, if he were say, Middle Eastern, doesn’t the name Peter Parker itself feel a bit…odd? The same goes if he was Native American, or Chinese, or Latino. As a real world example, the Japanese Spider-Man is named Takuya Yamashiro. He has a completely different origin and history, and yet his character is now accepted Marvel canon these days. He’s still Spider-Man, just a different alternate universe version.

The name Peter Parker carries with it a crap-ton of historical baggage, and to change his race requires time to rebuild him from scratch with a whole new origin and history. Simply flipping his skin color and saying it’s the same guy ignores how race affects real world people. A lot of the opportunities offered to white Peter would not be extended to black Peter, even if they come from the same humble origins. You can’t just do the same story without examining what a change in race means to the established history. You need to go back to the start and rewrite all that history to reflect the change. To do less is to be ignorant of how important race is in social interactions. It’s a “color-blind” reboot, and that in itself can end up becoming slightly racist by pretending that culture and skin color are universal and interchangeable.

A proper reboot could still possibly do the same origin with Uncle Ben getting killed and creating Peter’s iconic philosophy that “with great power comes great responsibility.” But beyond that point, the writers have to start thinking about how people perceive race and change Peter’s background accordingly. Can you really see the Marvel movies taking on that kind of thorny issue in a compressed format? No, probably they would rather go for the “safe” choice by sticking to a white Peter. That’s a shame because if the MCU is based around the Ultimates comics, we already have a better option for a diverse Spider-Man. Samuel Jackson is Nick Fury because Marvel wrote the Ultimate Nick Fury with him firmly in mind from the beginning of that universe’s start. And that’s exactly why Miles would be perfect to come into the Avengers instead of Peter. We already know it’s canon that Peter died, so it’s okay to do a bit of compression and explain Peter’s death and bring in Miles without causing much of a fuss.

But simply flipping a race switch in the movies without an established character change from a reboot in the comics is just going to cause problems. Look at how people are reacting to a black Johnny Storm, for instance. And while some of them are racist in their resistance to the idea, some folks are also probably upset because that’s not the established character history. People would be just as upset if Luke Cage was suddenly a white guy.

While I’m on this topic, there’s something Marvel’s been doing to swap out canon characters with new people that I really like, and that’s a passing of the mantle to a new character. Ms. Marvel is now Kamala Khan. Captain America is Sam Wilson. There’s two Hawkeyes, Clint Barton and Kate Bishop. There’s a new Thor, a woman who was deemed worthy to pick up the hammer Mjolnir. To me, this is the perfect response to calls for more diversity. Instead of simply swapping the old character and saddling them with all that old history, Marvel is giving the costume to a new person. This allows them to create a new canon and at the same time explores issues unique to those new heroes’ perspectives.

In the same way, Miles Morales is a perfect way to make a new Spider-Man. We get to do away with all of Peter’s baggage and give this new guy room to be himself. We don’t carry forward any expectations of what he should act like because this isn’t Peter Parker, and he doesn’t have to act the same. We also get to understand something of what it means to be carrying on a legacy by taking on the same costumed identity.

That’s not even a new concept. Look at the times the Flash was changed over to a new character. Or look at Blue Beetle, or Dr. Fate, or any number of characters who handed down their title to someone else going from one comics age to the next. It’s an established precedent, and while in the past, most white dudes passed their costume down to another white dude, it doesn’t mean we have to respect that old tradition. So the new Captain America is black. The new Spider-Man is mixed race. The new Ms. Marvel is a Muslim. Let’s keep that idea going and have other people inherit older titles instead of simply swapping the race of an established white dude. Let that show the changing times, where the mostly white, mostly male lineups give way to a new more diverse team of new age heroes. And while we’re doing that, let’s also introduce some new heroes to join the team who are equally diverse and don’t have to deal with a legacy at all. Let’s make a few more heroes like DC’s Static, a character who I’ve talked about before that was successful enough to get his own cartoon series going.

I’m all for broadening the racial and gender diversity of our comic book heroes, and I think it is possible to bring the same idea over to the movies. But I don’t like the idea of simply flipping a switch and saying “now X is this new race.” It ignores how important race is to the identity of a character and misses the point of what it would mean to be another race. And again, it would be taken in an entirely different light if an established character of color was suddenly race-swapped to be white. Then it would be okay to be upset, because it’s not just about skin color, but the identity of the character. You couldn’t make Storm a white woman without making a lot of people upset for valid reasons. So why is changing an established white character no big deal while changing a character of color a HUGE deal?

It’s because white is the default for so many heroes, and the few characters of color are a precious commodity. You take away Storm’s identity and you disenfranchise a huge section of your readers who grew up idolizing her and relating to her race.

I agree it’s a bad move to do so. But I wonder why it’s quite all right to snub the other half of the market by simply race erasing a white guy when there are already better methods of introducing diversity into the titles. Let’s look at that woman Thor again. She’s now outselling the old male Thor by a wide margin. Why? Because she’s picking up a lot of girls and women interested in the idea, and she’s bringing in some open-minded male readers who are curious about where this new Thor will go. Thor wasn’t just gender-swapped or rebooted, and oddly enough, Thor would be one of the few characters who could pull that off mid-series without a reboot, being a god. (Loki did it, so why not Thor, you know?) And this new Thor is helping to create interest in readers. Not just the usual fan-base, but also in new readers who might not have otherwise looked into the comic. It’s a great way to inject diversity into the story AND into the readership. Maybe it is a gimmick to grow the fan-base, but hot damn, it’s a gimmick that’s working. So let’s run with that and keep going by swapping other old heroes for new people with new names and diverse identities.

So, getting back to the movies for my closing point, why can’t we just race swap Peter? Well I think we shouldn’t because it’s a sloppy way of creating diversity that disenfranchises a big number of established fans. We don’t need to do it because there’s a great Spider-Man in the comics canon who could easily replace Peter Parker altogether. So if we’re going to cast a Spider-Man who isn’t white, let’s forget the name Peter Parker and move on to Miles Morales. Spider-Man is dead. Long live Spider-Man.

Game review: Castle In the Darkness for PC

Castle In the Darkness was one of the games Steam recommended to me, probably because I played other indie platformers like Shovel Knight and Battleblock Theater. Steam doesn’t really care if I liked a game or not, so their recommendations are something of a mixed bag. I can’t improve the system’s choices for me by telling Steam “I loved Shovel Knight, but I wasn’t so hot on some parts of Battleblock Theater.” What this means is that when they offer me a new game, there’s a 50/50 chance I’m going to hate it. Castle In the Darkness falls firmly into the hate category for all the worst indie reasons.

The game is pitched as a tribute to the NES days, but what that really means is the designers blatantly ripped off character designs from a whole bunch of better games. You can almost feel the designer sitting beside you, elbowing you in the ribs with every new sprite introduced while saying, “Get it? Get it? Ha! Nostalgia, amIright?” Look, it’s Link making a corny joke. Look, Sonic is an enemy. Here’s an annoying fairy saying “hey!” to cause damage. This is the indie style of tribute humor, where simply referencing an older character is supposed to be funny. Only it never is, and the game suffers from a lack of an identity to call its own because it spends so much time doing the hint, hint, nudge, nudge, wink wink routine.

The plot of the game is pretty simplistic. Monsters show up and invade the castle, killing all the guards except for your one lonesome knight, and now it’s up to you to kill all the bad guys and save the day.

I will give the story a little credit because the princess in the game is not one needing to be rescued, and rather she runs off to try and save the day by herself, briefly seen in a few cut scenes along the course of the game. But even this can be frustrating because the princess is able to one-hit-kill an enemy that you will need to stab about five to ten times to eliminate. And yet at the end of the game, she’s begging you to go take on the final boss because “he’s just too strong for me.” Yuh-huh.

At the start, I liked the controls, and the weapons and spells. That kept my interest going for a while, hunting around to collect new items. But it was hard for me to stay interested when even the next weapon or spell upgrades did so little damage to the enemies, to say nothing of the bosses. Backtracking to earlier stages does make the enemies easier to kill, but once I hit a new area, I was back to swearing and banging my thumbs in vain while looking for some way to dodge all the crap being thrown at me.

Even if I set aside the sprite designs and the story, I never really cared much for the game, and I rarely had fun with it.

One particularly annoying trait consistent across all bosses is their lying health meters. Initially, the first few bars go down with X number of hits. But as you get closer to the bottom of a boss’ health bar, the more hits it takes to cleave off another notch. It’s a guessing game how many times you have to dodge and strike on any boss, and if this is some kind of tribute mechanic, it’s a tribute to some pretty shitty games.

But the place where my hatred is mostly saved up for is in later levels, where the designer becomes fucking obsessed with instant death spikes and pixel perfect jumps. This is the sort of shit I’ve come to expect from a lot of indies, the aggravating difficulty spike that makes the health upgrades I’ve spent most of the game collecting absolutely fucking worthless. None of the spells I collect can counter instant death. None of the armor upgrades do me any good. If I don’t play these levels EXACTLY as the designer intended, well fuck me, I’m just going to have to quit and walk away.

So I did. With so little left in the game, I went to YouTube and watched the rest, and much like Guacamelee, I found myself muttering over and over, “Never in my entire life would I have pulled this bullshit off.” This isn’t a game for platformer fans like me. It’s a game for the memory mapping hardcore crowd, the kinds of guys who spend a year memorizing every single last pattern for the perfect speed run. For those guys, this kind of difficulty spike must be endlessly fascinating and fun. But this is nothing at all like the early platforms of the NES days that got me hooked into gaming. This isn’t Castlevania, Bionic Commando, Duck Tales, or Mario Bros. Instead it’s the current indie model of platformer as endurance test, and for me, it’s not even slightly fun.

Oh, and if you collect the right items and get the good ending, that independent princess who was doing so good to avoid falling into tropesville ends up becoming the knight’s grand prize anyway. Le fucking sigh.

The thing is, I know tribute games can be done while still building their own original concepts. Shovel Knight is a prime example, being a great game with simple graphics, great music, fun gameplay, and an interesting story. I wish more indies would ditch the copycat designs and make more original games like Shovel Knight, but this clearly isn’t the same beast even if they both claim the same genre.

I’m giving Castle In the Darkness 2 stars. It’s everything I hate in indie platformers, with no redeeming qualities to make it’s challenges bearable and a dumb gimmick of stroking the old nostalgia boner that’s been tired for a long time now.

Book review: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye has been one of those books that I often thought about reading, but then put it off. I suppose maybe I had to find the right time for when I was in the mood to try it.

I think it was about five or maybe six years ago that someone said, “You shouldn’t read The Catcher in the Rye after you’re out of high school.” Well I hadn’t been in high school for more than a few months before I’d quit, and I supposed I was too old for whatever secrets this book held that was meant only for teenagers of a certain age to understand. So I thought about the book, but I never really thought about reading it.

High school for me was a scary place. Part of it had to do with how I’d always gotten through my previous grades. I never did homework, and I was always flunking and having teachers give me speeches about not applying myself. Then when the year end exam came, I’d ace that damn test and prove that even if I didn’t play along with all the homework, I did read the damn books, and yes, I grasped what I was supposed to get out of them.

I didn’t skip out of homework because I was lazy, either. I had hand pains from normal writing, and despite telling everyone about this, no one ever believed me. It later turned out this was a very early symptom of MS, and had anyone believed me, I might have been diagnosed a lot earlier. But just to get to a doctor back then, I had to practically break a bone. I even took a hammer to the head, fell off the clubhouse we were building, and bled like a stuck pig out of my eyebrow, and all I got was a band aid.

I didn’t like school, to be honest. I didn’t like the bullies, or the teachers always telling me that I must be doing something wrong to get beat up all the time. I had a few teachers I liked, but most of them made me mad for how they ignored kids like me and let us fall through the cracks. So I refused to play along and do homework, and I turned in my tests and watched those lousy teachers stew over my passing test scores.

Before going to high school, the counselor of my junior high said my old tricks wouldn’t work there, and if I didn’t apply myself, by God, I was going to be sorry. So I went in thinking “Well, this is it. I’ve got to change my life and really do some work for a change.” I also decided that if I was stuck in for another four years of school hell, I was going to find somewhere I wanted to belong. So after looking around, I decided where I really wanted to be was with the cheerleaders. I started out buddying up to them, hoping to ask them how to make the squad, but only a few days into this plan, some of the jocks cornered me and told me they would mess me up if I hung out with their girls. And that’s when I decided that I no longer wanted any part of school.

When I talked to the counselor about quitting, I made up other reasons for wanting to leave, and she said that if I did quit, I’d never accomplish anything in my life. As it turned out, I took the GED a year later without studying and passed in the top five percent. I took college entrance exams, also without studying, and I passed everything except math, where I was told I need to take intermediate college algebra. I attended college for a degree in computer graphics, thinking I would learn how to make 3D cartoons. But the crumby old community college I went to thought computer graphics meant making Powerpoint slideshows.

And I’ll tell you a funny thing. I was passing my algebra class, but failing in Drawing 101. Yeah. I was supposed to make ten sketches a day, and after three or so, my hand hurt so bad I couldn’t do anymore. But of course I couldn’t get any sympathy with that old story. After a while, it just depressed me to think how I was passing my math class, but failing in art. The sketches I did make were praised, and yet, I wasn’t making enough to make the grade. I looked at my lousy grades in that class, and I thought about getting a degree in making slideshow presentations, and I said, “Well screw it, I’ll just see what I can do without a college degree.”

It turns out, I can do quite a lot. Over the years, I worked as a PC technician, a webmaster, a network technician, and as a help desk technician. I even got to be a movie projectionist because I had a technical background. For a little while I edited videos for a wrestling federation out of Austin, and they let me be the commissioner and tell these big burly jocks who was going to win and lose. That was a fun job, let me tell you.

Sometimes I want to go back to my old high school and find that counselor still working there. I want to say to her, “You know how you said I’d never amount to anything? Well you were wrong, and I did a whole hell of a lot without your stupid diploma. I live in Milan now, and I have a great husband, and I write novels, and I get paid to edit a magazine. I’ve worked on computers and networks, and I’ve worked on movie projectors. I’ve had a great goddamn life with no thanks to you and your lousy advice, and I don’t think you or these teachers are heroes. I think you’re a sad bunch of shitheads with a government mandated job of programming subservient company cogs.”

This is all a rather roundabout way of saying that I totally get Holden Caulfield. His is a story that despite the differences in our experiences, locations, and time periods, really connects to me. Most of the stories I read about teens are okay, but they all feel like stuff written by adults who want to tell kids how to behave, so they write about kids that are so gosh-doodly-darned clean and innocent that I can’t relate to them. And then there’s Holden; drinking, smoking cigarettes, trying to find some girl to lose his virginity with, and flunking with all his teachers asking why he can’t just apply himself. Oh, hell yes, I can relate to this guy.

I saw some other blurbs and reviews that made me think there was going to be some great coming of age tale in this book, with Holden venturing into the seedy side of New York. But that never happened, and this is really a story about nothing at all. Holden is kicked out of his fancy school, Pencey Prep, for flunking several of his classes, and rather than face his parents, he opts to go out on a misadventure around town. Everywhere he goes, he seems intent to keep burning bridges with old contacts, and even if it is his fault for saying some rotten things, I knew why he was doing it, and I felt sorry for him.

Once I got to the middle of the book and understood there wasn’t going to be any big revelation, I just settled into a pace of reading a few chapters a day, and they depressed me not because of Holden’s antics or his musings. I got depressed thinking how adults lose their perspective on this formative time in their life. I mean, I get why they do. You go from being a teenager yelling “When I grow up, no one is going to tell me what to do!” And then you grow up, and now everyone is telling you what to do. Your boss, your landlord, your bill collectors. You know it isn’t fair, but what else can you do? So you get a job and pay the bills and the rent, and in the process, you lose some of that empathy for what it means to be a teenager. You lose sight of why you were so angry. You forget what it felt like to be powerless and angry at having every single minute of your time dictated by others.

Well I didn’t forget. Maybe it was the multiple head injuries or the constant abuse that have me permanently locked in a teenage mindset, but even after reaching the ripe old age of 39, I have an easier time relating to teenagers than I do to most adults. So even at his angriest, most selfish moments, I understand Holden. I relate to him more readily than a number of YA characters I’ve read in more modern stories, and I think that’s because he feels real. Sure, he can still be viewed a bit like a cautionary tale, but there’s no sense of an adult lecturing through the character about what good girls and boys act like. It feels like a teen telling me about that one time they flunked out and went a little crazy at the prospect of facing their parents over yet another failure to conform. It feels like a story closer to my own life experiences.

And something else that I noticed is, this story has a scene with a trans person having a binging episode. Holden sees them dress up in a gown in their hotel room and walk around smoking and posing in front of a mirror. And yeah, Holden’s calling them a pervert, but how I see this is as a revolutionary scene for literature of the time. You just try to find a trans character in most modern YA. There may be a “safe gay,” the asexual friend with no romantic partner who allows the author to check off a box and say they write with “diversity.” But that’s as far as they go, and trans people don’t even get a mention in these books. Meanwhile, here’s a book published in 1951 showing a trans person binging in a hotel room, an experience I’ve read about multiple times from older transitioners who went through binging and purging phases before accepting themselves and coming out. That’s some brave stuff to talk about in a teen’s book, even if Holden is saying, “ooh, look at this pervert acting freaky.” He’s a teenager in a time when trans people were a very unknown topic. Hell in 1951, Christine Jorgensen was just getting her operation in Denmark. This was written before that, before there was even a trans celebrity in the public spotlight. And now, you can’t find a trans character in most of these YA novels even though there’s a few thousand high school students actively transitioning. Ain’t that a kick in the nuts?

This review is probably already going way too far into TMI, and I realize I’m just supposed to say how angry old Holden is, and he’s just a stupid kid who doesn’t know how hard life will get in the future. But I think I get where he’s coming from because I remember all too well all those speeches about applying myself and needing to amount to something. I remember what it was like not having the first damn clue of what I wanted for myself, and only knowing that I didn’t want to be stuck in a stupid school being told how to think and what to do. I get it, I really do.

So I’m giving The Catcher in the Rye 4 stars. I’m glad I finally read it, and I don’t think you need to read it before you leave high school. But I think if you do read it as an adult, you need to try real hard to remember what it was like being a teenager and being angry at how unfair the world looked from your perspective. Perhaps you just need to be in the right mood to reconnect to your old self first before you can get back to Holden’s mindset.

Book review: Vampire Diaries: The Awakening by L.J. Smith

Vampire Diaries: The Awakening had a hard time clicking for me. I wouldn’t say it’s atrocious, but it’s got a problem getting started or building sympathy for the main characters until well past the two-thirds mark of the book. I felt zero emotional impact from the romance, but unlike previous YA couples like the Hush, Hush series, the problem here isn’t with the male lead. No, it’s all on Elena. She’s introduced as the most popular girl in her school, a pretty pretty princess who instantly dumps her boyfriend Matt the instant she sees the new guy Stefan, and who compares boys to puppies. When he turns her down, she hatches a plot to make him jealous by inventing a fake older lover. This is really all you need to know about her because she’s lacking a personality to go along with her looks. She’s as shallow as a driveway puddle and only half as reflective.

Stefan makes a favorable comparison to Louis from Interview with a Vampire, a reluctant creature of the night looking for somewhere to get away from his past. There’s comparisons to Twilight for the high school setting (although in my opinion Bella comes out looking much better for lacking Elena’s ego), and more comparisons to Interview when Damon shows up acting very much like Lestat. But as the story nears the end, Damon really comes across as the stereotypical Hollywood vampire, the creature hundreds of years old who never matures, killing indiscriminately and leaving a trail of bodies, and always obsessed with fang-banging the hot chicks. Like a four hundred year old teenager, Damon’s entire purpose in life is to pursue his brother, like, “Looook, I’m bigger than you! I’m meaner than you! Looooook, bro! I’m so strong!”

Actually, I take back that comparison to teens, since that’s kind of insulting to the teenagers I’ve known. Damon comes across as an eternal eight-year-old brat, and his antics are probably the least interesting part of the story. Even the chapters with Elena’s hysterics over not being able to have her man candy are less grating.

The story finally seems to be making some emotional investment in Elena and Stefan, and then it just ends. Not in a cliffhanger. No, it goes one chapter past a proper cliffhanger, and then it just ends. Call me crazy, but I think they could have tacked on another four or five chapters if they were just going to end it arbitrarily anywhere.

I can’t say I hated the book, and I can’t say it really sucked me in, pun intended. I could see trying the next book in the series, but if I compare this to Twilight, Anne Rice’s vampires, or Rachel Caine’s The Morganville Vampires series, The Awakening falls flat in most every way by comparison. The descriptions are weak, the characters are hard to relate to until very late in the book, and the antagonist isn’t scary so much as annoying like my little brother. But there was no point where I dropped the book or yelled “give me a break!” and that puts it way ahead of some other stories I’ve read recently.

So, I give Vampire Diaries: The Awakening 3 stars. It’s okay vampire fiction, serviceable, but not exactly sweeping me off my feet. I will give the series at least one more try, and I guess I might recommend it to fans of YA vampire stories.

Game review: Resogun for PS4 and PS Vita

After getting my PS4, Resogun was one of the games that was supposed to be at the top of my must-buy list. Being made by Housemarque, makers of the fantastic Vita launch title Super Stardust Delta, and having garnered favorable reviews from so many sites, it stayed in my mind as something I HAD to play. But once I had my PS4, a lot of other bigger games stole my attention. It wasn’t until the release of Resogun on the PS Vita that I decided to get it. Cross-buying an arcade shooter that I could play on the big screen or on the go? Yes, please!

So I played it, and I beat it on the first couple of difficulty levels, and…and now I have no desire to play it anymore. It’s not a bad game, but it doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying as Super Stardust Delta does to me. Keep in mind, now going on three years, and I’m still playing Super Stardust. I have the high scores over all my Vita friends in most modes by a wide margin of several million points, and I still get jazzed when I hit a new high score record.

Why didn’t Resogun hit the same high notes for me? Before I get to that, I want to talk about what it did right. It’s pretty, and the design of the levels on a cylinder is clever and visually appealing. I like how blowing up enemies causes parts of the buildings and the platforms to collapse in a shower of cubes. The music is good, the sound effects are great, and the controls are easy to grasp. That’s about it.

For me, the biggest problem is that the game keeps shouting at me to hurry up, go, go, GO! You rescue humans like Defender, the old-school arcade inspiration for this game, but to rescue the humans requires first waiting for “seeker units” to appear. When this happens you must race around the cylinder to find them NOW. Because if they slip off the screen, the human dies, and you have no chance to go after them without resetting the whole game. The restart doesn’t reset the level, you see, it resets the whole game. To reset just the level requires suicide, which is a little irksome when your goal is to unlock the trophy for saving all the humans.

Sometimes, seekers must be killed in a very specific order, and you may sometimes find that your higher level weapons kill the wrong enemy, so again, dead human, suicide, start over. And okay, sure, you can beat a level with some dead humans, but you can’t unlock the full score bonus without them.

Once a human is freed, you must race to them quickly and pick them up, escorting them to one of two transport beams. If you don’t, they’ll get hoovered up by a flying saucer and be killed. When you kill the seekers, often the energy ball they release to free a human shoots to the opposite side of the cylinder, and if you happened to have used boost to get to the seeker in time, well haha, now you can’t boost to get to the human. You’ll most likely have to fight a few dozen enemies to get over there. It doesn’t help that there are times when two seekers appear right on top of each other, and as I mentioned, you can’t really use boost more than once to get around and take them out. So it becomes exceedingly tedious to kill the seekers, find the humans, and rescue them before they’re beamed up by a flying saucer and probed to death.

As an added gotcha, your weapons will hit humans and launch them into the air. That’s right, your guns and missiles that kill enemy ships will just make the weakling humans fly up into the air and turn flips. Shooting them in mid-air makes them flip higher. Which sounds like fun, right? Well about half the time, this can also launch them off the edge of a platform and into empty space or water. So guess what, even being right there, you can end up killing the human yourself because of this ridiculous form of friendly fire.

Shields in Super Stardust Delta last until you take a hit from an enemy or an asteroid, but in Resogun, they last only a few seconds and then go away. Frankly, it’s fucking pointless, and rarely did I ever lose a shield from an enemy hit. It was much more often that it faded, and two seconds later, when I needed it, I got killed.

There’s a bonus multiplier in Resogun, but unlike in Super Stardust Delta, this thing is on a fast timer, and it’s all or nothing. If you fail to kill an enemy or free a human every five seconds, you lose the whole thing.

So everything in this game is telling you hurry, hurry, hurry, go, go, go! But that’s still mostly okay, except for the fact that there’s this game announcer mentioning all this stuff so fast and so often that the messages overlap. I just wanted her to shut up and let me play the game after just a few levels. In fact, that announcer is a big reason for my burning out on the game so fast. The Vita version has a glitch where the announcer sometimes doesn’t talk because too many other sounds effects are happening, and I found that version preferable because I was so sick of her constant commands.

Then there’s the boss designs. On the first two levels, the bosses are kind of neat, if a bit simplistic. The first is a wheel with outer shields you have to shoot before flying inside to break down the shield of the inner hub while flamethrowers try to pick you off. The second boss…is a wheel, but when you defeat its first form, it has some different tactics that require waiting for the vulnerable points to become available. If you save just one bomb for this point in the stage, one hit is all it takes to wipe out the secondary form. From this point on, all the bosses show a complete lack of imagination. Look out! It’s a CUBE boss! Look out! Its a SPHERE boss! Look…it’s a…a rope? Seriously? It’s like the first two bosses had one team working on their design, and the other three had some bored interns doodling on napkins.

The rest of the enemy designs aren’t all that great, either. There’s ships that hone in on your position and try to attack you Kamikaze-style. But most just sit there, waiting for you to fly around and kill them, and once again, if you don’t do it fast, they upgrade to a gold version with more health and the ability to launch fireballs. None of this is all that exciting to me, and even in the thickest fights, I felt bored.

The game has the option to build your own ship with an editor and share it with others, but no matter what you design, you’re limited to the three weapon systems of the basic model ships. Of these, I preferred the Nemesis weapons, and found the other two ships to be huge pains in my ass. When I found the editor, I was thinking how cool it would be to make my own ship, but my interest quickly died because I couldn’t define the stats or the weapons. I could just give it one of the definitions of the three base ships. It’s a cosmetic change, and it doesn’t give me any reason to keep playing.

Ultimately, that’s the fatal flaw in Resogun for me. With one mode (Endless mode is AWESOME) and one ship design, Super Stardust Delta has a siren song that goes “just one more try” for many long hours. But once I’ve beaten the five bosses of Resogun the first time, I found it a struggle to want to play on higher difficulties with the other ships. It’s not the difficulty that turns me off, but rather how stale the whole thing became for me in just a few hours of playing.

So I’ll give Resogun 3 stars. I want to give it 2, but it’s not broken. It just becomes boring too quickly and isn’t as addictive as I’d hoped. I am still holding out hope for Housemarque’s next PS4 release, Super Stardust Ultra, but Resogun was a disappointment for me. Thankfully, it was fairly cheap, and I didn’t have to invest a lot of time in it before realizing it wasn’t for me.

What’s been going on…

I know it’s been a while since I posted anything. and it may still be another week or two before I have any new reviews out. I’ve avoided posting here because I was hoping things would turn out better than they have, or at least get resolved faster. But…

Three weeks ago, hubby came home early on Friday complaining about feeling ill. He didn’t have a fever and said it wasn’t really a proper illness until he had a fever. The next night, he got the fever he wanted, and we couldn’t break it no matter how much aspirin or ibuprofen he took. By Sunday, he was complaining about pain in his ankle, and by Monday, he was mincing worse than me on my worst relapse day. I said he should go to the doctor then, but he said he “might be feeling better already.” Tuesday, he was worse, and when he got in the tub for a bath, it took both of us tugging and pulling for an hour to get him back out. I said that if he wasn’t better by four the next day, he would call an ambulance.

Well he was worse, and yet the damn dispatcher initially refused to send paramedics over for “just a fever” and hung up on hubby. So I got on the phone to call them back, and after making it clear that this was a high fever that had lasted four days combined with joint pain, weakness, and diarrhea I was told that this was most likely just a flu, but they would at least send a paramedic if he was too sick to walk to his regular doctor. I assured them he was too sick to make it to the bathroom without help, much less walk six blocks to his doctor, and the paramedics came and took him away.

For the next week, I got calls from Cinzia, our friend and hubby’s longtime accountant, and every test hubby went through came back negative. He didn’t have any flu strain, nor a cold, but the doctors didn’t have any answers about why he was sick. They did note that the strain of the illness might have given him a heart attack, and their other tests seemed to suggest he has diabetes. I was instructed to start calling family members and let them know he was gravely ill, a task that I’m not prepared for because I don’t have anybody’s numbers except for his cousin. But I did get a hold of his cousin and his sister, and we all waited for more news.

The tests finally came back with a bacteria, a respiratory staph infection. The hospital he was in decided that because of the nature of the infection, hubby needed to be moved to a different hospital better equipped for heart surgery because they noted some masses built up around his stents. Hubby has now undergone open heart surgery to have his stents cleaned, and he’s due to come out of intensive therapy tomorrow or the next day. There’s still no word on when he can come home.

This should have been more than enough drama for one household, but three days ago, I started having difficulties going to the bathroom, and since then, I’ve started peeing blood and other gross bits that tell me I’ve got another urinary tract infection. And sure, it’s nothing compared to hubby’s ordeal, but it’s happening at the worst possible time.

Anyway, the doctors are fairly confident that hubby will pull through this, and that’s helped me dial down the panic enough to get back to doing housework and writing. I should even have some reviews coming up in the next couple of weeks if I can find enough free time to finish a game or a book.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you probably know all of this stuff already, but I think some of you are only blog readers, and I wanted to let y’all know why I haven’t been posting anything. Those of you who do follow me on the social site, I want to thank for the comments you’ve left on my updates. People kept asking how I am, and aside from some serious fatigue, I’m doing okay. (Well the UTI is no picnic, but hey, it could be worse.) I could really use a week or two of uninterrupted sleep, but getting real rest will have to wait until hubby is back at home. Despite the fatigue, I’ve managed to rearrange the furniture to make a better place for hubby to rest in the living room. I’m paying for that already, but the pain is temporary, and I’ve dealt with worse.

Anyway, I hope to post news of hubby’s return home sometime soon, and I want to thank everyone once again for all their support. This year has started off on a sour note already, but it has to stop sucking eventually.

Book review: Into a Dark Land by Walter Shuler

Into a Dark Land picks up immediately after the events in Gods of Sand and Stone and follows Conn, Mur, and Aerlyn in their quest to find a way to destroy a mad god, Cernunnos. At the start of the story, I thought there might be the chance of a somewhat darker take on the classic four-person RPG party, but the sidhe warrior basically walks off after saying, “Sure, the gods might kills us, but they’ll kill you stupid humans first, and that won’t be so bad.” (I’m paraphrasing heavily.) So that leaves Conn’s party as a trio, who upon stepping out of the sidhe’s territory discover that they’ve lost two years in human time, and that things are going very badly for the locals.

While Conn and his friends stop in at a small town to get information, Cernunnos approaches a grieving king, Tigernmas, and seduces him with promises of power and a return to prosperity for his kingdom. The two sides amass armies destined to meet, and in the following weeks of training, Conn also learns the origins of his spear, the real reason why Cernunnos has become corrupted, and that there are many more gods involved in this war than he’d previously believed.

The book concludes with a massive battle between the two armies, though it would be hard to declare either the victor at this point. This sets the stage for book three, where I’m sure there will be more gods introduced, more bodies, and more revelations.

I’ll give Into a Dark Land 4 stars. It’s a short, fast-paced novel that should appeal to fans of dark fantasy, though I’d suggest reading the first book in The God Wars series before delving into this episode.