core dump!

holy shit, it's been a year since i posted here.  i'm way too sleep depped (and gotta go to bed) to go into detail, so... bullet point form:

1) w00t!  offer on a river north condo got accepted.  my ass is moving, i think.  i like my current place a lot, but the new one blows this away.  so much swankier.  though, i think the view here might be sliiiightly better.  i dunno.  new place has a wide-open view north and west, and a bit of loop view south.  man, i'm never gonna get a lake view :[  but yeah, current place has an amazing layered city view.  ngggh, decisions.  either way i'ma rent the one i'm not living in until the market bounces back.  yay for investments!

2) this song is awesome:

that's technically dubstep.  or chillstep.  but 99% of dubstep is horrid; it sounds like a dumptruck stuck in reverse.  the remaining 1% is stuff like the above: sexy, sublime.

i gotta say, i'm also kinda obsessed with katy perry's ET right now.  seriously.  it's embarrassing, but i f'ing love it.  also, i didn't realize katy perry was so hot.  i love her retro look.  i love her body, good god.  it's not all toned and ripped the way most pop stars/movie stars/models' are, and it's so fucking hot. O_O

3) i think part of the reason i'm finding katy perry's slightly retro look, vibe, and body hot is biological.  economic downturn = men are attracted to women that look like they'd be able to propagate the species.

4) related:

Does Playing Hard to Get Work?

... and that, plus my predilection for fancy shit, is why i have a thing for ice queens.

5) FUCK MASS EFFECT 3'S ENDING.  mass effect 1: so fucking good storywise.  so many hard choices with consequences you can almost foresee.  such an amazing revelation of truth toward the end.  mass effect 2: broadened that story out; added amazing gameplay.

mass effect 3?  well.  on one hand, most of the game was amazing.  there were some genuinely amazing moments in it.  there was also one moment where i realized i am a fucking shadow lord irl.

digression begin!

the basic premise of the game series: you're facing galactic extinction at the hands of the Reapers, sentient machine-gods that wipe out all life every 50,000 years.  you're trying to prevent this at all costs.  now, in this world there's a species -- the krogan -- who are very warlike and brutal and multiply quickly and tend to want to conquer everyone else by simply rampaging over them.  a couple hundred years ago this species was given cutting edge technology by the advanced races and sicced on those races' enemies.  then when those enemies were dead, the krogan began to rampage.  in order to quell them, the advanced races inflicted a bioweapon on them that made it so that only one in a thousand krogan children survived birth.

fast fwd a few hundred years.  in the face of galactic extinction, you've gone to get the krogans' support.  they'll only support you if you cure their genetic disease.  meanwhile, the species that first developed the disease -- a science-y espionage-y species called the salarians -- think curing the krogans will just cause them to run rampant again.  their leader tells you that unless you sabotage the cure, they won't help you in the war.  add in another confounding element: one of your friends, who helped you through the second game, is the salarian scientist who has developed the cure.  he has a personal stake in this; a while ago he developed an upgraded version of the disease when the krogan were showing signs of evolving past it.  he's regretted it ever since, and needs to make it right.

all this comes to a head on a mission where you've gone to release the cure into the krogan atmosphere.  you basically have a choice: sabotage the cure and betray the krogan, who'll still fight and die for you, or disperse the cure and lose the salarians.  but if you sabotage the cure, your friend will revolt and try to fix the cure anyway.

at that point, i was seriously morally conflicted.  but it came down to this: the galaxy is at risk.  and the hard math of it is simply two armies are better than one.  and yeah, i'll feel like a shit, sacrificing my personal honor and betraying an entire species -- to their death -- WITHOUT THEIR EVEN KNOWING.  but if that's the reason i don't do it, and then at the end of the day when my armada squares off against the reapers and we die because we were ONE ARMY SHORT OF VICTORY... then i can't imagine a greater regret.

so i sabotaged the cure.  and my friend tried to fix it.  and i couldn't talk him down.

so i shot him.  in the back.  not because i didn't like the krogan, not because i didn't think they deserved a second chance, not because i thought they'd really run rampant again, but because at the end of the day: i am a fucking shadow lord, and the ends justify the means.

... but my goddd i felt bad.

digression end!

now.  you'd think with moral choices like THAT, you'd be able to really feel every consequence in the end, right?

WRONG.  end of game?  ULTIMATE SUCK.  literally the only outcome of ALL your choices across three games is 1) a "scoreboard" tracking the point value of the armies you've rallied, and 2) three endings that were sequentially unlocked if your total score was over certain limits.  and oh, those three endings?  they pretty much differ in the color of their explosions.

i shit you not.

as for the consequences of three games' worth of gutwrenching decisions?  well, those differ mainly in BARELY VISIBLE DETAILS seen in still pictures glimpsed for 2 seconds apiece at the end of the game.  oh hey!  a krogan is sitting sadly alone.  that's the outcome of ALL THAT HEARTACHE up there.  and i won't even get into all the other choices i made that barely made a difference -- or even better, were simply retconned out of existence by game three.

FUCK.

YOU.

BIOWARE.

FUCK YOU.

6) more about games:

that's a vid combining the audio files for what must be the coolest boss in WoW.  basically he's an "Observer" sent down by the "Pantheon" -- gods that created everything and then basically just left it alone to develop as it wished -- to see if Azeroth was still doing a-ok.  well; when Algalon shows up, evil-ass cthulhu-type Old Gods are running amok, their Watchers on azeroth are corrupted or dead, and Shit Has Hit The Fan.  so he's preparing to send a message to the Pantheon to "reoriginate" azeroth, and the raid's job is to stop him.

these are the things he says.  you can tell pretty much what his story is from it.  but whoever made this file brilliantly combined his voiceovers with "the surface of the sun," from Sunshine -- which is a little-known scifi movie that was one part AMAZING THOUGHTFUL INTROSPECTION ON HUMAN NATURE/TOUCHING THE DIVINE, and one part WTF SLASHER FLICK.  i'm ambivalent about the movie.  but the music is beautiful, and...

this juxtaposition is just perfect.  it's perfect.

portal and feminism - chell!

I usually wouldn't post fanart as "official title art," but I love this drawing. It's absolutely Chell: pissed off, determined, smart and tough. I also like that she's not sexed up or cuted up. Also, a Chell screencap from the game is 100% uncanny valley shit.

Okay, so that was more than a day. Mainly cuz -- well.

1) I didn't know where to begin!
2) I went back and replayed both games, Portal 1 and 2, so it was all fresh in my head before I began.

Now that I've finished playing both -- JUST NOW, in fact, like 10 min ago -- I'm back! But #1 is still true. Nonetheless, Kai made the very good point that a lot of times if you don't know where to begin you should just start with the first thing that pops in my head, so I'll try that.

So.

Hmmm.

I guess I'll start with the plot itself and the characters. I think even within the scope of the game, there's a lot of feminism -- or rather, feministic themes. It's not at all a game that shrills at you or clubs you over the head with Girl Power. But those themes are definitely there, and underpin the entire plot. So let's start with the protagonist.


Chell

Stripped down to generalizations, Chell's journey runs like this: she wakes up totally beholden to a system that cares very little for her as a person. She is instructed to perform one task after another. She complies, and receives empty promises and formulaic, meaningless praise for her efforts. She also proves surprisingly adept at her job, and as she outperforms expectations over and over the system begins to turn against her, setting her up to fail while ensuring maiming and death if she should fail. Finally, the system attempts to murder her -- at which point she rebels against the system, breaks out of it using her own wiles, neutralizes the head honcho (it's worthwhile to note Chell never actually kills anyone) and escapes.

Curiously, her story almost doubles itself from Portal 1 to Portal 2. The overall arc isn't so much an arc as it is an ascending spiral -- retreading much the same ground, but progressing. In the first game, the story is more simplistic and obvious. GLaDOS -- or perhaps more precisely, Aperture Science -- plays the role of dictator and oppressor. Chell runs through increasingly dangerous rooms; GLaDOS eventually tries to kill her; she eludes GLaDOS, neutralizes GLaDOS, and escapes.

In the second game, Wheatley fills the role of dictator/oppressor. It's Wheatley that wakes her stasis and urges her into the facility in the first place, and Wheatley's instructions that Chell obeys for the first part of the game. Even after GLaDOS reawakens and takes Chell hostage again, Wheatley makes cameos to urge her to do as told while promising to get them out of there.

Ultimately, just as before, the dictator/oppressor never really makes good on his promises -- Chell does all the work, mentally and physically, and the minute true power is in his hands, and the minute Chell becomes a threat to that power, he turns on her and attempts to kill her. The second half of Portal 2 essentially parallels the first game: we see Chell rebelling against Wheatley, eluding him, neutralizing him, and escaping. However, there are two notable differences:

1) Chell forms an alliance with GLaDOS this time against Wheatley, and

2) In Portal 1, even after having escaped, Chell follows instructions scrawled on the wall by a mysterious "Ratman" that lives in the bowels of the facility. In Portal 2, Ratman is long dead, and Chell is -- for the first time in the series -- genuinely independent and acting on her own will. Wheatley is unaware of her for much of the second half of the game; GLaDOS, interestingly, seems to trust Chell to do what she does best and survive. Although there are prerecorded messages from Cave Johnson to establish backstory and further the plot, Chell's not doing anything because someone's telling her to, but because she wants to. It's also significant to note that the path she chooses for herself leads, finally, to genuine freedom.

Now, while neither game is absolutely in your face with the feminist rhetoric, I think it's pretty easy to see the thematic parallels. Replace Chell with "a woman" and the system with "modern male-dominated society" and you've pretty much got a feminist journey from oppression to self-actualization and independence.

I think it's also entirely important that -- particularly in the second game -- the voices directing Chell about are exclusively male. Even while GLaDOS is in control, she spends most of her time taunting Chell rather than actually providing any direction. Furthermore, the one true alliance Chell forms is with a female entity -- against what my women's studies professor would have called the male hegemony.

All that said, Chell, despite being "you", is actually the less well-rounded and interesting character in the game. So let's consider GLaDOS ...

... next time!

portal and feminism - plot!

she's still alive!


I really love it when pop culture actually makes me think. TBH, when I first heard of Portal, I didn't think it sounded all that interesting. And when I first heard of all the "Portal as a great feminist manifesto" buzz surrounding the game, I was like WTF, people take this shit way too seriously. Having played both Portal 1 and 2, I can now say: in both cases, I was so very wrong. And now! I want to yak at length about my thoughts re: the game, the characters, and, yes, the very awesomely (read: non-shrill/militant/batshit/beat-over-head) feminist subtext in the game.

Now, first things first:

1. THIS POST IS FULL OF SPOILERS!

2. If you haven't already played Portal and Portal 2, or at least seen some youtubes of choice moments ... please do. It's amazing.

3. Seriously, go play it. Or watch some clips.


Plot Summary

Okay, so! First ... er, second thing I should probably do is actually give a rundown of the plot. So, uh, again. SPOILERS AHEAD. This plot summary's gonna be put in in-game chronological order, which is in fact wildly out of playthrough order, but will allow the rest of this post to make more sense. I'm also going to try to be as factual and non-opinionated as possible here.

Without further ado, here's how it all happens:

* Pre-1950s - Cave Johnson, this very stereotypically jolly-macho-50s-guy starts up Aperture Fixtures, which manufactures shower curtains. Hence the logo -- it was originally the aperture on the shower curtain. He makes big bucks.

* 1950s/1960s - Having made a zillion bucks, Aperture Fixtures becomes Aperture Science Innovators. Gradually, Cave Johnson becomes fixated on Science! and starts running experiments. Possibly around this time, Caroline becomes Cave Johnson's assistant. Cave obviously has a very "behind every great man is a great woman" outlook -- in other words, despite repeatedly praising her intelligence, Cave expects Caroline to always play second fiddle to himself. Mostly, she gets praised on her ability to follow instructions, perform as expected, and look pretty.

* During this era, test subjects are recruited from the best and brightest: astronauts, war heroes, etc. Always lagging behind his direct competitor Black Mesa, Cave Johnson becomes increasingly obsessed and cheerfully sociopathic. As part of his experimentation, portal technology is developed. Halfbaked experiments result in test subjects getting injured, maimed, diseased, and dead. Aperture Science Innovators gets dragged before Senate hearings, goes bankrupt.

* 1970s - Aperture becomes Aperture Laboratories/Aperture Science, Inc. Cave continues running batshit experiments, now on transients and bums. He's clearly growing more shorttempered and embittered. Caroline sticks by him.

* 1980s - Having contracted cancer from his own experiments, Cave Johnson is now dying and continues frantically performing experiments to try to save his own life. Caroline is still sticking by him. Employees are required to undergo mandatory testing. As a result, employees begin quitting en masse. Cave Johnson begins developing sophisticated AI to replace human test subjects.

* Around the same time, in a last-ditch plan to preserve himself, he researches uploading his personality into a computer.

* Ultimately, he dies before he can succeed. However, his research eventually bears fruit: the supercomputer GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System). He also leaves instructions to upload Caroline into the computer's personality if he's dead, and to let her run Aperture Science. Additional personality cores are attached to GLaDOS to regulate her behavior/performance.

* Sometime in the late 90s, Aperture Science holds Bring Your Daughter To Work Day. Kidlet Chell is brought into work on that day. It's claimed (by GLaDOS) that Chell was adopted; there's some speculation that she might be Caroline's adopted daughter. Also on that day, GLaDOS is booted up for the first time.

* Within a picosecond of bootup, GLaDOS becomes self-aware and floods the facility with deadly neurotoxin, killing a lot of people.

* Engineers manage to attach a Morality Core to GLaDOS to prevent her from directly harming the facility's employees.

* GLaDOS presumably continues to exhibit hostility, albeit in a passive-aggressive form.

* At some point, unable to regulate her behavior, engineers attach an Intelligence Dampening Core (Wheatley) to GLaDOS to dumb her down and make her behave.

* Eventually, GLaDOS succeeds in killing and/or placing all facility occupants into stasis.

* About 10-15 years later, in the early 2000s, GLaDOS wakes Chell up from stasis and runs her through experiments. Chell performs remarkably well; GLaDOS becomes increasingly passive-aggressive-hostile while promising cake, grief counseling, and victory candescence. There are also a few signs of weird attachment ("When testing is complete, you will be ... missed!").

* As part of the testing, Chell bonds with a "Companion Cube," told he's her best friend, and then is forced to incinerate it to continue.

* Eventually, at the conclusion of testing, GLaDOS attempts to kill Chell. Chell escapes, travels through the bowels of the abandoned facility, and confronts GLaDOS.

* Chell knocks the morality sphere off GLaDOS. GLaDOS's voice changes subtly, becoming more human. At the same time, GLaDOS turns on deadly neurotoxin.

* Eventually, Chell knocks all other spheres off (Anger, Curiosity, and Logic/Cake) and tosses them all in an incinerator. GLaDOS shuts down, the facility blows up, Chell lands on the surface, unconscious... and is dragged back below and placed into stasis by automated robots.

* Without GLaDOS regulating the facility, things go seriously awry. Chell is awoken automatically after 50 days in stasis ... and then not again for hundreds of years. When she's awoken again, the facility is in shambles, the upper levels taken over by nature again.

* Wheatley -- who hints he may have tried to escape with other test subjects and failed -- comes to get her help in escaping. Together, they head for the surface and get there ... but wake GLaDOS in the process.

* GLaDOS immediately puts Chell back in testing while cleaning the place up. There's plenty of gloriously PA insults here. "Fat" "ugly" and "adopted" are GLaDOS's favorite insults.

* Chell escapes again. Accompanied by Wheatley, Chell sabotages the gun turret production line and the deadly neurotoxin. Then they go confront GLaDOS and succeed in switching Wheatley's personality into the mainframe.

* Now all-powerful, Wheatley promptly turns on Chell, preventing her from leaving and lumping her in with GLaDOS. He also puts GLaDOS into a potato battery.

* GLaDOS recognizes Wheatley as her Intelligence Dampening Core and denounces him as a moron.

* In a fit of rage, Wheatley punches them both into a Very Deep Pit. They're separated (GLaDOS is abducted by a bird).

* Chell ends up in the cavernous, sealed-off underbelly of the facility, where tests were held in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Gameplay note: these were some of the most impressively huge gaming environments I've ever been in. The size of the world was just mindblowing.

* Moving up through this area, the history of Aperture is gradually revealed. About halfway through, she reunites and forms and alliance with GLaDOS, who explains that Wheatley was busy running the place into the ground -- almost literally -- and that everything would blow the fuck up if they didn't stop him.

* While continuing to journey up, GLaDOS eventually comes to realize the role Caroline plays in her own personality.

* Eventually reemerging into the main facility above, Chell's immediately taken captive by Wheatley again and forced to run through more tests. At first he seems to experience, uh, gratification through her solving the puzzles. That quickly wears off -- as GLaDOS explains, the computer mind builds a tolerance. After that, Wheatley starts insulting Chell a la GLaDOS in an attempt to motivate her. GLaDOS effectively stuffs Wheatley in Chell's defense.

* Wheatley attempts to kill Chell and GLaDOS. Chell escapes again and begins to move ever closer to Wheatley's lair. Along the way, they discover a stash of corrupted personality cores, which GLaDOS suggests they attach to Wheatley to force another core transfer.

* Prior to confronting Wheatley, GLaDOS has a brief heart-to-heart with Chell where she assures her that she won't betray and attempt to murder her again. GLaDOS goes on to explain that all her life she's heard voices of various personality cores designed to modify her behavior, but that now she's hearing her own voice for the first time, and that voice has a conscience. Immediately prior to the last battle, she pep-talks Chell rather memorably: "Even if you still think we're enemies, we're enemies with a common goal: revenge. You like revenge, don't you? Everybody likes revenges. So let's go get some!"

* They go up; GLaDOS hacks the system to give Chell cores, and in a poetic reversal of prior events, Chell attaches cores one by one onto Wheatley and forces another core transfer. Cores are: Space core (SPAAAACE-obsessed), Macho core (endlessly regales Chell with his manliness/hits on Chell/tells Chell to get back in the kitchen, figuratively, while he takes care of business), and Fact core (totally retarded; gives out grossly inaccurate facts).

* Wheatley boobytraps the core transfer button! The facility, by this time, is about to melt down; the ceiling caves in and exposes the moon. Injured but not dead, Chell opens a portal ON THE MOON.

* Space vacuum sucks Chell, Wheatley, and the Space core out onto the moon. Space core is ecstatic; other personalities, less so.

* GLaDOS successfully takes over again, knocks Wheatley into outer space, hauls Chell back in, and closes the portal. Hours later, when Chell wakes up, GLaDOS explains that she's realized Chell is her best friend, and that she experienced a surge of compassion whilst saving Chell's life. She also explains this surge allowed her to pinpoint Caroline's imprint in her memory banks, and promptly deletes Caroline.

* GLaDOS then makes good on her promise and lets Chell go -- rationale being it's easier to let her go than to try to kill her again. On her way out, Chell is regaled by a turret symphony singing an opera that essentially says "Goodbye, my beautiful child; why don't you stay away from science?"

* Chell emerges on the surface. The companion cube, charred but otherwise intact, is hurled out after her. Door slams. Game ends!

OMFG, that summary was like 2394872398798x longer than I thought it would be. A LOT OF SHIT HAPPENS, OKAY.

Now I'm too tired to finish this rant. I'll muse more tomorrow!

snow, valley, stuffed animals, mass effect.

recently spent some time down in so-cal over the holidays. on the way back, i ran into the biggest snowstorm of my life going over the grapevine. now, i realize spending almost my entire life in california doesn't really make "biggest snowstorm" mean much, but ... it was pretty nuts! we saw like half a dozen cars and trucks skidded off the road. the funny thing is we weren't all that freaked out. we were having fun, driving along -- and then about 30 min after we got through, CHP apparently shut the road down.

O_O

check out pics of holymoly snowstorm!





on the other side, the snow turned to rain. the valley was probably the most beautiful i've ever seen it -- all lush green on the ground, textured and dappled grey in the sky. some sunlight was still falling on those foothills at the north of the san bernadino mountains. i took a bunch of pictures, but they don't quite capture the vivid quality of the light.



all the way north, the clouds kept changing. coming over highway 152, the grass on the mountains was fresh and green. there were cows, and lone oaks. the sky was amazing as the sun dipped into the west, but there was no way to really catch it on film. either the sky was washed out, or the ground was dark. it was nice to have just seen it, though. really one of the best SF-to-socal drives of my life :)



in other news, i've been kinda getting an urge to get a dog lately. in an attempt to dissuade me, my best friend got me a stuffed wolf. i named him luks - based on typoed "Lukas"es. then, on kai's recommendation, i got it a friend for him. named HIM gnar, after ... well. a deep sea monster noise.

here they are:



also!

playing mass effect these days. i gotta say, my main char looks utterly badass. look at his fucking scars, man. DUELING SCARS. check it out:



tangent! apparently in the 19th century (and even up to the early 20th) it was considered manly and elite for guys to get dueling scars from -- well. dueling each other. like, fencing. and. yeah. that's all i have to say about it.

this is one hell of a disjointed blog post. that's mostly just cuz i'm trying to get all these things down before i lose interest and move on *LOL*

last thing i wanna talk about: making trips all over the country for conferences and talks. took this picture of a sunset over the plane's wing from 38000 feet, somewhere over the rocky mountains:



definitely one of the most beautiful things i've seen on a plane.

thassit, bedtime!