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.
