Current Ramblings
Saturday, May 29, 2004
I've found myself today with a desire to collect Gao Gai Gar figurines of questionable sexual content. There's just something deeply wrong and hilarious about figurines of little girls admiring their panties or Swan White being American or, well, this. I'll be the last one to claim that no adults are into toy cartoons, but I guess I'm just not used to seeing a company so willing to cater to the older, pervier part of its audience. And I'm a girl, so I can get away with it. It's like how only black people can get away with collecting embarassing old black caricature folk art.
posted@1:23 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Friday, May 28, 2004
posted@2:26 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
I should never, ever have discovered rec.games.video.nintendo. I went to ask for advice on charging my GBASP while in England, and now, 24 hours later, I am posting things like this:
"purda"
> I think that the Nintendo DS is going to screw over the PSP due to it's now
> widely know features and it's backed community. Plus this is Sony's first
> time into handhelds and are probably going to screw a lot of things up, make
> bad market choices, and simply all around suckyness.
I agree, and here's why:
The thing that Nokia has already learned and that Sony will learn soon enough is that portable gamers are a special breed. Maybe it's because of the Game Boy's domination of the portable market for all these years, but portable game consoles are a special market that can't be treated like normal consoles. First, you have to keep costs down - no portable gamer is going to shell out $300 for a system, and only the disgustingly rich are going to shell out $300 for something they could very easily leave on the bus. Second, you have to realize that graphical capabilities are not the most important thing. I still remember playing through the first GBA Castlevania and showing my boyfriend with awe how the background and foreground moved seperately, to which he pointed out that *real* consoles have done that since the SNES/Genesis days. Portable gamers, in general, are easily amused and don't live, eat, and breathe 3D graphics. For that matter, Third, lots of portable gamers are old-schoolers who would rather have a solid side-scroller or a well-thought-out RPG than an overwrought 3D adventure. Most of the most popular GBA titles have been RPG/Tactical RPG games and side-scrollers. So all this together means that the people who are interested in portable game consoles, who all already own Game Boys and probably have some small loyalty to Nintendo, aren't going to pay $300 for a system that will do far more than they really want it to do. They just aren't that kind of people.
posted@2:36 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, May 24, 2004
Damn, I don't even know where to start...
I don't want to sit down and do a proper Wizard World East "report". I put up a big photo gallery, which you should go look at if you haven't already, and I think that was about all the structure I had in me. I'll have more pics in my photo blog of the trip itself when I get them edited up, probably Wednesday or Thursday when I'm off work. It was a lot of fun, though. The cicadas are already making a racket out east; the news says they should be hatching here as soon as Friday. For some reason I find myself associating summer heat and cicada noise on a really deep level. I'm not sure if it's because there are always different cicadas in the summer in Alabama where I grew up (maybe someone reading this from the South can answer that) or if the last time these came out, when I was 8, just made that much of an impact on me. It's like the sound itself is the sound of oppressive heat and bright sunlight.
I really hope this new medicine the gastrointerologist put me on isn't wrecking my concentration. Something sure is. Maybe I'm just tired.
posted@11:47 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Yard sales have treated me well this weekend. I went to them almost religiously when I was in high school, strapping on my skates or getting on my bike every Saturday morning and riding around the local subdivisions looking for old Transformers. I found a lot of really awesome stuff this way, stuff that would have cost me a good chunk of money to buy from collectors. I didn't even know the Time Warrior watch I got for a quarter was worth anything until I wore it to BotCon '95 and people kept asking how much I wanted for it. But after a while the toys dried up and even before I left DC I stopped going to them. Here in Columbus yard sales seem to be a less structured affair. People have them on Fridays, they have them on Sundays, they last the whole weekend, they go until 5 or 6 or it gets dark outside. This Friday and Saturday there was a charity yard sale by my store using one of the empty spaces in the shopping center. It wasn't much, but I did score a fairly new Polaroid One-Step camera for a dollar. Sure, the film's $12 for a cartridge of ten, but the camera was $1! It's purely an experiemental art camera for me, though I'll probably snap off some shots of friends to give them. And in another instance of old technology, today I picked up an NES system and a big pile of games at another yard sale. Highlights include: Ninja Gaiden, Super Mario 3, Metroid, Goonies 2, and some stuff Graham assures me is wonderfull awful, like Kabuki Quantum Fighter and Low G Man. I'm forcing myself to finish Pokemon Colosseum first, though, because I need to breed Mon some Pokemon before we head to Wizard World East this weekend. But then it'll just be me, Ninja Gaiden, my Polaroid camera, and The Police's "Ghost in the Machine" on vinyl.
posted@2:38 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Some guy totally sold us this DVD today. And he did it with a straight face. In case you can't tell, yes, that alien is shaped like a giant cock. Apparently that only gets you an R rating.
posted@10:51 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Planet GameCube has all kinds of info from E3 about the unveiling of Nintendo's new "DS" gizmo. And WTF? It looks GOOD! Friggin' WI-FI, man. That's exactly what a nethead like me with friends spread across the globe needs. I won't even have to plan Wizard World get-togethers to trade Pokemon. The PSP is going to be hard pressed to get attention with the unique features Nintendo's engineered. How did I ever doubt them?
posted@1:05 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, May 10, 2004
That media, they sure are liberal. Why, just look at these stats on their hyper-liberal coverage of the March for Women's Lives!
And if the media is really all that liberal, why does the front page of www.fair.org, a non-partisian media watchdog group, look the way it does?
posted@11:17 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, May 09, 2004
I suppose I should let you all know how I'm doing.
I went in for my colonoscopy on Friday. To start out with, in preparation for this I couldn't eat any solid food from Wednesday night until it was over Friday afternoon. By about 6PM Thursday I'd open the fridge to get another bottle of water and just about start crying when I saw all the food in there I couldn't touch. I do not do well with not eating. Only the severe consequences of failure (i.e. not actually being able to get this colonoscopy over with) kept me in line. I had to start taking a miserable-tasting laxative called Fleet Phospho-Soda at 7, which I attempted to mix with Vernor's to cover the taste. It was recommended that it be mixed with ginger ale or water and lemon juice to "mask" the taste. Those of you who have experienced Vernor's particularly strong variety of ginger ale will appreciate how bad this laxative must have been for the Vernor's to be nigh useless against it. I took Graham out to pick up the Transformers PS2 game and a PS2 to play it on in hopes that the Mini-Cons would distract me. Actually, once I started taking the laxative my hunger stopped bothering me so much. Maybe it was the two bottles of water I had to chug immediately after it. I had to get up for another round of the Phospho-Soda at 6AM, though I got to watch Armada while I tried desperately not to vomit. Then I went back to bed, got up again at 9 for my last chance to drink anything (I couldn't even have fluids within 4 hours of the "procedure"), and caught another hour or so of sleep. Graham and Walky both accompanied Ron and me to the hospital where the clinic is located, despite an impressive thunderstorm that hit right as we were leaving. They checked me in and took me back, letting Graham keep me company while I waited for everything to be set up. I'll be happy if I never have another IV in me for a long time. They sedated me for it, and as of last night the stuff was still messing with my memory a little. I got to watch the monitor, thinking drowsily that I had done a pretty good job with the "cleaning out" part. I didn't really notice when they got to the imflamed part, though I did see them taking samples. I didn't actually feel anything, but it looked painful: a little metal rod came out from under the camera, prodded into the lining of my intestine, and then - SNAP! - retracted suddenly, taking a little bit of tissue with it. They did that a few times. When they were done they wheeled me back into the little cube I started in and brought Graham back so somebody who wasn't drugged could hear the results. I have ulcers in the lining of my large intestine/colon/whichever you want to call it. They don't seem to be large, but there seems to be a number of them, and they're almost certainly what's causing my chronic diarrhea and bleeding. The doctor said it's possibly a sign of a minor case of "a kind of colitis", and I presume he's talking about ulcerative colitis. Y'know, what with the ulcers. They're going to test the samples and get back to me with a solid diagnosis, and then we discuss "treatment options".
So yeah. Chronic illness. It's not a fun thought. I have to say, though, I feel vindicated to have something certain, to have actual photos in my medical file showing nasty red sores inside the gut that's been troubling me for almost three and a half months now. I feel like sending copies to the doctor I was going to when this started, who strung me along for three weeks, three horrible weeks of constant diarrhea and blood and pain and worry, worry more than anything, reassuring me that it was just an infection and if I'd just take the antibiotics even though they made me vomit it'd clear right up. It WASN'T an infection. I'm not crazy. I'm not making it up. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's the guilt I've always had about being sick because of the way I was treated when I was sick as a teenager or just that feeling of helplessness women get when faced with patronizing old white men in lab coats or what makes me feel so vindicated knowing once and for all that this is something that is a legitimate illness, that there are photos of my insides that show what's wrong with me and nobody can say I'm faking or making it up or that it's all in my head and dammit, I TOLD them so. I know doctors are trained to take care of these things, but sometimes you just know what's going on with your body more than some disinterested old man who just wants to collect his fee and get on to his next fee, oh, I mean patient. And even though I now have to learn to cope with something that will likely go into remission with medication but which may very well also plage me to some degree for the rest of my life, at least I know where I stand, which is better than I've been doing for about three and a half months now.
And now I go watch Invader Zim. Woo, DVD!
posted@9:08 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, May 03, 2004
So Graham and I found a new kitty friend on our landing when we came home from late-night grocery shopping. He was very affectionate and very not-neutered and sorta worryingly skinny and extremely hungry. We're not sure if he's abandoned or lost, but it seems like he's definitely one of the two. I put out some food for him that he devoured with the ferocity of one who has not eaten an actual meal in quite some time, and I figure if he's still lurking around the stairwell in a day or two I'll put some flyers with his picture up around the neighborhood. And if he is abandoned...I don't know. That's an awful lot of bills for shots and neutering, and I can't imagine Garfield would take it well, though God knows he's already facinated enough by her meowing through the door. (Yes, HER name is Garfield. Just deal with it. And she's long been spayed herself.) And she's got her own vet trips coming once I'm done paying for all my doctors. I guess we'll just have to see how things play out.
Now I've got Stray Cat Strut in my head...
posted@1:06 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments