윤

Just when I’d had enough of the game, blew my hoarded gold and mats on not one but two legendaries, does RNG finally yield a “toilet” reward:

Liquid-cooling should assuage my fears of another crashed laptop (assuming it wasn’t the SSD), but I’m finding little motivation to return to GW2 nowadays. Sure, there’s content galore and my new 24″ Asus with the new card makes it look all the more glorious, but the creeping progression game is unwelcome to on-and-off players like myself. Then again, at least there will always be a crowd at Jormag; I should check in on DCUO for some perspective.

So you’ll understand why I find solace in nerdglaze. (Loathsome, isn’t it, to resort to pop language; not that the term is even applicable, but a search for the 윤 family-familiar “thon” turned up only a relevant link in its oldest result.)Really, I got no other excuse for sitting through all 13 hours of this. Don’t tell me showing Laura Prepon’s breasts in the first minute of them wasn’t deliberate.

Seriously, DCUO’s PVP has nothing on this. Beats me how my Game of Thrones-fan leaguemates can pass up re-enacting the Kings Landing siege for 5-minute 4-man instances, replay badge-after-replay badge.

My new game. DCUO gets maybe 5% of my time now, what with a loot system that makes you hate the RNG, the ninjas, even your own leaguemates, and the general lack of anything to do. And what’s got to be my favorite here so far are the “jumping puzzles”, which take me back to Ultima Underworld.

This weekend is the second of their open betas, and I’ll give it a go again, this time with Xpadder because there’s no way I’d continue with one hand over the 1-7 ability keys on top of the other moving WASD-style. Either way, I doubt it’ll be an easy transition from the responsiveness and fluidity of animation I’ve come to take for granted—despite the utter lack of anything to do with them.

Was traversing a field where more than your average number of players were gathered for a soccer game, and while I laughed along with the antics of the participants, I carefully avoided any passes in my direction so as not to, er, slow the progress of the ball towards the goal. After scoring on the makeshift lines in the dirt, the Spring Break-like crowd stayed together and gathered around an individual who apparently recited a verse that stirred memories in former rapper Ice Cube. After that bit of weirdness, I continued with what turned out to be a business outing, stolling through a multi-level hotel enclosed in walls of granite, playing a non-DCUO game on my smartphone and finally arriving at the front desk to register. The clerk was taking his time looking up my reservation and the woman of the party behind me grew impatient. She had a shaved head like the (other) mother in The Walking Dead, and leaned into my ear to speak her mind as was the local custom, but uncomfortable to my touch. “Ne plus baisez moi, vous bête!” I shouted, and she retreated.

Must be all the comics I’ve been reading lately, or the feeling of empowerment from last night’s speed feat, but this morning I was quite the badass, at first offering to protect a young feline stowaway from behind a long curtain hiding bloody bathtubs. “Not even the Thundercats could stop me,” I assured her. Then I was outside, watching said cartoon, wherein John Travolta led a squad of mafia thugs, the lot of them having been pulled through time & space to do the bidding of their evil master (Mumm-Ra?). In addition to the novel amalgamation, I remarked how surprisingly good the animation was, pointing to the detailed light work on their jackets, but my companion was less impressed, replying that she’d seen this one and the villain was someone not so unfamiliar.

A group of us stormed their headquarters, taking a stairway up from a market on the street. The first room upstairs was for a conference, and I marched through, not taking notice of its participants like a determined 이병헌. (Come to think of it, my stride was more 高倉 健 in The Yakuza, wasn’t it?) I finally met with resistance from an Asian bodyguard who shot me once, and as that had no effect, threw shuriken, which I simply removed from where they had lodged in my arm and returned; unfortunately for him, he didn’t possess my inexplicable regenerative superpowers à la Warren Ellis. The next few along the way I tossed out the windows, describing my technique of immediately surmising the situation, noting all possible tools available to me, then acting faster than apparently they could react. When I felt the realism challenged, I decided that maybe I ought to be breaking the glass with a chair or something before throwing their relatively soft bodies through them. The boss was an invalid old man, helplessly sprawled across a bed, and his young wife pleaded for mercy. Their child was a newborn with an affliction that required it be fully wrapped in bandages. I picked up the bundle and held it to my shoulder as if it were my own, and felt compassion.

My free time’s mostly consumed with playing superhero (alas, not in any real heroic sense, such as a role model to my son and his generation, but levelling Spectreman—which might just represent the very opposite), so it’s no surprise I’d keep dreaming of being one. 老婆 and I were hiking through the woods, climbing separate paths off the highway, and met up with the rest of our traveling companions at an odd inn. There was something inhospitable about the proprietors, but we couldn’t quite determine what, though gathering for a group picture, we noticed that they were infiltrating our photos through other-worldly means. The viewfinder on the camera would shift as I focused, inserting invisible characters and replacing us with them. I then looked around and noticed her missing, and immediately suspected she had been taken. As it happens, they were tangling with the wrong crew: I assembled my team to action and scanning different frequencies with my super-powered eyesight, spotted silhouettes of them lurking in the distance. And my super-strength was such that I could rip two of them out from their shadowy dimension and threatened the frightened man that unless they returned her to us, I’d tear him apart with my fingers.

Things might change again now that DCUO has gone live, but Netflix certainly filled the gap, with its impressively-grown library of streaming titles. Last weekend was the superb Kurosawa police procedural 天国と地獄, and this past Sunday I sat down (several times, as resources permitted) to this “seminal ninja film” where Raizô Ichikawa makes you wonder how the stereotype in its progeny, such as 비’s recent namesake, became so gloomy and one-dimensional. First he falls for the boss’s wife—working as the company accountant, no less—then slacks off when he’s supposed to be atoning for his dishonor and instead hooks up at the nearest brothel! I especially liked the closing shots of his jubilant return home, obviously at the same breakneck pace, which isn’t done enough anymore.

Last time I did this I went a disappointing 2 for 5 (and the visiting one foreign country per year thing, well, that’s not going anywhere anymore, is it), but this time at least I got ahead of myself just before midnight by beating Bane!