Review update: Escape Plan

Today Escape Plan was patched to fix the fiddly gesture controls, and the scoring was changed so that only a player’s time through a level was graded instead of the number of gestures used. This huge patch also includes a DLC pack, Bakuki’s Lair, adding several new levels which play as a sort of prequel to the original levels.

So, do the fixed game and extra levels change my opinion of the game? Not in the slightest. While I found some levels were more forgiving due to the improved gestures, the vast majority of levels still had me holding the Vita in uncomfortable positions, or they had me fiddling with the camera stick while trying to also tap the front AND back touch panels AT THE SAME TIME. I have to wonder if any of the developers bothered to play these levels before inflicting them on their customers. Twice, I dropped my Vita in my lap because I was being asked to plug a leaking valve at the top of the screen with one hand and swipe the characters with the other. At one point, I even had to ask hubby to lend a finger because I couldn’t plug four leaks and still tell Lil and Laarg what to do. It’s like a multi-touch version of Twister, except Twister is more fun.

The DLC pack’s biggest new feature appears to be that the game now shoots sausages at the characters for several levels. They’re not in all the DLC levels, but they were in quite a few, and in addition to being ugly, they’re annoying. This game was already annoying enough without giant wieners shoving me off a ledge, really.

I had to play through the entire game again to unlock the DLC, and I found myself skipping the exact same levels in this second run as I did the first time I played. The DLC didn’t feel like a reward for suffering through the repeated levels, and the most damning part is, even on the levels I did play, I didn’t find them fun. Not even a little bit. This isn’t a game so much as a tech demo of the touch and tilt controls, and much like Little Deviants, the charm wears off long before the game is over.

A final observation: the credits list a lot of people, and I find it kind of depressing that it took so many people just to make this unimpressive mess. If you’re looking for a short cheap game to add to your Vita, I’d recommend Super Stardust Delta over this pain in the ass. Unless you’re a masochist, stay away from Escape Plan.

Da monthly butt smooching…

Today has been extremely hard on me. The temperature shot up to 24 after weeks of 16-19 highs and 7-9 lows. This is bad enough, but now the temperature plummeted 10 degrees in the span of one hour. This is so not good for someone with MS, and I’ve dropped into a fatigue coma and lost most of my day.

When I got up, I found an email from Amazon’s US branch, a payment of royalties statement. I’d just got a statement for the UK branch yesterday, and adding up both amounts, this has been a pretty good month.

So, even if I feel like strained baby poop, I’m determined to keep up at least one new habit, that of the monthly butt smooching for my readers. So, let me get down on one knee and assume the appreciation reciprocation position. This might take a minute, cause I’m slow today.

Okay, so, I know I’m rough around the edges and abrasive as sandpaper toilet tissue. I know I don’t make it easy to find my stuff, and I’m lousy at the ballyhoo efforts. And yet, every month, there’s a few of you buying my stuff. And more amazingly, you don’t ask for refunds.

I cannot properly express how much I appreciate y’all, but your continued support has been invaluable in keeping me going. I can only hope that once the weather stabilizes, me and the muse can come up with some new stories for you.

On being weird…

This last post I want to share with you today, I wish had been something my parents said to me. Alas, I grew up in a redneck family in Texas, and so even my parents were forcing me to conform.

It took me years to come out from under the crushing pressure to conform and not be so strange. I’d repressed myself so completely that for a few years I was transphobic. (Though, curiously, I wasn’t homophobic. I even had a gay dude embrace me and fondle my crotch, and I just said, “Sorry, but that doesn’t do anything for me.”) That’s how deeply in denial I slipped to avoid being abused any further. Everything about me was defined by someone else, and I just stopped questioning it. It was easier to give up and go with the flow, even if doing it made me feel miserable.

Anywho, the thing is, over the last few years, I’ve come to accept a lot of things about myself that I’d formerly run from. Even something like getting my hair cut short had more to do with being shamed over my messy hair in my childhood than it did with any personal sense of style. The ironic thing is, messy short hair has apparently become fashionable, because people tell me, “I love what you’ve done with your hair,” and I haven’t don’t anything. I don’t even comb it. I just sweep my hand over the top to get the strays all going in the same general direction. And yet, it somehow now looks good to others. Makes me want to track down my elementary school teachers, just so I can point at them and give a cheery “Ha-ha!”

But I’ve had this crisis of faith where I’ve begun to question the point of what I’m writing. This blog post has inspired me again, and it’s made me realize, I don’t need to worry what a few people think of my writing, nor do I need to worry about them declaring that they know me just because they’ve read something into my stories. I can keep cranking out my stuff without feeling bad over offending a few people here and there. And no matter what I write, it isn’t reflective of who I am as a person. I mean, really, I write sex into every other book, but my own sex life? Non-existent. Yeah, I know, it’s boring, but since I have this crazy idea about only wanting sex if there’s love involved, one-night stands with hot lesbians are out. *Sigh*

My favorite part of the post is this:

You don’t get there by acculturating. Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.

This quote alone is giving me a renewed feeling of purpose. I can’t say it’s going to translate in a new writing frenzy just yet, but I’m going to print this quote out in giant bold text, and I’m going to tack it to my wall. I’m going to make it my daily mantra. I need this because it reminds me that I’m not a character in a book, and I don’t have to be likable to the mainstream to have a sense of self-worth.

And after all, I’m not writing to please the mainstream. I’m writing to say, “These other people exist, and even if you hate them, we shouldn’t be erasing their experiences just because they make the moral majority squirm.”

So, I guess what I’m saying is, after I finish Peter’s last book and Ginger’s serial, I’m going to go ahead and write about gay sparkly werewolves. Then I’ll probably start Alice’s series, or work on another book for Sandy. Not because I see a demand in the mainstream for these kinds of stories. No, because it’s what I want to write. And if you don’t like it, well hey, there’s thousands of writers out there who all write with the express purpose of soothing your vanities.

I don’t want to be well rounded. I want to be a spiky punk, and damn it, it’s okay for me to be weird. The sooner I accept that, the sooner I can get back to kicking those professional writers’ asses with my 10K a day writing frenzies.

Fear me for being weird, but I don’t care. I’ve got my groove back on, and I’m just about ready to go Gonzo again.

Gamers making death threats for stupid, shallow reasons…

This second post for the day almost goes hand in hand with the last, because this is a good example of someone having a privilege and abusing it. What am I talking about? This Kotaku article on game makers getting death threats from players. Perhaps the most troubling part of the article is this:

Condon had had other threats, mostly triggered by that same offense of moving his games to Facebook. “I’ve had a bunch over the years,” he said. “I’ve been doing browser based stuff for about five years.. and that crowd can be rough, real rough. Especially when you make the move to social games: Oh, the seething anger.”

That’s people who were getting stuff free, and who can still get the new stuff free, but who don’t like Facebook. Folks, I HATE Facebook, but if a game company moved to making Facebook games, I would never think, I’m going to send those motherfuckers a death threat. No, it takes an extremely privileged person to think that their “right” to get something free online is so vital that the only proper response is an attempt to scare the target of their ire.

Death threats online are so common because a lot of people sit down and write without thinking at all. I know, some of my rants seem like I’m not thinking, but I spend an hour or two after a rant editing my post to make sure it’s not too incoherent. And at no time do I wish someone would die just because they’ve displeased me. I hated Shinobido 2, but I don’t want anyone at Namco to drop dead. I just want them to make a better game next time.

People online get so ridiculous in their debates. And we’re not even talking about important issues, like what to do about global climate change, or how to deal with racism and sexism. No, people are out there threatening death to each other over topics like JRPGs versus Western RPGs, Xbox VS PS3, and Vita VS 3DS.

The excuse given for this immature behavior is always the same. Online communication is so easy that people just say the first thing that comes to mind. Everyone has this ease of instant communication, but it takes a special kind of childish douchebag to resort to intimidation over an actual response. So if a gamer’s first thought in any debate is “Bitch, I’ma kill you,” then maybe, just maybe, they need to grow the fuck up and learn a little empathy before they attempt to engage other people in any form of discourse.

But that is of course wishful thinking, hoping that the gaming community would grow up and stop acting like a pack of spoiled brats.

Thoughts on privilege…

Gonna be a few blog posts today. Links on Twitter were coming in yesterday pretty fast, and I got to the point where my browser was scrolling tabs off the side because I was trying to save stuff that I wanted to talk about. Eventually, I got this pared down a bit.

This first post is short because I want to point you to an excellent summary on privilege, and what does and doesn’t qualify as privilege.

I have a unique postion on privilege, being that during my twenties, I was given privileges that I had never been allowed to have in my teens or formative years. Like most folks who have privilege, it was often hard to see when I was exercising or defending it. But it can honestly be said that loss of that privilege was one of my major concerns before I transitioned.

I’ve learned since then that the most common response to someone calling out privilege is shunning by those who are privileged. This is because most people live with the vain idea that they’re really, “good people,” and so any evidence to the contrary must be ignored. Or to borrow a line from a song, “I see all good people turn their heads to stay so satisfied.”

The thing is, it is possible to lose some privilege, and yet still retain it in other areas. Consider how being perceived as a fully white person, I get to have privilege over trans POC. My personal narrative can, if I choose, take precedence over the voices of trans people who are suffering worse atrocities than I do, or ever have in the past. And while I had it pretty rough, I also understand from constant reading online that I still got off light.

Which is why I try to point out that privilege isn’t something as simple as being in one boxed category or another. A black man may not have white privilege, but among his own community, he still has male privilege. A white woman won’t have male privilege, but she will have white privilege. And so on and so forth.

And, as the article says, just having a privilege doesn’t make you bad. It’s what you choose to do with your privilege that defines your goodness, or lack thereof. Which is why it’s important for people to acknowledge which forms of privilege they’ve been given. Because ignorance of one’s status, whether intentional or not, can lead to people committing terrible atrocities against others without any sense of remorse.

We all need to be aware of this, regardless of our positions in life. Which is why it’s just as important to discuss privilege as it is to talk about gender, sex, and race. These issues will not go away just because the moral majority wishes it would. We have to talk about these problems, or these wounds in our societies will remain festering, resulting time and again in outbreaks of racism, sexism, and ableism.

So, take a minute or two to think about who you are, and what privileges you have. Then take a few more minutes to look at other people and compare their experiences to yours. This is the only way we can learn and overcome these challenges.

Shaking my head…

This won’t quite qualify as a rant, and it’s going to be too short for a ramble, but I…no, just take a look at this story about a teacher who had sex with a student…while her own daughter was sleeping in the same bed. Go ahead, it’s a short story, and just a quick summary, so it shouldn’t be too triggery.

Finished? Okay, I’m floored by this. I just said this on twitter, but I need to repeat it. I write some messed up shit in my books. I don’t make excuses for it, and I know my stuff can be troubling for a lot of people. But I would never consider writing a story like this. No, to get this fucked up, you need real people.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to take a long walk to get my head straight. God, what a world we live in, you know?

Is there a better way to reach more weirdos?

Today, I ran across this blog post from Raw Dog Screaming Press, which was talking about how some people are publishing a few thousand ebooks, often with knockoff titles of bestseller books to confuse readers. While there’s a number of small press publishers and indie writers who work to make quality ebooks, there’s also a lot of operations set up strictly for the purpose of making a quick buck off of impulse buyers. What this leads to is reader fatigue with book promotions of any kind. Readers can’t be sure who to trust, so they stop paying attention to announcements of book releases. These ebook spammers are only in ebooks for the money, and that makes it so much harder for the rest of us to get our message out through all the noise.

Raw Dog wrote:

Karen Peebles, who is the author of I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, says she has self-published around 10,000 books though CreateSpace, not all of which are in her own name. “I am a single mother who home schools her children,” says Peebles, who says she sells “thousands and thousands” of books a month. “Self-publishing is a great way for me to make income. I receive a pretty nice royalty every month.”

Reading a quote like this makes me a very sad Zoe. I could be accused of a lot of things on my writing, but trying to trick readers will never be one of them. So yeah, it offends me that someone like Karen is enjoying so much success by taking advantage of people. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a similar kind of success. Yeah, I’m not in it for the money, but that doesn’t mean I find the idea of making a few dollars offensive.

Thing is, I can’t rightly say that I’d be selling more if only people like Karen would grow a conscience and stop selling their crap titles. Even with less authors in the pool, I’m still an acquired taste. With their focus on bizarro fiction, I suspect Raw Dog Screaming may also have the same problem. We’re not looking for just any reader. We’re looking for the distinguished connoisseur of weird shit.

A YA rant…

This morning, just getting off my couch, I stumbled onto a realization about something I hate about YA writing, and by extension something I hate about real adults. It’s a fallacy that is embraced by adults who read YA, and it’s an excuse that I hear over and over as a justification from real adults for why they try to program their teens like they’re personal appliances and not people with their own personalities and needs.

In two different reviews with two entirely different premises, the reviewers explained how the teen character gets into trouble, and the parents respond with unreasonably harsh punishment methods. Yet the adult reviewers both said, “I had an easy time relating to the parents, because they were just protecting their kids from bad influences.” Urgh!

News flash, adults: those “bad influences” are called “the rest of the human race,” and eventually, your own little bad influence is going to have to go out and deal with all those other people. The longer you insist on protecting and coddling your teen, the worse an influence they will be to someone else’s kids. That’s right, someone is looking at your “little angel” as their “little shit.” And they’re right to do so, because it will be your kid going “Hey, I’ve never done this before. Let’s try it.” It will be your kid acting as the bad influence because they had their own bad influence at home. YOU.

The sad joke is, for all your smothering efforts to coddle and protect your charges, you can’t change their minds on anything. You have a slim window of opportunity to influence their decision before they’ve made their minds up on any topic, but once your teen takes it in their head that something is a good idea, you have no more chance of stopping them than your parents had of stopping you before you made your own fuck ups.

Why I won’t be buying Diablo III: a rant…

I kinda suspected this was coming, and have had this creeping worry ever since Starcraft II and its single episode of ret-con bullshit. But even knowing that Blizzard stopped giving a fuck about everyone besides their World of Warcraft players, I still held out hope that they’d remember what was great about the Diablo series and not fuck it up. I also hoped that instead of rehashing the rescue Deckard Cain sub-plot, we might see a new lore guide.

But no, Deckard Cain is about the only thing that came back for Diablo III. Yet this is not why I’m pissed off. No, I’m pissed because the skill trees are gone. The attributes menus are gone. The game only gives you a predefined skill set for each character class, and you adjust NOTHING about their stats. The game does it all for you.

Remember how in Diablo’s dungeons, some were all twisty and turny, like mini-labyrinths where you weren’t quite sure if you’d just doubled back or not? Or remember walking outside of Tristram and being presented with an open field? Yeah, forget that kind of freedom. Here, the game has straight corridors that lead you where you need to be. You can’t get lost because your goals on the map will blink at you, to make sure you can’t make a mistake and wander off somewhere else. So much for the fun of exploration.

The mainstream isn’t for me; a ramble…

So I’m still wandering in this crisis of identity lately, not knowing what to do with myself in the absence of day long writing sprees. I’m still disillusioned and unable to recapture that creative spark that kept me working with enthusiasm, even on my worst days. But, in looking around at the creative offerings of other people, I’m reminded again of why I felt the need to write so differently.

It’s because I need diversity, and I’m not finding it in the creative efforts of most folks. Their main characters are white, and straight, and almost all narratives are set up in a heteronormative framework where anyone who isn’t straight or white is cast in shady terms for being different.

Which is not to say that all of this fiction is bad. Some of it is really good, which is why I still make an effort at reading mainstream stuff. But I can count on books like this to never push any boundaries, lest the writer risk making the mainstream squirm. So if there’s a gay character, they’re the sexless “safe gay” whom the female characters can confide in. There will be no trans characters, no bis, and nothing “kinky” in the story, unless that kink is displayed by the antagonist as a way to show off their “bizarre perversions.”