If you follow me on Twitter you probably know that I’ve been in a state of distress over the past couple of days.

Alexisonfire is dead and I can’t find anything to replace them. My life is over (no, I’m not being serious). But seriously (now I’m being serious), I do get genuinely upset when a band I love splits up and you’ve listened to their stuff so much that you know this constant replaying can’t last forever, but you also know there’s going to be this huge empty space where this big thing used to be. The saddest part is that I’ve only just rediscovered Alexisonfire after a long time (at least, their older and arguably even better stuff like Watch out!). And now I find out that they won’t make this kind of awesomeness ever* again.

Anyway I’ve been searching high and low for something as similar to Alexisonfire as possible. Origniality? Who cares. I don’t need originality, I need Dallas Green’s and George Whatever-his-last-name-is’s sweet sweet mix of clean and unclean vocals. Something where the clean stuff don’t sound like it came straight out of an R&B album (I’m looking at you, Jonny Craig), or high pitched to the point of femininity (I’m looking at you, pretty much everyone else). Before you suggest City and Colour: don’t. I like some of their stuff, but Dallas Green is not the same on his own and it’s too folksy. It’s a clever name, though! Get it? Get it?! Dallas = City, Green = Colour. Heh. Heh. Heh.

I tried everything from Dance Gavin Dance to Killswitch Engage to Closure in Moscow to Glassjaw and I The Mighty and Jawbox and The Fall of Troy and more. Some of them were really good (especially Glassjaw and Jawbox!), but not exactly what I was looking for. Nothing could come. close. to. this, but thanks to everyone for all of the recommendations.

I gave up last night, listening to Smash and feeling sorry for myself and wishing that I had had the initiative to go see Alexisonfire live once, just once before they split. I don’t regret many things in life, but this is one of them. Because they sound amazing live and I wouldn’t even mind feeling like I’m being crushed in a can of sardines for this. In fact, I make this vow: if Alexisonfire ever reunite to play live again in a country that is reachable to me at the time I will find a way to make it there. I will sneak on a plane. I’ll climb a mountain. I will sacrifice a goat if I have to, but I will make it there. Hold me to it, Internet.

And then this happened

Today I found remembered a band that has come closer than anyone to taking that spot that I’ve been trying to fill, just a little bit. I forgot all about them years ago because I am an idiot. I think I have a thing for compound words and fire because guess what this one is called:

Boysetsfire

This stuff won’t replace AOF. On the whole too much of their stuff is a bit too blatantly political-messagey for me, but it might keep me distracted. Maybe it’ll grow on me some more. I couldn’t properly enjoy Alexisonfire until about the third playthrough and now look where we are. I think I can cool the AOF search for a bit. This’ll do because:

1. Some of their music makes me want to jump around the house naked, my criteria for awesome
2. They have lots of material to keep me occupied
3. They are not dead yet (score!). They did split up in 2007, but reunited in 2010 and are now working on new material through Burning Heart Records

But mostly because…well…this (the following illustrates an example of Point 1):

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

So I will begrudgingly take Crisis and Watch Out! off of repeat, let them rest, and leave you with these wise words:

“‘Cause this shit is not about pants
And this shit is not about shirts
And this shit’s definitly not about hair
This shit is about having a good fucking time”

Get Fighted – Alexisonfire

_{* Unless they decide to reunite and be all amazing again, which would just be the bee’s knees.}

We now resume your scheduled broadcast: Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3Diablo3

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Prey by Michael Crichton

This book was recommended to me by my friend Olga, one of the coolest people I’ve ever met, during one of our sleepovers in Alabama. Being awesome, she introduced me to many great things. One of them was Prey. I became totally enthralled in this book about nanotechnology gone wrong and must have reread it four or five times now. It is always the first book on my shelf.

Prey by Michael Crichton

Neopets

I sunk a considerable amount of my life back then into Neopets – a browser based pet game where you adopt and train pets. Some people liked Neopets for the mini games, some liked it for the economy and shops, I liked it for the Battledome. I trained my pets to fight other players’ pets and ran a Battledome guild (Olga again reappears here as the second in command) – Battlewinners (yes, seriously). At one point I declared war on another Battledome-focused guild named Battledome Forces. I’m not even sure why I instigated this guild war (I think I just wanted to shake things up a little), but it lasted for-fricking-ever. Highlights included:

• Olga’s pet Katrina being our “flagship” fighter. We made a fight song for her and put it on the Battlewinners website (hosted on Geocities, of course)
• Mocking each other’s guilds privately and in public
• The opposing guild’s owner’s older cousin jumping ship and joining our guild to fight by our side. He became a spy for us, pretending to go back to the other guild and secretly reporting back to us
• The same cousin introducing me to Linkin Park, which ended up being my first CD
• Espionage. A spy making it into our midst, pressuring me to make him an officer, and deleting all of my guild members. This was the most intense, angry, destroyed 24-48 hours of my 12-or-so year old self’s life.
• All of the kicked members and more rejoining the guild over the next week
• My learning not to be so stupid and it clicking in my head that when people try to pressure you into giving them privileges, it’s usually not with good intentions (thanks, Neopets!)
• Battledome Forces being deleted because the owner got bored with the war
• Us making victory flags in MS Paint and putting them on the guild page
• Battlewinners being deleted because I got bored without the war

This happened 11 years ago. I know because my profile is still there with an 11-year shield on it:

No Transitory

I think everyone must have that song that they loved years ago and then somehow forgot. I’ve been trying to find that song for what feels like forever, on and off. I couldn’t remember the lyrics, just the feel. A few days ago I bought Watch Out by Alexisonfire and had one of those moments where it’s playing in the background while you’re killing zombies in Diablo 3 and then this song comes on and you freeze, drop everything you’re doing, and realize that this is it. This is the song I’ve been looking for (it was also the last tick in the collection that triggered this post):

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Deider

Deider was a 20-something year old Polish Arabian gelding who was stabled at the horse farm where I worked. He was old, but feisty (and grumpy). Deider refused to let anyone ride him until the trainer decided to try me on him because I was so light (he was old and was a pretty small horse even by Arabian standards, so my size and weight seemed to suit). I guess the weight thing worked because Deider didn’t try to throw me off. From then on he was pretty much the only horse I rode at that farm. What started as a somewhat frustrating relationship where Deider would get spooked when being groomed and run away when I tried to collect him from the pasture ended in my being able to pick at his ears to clean them (horses are sensitive about ears) and him trotting up to me from the other side of the pasture when he saw me coming. Deider was the only horse that I ever won a blue ribbon in a show with and it was the best feeling ever – not even because I came first, but because we did it together. It wouldn’t have been the same if it was any other horse. Even though he was 20 and had been out in the pasture for years before this he obviously still had it in him!

I was at the farm when I got the news that we were moving to Australia. The first thing I did was run crying into Deider’s stall. He walked up to me, put his head on my shoulder, and stayed there quietly for what felt like the saddest but calmest 15 minutes of my life.

Warcraft II

Warcraft II was one of the first PC games I played and definitely the most memorable from those years. After moving to the US it was either this or Age of Empires II that came first, but WC2 is the one that stands out the most. Even though I only have vague memories of it now I still clearly remember the feel of the world, the ships, the snow, the little trees. Wacraft II was the game where I kind of had the realization that “Wait a second…Someone has to have made this. How?” I need to play this again.

Bonus! Moonkittens and werewolves

I just remembered this one. And darn it I keep remembering more stuff. I may need to keep editing this.

Collaboratively writing Moonkittens…IN SPACE! with Olga at my house and a werewolf story with Jill in her basement. We took turns, paragraph by paragraph I think. Also writing a story about Furbies taking over the world from a closet (as in them staging the takeover from a closet, not me writing from a closet). I think I did that one on my own; none of my friends would’ve wanted to be associated with that embarrassment.

Ok, top 5 memorable things from your childhood – go!

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For the record, I’m not a Diablo fan. I’ve played 1 and 2 and enjoyed them, but never finished either one (I was little and got scared :( ). I didn’t follow any Diablo 3 news until a day or so right before release.

The Diablo 3 release has been plagued with technical issues and all kinds of complaints, among them:

• Internet connection required even for SP
• Server downtime on top of the above
• The game being pushed out in an incomplete state
• Game breaking armor bugs
• Lack of character customization/skill trees
• Microtransactions
• Graphics and art direction (really?)
• Pretty much anything else that you can think of has been whined about

Many of the above are valid, but I guess because I was never a big Diablo fan I didn’t really build up huge expectations over however long this game was in development for and didn’t feel too inconvenienced when issues came up.

Server problems are to be expected on launch, always. You’re an idiot if you give the game a score of ’0′ on Metacritic based on launch day server woes (in my opinion. I know this is technically debatable). I’ll admit that these things should not happen and would not happen in an ideal world, but come on – you have a huge number of people who preordered a game all logging in at once over the first few days post-launch and expecting everything to be just dandy? Could Blizzard maybe have staggered the release better? Maybe, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter because I expect these things at launch from any online game.

The always-on DRM does bug me. I should not have to be online to play a single player game. In practice, though, I’m used to MMOs where you’re online all the time. It’s not like this is anything different for me experience-wise. I don’t have the time or energy right now to go on a crusade against Blizzard’s DRM measures so pardon me if I’ll just deal and enjoy the game.

Everything else in terms of problems is ‘meh’ for me. I’m not seeing this as a sequel of D2 because I don’t remember anything about D2. The lack of skill tree does not bother me. I entered the game with a totally open mind, having next to no idea of what I would find (except I knew there’d be zombies). Yes, there are problems. Show me a game without any.

So meet Drakonka, my almost-level-11 Demon Hunter:

Drakonka

She is fricking awesome. My one complaint about her is that she’s wearing high heels while trying to stay alive in a zombie-infested Hellhole. She may not be the most practical of ladies in terms of footwear, but at least she doesn’t look like a total prostitute:

Tera -.-'

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What really bugs me is not our annoyance about technical problems or things not working as designed, but how much we whine about design or art or other decisions that don’t tarnish our experience in the long run (or wouldn’t if we didn’t get so worked up about them) and things that most of us don’t even understand; things that were put into a game or left out of one for what is likely a good reason that you or I can’t fully appreciate because newsflash: we weren’t there. We take these things so personally, as if Blizzard or [insert whatever developer you're complaining about now here] went out and ruined this game just to spite us somehow. Yeah. I’m sure they all sat around a big fancy table in a big fancy meeting room and brainstormed all the different ways in which they can make the community at large hate this thing that they’re sinking 12 or 14 or whatever-hour days into building. That’s exactly what happened.

Developers make mistakes. I get that. Many mistakes. It just gets tiring to hear people be so negative over and over about every single thing they see. Can’t we just focus on the good parts for once? Why do you even play games? To have something to complain about? We are a bunch of spoiled, ignorant kids whining about anything we can think of – graphics, sound, art direction, story. And it’s not like I’m saying that we shouldn’t voice our opinions or bring these things up (that would make me a hypocrite), but most instances of people “bringing these things up” are very far from constructive, mature criticism and very close to repetitive foot-stomping like the developer is your fricking mother refusing to buy you candy at the supermarket. You know those kids? The really annoying ones that make you swear off of having children for life? Please stop being one. It’s exhausting.

“Whine whine whine, everything sucks. The game is crap. The story is crap. The animations are crap. It’s AAA and they want our souls. THE PIXELS ARE TOO SQUARE.” You don’t like something? Express your opinion in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a spoiled 12-year-old and move on.

I like playing games because they’re fun, not because I’m interested in seeing this thing that someone made for us to enjoy dissected like it’s some sort of challenge to find something, anything, everything that could possibly be wrong with it and then act personally affronted. As if someone putting in some mechanic you don’t like very much is the equivalent of them personally slapping you in the face. STFU and enjoy the damn game. And if you think it’s that horrible, STFU and play something else. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head (one would hope).

(Also I saw this on Reddit and had to share even though it is completely irrelevant to the topic):
</rant>

Update: Anthony was awesome enough to link me to an article on games.on.net in the comments, which I think was published just before this post and also deals with the sense of gamer entitlement. Check it out!

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iiNet TopGeek 2.0 Final

On Thursday night iiNet hosted its TopGeek 2.0 final and the original finalists were amongst those invited. Some of you will remember that last year I got to the top 10, stopping just before the final round. I’ll be honest – I had next to no participation in this year’s competition in terms of TopGeek Facebook group or other activity, but the final was an awesome opportunity to meet up with many of my fellow contestants from last year, meet the new guys, and see much of the Perth Twitter community in general. And it was awesome!

The winner was none other than Steve Wright. I have to admit I was rooting for Skai (who was one of last year’s finalists), but then Steve gave me his omni-tool and of course I switched sides immediately. Sorry, Skaidris.

While the actual positioning of the competition (ehh..finding the top “geek” in Australia) is a bit meh for me, the entire contest does have a great atmosphere and community spirit. iiNet seems to have learned a lot from last year’s contest because looking on from afar, this one seemed much better organized and “fun” in general. Not that last year’s wasn’t. If it wasn’t for my participation last year I wouldn’t have met all the awesome people that I did. And I certainly wouldn’t have gotten a chance to go to EB Expo with the awesome Jess!

Hippo Creek!

On Sunday night I caught up with Dex, an old friend (has it been 4 years or 5 since we met, Dex? I can’t remember, but by my standards it’s old!). I had to blow him off the week before because I was sick, so this week we decided to go out for dinner to catch up after a long spell of…well…not catching up. We went to Hippo Creek at Hillarys Boat Harbor (I keep thinking there’s meant to be an apostrophe in Hillarys, but when I look online there isn’t one…I feel like I’m misspelling when I write it without). As someone who doesn’t eat meat except for seafood Hippo Creek (which is full of all kinds of meat) was an interesting choice. But they did have two seafood meals on the menu. I ate Marron and have never tasted anything this delicious in Western Australia in my entire life:

Mud Huts. AKA Heaven.

Marron. This was as delicious as it looks.

Dex had a giant meat…thing.

I forgot what this was called.

Guild Wars 2 stress test

Played a bit of the Guild Wars 2 stress test last night (there was no NDA) and made an awesome Necro who had missed an opportunity to join the circus:

Guild Wars 2 human Necromancer

This one hit close to home. One time I actually emailed a travelling circus and enquired about joining. They never got back to me.

Diablo 3

And today, this:

I don't think a description is necessary.

Enough said.

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