Adrienne said it's MEME day.
Guess I'm obligated to post one. I KNOW! I'll do the one I'm obligated to complete thanks to zombie_dog!
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me" or something of an equally pithy nature.
2. I will respond by asking you 5 questions of a very personal nature. Be warned!
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions, please?
4. You will include this and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them 5 questions.
Per step 3, I hereby present to you...
The questions and answers for Gabe's interview of me!
1) Top three video games ever. Go.
Curse you, opening with such a doozy! At least I get to name three rather than trying to narrow it all down to one.
I might not have thought of it had you not listed it, but I'll certainly dedicate one place to Net*hack. Whereas I haven't formed any sort of attachment to it as I have with several other games, I must acknowledge that it is simply the most versatile and ruthless and replayable game there is. Anything that makes sense to be an available option or action, is. It's a game where saying that it looks dated is an understatement, and yet it endures because it is brilliant. I also have to admire that you can work so hard for so long to gain every advantage and yet still have it come to an abrupt end because of something very simple, such as having a curse laid upon your bag of holding that suddenly makes you over-encumbered and slip down the stairway and cause you to lose your grip on the cockatrice corpse and petrify yourself. NOT THAT I'VE EVER DONE THAT well ok maybe a little.
I will grant my second designation to Final Fantasy VI. I have replayed this RPG more than any other, as I recall. I played it for a solid eight months after its release, pausing a while and returning to it after the Christmas gaming influx. I immersed myself in it entirely and connected with every character. Personal attachments aside, I really do feel that the game deserves it. The characters are real, making sequels VII and VIII all the more laughable in their offerings of character development. The story was excellent, and after the great event that marks the game's halfway point, nearly everything becomes optional. You can plumb the secrets of the world to gain back every ally and help him or her come to terms with past events, or you can work the system and take on the final challenge with a mere three characters and see what effect it has on the ending. Every player of JRPGs owes it to him or herself to come to know Kefka as a reference for measuring all other villains. The only thing I'd change about the game is the ability to teach every character every spell without penalty.
One more... I'll go ahead and say... um... Well, I'm in a bit of a pickle here. I feel that I should give credit to a tactical RPG rather than any other single game I've loved. That narrows it down to the original FFTactics or Disgaea Hour of Darkness. Whereas I really loved the former, I feel that I have to award Disgaea for taking the concept and adding to it immensely. I have very happily whiled away entire weekends in Item World without realizing that I haven't advanced the story line. Fighting several hours worth of battles, often with several minutes at a time being devoted to staring at colored grids to devise a chain reaction that would max out the bonus loot, all for the purpose of enhancing a stick of gum simply appeals to me. I upped DPsycho's axe to level 100 by purging it of an Item God and unknowingly granted myself an extra ending for the effort, and I'd do it several times again, enjoying every button press. As I've often said, if WoW had an Item World, I'd stop going to work.
2) What was the best memory you carry from college?
So I have to name another favorite. There are several worthy contenders, including placing a monitor in your hands and the moments following. There's also the significant stretch where I chanced to sight a shooting star and made a wish, and the month that followed proved terrible but true to the wish. I cannot call either of those "best," however, nor could I say that of certain other powerful memories that I could list for several paragraphs of glurge. If best denotes the one I most happily enjoy looking back upon, I would have to single out the performance of the Really Useless Improv Troupe wherein I, as I am known to do, ended to show during a game of double entendre. The theme was librarian, and I stepped forward and asked, in a moment of inspiration that was quoted much afterward, "Who wants to check out my Harry Potter?"
3) If you could have a dream house, what would the coolest room be? Describe it.
I caught part of an episode once of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I would have continued flipping channels had I not immediately recognized the name of Richard Garriot, "Lord British" of the Ultima series of RPGs. His home has, and I should not have been so surprised as I was, secret passages. Not hidden halls connecting rooms, but entire rooms including the wine cellar that are only accessible through veiled portals. Two seconds of footage showed him causing a mirror to swing back from within its frame to reveal a passage, and one of his cellar's wine caskets was itself the entrance to yet another room. In my dream house, the coolest room would be the one that can only be entered by means of doing something unnatural. It may very well only house a few chairs, a reading lamp, and a small bookshelf (and probably my animation cels as they should only be displayed in a windowless room to preserve colors), but it won't be cool for what it contains so much as it not being known to exist.
4) In your life, who's the person you would most like to deliver a blistering, unfettered tirade to? Feel free to be vague.
The correct answer isn't the obvious one. Actually, as recently as this time last year, I still held out hope for continuing what remained of friendship with that one, but events in October caused me to see that it truly was futile to bother. Even so, having finally given up, while there are several things that remain unsaid, I have no desire to say them. It would serve no good purpose.
No, the one person I'd most greatly desire to lay in upon is one of my coworkers. She's the kind who will speak ill of anyone to anyone, as if always siding with the listener against one person at a time. I suppose that "coworker" is no longer appropos as she has gone into management and makes the most ridiculous and, at times, damaging decisions on a regular basis. She doesn't simply reconfigure other management decisions when she arrives, but she bad-mouths the one who had laid the original (and sensible) plans. She also exhibits a need to throw away anything and everything without reason and to rearrange classrooms without teacher input and without regard to functionality, often creating problems that had been eliminated with the previous arrangement. I would relish the opportunity to sit her down and lay her straight about the way she's doing more harm than good, but instead I find that it's all simply fueled an overall feeling of apathy about my job.
5) Tell me a lie. Be creative.
I have a friend who is his own father. No one's quite sure when the time leap occurs, but he and his father coexist at separate ages. The really wild parts manifest themselves when you consider that, through infinite iterations of fathering himself, his genetic profile must consist entirely of his mother's code, but male. Any genetic material that was his own and not granted maternally has grown infinitesimally small to the point of nonexistence, but he must, to avoid paradox, have a Y chromosome. There is also the question of how he came to be in the first place, but we've reasoned that, were it not for the time displacement that sends him back to a time before his conception, his mother would have had a son with someone else, and it is that son who "first" stepped backward in time and simultaneously prevented his true father from siring him and wedded her himself. It's anyone's guess who this time-lost father could/would have been and what became of him, assuming that he ever truly existed.
Unrelatedly, my friend's favorite book is Oedipus Rex.
(That last part was the lie.)
I expect interview requests! Your answers needn't be as wordy as mine. I like to write, as you could probably guess.
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me" or something of an equally pithy nature.
2. I will respond by asking you 5 questions of a very personal nature. Be warned!
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions, please?
4. You will include this and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them 5 questions.
Per step 3, I hereby present to you...
The questions and answers for Gabe's interview of me!
1) Top three video games ever. Go.
Curse you, opening with such a doozy! At least I get to name three rather than trying to narrow it all down to one.
I might not have thought of it had you not listed it, but I'll certainly dedicate one place to Net*hack. Whereas I haven't formed any sort of attachment to it as I have with several other games, I must acknowledge that it is simply the most versatile and ruthless and replayable game there is. Anything that makes sense to be an available option or action, is. It's a game where saying that it looks dated is an understatement, and yet it endures because it is brilliant. I also have to admire that you can work so hard for so long to gain every advantage and yet still have it come to an abrupt end because of something very simple, such as having a curse laid upon your bag of holding that suddenly makes you over-encumbered and slip down the stairway and cause you to lose your grip on the cockatrice corpse and petrify yourself. NOT THAT I'VE EVER DONE THAT well ok maybe a little.
I will grant my second designation to Final Fantasy VI. I have replayed this RPG more than any other, as I recall. I played it for a solid eight months after its release, pausing a while and returning to it after the Christmas gaming influx. I immersed myself in it entirely and connected with every character. Personal attachments aside, I really do feel that the game deserves it. The characters are real, making sequels VII and VIII all the more laughable in their offerings of character development. The story was excellent, and after the great event that marks the game's halfway point, nearly everything becomes optional. You can plumb the secrets of the world to gain back every ally and help him or her come to terms with past events, or you can work the system and take on the final challenge with a mere three characters and see what effect it has on the ending. Every player of JRPGs owes it to him or herself to come to know Kefka as a reference for measuring all other villains. The only thing I'd change about the game is the ability to teach every character every spell without penalty.
One more... I'll go ahead and say... um... Well, I'm in a bit of a pickle here. I feel that I should give credit to a tactical RPG rather than any other single game I've loved. That narrows it down to the original FFTactics or Disgaea Hour of Darkness. Whereas I really loved the former, I feel that I have to award Disgaea for taking the concept and adding to it immensely. I have very happily whiled away entire weekends in Item World without realizing that I haven't advanced the story line. Fighting several hours worth of battles, often with several minutes at a time being devoted to staring at colored grids to devise a chain reaction that would max out the bonus loot, all for the purpose of enhancing a stick of gum simply appeals to me. I upped DPsycho's axe to level 100 by purging it of an Item God and unknowingly granted myself an extra ending for the effort, and I'd do it several times again, enjoying every button press. As I've often said, if WoW had an Item World, I'd stop going to work.
2) What was the best memory you carry from college?
So I have to name another favorite. There are several worthy contenders, including placing a monitor in your hands and the moments following. There's also the significant stretch where I chanced to sight a shooting star and made a wish, and the month that followed proved terrible but true to the wish. I cannot call either of those "best," however, nor could I say that of certain other powerful memories that I could list for several paragraphs of glurge. If best denotes the one I most happily enjoy looking back upon, I would have to single out the performance of the Really Useless Improv Troupe wherein I, as I am known to do, ended to show during a game of double entendre. The theme was librarian, and I stepped forward and asked, in a moment of inspiration that was quoted much afterward, "Who wants to check out my Harry Potter?"
3) If you could have a dream house, what would the coolest room be? Describe it.
I caught part of an episode once of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I would have continued flipping channels had I not immediately recognized the name of Richard Garriot, "Lord British" of the Ultima series of RPGs. His home has, and I should not have been so surprised as I was, secret passages. Not hidden halls connecting rooms, but entire rooms including the wine cellar that are only accessible through veiled portals. Two seconds of footage showed him causing a mirror to swing back from within its frame to reveal a passage, and one of his cellar's wine caskets was itself the entrance to yet another room. In my dream house, the coolest room would be the one that can only be entered by means of doing something unnatural. It may very well only house a few chairs, a reading lamp, and a small bookshelf (and probably my animation cels as they should only be displayed in a windowless room to preserve colors), but it won't be cool for what it contains so much as it not being known to exist.
4) In your life, who's the person you would most like to deliver a blistering, unfettered tirade to? Feel free to be vague.
The correct answer isn't the obvious one. Actually, as recently as this time last year, I still held out hope for continuing what remained of friendship with that one, but events in October caused me to see that it truly was futile to bother. Even so, having finally given up, while there are several things that remain unsaid, I have no desire to say them. It would serve no good purpose.
No, the one person I'd most greatly desire to lay in upon is one of my coworkers. She's the kind who will speak ill of anyone to anyone, as if always siding with the listener against one person at a time. I suppose that "coworker" is no longer appropos as she has gone into management and makes the most ridiculous and, at times, damaging decisions on a regular basis. She doesn't simply reconfigure other management decisions when she arrives, but she bad-mouths the one who had laid the original (and sensible) plans. She also exhibits a need to throw away anything and everything without reason and to rearrange classrooms without teacher input and without regard to functionality, often creating problems that had been eliminated with the previous arrangement. I would relish the opportunity to sit her down and lay her straight about the way she's doing more harm than good, but instead I find that it's all simply fueled an overall feeling of apathy about my job.
5) Tell me a lie. Be creative.
I have a friend who is his own father. No one's quite sure when the time leap occurs, but he and his father coexist at separate ages. The really wild parts manifest themselves when you consider that, through infinite iterations of fathering himself, his genetic profile must consist entirely of his mother's code, but male. Any genetic material that was his own and not granted maternally has grown infinitesimally small to the point of nonexistence, but he must, to avoid paradox, have a Y chromosome. There is also the question of how he came to be in the first place, but we've reasoned that, were it not for the time displacement that sends him back to a time before his conception, his mother would have had a son with someone else, and it is that son who "first" stepped backward in time and simultaneously prevented his true father from siring him and wedded her himself. It's anyone's guess who this time-lost father could/would have been and what became of him, assuming that he ever truly existed.
Unrelatedly, my friend's favorite book is Oedipus Rex.
(That last part was the lie.)
I expect interview requests! Your answers needn't be as wordy as mine. I like to write, as you could probably guess.