hack, slash
Bother. I spent most of yesterday pre-emptively wincing in anticipation of a nasty 2-hour dental session with root canal and a crown, only to have the dentist's assistant phone, as I was walking out the door, to cancel the appointment because the dentist has broken his wrist. Pshaw. The fragility of these modern dental practitioners must be deplored. Even worse, I now have to endure a temporary filling with a hole in it until sometime in April. I cannot help but feel that this is a situation fraught with the potential for painful disaster, some of it expensively in France.
The work situation is calming down a tad, thank the cosmic wossnames, although I'm still very tired and have been following a strict principle of arriving home and indulging my total lack of brain by playing Fable until I fall into bed, exhausted, at 9pm. Fable is still narking me off at intervals and will always feel clunky and lobotomised after Morrowind and Oblivion, but is proving reasonably absorbing. The gender politics continue dodgy: my amiable attempt to subvert the 14-year-old-male mentality by having my male avatar hit on other men instead of all the busty barmaids, is being slightly frustrated by the designers' clear slant towards a heterosexual outcome. The homosexual outcome isn't impossible, it's just underprivileged: for example, random female NPCs tend to the gorgeous, whereas random male NPCs tend to the small and dweeby with accents considerably lower in the social scale. You can flirt with any number of named female NPCs, but named male NPCs are all traders and so far resist my advances with presumably heterosexual disdain. If I want to indulge my vision of idyllic gay love, it'll have to be with a nameless partner, which seems needlessly discriminatory.
I am not a huge fan of the elements of boasting and preening which the Fable social system seems to require, but I really like the inbuilt moral code: it's entertaining to see the halo and gathering butterflies which visually render the firmly goody-two-shoes perspective from which I invariably play. I am also deriving considerable satisfaction from acquiring the key-bashing skills necessary to kill balverines, which are the local werewolf-derivative. Also, have finally pwned the fishing skill. It would have worked a lot better from the start if I hadn't initially grasped the rules firmly in the inverted position. This is probably a metaphor for something, possibly my absolute and total lack of interest in fishing as a real-world activity.
In other news from the Department of Ineffectual Druiding, my tomato plants are covered with whole shoals of little green baby tomatoes. This makes me strangely happy.
The work situation is calming down a tad, thank the cosmic wossnames, although I'm still very tired and have been following a strict principle of arriving home and indulging my total lack of brain by playing Fable until I fall into bed, exhausted, at 9pm. Fable is still narking me off at intervals and will always feel clunky and lobotomised after Morrowind and Oblivion, but is proving reasonably absorbing. The gender politics continue dodgy: my amiable attempt to subvert the 14-year-old-male mentality by having my male avatar hit on other men instead of all the busty barmaids, is being slightly frustrated by the designers' clear slant towards a heterosexual outcome. The homosexual outcome isn't impossible, it's just underprivileged: for example, random female NPCs tend to the gorgeous, whereas random male NPCs tend to the small and dweeby with accents considerably lower in the social scale. You can flirt with any number of named female NPCs, but named male NPCs are all traders and so far resist my advances with presumably heterosexual disdain. If I want to indulge my vision of idyllic gay love, it'll have to be with a nameless partner, which seems needlessly discriminatory.
I am not a huge fan of the elements of boasting and preening which the Fable social system seems to require, but I really like the inbuilt moral code: it's entertaining to see the halo and gathering butterflies which visually render the firmly goody-two-shoes perspective from which I invariably play. I am also deriving considerable satisfaction from acquiring the key-bashing skills necessary to kill balverines, which are the local werewolf-derivative. Also, have finally pwned the fishing skill. It would have worked a lot better from the start if I hadn't initially grasped the rules firmly in the inverted position. This is probably a metaphor for something, possibly my absolute and total lack of interest in fishing as a real-world activity.
In other news from the Department of Ineffectual Druiding, my tomato plants are covered with whole shoals of little green baby tomatoes. This makes me strangely happy.