Finished up watching the first season of The Wire last night. Personally, I’m kind of torn on the series. Not torn enough to not give the second season a chance, but I wasn’t exactly blown away by the first season. Maybe it was because I felt like people had really hyped up the show, and my expectations were off.

This post is minorly spoilery, in terms of themes; I’m going to avoid talking about blatant plot points.

My difficulty stems from one pretty simple fact. When I get invested in some form of entertainment, whether it is TV, movies, books, or video games, I have certain expectations of what I tend to expect out of the protagonists. Mainly, I’m drawn to your stereotypical hero versus villain kind of set up. Consequently, I have certain, shall we say, requirements for my “heroes.”

If you’ve watched The Wire, you already know why I would struggle.

On one side of the story, you have the drug dealers. I’ll give The Wire credit here; it doesn’t try and make many of these characters sympathetic. They do sometimes, and they succeed or fail to greater or lesser extents with them (i.e. D’Angelo doesn’t win my sympathy, but Wallace kind of does). The show doesn’t really try to make excuses for these people; certainly not the people in charge. For that, I appreciate the writing. The whole, “only life I know” angle which often gets played out in these scenarios doesn’t resonate with me (you could probably analyze the reasons for that ad naseum), and luckily The Wire mostly avoids it.

On the other side of the story, you have the police. This is where my trouble starts. I immediately need/want these characters to be heroic, to some extent. After all, they’re police, right? The Wire makes it very clear from the start though, that none of these police are clean. They’ve all got something in the closet. This makes it very hard for me to become invested in any of them; it makes me struggle to keep watching the show as I don’t feel any reason to hope that they succeed.  I’m happy I didn’t give up on the series though, because over the course of the season I was admittedly very impressed with the arc that each police officer has the chance to go through.  Frankly, the unit as a whole goes through pretty much the same plot arc that a comic which creates a new super hero team goes through.  Getting the team together, the internal conflict, the understanding-of-each-other phase through to the you-make-me-better-by-being-around phase.  This, luckily, kept me interested, even as I was on-and-off disgusted with the actions that the officers sometimes took.

I can’t pretend that The Wire doesn’t simply remind me why I often tend towards fantasy/sci-fi fiction.  These genres don’t as often delve into the gray areas of the world; there is good and there is evil.  It’s usually pretty obvious what is good, and what is evil.  When I’m looking for entertainment from fiction, I don’t always enjoy being reminded who gray most of the world really is.  I know how rare the black and white decisions are, that’s why it’s nice to be able to escape to places where heroes are free to be heroic.

Having finally completed Mass Effect 2, I must say, it impressed the hell out of me.  I’m going to stay out of spoiler territory until after the click through link.  I don’t consider game mechanics spoiler territory, so we’ll go into all of that first.

Every review of Mass Effect 2 has noted the removal of a lot of RPG elements from the first game.  Whether you consider this “streamlining” or not depends a lot on your perspective.  Personally, I was happy with it.  The fun part of RPG games to me has never been in collecting massive amounts of crap to carry back to a vendor and sell.  It has never been min/maxing sets of weapons and armor.  It has always been about playing through an engrossing story.  Mass Effect 2 has basically decided that it just wants to be a shooter, but have a really fantastic story, and for that, I appreciate it.  There’s no more, “Hey, is this gun better than this one? ” nonsense.  You’re told flat out which guns are improvements to which guns.  To me, this is streamlining; in Mass Effect 1, it was simply a distraction.  Mainly, I think this works because the game is a shooter, and does in fact rely on the player to be “good” at the game.  This is in contrast to “traditional” RPGs where there are more number mechanics in play for miss chances, resistances, etc.

I had also forgotten how awesome the dialog system is in Mass Effect.  Mass Effect 2 leaves this system exactly intact – no tweaks or changes necessary here.  It was interesting to play Mass Effect 2 immediately after Dragon Age: Origins to compare the difference between having a main character that talks to one who doesn’t.  I actually feel like I know Commander Shepard, where my character in Dragon Age, for all her in-game world renown still felt completely anonymous to me.

As for how your decisions in Mass Effect affect Mass Effect 2?  Well, yes and no.  Your decisions come up.  Do they ever drastically change the nature of the game you’re playing?  No, not really.  In the end, these decisions end up being flavor more than anything.  I imagine that the same will hold true for the decisions you make in Mass Effect 2; your decisions will color the world, but they will not end up changing the overall course of events.  This actually comes out in the dialogue every once in awhile.  For example, in one character’s Loyalty mission, it is made fairly clear that no matter what action you take, there is no 100% guarantee that you could eliminate the threat you’re dealing with.  The writers are very crafty in giving themselves an “out” to make your decision be important, but strangely not have any permanence.

Inside, lets talk about the completely bad ass final mission.

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I’ll be perfectly honest – even after running D&D for almost five years non-stop (yeesh, that’s a long time), I don’t often feel like any individual session goes particularly well.  After I closed off my first campaign, I felt happy with the arc I had presented as a whole, but felt that the campaign showed major problems stemming from it being my first attempted to convey a story.  Now, I’m running pre-built modules, and while that lowers my prep time, it actually puts more pressure on me to make things fun when the module falls short.  That is something I still don’t feel I do very well, but last night the setup of the module, combined with the player’s actions made for a great night, with virtually no extra input from me.

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Words of Advice: When you drop your sharpest kitchen knife while drying it off, do not be a dumb ass and try to catch it before it hits the floor. Just get the hell out of the way. If you are a dumb ass and try to catch it (Hi, there) be thankful when you don’t accidentally slice your finger off.

In other news, I almost always get a little depressed around my birthday. This year is no different. Perhaps a little different because of the surrounding circumstances, of course. I get a little down because there’s nothing that more obviously marks the passage of time (aside from the new year) than a birthday. And so that’s when I sit and reflect on changes in my life. Often things change in ways that I don’t want – which is clearly a no brainer this year. Usually its the same pattern of, “Oh, I wish I’d kept in better touch with so and so,” and not the extreme case of, “Oh, I wish that my best friend of the past eleven years hadn’t died.”

Anyway, I will do my best to have a Happy Birthday, though in all honestly I just want it to be like any other day at this point, and that’s good enough.

Look, I don’t want to be a downer, but its my website, alright?

So, at what point is it supposed to get easier? I can’t honestly say that I’ve had a single day yet where I haven’t thought about Derek being gone. Sure, sometimes its just a passing thought (on the good days), but the thought is there, nonetheless. Whether its telling joke that was a favorite of his, or simply passing by a place where he and I had gone (how silly is it that I find Best Buy mildly depressing right now?) the thought is there. Sure, there are good days and bad days. There are times where I’m surprised how ok I am, and times where it feels like I’m being smothered by a ton of bricks. Moving the last of Derek’s big stuff from his house in Cheverly, and therefore having to visit that house and his room, was surprisingly not as painful as I thought it would be. Seeing all of Derek’s stuff neatly piled in his Dad’s garage? A kick in the balls. His parents were talking about having a day where we gathered friends and pretty much gave away Derek’s possessions. That will probably be not so fun. Though, I will admit, there is some stuff of his I’d like to have – some for selfish reasons (stuff I could actually use, as gross as that is), some because I’d like to have it just because it was his. The idea bothers me a bit, for the same reason that I always get depressed when I move and see all my stuff boxed up. There’s this passing feeling like you’re summing a person up by their possessions. I like stuff. I like having stuff. Sometimes, my stuff definitely defines me. That doesn’t make it a good thing.

Gaming night has been sort of touch and go for me. In the past couple of months, Derek had missed our gaming nights a lot – he had been really busy at work before he left for Hawaii, and then… well, he left for Hawaii. So his absence wasn’t out of the ordinary, and yet now its just painfully obvious that he’s not there. Despite the fact that we often joked about how Derek tended to be a pretty passive roleplayer (something I hope I’ve learned to overcome [at least a bit] in the past two years of playing Nobilis) it was always obvious how much he loved being there with everyone. We just restarted the D&D campaign yesterday, and while we didn’t have a moment or silence or anything, I felt him missing (particularly since Kirt kept using the word “taint” – but you probably don’t want an explanation for that).

I am totally screwed if my MythTV box stops working. Why the hell did I let Derek convince me that installing Gentoo Linux was a good idea? I have no freaking idea how to even update the system. I guess this is where Derek starts teaching me to be as fearless as he was with this kind of thing. If it breaks, you just fix it, right?

I’ve never had to be Mr. Fix-It before. Not like this, at least.

Need to make time to get my second tattoo. I’d love to go down to Miami and hit up Miami Ink to do so – it would be a cool trip…but I think that might be a little difficult and expensive.

First off, I’ve turned comments back on, though I haven’t implemented a system for preventing spam comments yet because I haven’t had a good idea on solving it yet.

I’ve debated back and forth on whether I should post something here about Derek. Its probably still too fresh for me to do so, and I don’t know how to properly sum Derek’s influence on the past 10 years of my life in a post on a website. I would like to note that at the funeral this weekend, someone said that Derek was one of those people that, “lived each day as if it was his last.” Something about that made me angry, but I didn’t immediately realize why. It settled with me last night, however. I think that statement is a complete misunderstanding of Derek – he lived each day like it was his first in my eyes.

I used to talk
With honest conviction
Of how I predicted my world
I’m gonna leave it to stargazers
Tell me what your telescope sees

Oh, what is in store for me now?
It’s coming apart
I know that its true
Cause I’m feeling my way through the dark
-Through The Dark, KT Tunstall

No, proposing to Katie did not cause me to fall off the face of the planet. I apologize for my absence, and shall do my best to make amends. I haven’t had anything on my brain to draw, so I haven’t. I have, however, wished that I was drawing, so I’m going to through up some stuff I’ve doodled that is just random stuff.

The goings on:
I’ve had to turn comments off on the pictures and news because some asshat was spamming the comments with inappropriate advertisements. Here, of all places. A site that gets like 2 page views every month. Asshat. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn them back on in a little while.

Katie is currently in Russia studying abroad for a month, so I have been doing much movie watching to keep myself amused. I got a free one month subscription to Blockbuster Online which I’m using to rent movies that I’d be too embarassed to pick up in store (for the love of god, don’t ever ever ever see Ultraviolet).

Video games. I’ve played a lot in the last six months, so I’ll cover the highlights.

-Guitar Hero: buy a PS2 to play this game. Seriously.
-Condemned: Good atmosphere, nifty combat mechanics, superb lighting.
-Half-Life 2 Ep. 1: More of the same. Still not so impressed by HL2, but I’ll buy the other episodes because they’re at least halfway decent.
-Prey Demo: Goddamnit, a game with wonky gravity has been my idea for like 6 years now, and they’ve gone and stole it. This game should end up being a lot of fun multiplayer, and just might get me back to playing games online.
-City of Villains: I have NINJA HENCHMEN. I mean, how cool is that?
-Nintendo DS Lite: My most recent aquisition, and I’m quite happy with it. I’m totally enjoying New Super Mario Bros. and Brain Age is pretty fun too. I’m quite impressed with the intuitive feel of the control of Metroid Prime: Hunters as well.

Hrm…I guess I can actually find stuff to ramble about if I put my mind to it. Maybe I’ll come back in a few days and post some comic book rants (and talk about Superman Returns at that point).