The random mumblings of a maid

Once again, I push back these updates, always thinking “ugh I’ll do it later.”  How terrible I am.  A lot has been going on since the last post, and it has been most stressful for me.  But first, let’s start with that America trip round-up I’d been meaning to do.

So on the 16th of July I went over to San Francisco, CA to spend 10 days there to meet up with a friend, and have a few laughs.  The trip went pretty well, and I got a lot more out of it than I was really expecting.  So in the weighing it against the money spent scale, yes, I felt it was worth every penny paid.  Saying this though, there were times which, though not essentially bad, were still quite irritating.  I shan’t go into details since a) I don’t really want to discuss them and b) there’re eyes everywhere.  All in all, I had good fun and nothing will change that fact.

Now then, for more recent news, having finished my university course here in England (BSc (Hons) in Computer Games Design for those interested i.e. no one)  I wasn’t really what to make of my near and distant future.  Initially I had some crazy thought of trying to go into Games Journalism, but after a while I realised those were really some dumb fucking thoughts.  So my parents contacted me saying that they would like me to go back to Korea for a few months and take some course while there.  Sure, that sounds OK, I guess?  Turned out it was some Korean language learning course.  Me, already a Korean person, going on a Language learning course?  Are they fucking out of their minds?  But with no other real options available, I had no other choice but to accept for the time being.  While they thought it was a perfectly reasonable choice, I could tell they never once even considered how I would feel about the whole thing.  Honestly I really hated the idea, it felt like a goddamn insult to myself as a person.  A Korean person, going to Korea to learn how to read, write, speak and listen to Korean.  It was a goddamn patronising insult right in my face (saying this though my Korean is not entirely perfect, since I left Korea when I was something like 5 years old, though it has developed a lot since then).  Regardless, I really did not like the idea, up to the point where even when I thought about what I was signing up for made me physically sick.  I hated it that much.  But what the fuck am I going to do, eh.  Thankfully, should I managed to get into this Master’s course at a university in San Francisco, I will only need to endure the 3 month course.  I am hoping my plans work out well.

So, I am now signed up to this shitty course which I don’t want to do but willing to endure for 3 months (and don’t give me that shit about how you would love to take a course like this, because I fucking don’t).  Well then, I guess living in England is useless now right?  So go throw away all your stuff which you may have a sentimental attachment to since it’s all trash.  Yeah, clearing out the house really fucking sucked.  Not because of the manual labour involved, but because it meant throwing out a lot of stuff which I had many memories attached to.  Ugh.

And to all those people who may think “Oh but you visit so many different countries and live in such a varied amount of places, why aren’t you happy with that?” or something like that, just stop.  You haven’t had to fucking travel all around the world never being able to settle down in one house for more than 5 years.  Moving houses really hurts since I lose a lot and gain little.  It really does hurt.

Though, thinking about my permanent leaving of England, there are some upsides.  I get to get away from some people, forever.

Apologies for the amount of tantrum throwing complaining I’ve been doing lately, things haven’t been going particularly “peachy” lately.

Yeah enough of this shit I ain’t even gonna proof-read this

P.S. Don’t take any of this shit personally, please.  I’m only using this blog to vent.

I haven’t been writing to here much lately, though it’s been on the back of my mind.  This mainly owes to the fact that I didn’t initially want to turn this into “just another blog where some random nobody talks about nothing which no one cares about” but it seems that just makes it into an unused blog.  What a shame.  So let’s at least try to remedy that in some way.

I am currently on another trip to America, this time travelling on my own to meet with a friend in San Francisco, California.  I am fortunate to have a very close friend who lives here who has been showing me around, and on top of that, many other friends who are in the area whom I have been having fun with.

The most striking thing about here I’ve noticed is that to really get around anywhere, you really do need some form of transportation.  Walking will really only get you do far.  Due to the expansiveness of the American lands, I’ve found that you really need a car to do anything worthwhile.  Compare this to little ol’ England, it really does show the massive size difference between the two countries.

I was fortunate enough to find attend the Distant Worlds Final Fantasy symphony which was playing on the same day I touched down in San Francisco.  After landing and a (relatively) hurried change of clothes, I went to attend the said concert.  Being honest, I wasn’t expecting too much from it, especially since it was a concert on Final Fantasy music.  That being said, I knew it was going to be decent at least.  But what I witnessed there was music so good that it completely took me by surprise, and blasted me off into some sort of musical euphoria.  Aside from the questionable English/Japanese cross-over singing, the actual orchestra was so fantastic and amazing I was absolutely enthralled by their performance.  I am so thankful my friends invited me to attend thisas I had a great time with people who I would have thought I would have never had the chance to meet.  To those people who are reading this, I thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart.

Of course, this doesn’t really mean this trip is all unicorns and rainbows.  I’ve been having my fair share of unwanted stress from this trip.  From the moving I need to do on the 1st August to small little things like some friction between a couple of people, it really has been building up.  In all honesty, I don’t place the blame on them.  I’m sure they’re just doing what they do, but at the same time, I wish they would stop.  It just makes me feel that much more awkward and annoyed than I need to be and really does make me unhappy.  WELL WHATEVER SHIT SUX I DGAF 4 LYFE.  I still love them both very much.  I’m sure they’re not doing this on purpose (of course), and I don’t really want to be an intrusive guest so yeah…  I seem to be sighing a lot more than I need to be.  Oh well, oh well.  Chin up, stand tall, no regrets.  Sigh.

Regardless of these stupid little speed bumps in this trip, I have been having so much fun.  Whether my friends think I’m getting the most out of this trip or not, I’ve been really appreciating American life a lot more than my trip a few months back.  I’ve learned a lot more about the way things work and how different it is from England by just going around places and having someone who lives here show me around the place.  I’ve gotten a much more different feel for the way of living, and for that I am glad.

Yeah, maybe I’m being just stupid.  I tend to write dumb shit early in the morning.  I’ll just go get some more sleep.  I guess in the end this is only some small and weak outlet for some of the shit I’ve been up to because I seem to be finding myself holding back when I’m writing this.  Shhh.

Fuck I hate this shit.  Whatever I’ll publish this stupid thing now and worry about the repercussions later.  You reap what you sow!

I’ve been milling around some thoughts lately about the current gaming market and trends, and how everything seems to have changed drastically in the last few years.  This was made more apparent with a conversation I had with a friend just the other day.   I had a close look at Command and Conquer 4 recently and was intruiged that the game had changed completely in terms of gameplay.  I’ve never played any of the games from the C&C series, but even looking at this I knew there was something wrong with this game.  Now, this game was selling itself as being a “RTS”; a “Real-Time Strategy” game.  This would usually mean that there is some strategy; some thinking involved, in playing this game to utilise the player’s reactive, micro-management and tactical skills.  But all I saw in this was just mindless “spamming” of units to win the game (Even on the official forums, “spamming” of units was considered a “pro tactic”).  Can this really be called a strategy game?  More importantly, what has caused this once beloved game to have fallen so much, in a short amount of time?  I’m sure I can’t place the blame on one single element; the game market is too diverse, too large for that, but it can be mostly based on this: the casual market.

Ever since companies realised that there is a great big untapped ocean full of people who (would) enjoy video games, the whole industry’s been rife with medicore games which have been churned out by companies looking to make some quick money.  We’re all used to “shovelware” being churned out to try and hook the masses, but it has been getting worse over time.  If you look at the market of a decade ago, and compare it with the market of today, you’ll find that companies are now more focusing about quantity as opposed to quality.  This is not to say however, that all recent games are automatically bad, on the contrary, there have been some really good, high-production value games that have stunned and impressed me very much.  The issue here is the amount of shovelware games that are being pumped out, and the reasons behind it.  The market will eventually get oversaturated, and the industry will more then likely implode in on itself.  Along with this and the economy as it is, mass production of poor quality games will only cause its own downfall.

So, how do we go about fixing this?  It’s difficult to say.  The “casualisation” of games itself is not entirely a bad thing, it’s what it’s doing to the industry which is the main problem.  But as long as there are “casuals” who keep buying, the developers will keep making.

I’ve skimped on a lot of other factors, such as how bad piracy is these days, but I think that is for another day.

Hmm, I haven’t updated much recently but has been in the back of my mind for some time lately.  I’ve been busying myself with a plethora games that have been released recently though that’s not a particularly good excuse as to why I haven’t been posting.

So I’ll start with the games. Darksiders, Bayonetta, Uncharted 2 have all been really quite fun games.  I could quite clearly see why Uncharted 2 got the awards from last year it had gotten.  It honestly felt like I was playing in a great action movie, with characters that fit the role.  Overall, it was a very fun game!  And of course, not forgetting the other two games, they were also great in their own right. Darksiders delivered a fun, not too challenging, blatantly copied game, which provided a lot more fun that I initially thought it was going to, and Bayonetta provided an amusing story coupled with a certain ridiculousness which held its own charm.

But enough about games, I talk enough about games all the time.  Let’s talk about Academia.  Specifically trying to read other people’s papers.  So I was doing some research work on demographics and video games.  Sure, seems simple enough but for any sort of theory to be presented in a paper, it must be cited and quoted from another paper.  However, to even gain access to these papers you usually have to pay for these works.  Papers which people have written so research and science, must now be paid for in order to access them.  Best part is a lot of these papers they know are needed by other researchers and students around the world, so they can get away with bullshit like this.  Honestly it just makes me frown.  Very hard.

Other little bits of today, someone’s phone rang in class today and the “super cool kids who always sit in the back” burst out laughing which made me wonder exactly what was so hilarious.  I mean, it’s a phone, ringing.  I guess I just don’t have the idiocy nor the thug-life intelligence levels to actually understand.  I honestly sometimes wonder how people like that even attend university.

Driving back home during rush hour made me realise a lot of people should just stop driving, give up and die.

I hate people.  I hate incompetence.

Bonus round:  Best mission idea for a video game ever: Underwater timed escort mission, low hp, need to eat to be able to run every 2 minutes, you can’t run through your escort and she wont move out of the way if you need to, and hitboxes are off so you hit your escort all the time.