In rougly one year between 2004 and 2005, I created 10 YTMND sites

Here they are:

Mah niggas don't dance - Combining Fat Joe with The Simpsons. Based on its poor quality, I'm pretty sure I made the image myself and recorded the song with a PC microphone.

Shake Your Rump-Ah! - Some fat kid + Alizee + the Beastie Boys. It sounds like I used a PC mic again. I did not make the GIF.

Solid Snape kills Dumbelnooo - This is a combination of 3 trends on YTMND at the time (I believe I'm the only one that combined them in this way): Harry Potter spoilers, Darth Vader's "NOOOOOO" from Revenge of the Sith, and parodying Metal Gear Solid. I believe I made the sound and the image myself, which is way more effort than I'd currently put into something like this. This also seems like the first one where I actually had sound editing software.

Resident Evil 4 is GC exclusive!- I thought the lyrics in the song I used (by Taking Back Sunday) were hilariously bad and fitting for that image (which I did not create). I was also a bit of a Nintendo fanboy at the time so I sort of cared that Resident Evil 4 wasn't exclusive anymore even though I didn't buy it until last year. For Wii.

OW! My sperm! - Image/sound from Futurama.

Supersize it, Supervise it - Combining a picture of a fat kid at McDonald's with part of a song by Le Tigre (I believe it's called "Well Well Well"), who I was really into at the time. Le Tigre, not the fat kid.

Sexy, am I right? Guys? - A GIF of an anorexic transsexual walking towards the camera while the "Imagine there's no heaven" part of A Perfect Circle's cover of "Imagine" plays.

Sex in the future - I have no recollection of making this. I probably found the comic and the song around the same time and thought they'd fit or something.

Fear not, for I shall assist ye! - Another Futurama joke, but this time I put the extra effort into actually making the GIF myself.

SOUL RLY? - The "O RLY" meme was huge on YTMND. If it didn't start there, it definitely rose to prominence there. Soul Calibur III came out and had an owl character, so I made an O RLY YTMND using a picture of him. This is the second GIF I actually made myself.

The internet is stupid

I have a thing with message boards. The entire time I've had access to the internet I've been posting on them. Primarily video game message boards, especially during my adolescence. I still visit and post on message boards, but I try to stay away from video game specific boards now. The reason? People are idiots. Console fanboys are what did it mostly. I thought I had escaped... but sometimes the internet will follow you places.

Enter (the) Dragon Age 2. I loved Dragon Age: Origins and apparently so did a lot of people on the internet. I played it on PC. Apparently so did they, because they hate how DA2 is "consolefied" or whatever. They made this judgement before the game was released, mind you, and somehow managed to get their user reviews on Metacritic before the game was released. They must have industry connections! Truly they are superstar video game critics!

I played and finished DA2. It's superior to DAO in virtually every way. I have a fondness for the original, don't get me wrong, but DA2 is simply more fun and tells a more memorable story in my opinion. It's shorter, less expansive, flawed... but DAO was just as flawed in many similar ways. And it's still damn long. I'm a bit of a slowpoke/completionist and DA2 took me 50 hours as opposed to DAO's 80 hours. 30 hours is a pretty big difference, but I was far more familiar with the gameplay this time and 50 hours is nothing to sneeze at.

The big complaints seem to be that you can no longer select your race, you can no longer zoom the camera all the way out, and you have less diverse environments to explore. All valid complaints I suppose, but if these people actually played the damn game I'm sure they'd enjoy it and give it more than a 0 on Metacritic. Dragon Age 2 addiction is the reason nobody has updated this blog in 3 weeks. I personally think it could have benefited a lot form an extra 6 months or so of development, but I played the hell out of it regardless so I'm satisfied.

Chatroulette Love Song

This video is adorable. It sort of brightened up my day just now. It's been cloudy and rainy and miserable outside and I feel like I'm coming down with a cold. Having been aware of the stigma Chatroulette carries around with it, I was both surprised and delighted when this was sent to me today.

"I had a floppy disc that you turned into a harddrive." - Some things just make the rest of your day a little bit better. :)

Using My OCD for Good, Not Evil

So, as mentioned in my previous post I have the compulsion to collect things. It makes me both happy and sad because I find my bank account suffering more often than not due to my lack of control of my spending habits. Once I start buying things, I find I just won’t stop – I’m on a roll. It’s especially bad when my friends start going to comic shops or electronics stores on whims and take me a long. It’s not like they’re holding a gun to my head, but I’ll go if someone is driving… I don’t drive or have a car myself… T_T

Another downside to my “OCD” – I’m not a doctor so I’m not going to officially diagnose myself with OCD – is that I buy so many games that I don’t end up finishing them all. I’ve started most of them, but finished few – and it’s not for a lack of trying or wanting to, but somehow along with my “OCD” I also have some kind of “ADD”. I have a ton of games on the go, some I’ve almost finished, some I’ve just started, but very few have I actually finished – at least recently.

When I was younger and didn’t have the means to finance my addiction (I still don’t technically), I had to rely on birthdays and allowances for my video games, and when I got them I played them to death. I finished them and then played them again. To this day my two most memorable experiences with games – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Devil May Cry – are games that I have played again since finishing them. I don’t know if it’s just the nostalgia factor, or if they truly were just great games (I have enough friends that will vouch for Ocarina of Time), but I would totally pick them up again and have.

I’m really baffled as to why I can’t finish games now, however. Sometimes I will literally stop just before the end (Folklore and Persona 4 are some more recent examples of this behaviour for me). Sometimes it’s the grinding, sometimes it’s the rest of my life getting in the way, but for whatever reason – I just can’t finish games anymore…

I’ve decided this habit is coming to an end. Being obsessed with collecting and organizing, I’m also a big fan of excel. When I get the opportunity to make a sweet excel doc at work – I am happy. It’s like a productive form of meditating while working for me. I feel like I’m doing something productive while also somehow zoning out at the same time. I don’t really know how it works but it just does. I am by no means an excel guru, but I’ve got enough knowledge to make some decent looking and relatively efficient excel reports.

One day soon I am going to do an inventory of all my games, played and unplayed, finished and unfinished. Somehow I will prioritize them (probably starting with the ones I’ve started but haven’t finished or am almost finished). This will also probably take me 900 years… but I’m willing to give it a try because I'm tired of missing out on great games that are literally at my fingertips and ready to be played. I’ll keep you(the internet) abreast of when my all powerful excel video game tracker is complete and any time I manage to make a dent in the rather large list of games that I own but haven’t finished….

I HOPE THIS WORKS! O_O

Collections

So for a while now – basically since I’ve been making my own income – I’ve been collecting things. It did originate when I was a kid, however. I collected Barbies (I am female so I get a pass on this…), and not “Teacher Barbie” or “Gymnast Barbie”. I collected the ones that cost between $50 and $100, the rare ones. I got them as gifts, I had to be patient and wait until Christmas or birthdays for them, but by the time I left home I had what could be called a collection. Even before this, when I was a really small child I collected stuffed animals… again, I am a girl – there are some things I just can’t fight.

Since this habit began I’ve been collecting books, movies, games, comics and statues/action figures (I still collect stuffed animals…). While I don’t think any particular collection could be considered among the more substantial collections out there, when I put them all together, my “Nerd Collection” takes up a whole wall – or if I chose to do so – the den in my apartment. The only things stopping me from going all out and nabbing every item I want is my lack of space and insufficient income.

Yet still, I will now go out and buy the books, games, comics and toys that I really want, the day they come out, and for full price if I want them that badly. It’s a combination of OCD and ADHD… if that’s even possible… I can’t focus my obsession on key area, but I feel the need to get these things as soon as possible and promptly put them on display in my living room. Some of my more prized items include my Big Daddy statue from the Bioshock collector’s edition, my Thor bobble head, my Domo Kun plushie, my Misdreavus pokemon plushie that I got from the Pokecentre in Japan, and just my comic collection in general.

When it comes to books, I read about sixteen at a time – mostly sci-fi or fantasy, with some classic literature, books on D-Day and history thrown in for good measure. It takes me much longer to finish them sometimes but I can’t restrict myself to one story at a time. There are probably more than sixteen books that I have on the go, but I stopped trying to keep track when I was fifteen. The list just got too unmanageable. When I find an author, who’s written one or two books that I liked I will get as many of their books as I can get my hands on. I don’t always read or even like all of them, but I must have them.

As for comics, I don’t bother looking to the old classics. I catch up on the events of the past to get a better understanding of what made my favourite heroes who they are today, but I’m far too poor to spend the money on collector’s items of the past. Plus there are plenty of contemporary comic story arcs, writers, artists and characters that are extremely good that I don’t really mind if I’m missing out on the vintage stuff. I actually have my mom to thank for my obsession with comics. If she hadn’t gotten myself and my brother and sister into watching the old 80’s X-men cartoon I don’t think I’d love comics as much as I do today. Fables, The Walking Dead, Batman, Justice League, X-Force, X-Men, X-Factor, Thor, Captain America, The Eternals, Deadpool, Cable, Dorohedoro and more are all part of my comic collection.

I’m also currently amassing a collection of Collector’s Editions of games. From Assassin’s Creed to Halo, Final Fantasy to Dead Space, if there are cool enough statues, artwork, toys, or in-game items I will try to get the Collector’s Editions of games. I have some of the boxes still because they looked cool (this may or may not be verging hoarder behaviour but for now I’ll give myself the benefit of the doubt, I can still move through my apartment without tripping of piles of shit).

I love my collection, as random and chaotic as it is. It’s not just a collection of things created out of a need to have everything related to one thing – they are things I really love which happen to all be related in the fact that they could all be considered nerdy. These things are stories, characters, and experiences I’ve had. They’ve connected me to new people, helped me discover new worlds and new experiences, and eaten a great big hole into my bank account… but that’s beside the point. This collection has grown so big, it’s a part of who I am, and I hope I never stop.

*As a side note… as I’m writing this I’m also watching an episode of Criminal Minds about a crazy woman who COLLECTS women and turns them into living dolls by paralyzing them, dressing them up like dolls until they die and she finds a replacement. Suuuuuper creepy…..

The Sub

I recently moved from my very own one bedroom apartment to sharing half of a small house with two other people. As such, I've had to throw away a lot of crap. As I was tossing out a backpack with a broken strap (the strap is only partially broken, and therefore in my mind the backpack was still usable... anyway...) I discovered 3 copies of a script I wrote in a high school writing class. I've been out of high school for about 5 years and continued using this backpack for about 2 years after high school and never removed these scripts for some reason. Maybe I hoped one day they'd be a conversation starter or something, I don't know. I even knew they were there before I decided to throw out the backpack. The script itself is heavily inspired by the BBC version of The Office and grizzled old lazy substitutes of my youth. It features semi-excessive cursing due to the fact that the teacher didn't care if we swore and I was a teenage boy. Here are all 8 pages of the script in their unedited written-by-a-17-year-old glory.

Amnesia is dark, decent, not a traditional game

There are some people that believe horror games should be played alone, in the dark with headphones on. Those people don't know what they're missing out on. Nel, a few of our other friends and I have been playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent by committee on a projector screen at work. It's almost scarier when other people are reacting to things (especially when they're as wimpy as my co-contributor) and there's something very compelling about working together to solve puzzles despite the fact that only one person is really in control. It probably helps we're all reasonable human beings for the most part.

Anyway, interest in Amnesia among our friends is largely fueled by this video:

We actually played through this part of the game yesterday.