Why do my games have to have such tiny tiny text? It drives me bananas. Admittedly, I don't have eagle eyes or 20-20 vision or what have you, but if something's too small to read from my couch I'm stuck with the choice of either only halfway knowing what's going on or sitting uncomfortably close to the television.

Worst offenders: Mass Effect (!!), Assassin's Creed, Eternal Sonata.

Actually come to think of it, it seems to be mostly 360 games I have trouble with. I haven't noticed Twilight Princess or Persona 3 making me read 10 pt font from across the room. I bet the designers don't want the text to interfere with the graphics, but it makes it awfully hard for me to play when I can't see what the heck's going on.

I think it would be kind to give me the option for larger print.

This makes me feel about eighty-five years old. :P

Anyone else had this problem, or am I the only blind gamer out there?

In an effort to spare you good people from the continual boring ups and downs of my meagre existence, I did not tell the story of what happened on Easter Sunday on this blog. Unfortunately, now I find my AIM list empty and I might honestly yank out all my hair if I don't get a chance to vent this crap, and the Sunday evening incident is key. So tighten your belts.

Sunday Evening, March 23rd. I was going to drive my brother back to college, he'd been home for the obligatory meal in which my mom tries to get rid of one of the behemoth frozen turkeys she's had in the freezer since butchering season. I was in charge of delivering him back to where he belonged and in deference to my incomeless-ness I'd been given the gas card to get a free tank of gas out of the deal ('free tank of gas' should be mentally accompanied by a light shining down from heaven and an angelic chorus singing OH-OH!)

I still wasn't feeling so hot after my bout with Mr. Flu Virus last week, so I decided to make Wade drive me out, and I'd drive the car back alone, thus resting and accomplishing my task at the same time. Instead of successfully leaving the driveway, Wade decided to back my car directly into my brother Kenton's S-10 (which incidentally, he had just paid off and received the title for earlier in the week). I had no taillights, and thus was not able to drive at night without being a cop-magnet, and was forced to forfeit the aforementioned free tank of gas (light flickers, angels groan and cuss).

So my father offers to fix the taillights for me seeing as how Wade has even less income than I do, and I look prepared to make a stink about it. He takes my car to the garage, gets it fixed and the mechanic gives it a clean bill of health re: state safety inspection standards, and it is returned to me on Thursday afternoon.

Skip forward to Friday, one day later, yesterday. I drove to my parents house in the afternoon, did some odd jobs for some small amounts of cash, and was driving home after dinner at about 9pm. I get within sight of my own driveway and something terribly familiar happens. All the lights dim to the brightness of a flashlight or less. The interior lights go out. The spedometer and the other gauge needles drop to zero (even though the car is still clearly moving). The clock stops, the fan stops, the radio slurs like a bad sound effect.

The alternator has died. Again.

[Seriously Restrained for TOU] Goshdarnit to heck!

To add insult to injury, earlier that day I'd missed a call from Dream-Prospective-Employer while vacuuming and didn't happen to check my voicemail for, oh half an hour or so, which put the time at after five. Voicemail says call back we can discuss details, sounds awfully like a job offer to me.... Who calls to make a job offer at ten til five on a Friday? Now I can't call back until Monday, and just as my car has died and left me stranded in the middle of nowhere's Left Armpit until further notice, it would have been nice to be able to say "I'm just starting a new job, things are on the upswing."

Instead I'm just going to be sitting all weekend staring resentfully out the window at the Corolla and cussing under my breath waiting for webdesign companies and garages to reopen for the week.

Alright, alright, already.

1) I don't wear gold jewelry. Ever. I have brown hair, and brown eyes, and this olivey-tinted skin that tends to get real tan real fast if I'm out in the sun, which makes me pretty much brown all over, and when I add wearing gold to the mix it makes me feel like some kind of a pirate, or a honeybee, or something. Ick. So I don't do it.

2) The biggest fight I ever had with anyone was over Tetris. To be more precise, the N64 game The New Tetris. It was one of those cIassic college-girl fights that are really about territory and who used whose hairbrush, but we actually came to blows over whether it was alright for my suitemate (shared a bathroom, and thus had a private door into my dorm room) to come in while I was sleeping to indulge her Tetris obsession. She said it was, because I slept at abnormal hours when people really ought to not have to worry about waking me, I said it wasn't because it was my room $%&%@#$. It was a big fight. I won. It was not my N64, but it was my television she was playing on, and I took it.:lol:

3) My father once painted my laptop shut. He was spraypainting the ceiling in the sort of random gesture my parents always make when they talk about selling the house (they haven't yet done it), and he somehow didn't realize that it would be a good idea to, you know, sheet over the furniture or warn the people sitting underneath. Fortunately when the little specks of white paint began to come down I slammed the laptop shut, but to this day the outside of the cover is all whitespeckled all over.

4) I'm a Red Sox fan. Not the kind who sprung up out of the woodwork around about 2004, but the ancestral kind who actually lives in New England and has a younger brother named after Wade Boggs. When I was a little girl my dad used to take me to Fenway every summer, but he wouldn't let me go to the bathroom alone. Have you ever been a little girl trying to hold it through a major league baseball game!? That's being a fan. *nods* Anyone who looked at my gamercard in October probably does know this, but I can't imagine too many of you actually study my gamercard, since I don't play much multiplayer.

5) I'm an avid reader of many disparate kinds of fiction, I read far far more than I play video games, and that is indeed quite a lot. Some of my favorite authors include Lynn Flewelling and George RR Martin, but I like other non-fantasy writers as well like (to name two drastically different examples) Herman Wouk and Helen Fielding.

And that's that.

[Edit: There aren't five more people on my friends list who haven't been tagged. But, just to make Austin happy, I'll tag Yeah_Write, just in case nobody else has gotten there first. Consider this a friendly poke from the general direction of Trigames.net.]

I didn't realize that the apparent dreamlife of sitting on the couch in pajamas all day with my 360 controller in one hand and a Killians in the other would get old so fast.

I mean, not that there isn't a certain charm to getting up at 3pm on a Wednesday and immediately beginning a crusade of drinking that will last until the small hours of Thursday morning. It's more that most of my friends can't or won't indulge in such crusades in the middle of the week, so I'm left with the bleak choice of either drinking with sober people (yeurgh), drinking alone (call AA), or not drinking at all (and this is where I find myself). Being unemployed is guaranteed to make one wish one was more of a lush, but it doesn't seem to be working out to actually turn me into one.

Also the limitless possibility of going out at any time has not materialized, largely because without the constraints of work my sleep habits roll over immediately and slide into a vampirelike regularity where I sleep with the sun and wake with the dusk. This is not an asset to having a social life, as going anywhere means everyone else will be asleep before I'm ready for lunch.

To counteract this continual boredom I've been writing a lot, the continuation of a project I started around about Halloweenish. I've written just over sixty pages of cookie-cutter material which might be novel-length if I ever work up the gumption to finish it. I can't imagine a first attempt ever pans out into much more than scribblings that would seem familiar to half a million or so nerds all across the country, and that is, I suspect all this will amount to as well. But I'm spending more time currently with fictional characters than with anyone alive, if one discounts my dog Daltrey who barks a whole lot more when I'm with her 24/7 to hear it.:roll:

What this means in plain English is this: Please, Please, prospective employer, I have done your test-like assignment and emailed it to you well before your generous deadline. Approve me! I need work and income and a life with goals in it, other than my next achievement in my second playthrough of Mass Effect and reaching the end of chapter six! Please do not take another two weeks to respond to me like you did the first time, I can't wait that long, I'm running out of money, food, patience, and above all sanity!:cry:

*falls to the ground stricken, with eyeballs bulging out of head*

Today I have inadvertently run across spoilers regarding character deaths in not one but two games I am currently playing.

*stomps feet* *whines* *throws fit*

Neither one is particularly recent, neither game was the one I was actually looking for information on. The blasted spoilers were just tucked in there waiting to catch someone unawares.

Everybody knows who dies in FFVII, and even then you still probably put up a warning. Seriously.

Fie Kotaku. Fie Destructoid. Industrial sized fies on spoilermongers everywhere.

And Microsoft still hasn't fixed KOTOR II yet, still gibberish instead of legible text. So for good measure, fie Microsoft!

My friend Kristen and I were both around the same sickie early this week. We haven't identified the culprit, but we're too busy feeling like death to care.

I present, a series of amusing texts from one sickie to another.

=========

March 20, 6:13 pm

Sara: I finally put clothes on

=========

March 20, 6:15 pm

Kristen: I ate 5 crackers and have 102.5 fever

=========

March 20, 6:16 pm

Sara: Goodness. I don't think I even own a thermometer.

Some time passes, some tylenol is consumed, various death wishes are wholeheartedly expressed and fortunately not-granted. I discover that I do own a thermometer, and I also am boasting a body temperature in the 100+ range.

=========

March 20, 8:31 pm

Kristen: How are you doing? My fever is down 2 degrees!

========

March 20, 8:33 pm

Sara: I'm very tired, but I've been awake most of the afternoon and I can sort of breathe now.

========

March 20, 8:34 pm

Kristen: Good deal. I think we might live.

:lol: Oh the melodrama. Current time: 11:54 pm. Both still alive. Despite the lingering fever (my skin hurts like a sunburn!), I think we'll both survive to wreak vengeance on the sickie who did this to us.

/Internet Drought

/Social Drought

/Work Drought (I hope!)

/All droughts everywhere.

Things are going good. How long have I waited to say that, huh? :lol: Today was a good day, yesterday was a good day, Sunday was a good day, and Saturday wasn't half bad. Let me begin at the beginning.

Saturday night we went out for a bit of a St. Paddy's day early bash... not so good for employed people to drink lots on a weeknight. Saturday some friends were driving some other friends to Portland, (which is a city large enough to have bars) so that presented itself as an excellent opportunity. We found ourselves at Bull Feeney's, a faux-Irish sort of place, where we proceeded to consume huge amounts of shepherds pie, fish and chips (which we in Maine do well as a rule), and dark luscious beers. There was a guy singing faux-Irish music (as I see on Comedy Central, Danny Boy = not really Irish. Hmpf.), he wasn't half bad. My friend got tipsy, sang along very enthusiastically with faux-Irish singer. Friend J. got drunk on two beers, very unusual. I texted people without restraint or coherence. Par for the course for all of us. All in all a good day.

Sunday followed, also a good day, nothing terribly exciting on the social scene, but much companionship, something I don't get enough of on a regular basis. Monday was the corned-beef extravaganza. I was planning to go somewhere in the evening, but we just got so corned-beefy that I wound up staying put, then we had a little more guiness, the employed among us conked out early and I stayed up late having a ridiculous and probably slightly inebriated conversation with MrCHUP0N of Trigames-hates-my-ears-fame.

Today was the best day of all. Came home from K.'s house, found email from landlady, hoping she can give me a wireless adapter. Anyone who wants to give me a wireless adapter is cool. Also, having finally determined tht problem lay not in wireless card but in slot where wireless card belonged, it had become pretty important to have adapter that did not rely on that particular point of attachment. This adapter is USB related. Thank God. I'd have done this months ago if I'd just realized what (exactly, precisely) the problem was. I kept putting different cards into the same slot, card after card after card. Anyway. I'm good now. Little wrestling over the drivers (Crashed my blackberry trying to dl drivers to it, then transfer to laptop. Not successful.) finally up and running. It's a good thing.

And as if that wasn't enough, I got an email back from the job I mentioned earlier. My resume and much-agonized-over cover letter have apparently not been found entirely wanting because I've been sent a "homework assignment" for reading up on how search engines work (baffling), and some text to write using various very specific criteria. Must. do. tomorrow. If that goes well, I'll be working for them shortly, I think, I hope.

To sum up. Various things have been wrong with my life lately. Some of them seem to be correcting themselves. This is good.

I am sick, but happy.

I love it!!

I am sitting home responsible for a large vat of boiling beef and a mountain of rooty-vegetable-goodness. It's like finally being a New Englander again. When my friend Kristen gets back from work, we'll run out and get us some cider and some Guiness and we'll try as hard as we can (and probably fail, as I've never been successful, and she's never tried) to get the Guiness to float on top of the cider in a nice beery-apply way.

We're making corned beef dinner for NINE! This is the girl who's barely left the house in the last six months. I am so very relieved to know nine people that are all in the same place.

Also, I've been talking a lot more to my old friends, the ones I realize now I was really close to. They weren't always the ones that I spent the most tme with or that I would have counted as the most important people all the time... but the best friends are the ones you can still talk to when you live thousands of miles away and they still care about what's happening to you even though you don't have any people in common anymore. The ones who take the time out to call you (or IM or Email or whatever) you, even when you've been depressed and not answering the phone for a while.

I love my friends.

PS - on Saturday night I found my IM list in some disarray and a large amount of garbled drunkeny text to various people, some of whom are relatively likely to read this... my apologies, I'm not sure it's such a good idea for me to have unlimited mobile IM and a lot to drink all at the same time. ;)

I've noticed in the last few weeks that I've been playing sort of an odd mix of games, it's pretty unusual for me to play more than one game at once, so the way I've been popping them in and out at random lately is odd in and of itself.

I hate the term backlog. It makes me feel like having some unfinished games on my shelf is somehow wrong or that there's some reason I ought to. I don't want it to be work, and thinking about it like work makes me not wanna do it. So here's what I've been dabbling in and/or finishing up.

My Oblivion obsession is tapering off, after two weeks of playing more than full-time. I've completed all the guild quests, including the Dark Brotherhood, I've done a fair amount of the main quest line and I've decided I don't particularly care about the main quest. Hence the tapering off. I think the problem with the game is that it's more about the challenges of various quests and there isn't really much focus on the story at all. Now that was enough to engage me for a long long tim, but it isn't enough to make me get through the main quest because I don't care that much about the challenge of the storyline level. It isn't the kind of thing that I was interested in. I liked the thieves quest best, and the Dark Brotherhood quests were mostly interesting too. The Mages and Fighters quests were not as interesting, I had to force myself to finish them, and that took the fun out of it. When I got to the Aid for Bruma quest and I realized how much running around I was going to have to do on Oblivion planes (is it just me or were they all alike and not that interesting?), I just couldn't make myself do it.

So in the void left by Oblivion I'm playing a little of this n' that.

Since a while ago m0zart told me the (obvious *smacks head*) solution to my problem in Eternal Darkness, I restarted that, and lo and behold now that I'm not hung up on an easy part, I got quite a long way into that. I like the storytelling, I love what happens when I don't get my sanity up in time.... sometimes it makes me a little motion sick, but I'm willing to put up with it. Also I like the spells creation and the rune collecting stuff.

Also, I never finished Twilight Princess, so I have popped that in and out occasionally. I can't seem to get into the mood for it though. Does anyone else have to be in a certain mood for Zelda?

I'm also fighting my way back through Mass Effect trying to get some of the achievements for being a bad dude, and also some of the weapon specialization I missed the first time through. I'm almost halfway through that again.

I've also got kind of a retro craving lately, and I'm rerunning back through FF VIII and FF IX.

And Shadow Hearts Covenant. Again. Maybe this time I'll finish it. I just can't get enough of the judgement ring.

Aaaand, I think that's everything. No news yet on the job hunt. Cross your fingers for me.

One month later, she is working odd jobs and living off the dregs of her tax return. It's something like a very long vacation, with an unpleasant undercurrent of nerves.

I'm applying for several different things, including some more schooling and some jobs. My favorite opportunity yet is having an application sent off any minute now, it would be a copywriting position for which I have zero experience but a personal recommendation from within the company. It would be a pretty good opportunity for me so I'm holding my breath on that.

Anyway, since I'm up to my neck in a cover letter and only briefly online for that purpose, I'll have to keep it that brief for now. But if I were to get this job it would be definite that the internet would have to return immediately, because I'd need it for work and it'd be top priority. So I'm crossing my fingers on that too. Until then *waves*.

Edit: Terribly humourous incident. I was taking one of those market research surveys and it asked what my current occupation was. Needless to say "temporarily between jobs" or "currently looking" was not an option in this survey. So I was sitting there pondering what to answer, "self-employed" doesn't really seem to cover my current status as house-cleaner, house-sitter, dog-sitter, baby-sitter, and whateverneedssitting-sitter, so I wound up going with "full time homemaker". *laughing at self* That's right, I'm a 25 year old, single, full time homemaker who lives alone.