girlofprey | (no subject)

Hello. I've been meaning to post for the past, um, few weeks. But I've been keeping myself on a pretty steady diet of Skyrim, Saints Row 2, rewatching about half of Season 2 of Oz for Peter Schibetta reasons (who I love MORE THAN EVER), and watching American Dad, for humour and intergenerational het incest reasons. THE BEST REASONS THERE ARE. Also, I managed to get onto the jewellery making course in Leeds for a second term, and I've been going to see my employment coach again. Christmas is truly over. Even if all the sales aren't. So I haven't really had a lot of time to do other things.

Some nice things that have happened to me lately:

My new nephew came home from the hospital on Monday, yay!

On Saturday in the post I got both a slightly gloomy, but lovely, card from jekesta containing beautiful stickers (thank you jekesta), AND a letter saying I'd won a premium bond, for the amount of £25, including a cheque for it. It was a good day for post.

I got back on my jewellery making course. I was lucky to do so, really, in a slightly sad way, because I was only on the waiting list, and they didn't call me the morning of the first lesson like they did last term. But I called them and they said yeah, come in, so I went in and enrolled and went to the class. And then the tutor took the register and realised one person - who had also been on the course last term - wasn't on the register, and there were 13 people in the class when the maximum was usually 12. The woman who wasn't on the register said she hadn't signed any forms or spoken to the people running things upstairs, she'd just come back to the class. She and the tutor went upstairs to talk to the people in the office, and then the tutor came back down and said the woman had had to go home, because there wasn't a place for her. So assuming she wasn't on the waiting list like me, I probably ended up with her place. Which I did feel slightly bad about. But not entirely, because assuming I don't win my appeal - which I don't think I will - by the time the next term comes round, I might well have less money to spend on courses, and no concessions, so it would cost £50 instead of £5. So mostly I'm just relieved about it.

My Oglaf book came in the post today, hurrah!

Some bad things that have happened to me lately:

Yesterday at my jewellery course, I managed to cut my thumb with tin snips, which if you know anything about tin snips is pretty hard to do, but I managed it. I also burnt my fingers quite a lot while trying to polish things, scraped my elbow on part of my desk, and get hit by a tiny drop of boiling water while someone was quenching another piece. It really was not my day yesterday.

I got a call from the Tribunals service today (and yesterday). It turned out it wasn't about anything much, though, but still. A reminder that it is coming :(

Hmm. In other news, Skyrim's wicked. The only problem I'm having with it is that there are so many quests, SO MANY quests, and you don't have to take them all, but I always worry that turning them down WILL mean you don't get to still do them, or that I'll forget that people are offering them and miss out on them. But now I have probably about fifty 'to do', and it's sort of stretching my own suspension of belief that people would not be upset that I took a few months to basically take something to another town for them. So I'm trying to work my way through them at the moment. And basically running into and getting more along the way. But still. It's pretty good.

Further adventures in gender included a quest where I had the choice between taking the side of a woman in hiding or the side of the men hunting her for supposed crimes, and taking her side led to the men accusing me of being fooled by a 'pretty face'. However, I just got sort of spoilered on tumblr - because it certainly hasn't come up for ME yet - that apparently in Skyrim you can get married at some point, and you can choose any gender or race you want when you do. So maybe Skyrim/Tamriel really IS meant to be a world where it's perfectly okay and accepted to be gay. In which case, well done, I guess, Bethesda.

Adventures with gender in Saints Row 2 have been slightly more confusing. By and large it's fairly straightforward or not mentioned. But there's an activity you can do in the game called "ho-ing". Which, as far as I can tell, is where you gain respect by going to strip clubs and "pleasing" - strippers, I guess - after which your sexual prowess is known throughout the land, or whatever. I went and did it as part of another job though, and you don't actually get to see any of the act, but you hear voices, and my character was definitely in there with a man. So. I don't really know whether I earned or spent money after that activity. Was it a male ho? Was it just some random guy and we were using a strip club as basically a motel, without paying any of the actual people who worked there? Which is kind of insulting if you think about it. Apparently you can earn money as a pimp by ho-ing, but I don't know how or if I did. But it sounded like a good time was had by all, at any rate. So fine.

Saints Row 2 is getting a bit tricky at the moment in that it's got to that sort of middling part of games, where you're quite good at it, but not super-good at it, so I'm feeling a bit cocky perhaps but the challenges are getting slightly harder and I can't just breeze through them like I could the earlier stuff. Which is a little bit aggravating. But I'm still really enjoying it. Especially now that I've figured out I can steal helicopters if I want to. Even if I can't quite fly them yet. Still.

I haven't really been watching any TV or anything lately. Although I did have dream the other night about hanging out with my awesome nana, before realising, in the dream, that she was actually Rita from Coronation Street. Which led to a weird dream about an alternative Coronation Street, where David Platt had a cat he walked on a leash, and Karen was still hanging around. Good times. Anyway, other than that, nothing really. Other than Oz and American Dad. YOU ARE FREE TO TALK TO ME ABOUT PETER SCHIBETTA OR HAYLEY SMITH IF YOU WISH. I love you guys. x

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Bethesda are actually really, really good when it comes to gay representation in video games. Fallout New Vegas has loads of characters who are gay just because they are, and I love it so.

Yeah, they had a mention of it - sort of - in Oblivion, with a guy writing in his journal about his male friend that 'I fear he's as naive as he is beautiful'. Also, I was pretty sure a bunch of female NPCs were coming onto me. But it's always difficult to work out with RPG games especially, because sometimes in the middle of those same games someone would suddenly refer to my female character as 'he', and then it's hard to know if things are really positive representation or just slightly patchy programming. I've not played the Fallout games, but I know that in the Elder Scrolls Bethesda has always been pretty great with letting you play male or female characters equally though, and having plenty of male and female NPCs in the Elder Scrolls in various roles. And with having lots of different cultures, and not having any of them be good or bad, but having racial tensions all the same. So I've always been pretty in love with Bethesda's general tendency to have lots of representation. I didn't know about the Fallout thing though, or about the marriage thing in Skyrim. So that's a new thing to be pleased about, I guess. :)

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TRULY YOU MUST. Oh. I could make that post. But it would be full of caveats that I don't UNDERSTAND the processes I describe, I just know how to do them. And I don't know what things actually are or where to get them, I just know the NAMES of them. If that's a post anyone might find useful or interesting, then I may indeed make it at some point.