(Brace yourselves for yet another long-ass post. D: )
Argh. Really starting to feel the cheese sliding off my ******. Financial situation isn't getting any better, same for the job hunt, it's starting to freak me out...having trouble sleeping, and to top everything off, I've hit writer's block on most of the half-dozen books/stories I've got going. Just end up sitting here staring at the screen. Ended up playing Borderlands 2 while trying to let stuff percolate in my head and hope something starts to click into place...and I gotta say, Handsome Jack is the most infuriating video game villain I've encountered since that ****** Kai Leng. After I finished off the final boss, I didn't even wait to find out if HJ had one last speech, or anything like that--I just unceremoniously shot him in the back of the skull with a huge shotgun.
But at least he was infuriating in the way a villain should be. Kai Leng, on the other hand... 
One kind of interesting thing happened recently. One of my regular readers on FanStory commented in an email to me a couple weeks ago that after reading Freelancers, she got interested in Mass Effect and started reading the books. I haven't read any of them yet, but having heard about the horrible mess that the fourth book was, I was quick to warn her to avoid that one. She checked out the reviews on Amazon and wondered how that even slipped past the publisher/devs. With over 20 years of rejection letters under my belt, while seeing books ranging from mediocre to full-throttle garbage actually get published, I'm not all that surprised that something like Deception happened, but I did find it a bit odd that a single book with so many mistakes made it into bookstores without someone doing some sort of quality control. D: Though given what happened with ME3, I guess it was kind of a sign of what was coming later....
This same reader also mentioned that she's not interested in playing the games, which in a way is a good thing. At least she won't become attached to the characters, setting, and story, and then have to watch it end the way it did. But at least there are synopses online if she decides to find out the gist of the plot....
As for Allers, I always wondered why it wasn't Emily Wong. Then I read how they killed off her character via Twitter...which was weak. Personally, I feel that it should have been Wong vs Al-Jilani on the ship. People who went out of their way to avoid Wong would be punished by having to put up with Al-Jilani (assuming they didn't boot her, like they can Allers).
Not that I have anything against Allers or Chobot per se. I just didn't like the manner in which they were included in the game, and the politics of it felt bad. After all, one could hardly be an objective judge of a game if they were INVOLVED in it. However, the LARGEST issue I had with it, storywise, is the same problem I had with Traynor (that earlier post about how all her intel should have been Liara's dialogue)...
We already had established characters, who could be made to speak the exact same lines, and it would lose nothing in the telling. Rather, for long-time fans, it would even add nuance. With almost no additional work, BW could have forged one more sentimental connection, and new fans would be no less endeared to Wong as they were to Allers.
A lot of folks dislike Vega, even more dislike Allers. Of course they have their fans as well. However, from a sheer story POV, they are both wasted potential. Inclusion of pre-existing characters (even with short re-introductions, or even via character redefinition) would have forged more compelling connections for veterans. For the new fans, you lose nothing in the telling. In all honesty, walking in on the 3rd game of a series, new fans shouldn't be upset when Shep knows half the people in the story, and they don't; but proper intros can navigate that as well.
Bah, I ramble...
@ ftkerns: have fun with the daydreams! As of yet, the only downsides are thus...
1) narration software isn't up to par with dictating ME fanfiction (assuming I had a headset on while daydreaming)
2) if I have the same song on loop, I can eventually get tired of it, when not brainstorming for the story...thus certain songs I can ONLY listen to in that setting
Barring that, like I said, it's the most fun part of the writing process for me!
Haven't had a chance lately to really give it a try (too much on my mind, right now), but I should see if it might help me break through one of the mental blockages I've got....
As for Allers, yeah, that entire thing bugged me for all sorts of reasons. The whole conflict-of-interest thing with a news/reviews site having one of their own reporters with a fairly significant role in the game, for one thing. I also think it should've been Wong vs. al Jilani. And the way Wong was killed off, before the beginning of the game, just pissed me off. Same with the way Kal'Reegar went out. Not even on screen. We find out about it in an email. Seriously? 
Bringing in new characters like Allers and Vega instead of using those who've been part of the story since the beginning...to me, it kind of ties in with the developers' comments about players jumping into the story with ME3--having characters there just to have stuff explained to them. When it's the final installment of the story, you should just focus on telling the story and not waste time bringing new viewers/readers/players up to speed. Anyone who begins a story with the final few chapters deserves to be confused.
Well, glad to see I'm not the only one.
Also, I will see your "frell" and raise you another "gorramn" amazing sci-fi series! Ah man, good tv set in outer-space is so hard to come by. I think my list of faves goes...
1) Farscape/Peacekeeper Wars
2) Outlaw Star
3) Firefly/Serenity
Star Trek and Stargate were fun, but I can't stand marathoning them, like I can the ones on my list; and Battlestar Galactica is too frakking depressing for multiple viewings. As for Cowboy Bebop...I have to be in the mood for it. Incidentally, this is why I was such a fan of the ME series, going so far as writing fanfic.
For me, BSG had a fantastic start, but went off the rails in the last couple seasons. But yeah, overall, it was just too bleak and depressing. And when I finished the final episode, I just shook my head and muttered, "What the hell did I just watch?" But at least I didn't pay $80 to see a mishandled ending. 
I couldn't get into Firefly. I tried, I really did. I managed to get through three episodes, but I can easily live the rest of my life without ever seeing another episode.
Farscape, on the other hand, has remained one of my top five favorite shows since it first aired. 
I think you give the writers too much credit, Stoob. I think they pretty much said, "We need to pick who they are now to make a good cliffhanger. Who makes the most sense? Eeny meeny miny moe..."
For all the talk of 'The Plan' there really was no plan. Another show where the mystery was stretched out, nonsensical and unsatisfying. For all the show did right, I think it did about two other things wrong. Sigh.
That's pretty much how I felt about it. The show started off really strong, but the longer it went on...sigh. Seemed to me like it became more about the mystery of the Final Five than about simply telling a good story. It just went off in the wrong direction, I think.
I highly recommend seeing Firefly, Farscape, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis. Star Trek: Enterprise is good, well all the series spin offs are good. To me anyways.
Love the Old Republic RPG games.
Saw most the of X-men movies mentioned above, not the newest one though. Avengers, check. Dark Knight: Nope. Probably won't ever. Friend said it was depressing to him. I've seen Thor and Iron man. I've watch Battlestar but I felt there too much violence and drinking going on... messed up.
I recently bought myself a new computer for my birthday, motherboard, memory, video card, cpu/fan etc. Not a bad investment. Works great! Better than my four year old piece of crap. I'm ready for Dragon Age: Inquistion! I paid roughly $1000 and received two free games with it. Saints Row IV and Thief. I have been playing Saints Row IV. That game has some pretty messed up **** going on. Not really what I expected but fun regardless. That alien bastard! However, the actor who voiced Oriana Lawson is one of the main female voices. It's really funny hearing her swear/****** a lot... causing all sorts of mayham.
I'd also recommend Farscape, SG-1 and Atlantis. 
And I actually enjoyed Enterprise quite a bit because of the characters. To me, they just seemed more like actual people than some of the stilted characters on the other spinoffs.
Congrats on the new computer. Having gone through half a dozen computers that couldn't handle games that were less than four or five years old, I know how wonderful it is to finally have one that can play more up-to-date games. I've been enjoying the hell out of Saints Row IV since last August. I love that game. Also, Saints Row: The Third. Heh, there have only been a few games that I never get tired of playing. As I've mentioned before, I kept playing Mass Effect 2 over and over and over and over for at least a couple years because I just had so much fun with it. (In fact, it's what started giving me ideas for my own ME fanfic.) Then I played ME3 once (well, I tried going through it again, got maybe a third of the way through, and couldn't continue...though I should be able to enjoy it now that I have MEHEM and the Citadel Epilogue mods) and ended up so bummed out and enraged that I was actually depressed for a while--then I saw a videos from the Rooster Teeth guys playing Saints Row: The Third. I thought it looked like fun, so I bought it and tried it out...and loved it so much that it pretty much became the game for me, until IV was released. Then I ended up playing that one over and over.
I tried Saints Row 2, and it had its moments, but it was too similar to the GTA games for me. I like the last few GTA games, for the most part, but SR2 gave me a feeling of "been there, done that." The next two games, though, were just so damned much fun that I can't get enough of them. I probably discovered SR:TT at exactly the right time. After ME3 left me so depressed, I needed a game that was that much fun.
And while I'm on the topic...just for the hell of it, here's a couple images of my Boss:
Heh. I tried out the brighter hair color and...it didn't quite work. 
I ended up going back to the darker red. Also, that uniform she wears while in the "real world" for some reason makes her breasts look enormous. I've actually adjusted their size downward several times, but they still look gigantic when she's in that suit. I just headcannon it as "the suit is just made of thick material."
On the other hand, I like how she's still beautiful even with those scars. At least, she is to me. I used a couple of mods to give her those odd eyes and make her more plus-size than she could be in the vanilla game. I actually tried to make her a bit bigger, but that caused some really distracting clipping problems with certain items of clothing.
Anyway, all this kind of brings me to...
Obviously, the main point was the pony tail physics... hehe. But yea, having ALL female chars naked all the time gets old fast. That said, few and far between are hetero chaps who don't raise at least a smirk at even virtual boobs. What can I say, it's in our genes to appreciate the female form.
Ah yes, mods to remove clothing from female characters. Heh. I certainly agree that it's perfectly natural to appreciate the female form (or the male form, for that matter). I admit I've used a mod in the last couple of Saints Row games to have my Boss running around naked every now and then, but I also like a lot of the outfits available in the games (especially the Badass Longcoat), so I tend to keep her clothed most of the time. And at the beginning of IV, I just find it hilarious that she's the President of the United States and can run around in the White House in a string bikini bottom and pasties and nothing else, and no one around her even notices. Would've been funny if the NPCs could've reacted to it. "Um, wait a minute. You're not actually doing a press conference looking like that, are you? O_o"
But having every female character in a game running around naked is...a bit much. I've never tried that, but I suspect it'd be really distracting at first...and after a while, I'd probably just stop noticing. Either that, or the sheer ridiculousness of it would annoy me. I'm okay with some silliness now and then, but there's a point where I just start thinking, "Really? Seriously?"
As a bit of a side-note, by using the same mod I used to make my Boss plus-size, you can also adjust the sliders in a different direction and give her huge muscles. Just about every "muscular" screenshot I've seen from players who did that, the character also had giant breasts, which strikes me as completely stupid. I have a version of her with big muscles, but I kept the breast size to a minimum because that's what a woman with that physique would look like unless she had implants. The problem was, it caused her to have these weird, huge lumps on the backs of her arms. O_o
Anyway. I don't necessarily have a problem with female video-game characters showing some skin now and then...but I do have an issue with the type of figure such characters often have. There are more ways to be attractive than the typical slim, huge-titted figure we see everywhere. I've seen plenty of fat women who are hotter than hell, as well as bodybuilder types (there's one in particular named Heather Foster who's got huge muscles, doesn't have implants, and looks like she can curb-stomp an entire division of Blue Suns--but she still looks feminine and has one of the loveliest smiles I've ever seen). And then there's one of the trailers for Borderlands, which has someone (I forget her name, but she's quite easy on the eyes from that angle ) delivering a short monologue, and at the end she turns to face the "camera" and you see that she has a screwed-up eye and the left side of her face is all scarred up. When I saw that, my first thought was, "Huh. Y'know, she's still beautiful."
Which is one of the reasons I made my Boss a big girl with scars. You don't have to be perfect to be gorgeous. Also, I think it's just more interesting, visually, to have characters with a wide range of body types and facial features. (Also, I figured that she couldn't get blown up, shot, stabbed, and punched so many times without ending up with a few scars. XD )
Heh. Anyway. Didn't expect to go off on such a tangent with that. Getting back on track....
Hah, in my experience, the ladies liked themselves a bit of beefcake as well...or you know, chiseled abs on the ladies if they prefer that (I know I certainly did). These are Vikings, and their women are supposed to be just as strong! In other words, no more stick figures wielding giant two-handers!
Which is why I am particular about "gritty reboots." Anti-heroes are all well and good, but we still need something compelling and sincere to root for. Even the Punisher had friends, had boundaries, had a code. This is why I found the God of War series such a failure. It wasn't even a proper "fall from grace" of a person who "became what he beheld." Kratos went through what can laughably be beaten into some semblance of "an arc" in the first game, then spent the rest of his time being vile, subhuman filth. I'd have had more respect in simply playing him as a straight out villain, but the devs wouldn't fully commit...so we get someone who thinks he's righteous, yet sickeningly myopic and amoral (yes, I mean "amoral," though he is "immoral" as well).
Just finished playing Watch Dogs, and it reinforces why I rarely get into GTA-style games...lack of story. Oh for sure, WD HAD some bit of story...but I would hardly deem it compelling. The IDEA of the world and the story was far more interesting than the product we got. I wouldn't call the end result mediocre, but it was only slightly above average. Gameplay was fun enough, but there has to be a reason for me to care about the characters in a game. Otherwise, I cannot justify devoting any amount of time to such a thing.
A barebones story that works for a 1.5 hour movie acquits itself VERY POORLY over the course of any game that lasts several hours or more. Hell, I actually enjoyed the crap out of Saints Row 3-4 simply because they had FUN stories that were well paced. However, I can't say as I've enjoyed many other GTA style open world games. As far as open world games, I suppose the Elder Scrolls (Skyrim, etc) are something of an anomaly...there's more lore than there is spoon-fed story...but it's more than enough to be compelling!
Yep, I feel the same way about chiseled abs and whatnot on ladies. Maybe it's just something that I in particular find attractive, or maybe it's just my sense of logic (or both XD), but someone who's wielding gigantic battle-axes or maces or whatever, probably should look like she's able to pick those things up and crack a few brain-cases wide open with them.
As for "gritty reboots" or just "darker and edgier" stories in general...eh, I do prefer more serious stories most of the time (sitcoms just don't interest me at all, for instance), with only a few exceptions here and there, but it's easy for a story to go too far in that direction. If the story is relentlessly dark, I usually can't sit through the whole thing, and just have to pull the ripcord at some point, usually pretty early on. If it's dark just for the sake of being dark, or features a main character who's a dick just because the writer(s) wanted him to be a dick, I'm not interested. If there's a real reason for the character acting that way...for instance, Arcee in Transformers Prime being kind of cold and harsh at the beginning because two of her close friends had been killed and she was trying to keep her distance, emotionally, from everyone to avoid being hurt again--okay, I'm fine with that, I find it adds an interesting layer to the character and the story, as long as she shows at least a little development over the course of the series. But someone who's an a-hole for no reason at all? There's nothing terribly interesting about that. I've run into too many people in real life who go out of their way to be a-holes (especially when I worked at Hell-mart in the tiny, redneck town I used to live in--oh, the stories I could tell you. Jesus Christ. O_o). I don't need an overabundance of that kind of thing in what I do for a bit of entertainment.
And the GTA games...as I mentioned, I liked the third-person-shooter ones, particularly Vice City (which was just fun, possibly because I grew up in the '80s). I'm looking forward to V when the PC version is released. But that kind of "story" does wear thin pretty quickly, and I have a feeling that I'd enjoy multiplayer a lot more on that game, if I were into multiplayer at all. Just based on the "Things to do" and "Let's Play" videos I've seen Rooster Teeth doing, the multiplayer part does look tremendously entertaining....
tl;dr: Bad writing and characterization abound in all forms of story-telling...and objectification can occur in all forms of art.
Not saying I don't enjoy the nice window dressing on the pretty men and women in games/movies/etc. Hell, I get livid if anime/book relationships never get proper resolution. Titillation is all well and good, but meaningless without substance. For example, I rather doubt all the slash fiction for Supernatural would matter as much to fans who hadn't already fallen in love with Sam and Dean Winchester. Of course, I don't partake of that particular aspect of the fandom. However, let's consider what I did in my story, when I chose Shep to have a relationship with Liara and Jack...
Again, I felt extremely apprehensive, as the obvious thought is going to be "cheap fantasy fullfillment." However, it was more than that for me, and why I strained so hard to make the relationship poignant and believable as possible. Not gonna lie though, writing the tawdry bits was satisfying...if only b/c I get pissed at seeing characters act overly repressed.
Concordant to that, the romance element in the BW games meant so much because I fell in love with the characters. There was an emotional connection that made that bit of "cheesecake" all the sweeter! Hell, I have a folder full of fanart dealing in ME romances, whereas I don't bother with such art from a lot of other IP's. In contrast, I couldn't have cared LESS about the rampant sex prevalent in the God of War series (between characters I didn't know or care about, or even characters I out-right despised). This is just me, however..."different strokes for different folks" and all that...
Yep, same here. The characters are probably the number one reason why I love Mass Effect so much. One of the things I liked in particular about the Tali romance is that, well, she was a romance option even though she doesn't have huge boobs, but mainly because we never knew what she looked like (even though there's that half-assed...no, not even that, more like quarter-assed photoshopped stock image in ME3, which doesn't count as far as I'm concerned). For all we knew, she could've been fugly--but it didn't matter. I fell in love with her personality. She could've had a face that looked like the bottom half of a stop sign and I would've been perfectly okay with it. (I just think aliens should actually look alien...and not be a thirty-second photoshop job with two fingers erased and a few lines drawn on her forehead.)
Anyway, yeah, eye candy just for the sake of eye candy is just..."meh." There has to be substance to it, like you said. It's got to mean something.
I had similar concerns about the three-way relationship that's central to my novels, by the way. Can't remember for certain, but I might've mentioned this before...for a long time I wondered if it would be seen as some sort of fantasy, when I actually just thought it was kind of an interesting idea that I hadn't seen very often. And I did decide early on to put a slightly different twist on it by having the male character be the one who was reluctant and resisted it throughout the entire first book and most of the second before he finally gave in.
There's a similar thing that happened in Freelancers in the latest chapter, with Garrus, Kelly, and Dr. Michel--though when it started, I played it entirely for laughs. I noticed in ME2 that Kelly seemed to have a crush on him, and in an email you get from Michel, I got a similar vibe from her. So I thought, why not have Garrus and Kelly starting to hang out together, then have Michel appear and be disappointed when she realizes he's pairing up with Kelly...and then Kelly being totally okay with her joining in. Just so Garrus could scratch his head and mutter, "Uh, what the hell just happened here?" XD
But I don't want to treat that kind of thing as if it's just a joke. What I'm thinking is that, once the Reapers invade and the war starts, and Michel is overwhelmed with patients and Garrus and Kelly being worn down by the strain of the fight for survival, I think they'll need each other. They'll need whatever little comfort they can find, and Michel might not have anyone to be there for her without them. So I'm planning to take it in a more serious direction, though I admit it'll be kind of amusing to play around with Garrus's discomfort and awkwardness over it at first.
As for "tawdry bits," I usually don't go into detail aside from having some of the characters talking about it occasionally. Like Dakka boasting about the number of times she and Quint had sex their first night together, or Valeria mentioning medication she and Irving have to take every day to avoid problems caused by the levo/dextro thing, or the characters being affectionate with each other and making lewd or suggestive comments to/about one another. Most times, I do the "fade to black" thing when things start to get heated. Though for some reason, the latest chapter of Arena I wrote had a somewhat detailed scene with the seven characters finally getting physical. Dunno why, it just seemed right for the story. I tried to find a good balance with the description because if it's too detailed or graphic, I get bored with it. And if I get bored with a scene I'm writing, there's no way it'll hold readers' interest. And I did subvert it a bit by moving a conversation between two of the characters (discussing their overall situation and making battle plans for escaping the situation they're all trapped in) and moving the characters actually having sex into the background at one point. XD Anyway, I'm not planning to make a habit of this kind of thing because it (in my opinion, at least) doesn't really develop the characters or move the story forward. I just figured it would be significant this one time because it had been building up since the beginning, and since these characters are in a pretty horrific predicament, being forced to fight in battle after battle and being killed over and over--why not let them have that connection with each other and give each other some measure of comfort....
And again I'm rambling. O_o Must be why I've got writer's block...having trouble keeping my brain going in a single direction at once....
I don't mind that kind of silly reference if it's done well and humorous.
I had a 'shtick' oneshot of the ME1 crew having their first 'music night' (Wrex wanted combat styles from around the galaxy but Shepard said "Wrex..." in her impatient mother kind of a way) and 'Earth' (ofc) comes up as the first choice. Wrex chooses 'Spring' from Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
...
“Wrex...” Verity says, “you never have to contact banking establishments do you?”
“Uh, not often. Why?”
“Because every time they put you on hold to speak with a manger to authorize a perfectly simple transaction after patronising you for the previous half hour, they play this damn music! God only knows how it circulated the galaxy so quickly.”
Heheh, that kind of thing can be a ton of fun. I like to slip little bits of business like that into a story wherever it seems reasonable. For some reason, I have this thing always in the back of my head about characters using obscure references for passwords and whatnot. Kind of like...
Computer: "Please enter passcode."
Dakka: "I HAVE THE SHINIEST MEAT BICYCLE!!!"
Everyone else: 
Dakka: "Well, would you have guessed it?"
Heh. I haven't actually used that one yet, but I need to work it into a scene ASAP.
Or there's this bit from the latest chapter of my current Transformers Prime fic. Bulkhead's been severely damaged, has just awakened but is unable to move or speak, and has to communicate via texts or private messages. After commenting that he really could use a good joke right about now, Miko pops off with, "Okay. Y'know what the next Star Trek movie needs? A Klingon character named *'***." (Um...it rhymes with "punt"... O_o) To which Bulk replied, "You're a bad person and you should feel bad." XD
I had that line in my head for at least a year before I finally found a way to work it into a scene. D:
Brilliant idea... fighting a krogan "Starbuxx" employee while listening to Vivaldi WHILE INSIDE the Space Hooters!!!
In all seriousness, I love those little moments of culture clash. I said this earlier, but an amusing little tidbit I had was Shep having to explain what "Mexican Standoff" meant.
Awesome. XD I suddenly had this image in my head of Garrus or Wrex or Grunt saying, "First of all, what's a Mexican?" And after the explanation, immediately wondering what about them sets a standoff apart from all the other kinds....
For a long time I've had this idea in my head of one of the alien characters being slightly bummed-out by their inability to properly give someone the finger due to lack of a sufficient number of digits. ;D
Hmm. Suddenly, that makes me wonder what sorts of obscene gestures various alien cultures have that are equivalents of the finger? I'll have to ponder that and see if I can come up with something. Never know when something like that might be the perfect bit of business for a scene. XD
Anyway. Wow. Holy crap, I think this might be my longest post ever. Probably should wrap it up now, before my brain comes unteathered any more than it already has....
Retour en haut
While taking deliveries yesterday afternoon, there I am sitting in my car on the way to the customers' houses, without anything else to do, so my brain keeps itself occupied by coming up with stuff and putting the pieces together.
) if not by replying, then by putting an acknowledgement as an Author's Note at the start of the next chapter.
) 
