InsaneJournal

Current mood:

weird

Meg Situation Update - 25 MAY 2009
Okay, things are... interesting at the moment.

First up, until the end of May, I'm not likely to be posting too much, because our internet connection has been throttled between the hours of noon and 2am - as in, cut back to dial-up speed. The reason for this is very simple: Himself has been bored. Bored enough to be watching entire seasons (as in every single one of them) of both Daria and Kim Possible on YouTube. He then acted surprised when I pointed out the amount of bandwidth such things would swallow, and when I pointed out I hadn't really been going overboard on WoW at all in the past three weeks. So, we're on trickle internet until the end of the month unless I get up early enough in the morning to beat the rush.

Second on my list: we're putting the house on the market. Again. Maybe this time it will sell (although I have to confess I hope not - I like this place, and the main option Himself is considering for the aftermath is moving in with Himself's parents). We had a nice man from the real estate people visiting today and taking snaps of the place (I managed to persuade Himself that while putting things away is all very well, if he packed anything he would be In Serious Trouble) and promising to call us back tomorrow. Yay.

Thirdly, I visited my GP today. Part of it was about the annual service (ie blood pressure, check everything is still functioning, make sure I'm not dead, rotate the tyres, etc and so on), which means tomorrow I get to go in again and visit the friendly vampires at the pathology collection station in the same building. Another part was about getting a repeat on one of my psych meds (this whole business of being on two different strengths of the stuff is irritating). The next part was getting an official Centrelink medical certificate regarding the depression, as accepted by our very persnickety agency of the Department of Human Services - I can't just send in a standard med cert, since they don't go into the appropriate level of detail, and Centrelink won't accept them. I'll be dropping that in at Centrelink tomorrow as well, plus calling in to speak with my Job Network folks. I also have the names of a half-dozen psychiatrists, and I have to find one who will firstly have an opening some time before November (no, I'm not exaggerating... or if I am, it probably isn't by much - I know the specialists in this town, and most of them do tend to be booked about six months in advance), and will secondly accept a Health Care Card as a legitimate reason to reduce the size of their bill (preferably by bulk billing).

The good news from the GP is my blood pressure is still at the low end of normal. I blame this on my mother's side of the family, who have genetically low blood pressure, to the point where Mum faints if she tries to hang out washing on the wrong days. In order for stress to register on my veins, I have to apparently be under enough of it to kill an elephant outright. Yay again.

Finally, tomorrow we're having dinner with Himself's parents. It's one of their regular "hello, how are you, haven't seen you in about a month, are you both still alive?" things (they live about five minutes walk away - gods know why they don't bother just dropping in to say hi). So we'll get to hear a lot about their friends and Himself's two brothers. Oh, and their grandchild. They've only told us the stories about their last visit to Canbrrra to see the kid about twice, so we're due a few repeats.

In other news, since I can't really spend huge amounts of the day futzing around the internet and doing nothing, I've shifted the venue of my nothing-doing to the lounge room, and picked up one of the games which has been sitting in my "round tuit required" pile. For the past few days, I've been slowly working my way through Shadow Hearts: From the New World. The gameplay is okay, the graphics aren't particularly fancy, and the storyline has its good points, but the thing which catches me on the raw with this one is that it's purportedly set in the USA in 1929. You wouldn't be able to guess this from the outfits of the main characters, most of whom would draw strange looks on modern streets due to the amount of clothing they aren't wearing. They might fit in okay at a cosplay convention... but I doubt it.

So, we have our sixteen year old protagonist (who has a 21st century hairdo, and wears clothes which won't be fashionable in the states for at least another thirty or forty years) who is a private detective from New York. Then we have the other lead character, a mysterious blonde, blue-eyed Native American bounty hunter, whose trick is that she merges with various spirits and gains special abilities from them (or in other words, she's a shape-shifter). The merge scene in long form involves one of those standard Japanime magical girl transformation scenes, where the young lady in question has to get naked in order to transform; this comes complete with strategic pan down the young lady's body just ahead of her unravelling underwear (so that the US censors didn't get their underwear tied in knots, I'd guess). Given this young lady is wearing less than most swimsuits would cover today, her most astounding ability in the USA of the 1930s is her ability to walk around various cities without being arrested for public indecency. Possibly her bodyguard has something to do with this - he's built on the standard "condom full of walnuts" model for brawny blokes, and is wearing a pair of pants and a top which appears to consist of a couple of handkerchiefs placed in such a manner as to point out his pectoral muscles. His gimmick is a form of fighting called "gun fu", which is, of course, totally historically accurate. Just like the rest of the game.

Oh. The rest of the team. Well, there's Frank, a middle aged-guy who talks of himself in third person, who was trained in the secret arts of ninjitsu by a group of people hidden away somewhere in Brazil (he found them by crashing what looked to be a Cessna into the jungle... don't ask me how); Frank's master (a master of the "drunken fighter" style of kung-fu, she's a human-size, talking calico cat... again, don't ask me how this works); Hilda, a vampire who comes in three forms - Plump Hilda, Slim Hilda, and Pink Bat Hilda - and transforms between these depending on the level of calories she has in her calorie meter (both plump and slim Hilda wear the same black and lolly pink french maid outfit... vampire chic in the 1930s, one presumes); and the final member, whom I've just collected, a mariachi named Ricardo who shoots bullets from his guitar (Robert Rodriguez called; he wants his concept back). So far this intrepid group of explorers have visited New York City (of course); Arkham University in Boston (not to be confused with the Miskatonic Institute of Terror, which is on the other side of town); Chicago (under the control of Al Capone's gang); Alcatraz Prison (where they busted out Al Capone); a Carribean island (complete with pirates led by Anne Lafitte); the Grand Canyon; an army base in Roswell, New Mexico; Las Vegas; Purramount Studios in Hollywood (where the cat is shooting a picture); and now they're down at Chichen Itza, discovering the Aztecs apparently created light-up floor tiles.

The localisation from the original Japanese is pretty well done, I must say. There's the occasional glitch (the protagonist's butler keeps calling him "Master" rather than "Sir") and of course the level of anachronism is something frightening, but other than that, it's a pretty good game. Certainly it keeps me occupied.