Walking the Line February 6, 2010
Posted by Weng in Addictions, Drinks, Epicureanism, Rants, schadenfruede.Tags: alcohol, booze, carnegies, cocktails, divinyls, economic tightwaddery, gym, money, parking, sales, tightarse, unit pricing
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There’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, once you’ve done it once, you can do it again – Chrissy Amphlett
Having the economic genetics of an Asian, is actually amazingly handy a lot of the time. I was fortunately spared from the need to try haggle down the price of everything, especially handy in a society such as Australia’s where it’s not the norm and you’re looked at as a complete jerkoff of a bad customer if you do. Other than that though, everything is deconstructed based off how cheap it is, I park in the cheapest place possible, even if it means walking aeons.
Afterall, that walking is exercise. Who needs a treadmill or a gym membership (both of which cost you money) when you’ve got a stupidly long walk to do it for you? The money you WOULD have spent parking can then be spent on a GOOD coffee, a coffee that happens to be en-route to everywhere I happen to go from said parking spot.
Epicureanism is basically the one over-riding factor over cost-effectiveness. Quality can, on occasion, over-ride price. That’s the reason I’d get a Grand/Mighty Angus over almost anything else at McDonalds. It’s the least bad, and generally the most edible burger there.
I just bought a whole load of Dry Ginger Ale simply because it was on special for $2 for a pack-of-4 bottles, despite not having the spirits to mix it with at present. I’ve been drinking it straight, since. Great times.
Supermarkets with unit pricing are actually the greatest thing ever, it does all the mental math needed to be a massive tightwad by giving you a handy cost-per-unit. This then allow you to consider relative cost to quality. (e.g. Do I want to pay $2.30 per 100g for this fancy imported French marmalade or $0.69 per 100g for this Radioactive Bio-Hazard of Black and Gold brand Imitation Orange Flavored Goop?)
Woolworths - Almost Redeemed by Unit Pricing, but just not.
I had my heart set on an orange Wolverine t-shirt I saw in a stupidly expensive boutique store in Claremont (my love-hate relationship with the suburb being another potential topic of interest). It was $50, I went back to see whether Epicurea/General Awesomeness over-ruled Economics, it was on sale for $30. It was the happiest day of my life. Then they offered to take ANOTHER TEN PERCENT OFF because in taking out the security tag, there was a tiny pinhole I could barely see.
I very nearly made some sort of ridiculous SQUEEEEEE of delight. I may have actually exclaimed “This is quite possibly the best day ever” to the shop assistant serving me.
Whilst it is generally a brilliant trait to have, there are moments when economic rationality has it’s negatives. And no, this doesn’t eventually lead to some moral story about how being tight leads to all of your friends and peers thinking you’re a total douchebag, that’d be far too Ebeneezer Scrooge.
Where the positive becomes a negative is when it comes to booze.
Drinking alcohol whilst out is a costly exercise, most of the time. $8 for a shot of (decent-non-Bundaburg-or-Bacardi) Rum and Coke? I could buy like a whole bottle of QUALITY rum and the equivalent of many Rums-and-_____ for the cost of say… five at a bar.
But then, when you get cheap booze, that inverses. Carnegies on a Wednesday night is not a good place to be. Three words sum it up.
Half price cocktails.
Half-price cocktails.
HALF-PRICE cocktails.
Things are usually cheaper in bulk, this applies to meat, toilet paper, subscriptions to Girlfriend magazine, this also applies to alcohol.
A Long Island Ice Tea – 5 shots of god-knows-what with Coke and some kind of lemon cordial to drown out the taste is normally $22. The magic of unit pricing means this is maybe… $4.40 per shot, about twice as cost-effective as a Rum and Coke. But then you go on half-price night and it drops even further, to $11, or $2.20 per shot.
However, unlike with buying say… 10 kilos of diced bacon pieces from a market where you can freeze said bacon and use it over a long period, you have to take that bulk-efficient-alcohol there and then. And, just as the general rule of buying in bulk applies to many things, so does the quote from the Divinyls.
People have a ‘magic point’ with alcohol where they’re still sober enough to remember exactly what they’re doing and they’re still as amazingly witty and debonair as they always are, whilst lacking whatever inhibitions stop them from being fantastically awesome. However, when you cross that fine line between pleasure-and-pain, you enter a world where your stomach and liver wants to murder you and the answer to the question “wat up?” is “Throwing (up).” You then end up sitting down in a heap going “DEAR GODDD KILL ME NOWWWWW….” and generally being unclassy.
That line is very hard to cross if you’re drinking in bulk and in multiples of 5. So you were at the Awesome Phase at 11 or so, but where did it change? It certainly changed after you hit 16, it completely died when you hit 17 with that FREE JAGERBOMB YOU’D BE STUPID TO TURN DOWN! BECAUSE IT’S FREE.
But where was that line-in-the-sand?
Somewhere between 11 and 17 lies a magic mark where I actually think the world is a glorious, magical place AND I’m still sober enough to be a prick to random strangers in line, but that’s another story for another time. That time probably being in a blog I’ll probably write immediately after this.
S&M, ice-cream, booze, touching yourself, it’s all the same really. Chrissy Amphlett was right in so many ways…
Note to self, shoot for 13.
Textual Constipation January 25, 2010
Posted by Weng in Addictions, Rants, Tekken.Tags: American-Indians, Armor King, ego boosting, Julia Chang, tekken 6, Wang, writers block
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Writers’ block is a horrible thing. It’s a somewhat boring name for a painfully boring ailment really. When you feel the need to put some finger-to-keyboard and NOTHING comes. A better name for it would be to say you have an ink-jam in your Mental Pen, then you could go on MSN, make a horrible typo and go “My Mental Penis blocked”
I burnt all my half-way decent concepts last week, leaving me somewhat empty at the moment. Whatever, I won’t blog for a while. No biggie. Sadly, that’s only the start of the problem.
It’s like a cancer, it gradually spreads through your brain and burrows itself deeper into your psyche. First, you can’t think of a broad blog topic idea, then you can’t think of a new tag-line for your blog, THEN you can’t think of a new, shit, barely-witty pun for your own nefariously nerdy purposes.
As I’ve probably made very clear in my thousand-word rants on them, fighting games are kind of my quasi-passion. Like a musician, the passion is a burning thing. And it makes a fiery ring, bound by wild desire. You just fall into a burning ring of fire that you go down, down, down, as the flames get higher. But that is a blog-idea for another day (thanks Evan, totally stealing your concept when I’m in the mood.)
Anyway, in the arcade version of Tekken 6, you can buy data cards that you permanently associate with a particular character. You can then collect currency and customize them, dress them up in amusing ways and what not. But arguably, most importantly, they track your win/loss record data so you’re essentially playing with your ego on the line. Not only are you in a vicious brawl to maintain your $2 credit input, but you’re also playing for percentages. If the monetary input wasn’t enough of a play-to-win motivation, the permanent record scarring surely is.
Being the kind of person that loves his shitty puns, all my cards need some kind of ridiculous name to them. CoolzInferno is fine as the kind of generic online username that’s been straddled to me like a parasite since early high-school, but if you’ve got a million letter slots to play around with a witty card-name, why not use it?
Hence and therefore, I currently have 2 cards I mainly use Armor King – a dude in a jaguar mask wearing armor, and Wang Jinrei – an old Asian Pedophile/Kungfu Master:
Cougar Patrol~!!!
Touch my Wang
Both exercises in Bad Punnery 101. Armor King obviously having an animal head on him, cougar being a cat as well as attractive-older-woman, works on so many levels! Then you’ve got Touch my Wang or “Touch my VVang” as I needed t0 call him. His name is Wang Jinrei, the CARD ITSELF is called Wang Jinrei by default when you first get it. BUT, if you try using the word Wang when you edit the name, it censors it out into ????, so the VV is a necessary censorship bypass thing.
Then I decided to try main a new character, Julia Chang, a character that no-one likes, simply because no-one likes her. Whether you’re a decent level player, a pro or even a below-average scrub, there are always sighs along the lines of “Why the fuck would you use Julia?”
These are often for different, but similar reasons depending on who says it, but there’s a general air of pariahdom surrounding Julia.
There’s even a hilarious many-page-thread about Julia’s pariah status on the Julia forums of the largest Tekken messageboard, Tekken Zaibatsu (that eventually descends into a discussion of how she’s hotter than all the other Tekken girls who are massive slutty-ho-bags or teenage-upskirt-loli-pedo-bait or the “Spider-Witch whore Zafina who doesn’t make scientific sense.”)
So I learnt Julia, got her ridiculously painful juggles moderately down-pat, learnt her tricky bullshit, read her Frame Data. Bought myself a data card from Timezone, got to a respectable 7-2 winrate against run-of-the-mill competition, but she was nameless. Unlike with my other two cards, where the pun flashed itself in my brain out of the blue (like the Delta Goodrem song), nothing came. (that’s what she said, hurr hurr)
The other guy was waiting on me to finish setting up the card, there was a queue of arcade-goers waiting on blood to be spilt, for someone to fall so they could rise to take their place and like a Hydra spawn a new head to subdue the Heroic Champion…
Nothing.
Just her name, staring at me, complete with her plain-jane Costume 2 – her decked out in spectacles, a denim jacket and jeans. Julia Chang.
Curse your Genericness!
I’ve attempted to brainstorm with other people. Nothing. I’ve attempted to brainstorm other concepts, blog-taglines for instance. Nothing stuck, there was nothing that served as a Master Baiter to lead people to read a small mountain of text. I need Linguistic Chemotherapy, it’s clearly malignant, not benign...
Writing about writer’s block to get over writer’s block, totally not actually helping at all. Subsequent to the major-writing aspect of this entry, I self-plagiarized, brainstormed, and stole and modified the tagline of my older incarnation of this blog. SO, writing about writer’s block is step one in the process of getting out of it. Much like with Alcoholic’s Anonymous, you need to admit you HAVE a problem to be able to solve it. Yaaaaaay~!!!
One day, I shall go to France, start up a company manufacturing chicken stock cubes and call them Coq Bloqs.
Memoirs of an Addict – One Step At A Time January 3, 2010
Posted by Weng in Addictions, Rants, schadenfruede.2 comments
At risk of sounding like some kind of online Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, I’ll avoid using the obvious “Hello, my name is ____ and I’m an ______” opening to begin this entry. That then leaves the problem of “How do I begin? You can’t begin talking about why you’d open in a certain way but then subsequently chose not to. That’d just be unprofessional.”
To self-diagnose myself, I think I have an addictive personality. To quote Murder By Numbers by Sting (the version with Frank Zappa being a shining example of Awesomeness Incarnate):
“Murder is like anything you take to, if you’re having fun, you need for more and more.”
Elements of my own strange and warped thought process re: gaming are somewhat similar to elements of other more ‘hardcore’ addictions. Like Pringles (a word I can’t think of without thinking of this video) once I pop, I quite simply cannot stop.
So, I figured, much like a folk or jazz musician or a poet or an emo, my own failings could be some kind of inspiration for a creative writing spark. This quite clearly isn’t particularly creative at all, I’d say I’m failing.
My current addiction of the month is the Turn-Based Strategy game. Think the Heroes of Might and Magic series or the Disciples Series. The major culprit being Heroes of Might and Magic V and it’s expansion-packs which was just recently on sale on a massive Steam holiday-season-sale.
These games generally draw you in with the same premise of an RPG or an MMORPG. By feeding into an insatiable human lust for larger numbers. Just as I enjoy watching my bank balance slowly increase, I also enjoy seeing virtual numbers increase. I’m weird like that.
There’s a certain strange pleasure in taking your crappy Level 1 Demon Lord with his 44 Imps and 5 Succubi who struggles to defeat a horde of pixies to being a Level 30 Demon Lord commanding an epically large Demon Army with a Ballista that shoots BOLTS THAT EXPLODE IN FIREBALLS~! THREE TIMES IN A ROW~!!! and who can also MAKE THINGS IMPLODE~!!!
Think about that for a moment. Instead of stuff flying out everywhere, things COLLAPSE INTO THEMSELVES.
Explosions are soooooo last decade.
Then after you’ve done that, you’ve got another campaign with another story and a brand new Level 1 Elvish Poetic Bard with a 30 Fairy Princesses and a Rainbow Unicorn to do the same with. And everyone knows Unicorns are made of magic and victory and awesomeness.
All of this is then held together by a barely-cohesive storyline that’s JUST enough to clingwrap the number-whoring together, like double-sided tape holding a particularly loose-fitting dress on a woman.
Moving on and attempting to ignore the last hideous attempt at an over-worked metaphor:
There are the specific peculiarities and notable points of this particular addiction that is unique to the format. Being a turn-based game as opposed to occuring in real time, the “Just One More Turn” phenomenon occurs.
In a very similar paradigm to a gambling or alcohol addiction, you question the potential harm of one more spin at the pokies, another beer, another horse, another greyhound, another 5 Cougars Thanks, another line of coke, another ride on Space Mountain.
Then you end up a broke, alcoholic, drug-addled mess whose visited Disneyland and most likely vomitted on Mickey Mouse.
Essentially, you go through your turn, kill things, get treasure, get close to levelling up, realize it’s 2:00 am, go “Eh, one more turn, then I’ll go and sleep at a semi-decent hour.” That one more turn keeps multiplying itself like a single celled organism that splits itself expontentially reproduces until you look at the clock and it’s now 5 in the morning, the sun is starting to rise and birds are chirping.
And just as birds and sunrise are apparently nice and romantic “oh wow, the natural beauty of the world” things to wake up to, they are actually amazingly depressing things to go to sleep to. I know from experience.
My particular HoMM5 addiction draws parallels with that of a casino, or an inverted version of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. But yes, lets go with the addiction parallel instead of the Dragonball Z one, as awesome as that would be, the title of this entry isn’t “Memoirs of an Inverted Gaming Hyperbolic Time Chamber”:
- Bright Lights and Pretty Colours
- Sense of Winning
If you win at a casino, your slot machine goes insane, makes loud noises and flashy lights
If you win at HoMM5, you end up with a Fireball Triple Ballista, commanding Dragons and making SHIT IMPLODE~!!! with an equally epic animation, bright noises, large numbers and loud images.
- No Windows or Clocks
Casinos are designed in such a way that there are no windows or clocks. That way, you can’t see outside to see the sun rise, you don’t know what time it is, there is no outside light. The light experienced is whatever you’re seeing from the glow of a slot machine.
Heroes of Might and Magic 5 also has no windowed mode option. It’s a weak parallel but the similarities are there. You lose communication with your (virtual) outside world. There are no windows of friends open in MSN saying “Dude, it’s 3 in the morning now, I’m going to sleep”. There’s no looking on Facebook chat to see that “Oh, there are only 4 people online now and they’re all away, and probably asleep. Perhaps I should too…” There’s a distinct lack of social peer pressure or reasoning to tell you to sleep.
In fact, HoMM5′s role models are entirely un-sleep-worthy.
Markal the Necromancer doesn’t rest at any stage of his quest to raise a giant undead army, why the shit should I?
Agrael is too busy making shit implode to sleep.
Implosionizing things is amazingly cool.
Sleep is therefore clearly for the weak.
It also serves for great amusement when leaving Facebook Chat open to find people trying to contact you for hours wondering where the hell you are and why you’re ignoring them.
“Sorry, I accidentally left Facebook on last night whilst I was busy raising hordes of Rainbow Unicorns and making Dragons implode.”
That excuse alone justifies everything.
If it doesn’t to your friends, get better friends.
