New! Neu! Noveau! Nuevo! Nieuw!

New site's up! Clicky here!

I aten't dead

In case someone were wondering, no, I am not dead. But building the new site is taking longer than expected, or, to be more exact, I've had a lot less free time (and energy) to learn how to build a decent site than I expected. And... ok I confess, a good part of my free time has been absorbed by Team Fortress 2, and another good part by my pathetic attempts to remember how to drive a car after five years of "mmmh, I'll just take the bus". Not to mention the wonderful Easter I spent at home with my family and enough Neapolitan Easter cakes to fill a small silo (yay, pastiera!).
But I'm alive and (sorta) well, I'm submerged by tons of chocolate I cannot eat (darn intolerance), I haven't turned my car into a surrealist sculpture (yet) and I found out I can suck at games and still love them (mmmediiiiic!). And I keep using too many parentheses.
Hopefully, after this weekend, I should be able to put a little more time and effort in building the new site and maybe even manage to come up with something passable. Or die trying.

It's Random Picture Time!

Ingredients: 1 (one) bored geek, 1 (one) very bad tuna sandwich, 2 (two) 500 ml bottles of water.

First of all, make sure it's lunchtime and that your geek is bored, stressed and unsatisfied enough. Then sit him/her on an office chair stolen from the Medieval Torture Museum and force him/her to eat the whole sandwich. The put the other ingredients on the desk and wait five to ten minutes, depending on the quality of the sandwich (the more disgusting, the better). You should get something like this:

Bonus pic: the reason why living so close to Africa is not that bad, after all. Clicky for a better view, the thumbnail sucks.

The sexist BS anthology

When discussing “girls & videogames” (a topic that gets more annoying every day), there is always, and I mean always (always!) some idiot who feels the need to mark the territory. I try not to get furious (and kick the above mentioned idiot’s butt to dust), I really do. So this time, after risking death again (shaky hands, blurry vision, red hot face), I decided to follow Ivan Fulco’s advice (Ivan is one of the most important videogame journalists down here, and one of the coolest people I’ve ever had the luck to know). Rather than stating my opinion for the 1,000,000th time (I got tired of that, and it’s summarized by the last sentence of this post anyway), I tried to portrait an unfortunately common kind of gamer (the sexist, ignorant kind, to be exact) by selecting and copy/pasting comments I found on The First Place, Kotaku, various blogs and other web pages. Please keep in mind that this kind of mentality is quite common not only in frustrated 14-year-olds, but also in older, supposedly educated people.

Games pour femmes, spring/summer 2008 collection
We need more women making games that can appeal especially to women. Since when do guys know what women want?

Let’s make science!
Gamer 1: Men like challenges, competition and winning. Women like being taken care of.
Gamer 2: Oh wow, you sure understand women perfectly
Gamer 1: This is biology

Belic???
Of course... girls like play video games, but normally games like supermario, donkey kong, the sims... not belic games.

STFU U BIT*HZ!!!11!!1!
One of my main points is, you women want to bit*h about how little the girls in games are wearing... ahh LOOK OUT INT THE "REAL WORLD" AND SEE HOW MUCH LESS GIRLS ARE WEARING THAN THE ONES IN THE GAMES AND THEN KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT FROM NOW ON.

A mythologic creature
Girls dont play video games its a myth a legend something told to young geeks to make them sleep better at night. They are like Unicorns something that is cute to think about but in truth doesnt exist.

You want games? Make them yourselves!
The only thing that females can do is to make there own games or games "geared" toward females but you’re not going to change the way games are now or will be.

…or so I’ve heard…
Remember that there are still differences, like the movies, in the way women play video games. I also hear that consoles are less popular among women. They prefer games on a computer and are less likely to embrace violent video games.

A matter of fashion
What I mean isn’t that girls are stupid, they just have different tastes: no cars, sports and violence, but interesting stories and characters, or custom clothes and accessories. Guys buy virtual Supra, girls want polygonal Versace. Women play less than men because there aren’t many games targeted at females.

Let’s make science! part two
Many games stimulate the production of adrenaline, through death matches, battles, risk, action, suprise, and general survival of the fittest gameplay. Men seem to enjoy these adrenaline-induced feelings more than women. Adrenaline can be addictive, esp for men. Women don't get off on adrenaline the same way men do. So you need to design games for women which are not driven by adrenaline fundamentally, but rather induce more feminine feelings (love, security, relationships, etc) that women would rather experience.

I know it because I know it
Females play non-competitive gmaes that don’t require any manual skills, and obviously those casual little Nintendo things.

Poor things, it’s not their fault...
It's not that they don't want challenge. It's that they don't want good games, probably because they don't know what a good game is.

Ask the Industry (Ubisoft on the Imagine: Whatever series)
We did research, and we are studying the market... that's what the girls actually like, so we should try to fulfill their needs... Those games were really designed for young girls who are just looking for fun games and ways to explore their favorite hobbies... From what we've seen, [the girls] didn't mention anything about being a police officer.

There’s still hope
Guys, girls, we're all the same organic mass. We're all flesh and bone, gender is so 2006.

Random thoughts on a deadly deadline day

Going to work on the first real spring day of the year, when the sun is warm, the air is fresh and the trees are full of tiny pink flowers and cute little chirping birds, is a HUGE waste of time. Huge.

I’d like to meet the guy who first thought videogames for girls were a good idea. Maybe a headbutt could fix his brain. I wouldn’t mind trying anyway.

Perfume does not attract the opposite sex. And it’s not a good substitute for a shower. Really. I’m dead serious.

I’m not a man, I’m a free number.

Acne, Times New Roman and sprained ankles are a small taste of hell.

Grammar, syntax and consecutio temporum exist for a reason.

Eating a sandwich for lunch every day for over a year is a very slow and painful way to commit suicide.

You know what? This is probably the best thing I have ever written in English. Maybe I won’t translate it.

Videodreams (why can't I just dream of electric sheep?)

I dream very often, and I’ve had lots of videogame-inspired dreams in the past, but the one I had the other day was, by far, the weirdest I’ve ever had. It was even worse than that one about me in a kwama nest (kwamas are some huge termite-like creatures in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind), wearing a chainmail and wielding a silver sword, and trying to defend the kwama queen from a group of Arx Fatalis goblins.

In the dream, I wasn’t me. Well, I was me, but I looked like a tall, quite handsome guy with blonde hair and blue eyes, and I and some other people were looking for something. Someone captured us all, though, and locked us, hanging by the wrists, in a room where we were tortured by a swarm of grey fleas as big as my little finger’s nail. I fainted, but I soon recovered and managed to escape, my body covered in tiny circular scars.

I found myself lost in a maze of white, aseptic rooms, with a rusty, big and unusually long iron wrench in my hand, defending myself from a crowd of insane, aggressive people. The weird thing was that these people existed only in the past, and that if I’d go back to the present (and a couple of times I did) the place was empty and dirty.

At some point I ended up in a big room full of people, with a huge window on the right and some stairs. Among the others, there were two dull, ugly, elderly ladies who were very kind to me. One of them was tall and had white, curly hair, while the other one was shorter than me (shorter than the “real” me, which means she was really short), with black hair and a strange hairstyle. At this point, I thought that maybe I was looking for my mother, and I found myself in the arms of a woman dressed in white wool, with the same weird hair as the other one but younger and very beautiful. And, in the dream, she was my mother. When she let me go, though, I was “me” (that is, a 1.50 m tall young woman with long brown hair and glasses) again, and the people in the room didn’t seem to like that very much. I tried to defend myself, but when I tried to hit the two ladies all I could do was touch them weakly with the wrench. So I started to swing it around, and somehow reached the door at the top of the stairs.

A weird industrial elevator brought me to a small room filled with creepy red light, with rusty metal walls and big machineries. In the next room, I rushed up some more stairs and fell on a wooden pedestal with an object that looked like a tiny volcano made of transparent plastic on it. For some reason, the door that brought to the small red room was not at the top of the stairs, and I knew that I was back in the present. I left the pedestal and opened the door. The room was now full of white light and very dusty, and instead of the machineries there were only a big armchair made of dark leather, with a crocheted round thingy on it, a big glass displayer and a gramophone with two red LED lights on it, playing some music from Bioshock (Dancers on a String, the one from Fort Frolic). The moment I heard that music, I knew that was what I’d been looking for all the time.

And then I woke up with a start, and scared my cat to death.

This dream was brought to you by Portal, Half-Life 2 and Bioshock. I should stop playing videogames, really. Now, if you will excuse me, someone’s at the door. It must be that Cthulhu guy who called me earlier.

Migrating

Ladies and gentlemen, this blog is going to move. Blogger is nice and all, but it's a bit too basic for me and there are so many things I'd like to do. So I'm moving it to a new address, and I'm going to use Wordpress to build my homepage. No, I've never tried it before, but it doesn't sound too hard and learning is part of the fun anyway.

Besides, this is a good moment to learn how to build a good homepage, something people would like to read. So, if you have any suggestions on changes I should make to the current layout, any ideas on how to use Wordpress efficiently, anything to say about the stuff I write or just want to encourage/discourage me, feel free to contact me. Thank you!