Thursday 16 December 2004

Pic of the day: Bare female backsides and money growing on trees, equally abundant in the Chaos Node. (Screenshot from Sims2. Relax, my Sims are happily married.)

Wintry hearts

Last Friday I bought, among a few other fantasy fiction things, Robert Jordan's novel Winter's Heart. I used to read the Wheel of Time novels as soon as I could get my hands on them. But as usual when a writer enjoys great success, things slowed down, until I no longer bothered to buy the books. Page after page devoted to the girls' clothes simply was no better than I could do myself.

Now, I cannot write much myself anymore, because of the pain in my hand and arm. I still think I am fully a match for the current Robert Jordan, more's the pity, but that's in quality rather than quantity. So I decided to give him another chance, picking up where I left.

I have got through about half of the book by now. I may finish it, rumor has it that the last chapter is particularly good, one of the better for the later books. And it is kinda nice meeting the characters again after all these years.

The book will, at the very least, have caused a lot of his most faithful readers to rejoice because Perrin's wife, Faile, spends several pages bound and naked, first trudging through the snow till her feet bleed and then being carried with her bare ass in the air and spanked repeatedly until she passes out. While I personally am strongly opposed to spanking, I think there must be a few million readers who have been longing deeply to see Faile get what she deserves for being the uber bitch for several books. If anything, there may be some readers who are disappointed that she gets away with her life. Well, actually I don't think that is entirely decided yet, but at least she survived the frost and the spanking. For enemies of Faile (or fans of spanking) this may be enough to redeem the book. Myself, I am still holding out for the final chapter where Rand attempts to cleanse the male half of the One Power from the Dark One's Taint. (Yes, the book still suffers from excessive use of capital letters.)

***

While I dislike spanking, I'm all for carrying women around. It's one of those small things that you miss when you realize you'll never going to do it again. Of course, I should have realized that a decade or two ago, but hey. At the very least you'd think they would implement it in sword & sorcery style role playing games, since it's a staple transport for women in Conan and similar genre comics. But it is conspicuously absent from the MMORPGs I have played, such as Realmserver, Dark Age of Camelot and Rubies of Eventide. (RoE actually let you carry a fallen compatriot to the nearest temple, but there were no accompanying graphics for either part.) Neither is it present in City of Heroes. (Superheroes are more likely to carry people in their arms while barbarians carry them over the shoulder, but I'm not picky here.)

EverQuest II has arrived in the local shops one of the days, I haven't noticed until now. I suspect there is no carrying people around there either, but I haven't tried. I simply doesn't have time to play the games I already have, or I would decidedly have wanted to test another game for you. It is supposed to have really good graphics.

I wonder if I would meet the same problems with this game as with its progenitor, the original EverQuest. Problems, as in the machine locking up repeatedly, objects jumping down from shelves to strike the contents of the box, and me being rushed to hospital with symptoms of life-threatening illness. To be honest, I don't think this would happen now. I think the reason a flurry of near-magical attacks barred my way to EQ was its reputation as a dating scene. I had read quite a bit about that prior to buying it. It seems that whatever higher power watches over me, it will go to great lengths to keep me from meeting compatible women. In fact, I would not be surprised if the Power would rather see me dead than finding a mate. This makes a lot more sense to me now than it did three years ago, because now I realize that even in real life it would only have been role playing from my side. I cannot fall in love any more than a beast or an angel can, and it would be cruel and unusual to keep role playing it, destroying another person's life in the process. I know it is a really big deal to a human.

***

Of course, if your idea of "couple things" is beating up villains together, you might be slightly more in luck. Astoundingly, some people seem to think so. There is a nice article in WomenGamers on CoH as a couple game, and it gets high scores indeed. Of course, it is nice to play alone too, and then you can start and stop whenever you want. But I thought some of you might find it interesting to read anyway. ^_^

So... all women who think it's romantic to beat up imaginary gangsters together with the man in your life. If you also think it would be fun being carried around like a sack of grain from time to time; if you think sex should be infrequent and clumsy; if you enjoy relative poverty, and look forward to playing second fiddle to your man's invisible friend and compete for attention with the muses in his head... you know where to find me. Yeah. At least you'd get dibs on genes for independently moving ears. Woo. Of course, to get at those genes you'd have to pry the man away from his online diary at 1AM. Happy hunting.

(At least, I don't ask women to dress up as anime characters or wear cat ears. No, really.)