Watching, Playing, Reading #6

I'm going to try to do these more often so they aren't so crazy long.

Watching:

Dexter: on Netflix; I tried to watch this show once but I couldn't get into it.  I decided to give it another shot, based on a recommendation from a friend, and I'm so glad I did!  I started two weeks ago and I am already on the eighth, and final, season.  It's about a blood spatter analyst who leads a double life.

I would recommend it to people who like psychological thrillers, serial killer stuff, and who have strong stomachs.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: on Netflix; I have seen all of this show but one of my friends had not seen any of it, so I had to help right this injustice.  We have been having at least a weekly Buffy night with lots of junk food.

I would recommend it to everyone who likes witty shows, shows with strong female characters, and supernatural shows.

The Boondock Saints: on Netflix; I watched this with N because he said it was his favorite movie in high school and he hasn't seen it in awhile.  I really liked it.  It's kind of similar to Dexter, as far as the vigilante justice stuff goes, and was pretty funny at times, which I appreciate with my action movies.  This movie is about two Irish brothers who decide to kill bad guys together.

I would recommend it to people who like some humor with their action movies, people who like vigilante justice themes, and people who like Irish accents ;)

Deadbeat: on Hulu; I watched the whole season of this in a single day.  It was really funny and I literally laughed out loud the whole time.  It's about a guy who can see and talk to dead people.  He helps them move on to the afterlife.

I would recommend this to people who like shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons.

Playing:

Flash games!  I used to be pretty addicted to these, so I cut myself off for a long time until I could play in moderation.

Edgar's Dream: This is an interactive art game with elements of Edgar Allen Poe.  It is cool, fairly easy and quick to play, and suitably creepy (especially with the sound on).  (I didn't want to go into that tiny hidden door because I expected to find pretty much what I found in there.)  To make it creepier play it late at night with the lights off like I did.

screenshot from the game; this part is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland

White Door Room Escape:  Escape games and point-and-click games are my favorite kinds of Flash games.  This one was okay but I didn't love it.  It is written in Japanese but that doesn't affect the gameplay.  It was pretty easy and I completed it in under five minutes.  I prefer my escape games with more "logical" escape puzzles, such as having to put together electronics and find tools to aid in your escape.  This one was just finding various codes and then being able to escape after finding them all.

Reading:

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh: I have wanted to read this book ever since Allie announced that it would be a thing that would exist.  I waited and bought a used copy on Amazon because I am poor thrifty, and I read it in a single day.  This used to be a standard occurrence for me with books but I haven't finished a book in one day since I graduated high school.  Sure it helps that a lot of this book is pictures, but still. 

I would highly recommend this book to everyone who has a sense of humor and likes to laugh out loud when reading books.

The O of OCD

I have OCD.  I have talked about it a bit before.  I have mostly discussed the "C" portion, which stands for compulsive.  It means that you feel the overwhelming need to do a certain thing and if you don't do it, then you can't concentrate until you do or you just have to remove yourself from the situation completely.  For me, my stongest compulsion is straightening pictures.  If there is a crooked picture in the room, I have to straighten it, even if I am out to dinner and the picture is all the way on the other side of the room and I have to walk past numerous other diners to get to it.  If I don't straighten the picture, I have to stare at something else so I don't accidentally look at the crooked picture again.  It makes me feel uncomfortable when there are pictures that aren't hanging straight.  A compulsion that I had when I was youger, but outgrew, was much much worse.  When I put on my pajamas before going to bed, I had to put my dirty clothes into the hamper a total of three times.  I couldn't toss everything in at once.  I had to do it in three separate times.  For example, I would put in my socks, then pick up my shirt and put that in, then my shirt last.  It had to total three times, not four, not two, not one, three.  If I didn't do it in three, then I felt like something very very bad was going to happen.  If I was just putting my socks into the hamper and nothing else, I had to put them in one at a time, then take one out and put it in again, so that it totalled three.  My parents were not aware of this behavior and therefore I was not diagnosed with OCD until I was in high school.

But I am not talking about compulsions today; I am talking about obsessions.  I'm sure that everyone knows what an obsession is.  Maybe you're obsessed with a famous person or a band or a certain TV show.  An obsession is something that you are so fascinated with that you cannot get it out of your head and can easily devote a large amount of your time, and in some cases money, to it.  It is possible for anyone to become obsessed with something.  It is much much easier for a person with OCD to become obsessed.  I'm not sure if I told you this story before but if I have it was a long time ago so I'll tell it again. 

When I was about 12 years old, my brother and I shared a Game Boy.  Not a Game Boy Color, but an old black-and-white Game Boy which had no backlit screen.  This was old technology at that time but it was what my mother allowed us to have so we were happy with it.  We were each allowed to play it for 20 minutes a day and not a minute more.  My uncle hit a deer on his motorcyle and became very badly injured.  He was in the hospital for a very long time.  He has recovered now, aside from brain damage.  When he was in the hospital, my mother and my grandmother would go to Portland to visit him every single day.  Since it was during the summer, my mother would drop my brother and I off with my grandfather while they went to the hospital.  We were allowed to visit later, but at first his injuries were so awful that if a kid saw them, they would be scarred for life.  Of course my brother and I would bring the Game Boy when we went to our grandfather's house for the day.  Our grandfather would sit in the dining room and watch TV while my brother and I were in the living room.  He didn't really check on us that often, except for when he brought us our lunch.  He definitely didn't enforce the rules.  Our mother allowed us to play Game Boy for one hour each while we were at grandpa's house.  We always played for much longer than that, but took turns, because we knew how to share.  We got this game called Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle and it was one of those games where you couldn't save but you did get a password every time you beat a level.  My brother and I would each play until we died three times and then let the other one play.  We were trying really hard to beat this game, which must have had about 50 levels.  It took many days.  On the day that we would beat it, we played for a long time and then finally reached the last level, where the final boss was a big witch.  My brother tried again and again to defeat her, but couldn't figure out how.  He got frustrated and left me to defeating the final boss.  I tried and tried for hours and then I finally beat it!  Later our mom came and took us home.  I was in washing up for dinner and there were Bugs Bunny's floating in my vision as I washed my hands!  I was really frightened but my mom knew right away that I had played the Bugs Bunny game for too long.  The thing with the screen on the old Game Boy not being back-lit is that it causes much more eye strain than today's screens.  Bugs Bunny stayed in my vision for a few more hours and it was long enough that I never played longer than my time limit after that. 

The point of me telling this story is to illustrate how I can become obsessed with things fairly easily.  My brother quit when the game got frustrating but I had to keep playing until I beat it.  To this day, I get this way with computer games, which is why I can never ever start to play World of Warcraft.  I stick to Flash games like escape the room games and point and click games.  These games are shorter and can be beaten in the course of a day.  When I discover a TV show that I enjoy, I have to watch every single episode that exists all in a row until I'm done.  When I first started reading blogs and in fact up until the beginning of this year, when I discovered a new-to-me blog that I enjoyed I had to read all of it.  I would take days just reading through the archives and stopping only to eat, sleep, or take a bathroom break.  I don't do that with blogs any more.  I have managed to outgrow that obsession, but I do still love to read blogs.  Don't even get me started on websites where you earn achievements or badges.  I can stay on those for days until I earn all of the badges.  There is this really difficult Flash game called Achievement Unlocked.  Your character is an elephant and you have to traverse the small game area earning achievements.  You can see the names of the achievements but that is it.  There are over 100 different achievements.  You have to try things and push random keys on your keyboard until you figure out how to do things.  A random key will turn everything orange and you earn an achievement for that.  You earn an achievement for having your elephant hit the spikes 100 times.  I played that game for an entire day straight and most of the night until I earned all of the achievements.  By the end I was no longer having fun.  I even had to look up the walkthrough and then do everything it told me until I got the remaining achievements.  Most people would have been satisfied with just reading how in the walkthrough or even just quitting the game, but not me, I couldn't stop until I earned every last achievement.

The reason I share all of these personal things with you is to help you understand why I do some of the things that I do and also to be real.  I personally can't stand blogs where it's nothing but cute outfits and fun outings and yummy foods and nobody ever even gets a splinter.  I like to read about real people doing real things.  Real people make mistakes.  Real people don't have perfect lives.  Real people have things that make them weird and unique.  So this is me letting you all know that I am a real person, just in case you didn't already know that.

Home Sweet Home

So as I mentioned the other day, I'm all moved into my new place now.  My mom doesn't like it because it's right next to some frats and across from some sororities.  Also, she heard a girl on the front steps planning with a couple of guys how much pot they're going to smoke in the park.  I told her that people probably did that in the dorms too. Also, at first she thought that this place was dirty, but later she realized that it's just old and sort of discolored in places.  I met some of the people who live here.  There's Old Drunk Guy, Stand-Up Comic, Ex-Navy Guy, Supposedly Antisocial Guy, Rebel (which is how he introduced himself and I had to clarify if he said Red Bull or Rebel.  He said I can call him either.), and Rebel's Friend Whose Name I Don't Recall.  Those are the only people I've met so far.  I've gotten most of my stuff unpacked.  I took some pictures of stuff in my room.  It's a very small room so every bit of surface space is covered with stuff, but it works.  As an added bonus, none of the mattress springs stab me, unlike at my old apartment.

Some of the stuff that's piled places is really pretty.  I got these lovely teacups for 50 cents each at a
yard sale, and I got this H.G. Wells treasury at a thrift store for 50 cents.  It's 50 years old!

The yard sale where I bought these teacups had so much vintage stuff!  I know of so many Etsy sellers that would have loved those things to sell, or blog people who would have loved those things to have.  But, alas, I am not made of money, far from it.  I just filled out a job application for Jack in the Box, at a really sketchy Jack in the Box location, where what my buildingmates refer to as "wannabe crackheads" hang out in a group of five or more at a time and gawk at passersby.

My parents found me this clothes rack thing at Walmart, because this room has no closet.

I'm actually really liking it here so far.  As you can see from the second picture, my room gets a ton of light.  Everyone I've met has been really nice.  Old Drunk Guy lives on my floor and he likes to come by my room and ask me how my day was.  He always invites me to go hang out on the porch with some of the guys who like to talk and drink PBR around 5 o clock.  I'm not quite ready to be that social yet, but I'm doing pretty well.  I have even left the house at least once every day since I moved.


In other news, I adore Felicia Day in "The Guild" webseries, and I just started watching her vlog called "The Flog" and, unsurprisingly, she's just as awesome as her character in The Guild.  There are only 16 episodes of The Flog so far and I may or may not have watched them all today.  In one of them, she recommended this browser game called Fallen London and I started playing it.  I may or may not be addicted to it now.  It's actually a better game to get addicted to, because you keep on having to wait for all your stuff to refresh after you use it up, for about 8 to 9 minutes.  So during that time, why not do important stuff that you weren't doing while playing the game?!  And then if you do important stuff for about 15 minutes at a time and then play the game as a tiny break, it's actually super efficient and doesn't make you get tired of doing the important stuff.  The storyline for Fallen London is slightly ridiculous and incredibly interesting.  It also lets you choose between lots of different options for things, so everyone's game will end up different.  I think it's pretty wonderful and will definitely keep playing.

So to recap: I like my new place despite it being very very small, Felicia Day is a fantastic role model for females, and Hidden London is a super fun game that also allows you to be productive.


And in other other news, G took me to watch Ted yesterday and it was completely hilarious.  I got an ab workout from all my laughter.  After that we went and cooked dinner at his mom's house, because she has an indoor grill thing to put over the burners.  Protip: Steak tastes really really good if you use a spice rub of salt, pepper, oregano, red pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  And it smells amazing when it's cooking.

The Good and The Bad

So today was partially good and partially bad. How's that for an opening sentence? Really hooks the reader, doesn't it. This is why I'm a blogger and not a writer of any sort that is expected to be good at writing. You can tell by my complete mastery of the English language and sentence structure.  Anyway, I'll tell you the good stuff first. I had a midterm today and I didn't completely space and forget everything that I studied. In fact, I didn't even partially space and I didn't forget anything that I studied.  That reminds me, I need to check my grade from my physics midterm. I'll be right back.  I got a 16 and the average was 15.68, so that's good.  Other good things, it was sunny today even though it was cold and I took some pictures, four to be precise.  Here they are.  Well, at least they would be there if I had uploaded them. I'm going to go do that now.

Pretty Little Liars is on tonight, so that's another good thing.

Now for the bad things.  My mini fridge leaked on the floor because I guess the bottom isn't sealed properly. When my roommate was trying to figure out what was wrong with it, she found mold on the floor, gross.  I wanted to have dinner and watch a movie with C tonight, but he has to study. He apologized twice.  However, that's not really a bad thing since I was planning to give up watching Pretty Little Liars tonight to hang out with him and now I don't have to. I would have rather gotten to hang out with C, but this is me being optimistic.

I don't remember if I told you why I like him so much, but if I have, bear with me.  He likes art, he plays piano and guitar, he's helpful, he reads for fun, he's funny and he thinks that I'm funny, we have the same grey Converse shoes (which is obviously super important), and he's cute.  My parents liked him when they met him too. Oh yeah, and he also does Rubik's cubes and has a 4 x 4 that he doesn't know how to solve, just like me.  And he dresses nice which I could usually care less about, but in this case I enjoy it.

Last night I watched V for Vendetta and it was fairly fantastic. I was going to be all alliterative with the letter v in my review but that's way too difficult.  I have a friend who watches this movie every November 5th and absolutely adores it, but I hadn't watched it yet until last night.  It's an interesting movie about a future England that is completely controlled by the government and one man's quest to end the oppression of the government.  It challenges your views of what is right and what is wrong and V has some superb lines.  There's tons of action and politics and it's just a really great movie.  I give it a 4 out of 5.

I started playing Robot Unicorn Attack the other day and it is addicting and infuriating. The heavy metal version is really awesome and no game has ever made me so angry. I was yelling at my laptop for lagging and making me run into pentagrams when I was supposed to dash through them and I had pushed dash but the game just wanted me to die.  Anyway, the soundtrack is awesome, if not slightly repetitive.  If you plan on ever doing work ever again, do not play this game.

I'm going to go get some dinner now. Bye.