Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

You can also watch the video blog of this entry at The Geek Girl Gamut YouTube page. Please have a look and let me know what you think of it. First attempt at this, but an awesome job by my video editor.

Most of us might trace the history of zombies back to George A. Romero’s original 1968 “Night of the Living Dead” film. The concept of zombies, however, goes back much further.

Zombies weren’t originally thought of as the dead brought back to life, desiring more than anything else “Brains!” but actually originated with the Afro-Caribbean spiritual beliefs of Voodoo. Voodoo zombies can be the living too, unfortunate souls controlled by a witch doctor to become mindless drones that only do their master’s biding.

But Romero is indeed the one who first created zombies as the undead cannibals we know and love today.

Of course some form of flesh or blood-hungry undead existed long before Romero came along and dubbed them zombies, like ghouls and vampires, for example. In some ways Frankenstein’s monster might even be considered a type of zombie too.

There were also many films before “Night of the Living Dead” that included zombie-like creatures, like “Last Man on Earth” in 1964, a closer adaptation to the vampire short story “I am Legend”.

Will Smith’s version was good, I even own it, it just wasn’t the same story.

But I’m not here today to discuss the history of zombies, this commentary is called “The Zombie Plan” for a reason. Any self-respecting geek has some kind of game-plan for if and when the Zombie Apocalypse descends upon us. Just admit it, you know you do too.
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To even begin my review of the new PS3, Xbox 360, and PC phenomenon, Dragon Age: Origins, I must first discuss the company responsible for the masterpiece as well as many other claims to fame: BioWare.

BIOWARE

BioWare is a Canadian electronic entertainment company that started up in 1995 and is responsible for some of the more cutting-edge and popular games of our day, like the Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights series, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and the Mass Effect series.

These guys know their role-playing video games. They are known best for allowing for substantial customization in both player character appearance and in the options given throughout the games in choosing various paths, ie Light Side vs Dark Side.

Dragon Age: Origins is a culmination of years of successful gaming, and at this point I can only imagine that BioWare will continue to do better and better.

BioWare is currently a part of Electronic Arts (EA) but has retained its autonomy. It is safe to say that EA appreciates and understands the cash-cow they have in BioWare, and they are even restructuring their gaming development into a new RPG/MMO team headed by one of the BioWare founders, Ray Muzyka.
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I hate Twilight. I think Stephanie Meyer’s poorly written and inane series is the worst thing to ever happen to fictional vampire culture. Possibly the entire fiction world.

Vampires that sparkle in the sun? Seriously?

And don’t even get me started on the abusive relationship between Mr. Hot Vampire Guy and his totally unremarkable leading lady.

But this isn’t a forum for me to bitch about Twilight. At least not today. Today I am comparing as impartially as possible the franchises of Twilight and Anne Rice’s older series, The Vampire Chronicles that began with its most notable title, Interview with the Vampire.

My bias is even worse here since I have reed the entire original series by Anne Rice and I absolutely adore it, at least up until the point when the author lost her mind, but again, I will do my best to remain impartial throughout.

Onto the history.
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“I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else.” — Gary Gygax, 1938-2008

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson—may they rest in peace in a land where skimpy chainmail really does protect better than full body armor on big-breasted women—created D&D and published its first book in 1974.

It was different from tabletop wargames in many ways, allowing for each player to essentially create and become a single character of their design to embark upon adventures in a fantasy setting. This was all guided by the Dungeons Master or DM.

Besides telling the story the players’ characters live through, the DM’s job is to try and kill the characters off. Hopefully, your DM wants you to succeed, but if they’re not throwing challenging monsters and puzzles your way that could potentially kill your character at every turn then they are not doing their job.
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The first question, of course, is what is WoW? With over 11 million players worldwide, most people already know that answer, at least enough to say that it is an online video game also known as World of Warcraft.

More specifically, WoW is an MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role playing game. This means that not only are you playing online as your own character, but you are playing with everyone else’s character too, almost like an interactive chat room with depictions of yourself that can go off and kill things after you’ve had that meaningful conversation.

Created by Blizzard Entertainment, WoW was not a new idea in scope or setting, following the Warcraft series of games that first began in 1994 with Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

Going the MMO route, however, was new as the previous Warcraft games were all RTS format or real time strategy.
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We all know the jobs out there that are the geek dream, such as being a game tester, or a comic book artist, or an intern for X-Play. But if we’re being realistic with ourselves, we know that those jobs are not easy to come by. Most of them, most of the ‘geek dream jobs’ are nearly impossible to break into.

However, that does not mean that we have to content ourselves with being sales or customer service reps in those awful giant call centers. There are geek jobs for the rest of us that can be just as rewarding as the dream.
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Tattooing has been around almost as long as human beings, seen in many cultures throughout history for many varying reasons, usually for personal, cultural, or spiritual expression or identification.

In the previous century there was a time when tattooing was seen as something only for the hardcore, scary people like bikers and gang members, or sailors who got drunk one night on leave. In Japan it is still generally thought of as a sign that you are part of the yakuza, the native gangsters.

But these days nearly everyone you run across could potentially have at least one tattoo, even if that one is merely a typical ‘tramp stamp’ on the lower back.

The average person might only have something small and simple, like Woodstock on their hip or a flower on their ankle, but even the unexpected person might surprise you with a slew of tattoos hidden beneath their clothing.

Tattoos with a geeky origin are more common these days than you might realize. All three of mine fall under that category.
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I am a geek. That has already been established purely by the existence of this blog. I am also very typical of the American woman my age. Middle class, over-educated, under-appreciated, with a husband, a cat, and a lot of bills to pay. I believe that my current financial position of getting by paycheck to paycheck is in part the fault of my geek status.

Allow me to explain.

I attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. This was the most expensive of the schools I looked at toward the end of high school, but it was the one I had to go to, no compromise, because of what it offered. My first year of schooling was $28,000. By the time I graduated the yearly tuition had increased to $38,000. That’s a $10,000 increase in four years. Frightening, right?
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If you don’t know what fanfiction is…

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

Just kidding. I have to explain the definition of fanfiction to a lot of people whenever I discuss my hobbies, so I know that it is not quite the household name that I often think it is.

Fanfiction is really for a specific group of people, and while some others outside the practice of writing it know of its existence, many still do not.

Fanfiction is stories about characters or settings written by fans of an already existing fictional work, rather than by the true creator.

This can be of a book, movie, TV series, anything, really, as long as it is written by a fan, not the author, and normally would never be published as it would not have the permission or backing of the original work.

The usual example I give is this. Say you like Harry Potter. You decide you want to write a story for fun, or maybe for some friends to read, involving Harry’s parents when they were younger, because the actual books don’t cover much of that. The story you write would be fanfiction. Read the rest of this entry »

Halloween is my favorite holiday. You can dress up as whatever you want, become something or someone else, and look completely different than how you look otherwise. It is a very liberating holiday, more so sometimes for adults than for the kids trick-or-treating. It’s why we have costume parties all year long, because we don’t want to have to wait for a holiday to get dressed up.

In college it was tradition that the students trick-or-treated on the street that led down the hill from our campus toward town, and we did so proudly. These days, when I want to dress up, and there isn’t anything planned for Halloween and no costume parties in the works, I have cosplay to get me through the year.

Cosplay is short for ‘costume roleplay’ and is much more than just slipping into a character’s literal shoes but becoming that character to the best of your ability. You are transforming yourself into someone else, usually for performance or competition, and there is a lot of work that can go into every detail of your persona.
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