on a lighter note, i spent most of yesterday sleeping and playing video games, with a brief yoga interlude because i realized that not moving around all day was turning me to stone. i gave diana my fat yoga dvd because i thought i'd moved past it and basically memorized it, buttttttt i need to get it back from her and make a copy. i think i have stockholm syndrome with the smug asshole who hosts it. i haaaaaaaated her calling me a sassy diva and strong confident woman and stuff when i was just trying to get my downward dog on, but now i find that it's hard to do it without her stupid encouragement.
namaste, jerk
also, i have no concept of time so i'll be like "i just held that pose for THREE HOURS !!!" and it was actually 15 seconds, so i think having an instructional video helps.
on monday night i played borderlands with perry for a few hours. the game is okayso far, though i have absolutely no clue what is going on or what the objective of the game is. i think one of the problems is that i can't read quest text on my tiny tv (not that i ever read quest text anyway) and that i'm playing with someone who knows what we need to do.
maybe my goal for today will be to make perry tell me what the game is about.
yessssssterday night i played left 4 dead 2 with ken (and were later joined by a couple of other dudes who i kinda know !). THAT was a lot of fun. i guess i don't know what this game is about either, besides killing a lot of zombies and trying to escape from them. i think the factors that led me to believe that it was more fun is that it seems a lot easier. there's tons of stuff to kill at close range and you don't have to even aim your gun (and it manually reloads), whereas in borderlands there's usually a bunch of dudes shooting at you and ducking behind stuff for cover (because they are alive and not dead).
the game itself looks pretty cool, though there's not a lot of variation in the zombies (and one zombie was wearing the exact outfit i was wearing yesterday and i had to kill her over and over D:). the zombies' movements are fast and jerky and scary. we finished two of five possible campaigns, and there doesn't seem to be much variation- waves of zombies, the same 4-5 special zombies showing up occasionally, and then some kind of gimmicky objective. there is a marked difference between each of the skill levels though- we did everything on normal, switching to 'easy' for the tougher parts (the first campaign was just me and ken with two computer players, before two of his friends joined us) so at least there's some variation there. overall it was really fun and seems like an easier beginner game to get used to using the controller. unfortunately i did the worst out of everyone every time !
what else? i took a german placement test (required of all people taking the summer german I class who have previous experience) and i was super worried i'd place out of the class and mess up my schedule. guess what ! i totally didn't need to worry because i forgot like all the german i know. when people are talking to me or i have to read something in german, i can understand like 85% of it, but i don't remember tenses and genders and pronouns at all.
one part of the test was writing a personal essay and mine seriously was like, "my name is roxy, i live in philadelphia, i'm 28 years old, i love fanta and potato salad, my favorite singer is nena hagen" (basically like, all stuff from the laughably outdated neue freunde textbook, which was mostly about the scorpions, falco, and piranha 2).
what else did i want to talk about? oh, i wanted to talk about monster high, mattel's attempt to capitalize on the success of both bratz and twilight. it's basically a line of toys where the characters are descended from monsters but are run of the mill misogynist stereotype airhead bimbo shopaholics !
so like, can anything marketed toward young girls be cool? ever? bratz are fucked up weird dolls that promote materialism, competition between women, sexualization of children (one of their lines was... babies... in diapers... with makeup and heels), and unhealthy body images. twilight is a fucked up book that promotes abusive relationships as romance, a stereotype of female weakness and incompetence, sexual assault and stalking as romance, and uses monsters as a thinly veiled excuse for men to do whatever they want to women because it's their NATURE. why would you then COMBINE these two things to sell to female children? oh, because money is and has always been more important than the health, future, and well-being of women.
the dolls don't come along with books, or comics, or even a tv show. they are just dolls, with a "fun website" that you can log on to, a la those pet toys for babies. the website is full of riveting information like that the werewolf's biggest pet peeve is not being able to wear platform heels in gym and that she spends hours plucking her excess hair to be fabulous. wouldn't a werewolf's biggest pet peeve be that she goes fucking berserk and kills humans during the full moon? the vampire is vegan, which means she's not a vampire. one of the characters isn't even a mummy, she's just egyptian. is "egyptian" a monster now? like, the characters essentially have nothing to do with monsters and their monsterness is only presented as a slight setback in their quest to be hot sexy fashionistas who love boys, gossip, and shopping. plus, to compensate for their monster features, i guess they wear even less clothing than bratz !
get that message, little girls? you're a thing. if you don't look like these dolls, you're ugly. if you're ugly, you're worthless. oh, and instead of having actual interests you should only care about shopping, makeup, gossip, and boys. i just wanted to state that in case the message mattel has been sending us since the 1960s was too subtle.
soooo basically i'm going to blow up the planet.
p.s. i haven't even played red dead redemption yet. word is that it is going to suck on my crappy CRT tv in my bedroom !
p.p.s. i already watched everything good on netflix
