And Now, Something Personal

Now that I've established the need for unhappy ME fans to remain civil in this situation... I would like to give my own personal opinion on the game.

By and large, Mass Effect 3 is an awesome game. The graphics are gorgeous, the music is phenomenal, and the characters are all reasonably believable. I love the reintroduction of banter between your teammates (banter, how I missed thee!) and the fact that your crew members now interact with one another and aren't simply confined to one location on the ship? Oh, that made me squeal like a gleeful little schoolgirl. Some of those moments are just pure gold.

And their interactions with your Shepard? It was so genuine. There were parts that honestly brought tears to my eyes.

But... the game isn't without its flaws.

Don't get me wrong, no game is perfect. But some of this stuff is absolutely, mind-bogglingly bad. Like, for example:

1. The journal system. What was once a fairly organized, useful feature for keeping track of side missions has become an utterly convoluted, disorganized mess. Yeah, you have a list of missions for you to do, and even some marked "priority," but it's such a mess that it's stupidly easy to miss out on important time-sensitive missions, causing them to expire when you hit important plot points and thus costing you important resources. It's also utterly useless when you need to go to find most "fetch quest" items, or where and who you need to take said recovered items to, because it doesn't tell you.

Seriously. The journal structure from ME2 worked just fine - why change it?

2. The map system. Another thing that's lost at least some of its functionality. Sure, it looks prettier, but... Function over form, guys. Function over form.

3. MOTION BLUR. Oh my god, motion blur - and the accompanying motion sickness. Yeah, I get it from a stylistic point of view, but it really should be an "opt in" feature, not an "opt out," if for no other reason than the crippling lag it tends to cause.

4. The scrapping of the classical Paragon/Renegade system for that patently ridiculous "Reputation" meter, and the directly-related paring-down and muddling-up of your dialogue choices (which give you either one extreme or another, neither of which tends to be very useful.)

5. Angst for the sake of angst. Attention, BioWare: gratuitous character death does not good storytelling make. When character deaths are done solely for the purpose of character death, they quickly lose their impact and become mundane. Also, when you spend entire missions to save characters only to have them die a pointless death at the last minute (see: Lieutenant Victus) it just becomes gratingly frustrating. It makes you not want to keep playing when everything - everything - is made out to be completely hopeless.

There's a glaring difference between "You can't save them all," and "You can't save anyone," BioWare. You seem to have missed that distinction.

Which brings me to...

6. That thing. You know, that thing that's being talked about?

And by "that thing," I mean "the end."

Now, I could go on a long, long rant about the quality of the last half hour. I really could - ask anyone who knows me. I could rant for pages about the ending of Mass Effect 3.

But I'll save you the novel and just go with three small words.

The ending sucked.

I know you're probably going to counter with "But there were multiple endings!" The truth is, no, there weren't. There was one stock ending with a few very minor changes.

Essentially, when you go to use the gratuitous Deus Ex Machina (which shows up out of nowhere, with precious little in the way of a silly little thing called "explanation") you're confronted by the equally-gratuitous Reaper God or whatever it is, and it proceeds to give you:

a.) a shoddy explanation for the Reapers (they are synthetics created to... kill off organic life in order to "protect" organic life from synthetic life that would inevitably turn on it and wipe it out,) and,

b.) Three different flavors of "destroy galactic civilization." They are as follows.

- Control: You take control of the Reapers and make them leave. The relays then explode with blue energy, leaving everyone more or less stranded where they are.
- Merge: You (forcibly) merge organic and synthetic life, effectively halting evolution. The Reapers leave, and the relays explode with green energy, leaving everyone more or less stranded where they are. . The Citadel explodes, too.
- Destroy: You destroy the Reapers - and all other synthetic life in the galaxy, including EDI and the geth - and potentially destroy all advanced tech in the galaxy. The relays explode with red energy, leaving everyone more or less stranded where they are. The Citadel explodes, too.

I'm not even going to get into the truly epic amounts of Fridge Horror brought on by the destruction of the relays - anyone with even slightly-below-average intelligence can pick it out by putting just a little bit of thought into it.

I will, however, ask: Just what the hell was up with that ending?

Actually...you know what? I'll just sum up all of my problems with the ending thusly:

- Plot holes big enough to fly a Reaper through
- Random Deus Ex Machina
- Glowy Reaper God
- Shepard is OOC
- The Normandy crew is OOC
- None of our choices matter
- Virtually nothing from the entirely of the past two games matters
- All the time you spent gathering War Assets is more or less meaningless
- Fridge Horror

and

- Mountain Dew destroys galactic civilization.

And there you have it. My (admittedly "not nearly as thorough as I'd like it to be") take on the drawbacks of Mass Effect 3.

Tell Congress To Undo The NDAA, Ban Indefinite Military Detention Of Americans

From DemandProgress.org:

President Obama just signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law despite startling provisions that will allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens. It's a travesty, defying basic principles of justice and due process in perhaps the most extreme respect our nation has ever seen.

Thankfully, several lawmakers are keeping up the fight. Senator Dianne Feinstein has introduced legislation to undo these provisions of the NDAA, in the form of the Due Process Guarantee Act. We need to urge other Senators to support it.

The Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011 amends the Non-Detention Act of 1971 by providing that a Congressional authorization for the use of military force does not authorize the indefinite detention—without charge or trial—of U.S. citizens who are apprehended domestically.

If there's enough of a public outcry, we have a real chance of making this happen: More than 40 senators voted against the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA -- and that was before the media and general public caught on to what was happening. Please urge your Senators to remedy this terrible wrong.

Just fill out the form at right HERE to urge your lawmakers to block the indefinite detention of Americans.

Newt Gingrich Doesn't Know His History

Palestinians are an ''invented'' people, huh, Mr. Gingrich?

I think the Bible (you know, that particular holy book you claim to live by as a Christian?) would beg to differ.

Joel 3:4 Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine?

So, uh... you were saying? If the Palestinians were "invented" a few thousand years ago, I think that means they've cemented their status as a "real" nation by now.




(And this guy's running for President? Seriously? Sigh...)

Sandburg Mall: Step Up, Or Step Out (Part 1)

Hi there! It's been a while since I updated last, hasn't it? Well, hopefully with the situation at home finally settling down, I'll have more time and energy to devote to silly things like blogging. Hah!

And what spawned this sudden update, after such a long silence? Well... let's just say it's frustration.

You see, our local shopping center, the Sandburg Mall, is losing yet another store. With so many of its formerly-occupied storefronts now empty, the loss of long-term merchant Fashion Bug (which has been a fixture at the mall since I was a little girl,) is a staggering blow for this establishment.

But, really - I can't blame Fashion Bug for leaving. Their departure isn't what is frustrating to me. What's frustrating is the lack of constructive action on the mall owners' behalf. To be perfectly blunt, I wouldn't want to rent retail space from a provider that effectively took my money, and did absolutely nothing to attract potential customers - and, in fact, seemed more interested in driving the public away.

Take, for example, the appearance of Sandburg Mall itself. The first thing any potential customer sees is a poorly-maintained, crumbling parking lot adorned with faded paint and sorely-neglected landscaping. To be perfectly blunt, if it weren't for the scattered cars there, the place would look abandoned. Does that sound at all appealing?

The second thing a potential customer sees is the drab appearance of Sandburg Mall's exterior itself. It's dull and brown, with nothing particularly attention-grabbing about it. The signs that are supposed to direct people to the mall are likewise drab, outdated, and extremely easy to miss. This setup worked just fine in the Eighties and Nineties, but nowadays, with big businesses like Wal-Mart relocating to the edge of town - and moving into bigger, cleaner, more attractive buildings, to boot, with prominent signage announcing their locations... Well, it just can't compete.

Should anyone manage to look past the exterior flaws of the property, and make it inside, the very next thing they will be confronted with are numerous empty storefronts, tacky paper "signs" taped to windows, and an archaic layout that's barely changed at all since Sandburg Mall first opened in 1974. It's old, stale, and unattractive, end of story. The interior signage? Is just as dull and uninspiring as the external signage, especially that which is advertising things that no longer even exist - like the cinema, which shut down in 2007.

Most of the storefronts that are occupied are unattractive at best, and embarrassingly amateurish at worst.

The halls are cluttered with nearly-empty kiosks, installments advertising shower stalls, and archaic kiddie "attractions" that were cutting edge thirty years ago, but which can't hope to appeal to today's under-twelve crowd.

Also, there's very little by way of food at the so-called food court - there's an Orange Julius and a KarmelKorn, as well as some obscure little eatery that doesn't even seem to have set hours of operation, and that's it. All of the other restaurants that once called Sandburg Mall home are long-closed, leaving nothing behind but empty spaces, and fixtures that do nothing but gather dust.

It's painful to behold, especially when compared to the memory of an establishment that was flourishing a mere ten years ago.

On the cyberspace front, Sandburg Mall fares no better - their website is positively ancient, unintuitive and, again, amateurish. It's UGLY. It honestly looks like something I would have put together in my Comp Skills 1 class - and that is most assuredly not a compliment. Could I do any better now? Not likely, but there are thousands of people out there who could, for a reasonable price.

I also see very little advertising going on for the Sandburg Mall. Once in a while, a local animal shelter will advertise an event being held there, but that is, by and large, the extent of it. The anchor stores advertise (largely because they're national chains,) but do the mall owners put forth any effort in advertising anything, themselves? To put it simply, no. I suppose they think that they don't have to advertise, because "everyone already knows" that they're there, but that's a ridiculous notion. Of course "everyone knows" about the mall - the problem is, nobody cares, and the mall owners don't seem very intent on making anyone care.

And that, my friends, is utterly tragic.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

SIGH. Oh, Etsy...

You've made some awkward, questionable, and, at times, even downright BAD (i.e. malicious) decisions in the past.

But today's happy little accident just leaves me scratching my head and, well... wondering about you.

To-wit, for those of you who don't fancy clicking the link: Today, Etsy added a new "feature." What is this feature, and why is it so bad, you might ask?

It's an active cursor. In the Search bar.

On every. Single. Page. Even in shops AND on the Search results pages themselves.

This "improvement" has made it impossible to navigate the site naturally - if you want to use your keyboard to navigate, you constantly have to click on the side of the page to remove the active cursor, before you can do anything. It also ensures that, whenever you go to a previous page, you get relocated to the TOP of the page, instead of wherever you'd been before. Naturally, this "intuitive and helpful" change gets awfully annoying after the first three or so pages.

Oh, and did I mention that the active cursor appears on every page? Even in your shop? Yeah. Is Etsy trying to direct people OUT of our shops now?

Sigh.

This can only end in tears. And lost revenue.

Crap move, Etsy. Crap move...