Past Lives and Dream Deaths

Girl

I was temporarily convinced that I was girl in my past life. Well, not exactly temporarily. I wrote a section of my work yesterday (from the perspective of a girl) and I realised that I wouldn’t have been able to do it in such and such a way if it had been from a guy’s. I just know how to approach it better like this, I think. Which makes no logical sense, but it’s good to know what I’m okay at and what I’m not quite okay at.

The Collector

I dreamt this dream where a relative of mine died. It wasn’t frightening at all. It was just quite sad, but I think I always knew that it was just a dream, so it didn’t quite have the effect that it might have been intending to have. The most interesting thing about it was the old man that came up to the front of my flat. He stood on the grass, at some distance, and pointed to my door. And as with so much of our dreams, this immediately made sense to me. He would point and stare at whichever household he had to make his announcement to. It was just a natural law.

He came up to the door next and we opened it and we talked. He came to collect something. He was a nameless old man in a blue suit, but I called him the Collector. It was a name I’d made up. I didn’t know what it was that he collected (nope, not the body), but he collected something. And then he did his job with his perfectly straight face and we were like friends. I didn’t blame him for anything. I didn’t see him as the harbinger of some mysterious doom. No, he was just a guy doing his job.

That’s not to say that the loss of a relative was nothing sad. I was sad. I remember crying in the dream, remembering all the stuff that we’d done together, a smile, a face, a joke, and some lost epiphanies. I was really upset. I didn’t wake up in tears or anything, which led to my belief that I must have known that it was a dream, at least on some level, and that I’d wake up and it would be okay.

Reading

I’m now reading Wena Poon’s The Proper Care Of Foxes. This comes after my second reading of Gatsby. I read that a long time ago. I read it again because it’s in my course. I realised as I did that that I had clean forgotten almost everything about it. Now I have to write an essay about it.

Oh so many things.

Really. There are a lot of things to do. Sure doesn’t feel like it, but it’s true. That’s because most of these things that I have to do don’t have a hard deadline. At least not for the time being. It’s either something that I have to do at my own pace (that is, it doesn’t require a submission of any sort or is a self-imposed thing) or the deadline is so far away that it feels that way too.

I’m getting things done. Very slowly, but I am. I do however get the feeling that I’m sliding down the muddy old slope and will be overtaken by work before too long. The usual school work balance (that is, inter-subject balance) has been complicated by the various things that I’ve undertaken in the recent months. It’s not necessarily a greater amount of work, just more complicated.

On the lighter side of things, Mass Effect 2 has been proving to be quite the enjoyable experience. The quests, for one thing, certainly show that the developers put more care and attention into them. I also like how the characters seem to be better written, regardless of how the story is compared to the first game. The choices I get to make also few less obvious (that’s a good thing) and more important. It doesn’t feel like, Hey, this is the bad option and that’s the good one, and if you save this guy you get to hear about him later. Definitely also feels like a much more interesting bunch of folks I’ve got with me. At least they actually seem like they can’t get along, which was the feeling it always should’ve had.

Of course, it’s still early days. But I’m having a good time so far. It’s surely a nice distraction from work.

It’s also been nice to hear from a few friends. I have plans to meet them this couple of weeks, but I get the nagging feeling that I’m going to have to be a disappointment once or twice. Always happens. But I’ll do what I can. And onwards to the midweek.

d

Tuesday Photo: girl + phone

Steam-Powered

For whatever reason, for the longest time, I was under the impression that Steam didn’t work here.

It all started back in the day of Half-Life 2, where there was all of this hullabaloo about Steam being some kind of unnecessary and troublesome anti-piracy measure. I didn’t care too much about the fuss they were kicking up because I just really, really wanted to play Half-Life 2. The registration and all that did seem somewhat difficult back then, but nothing was going to get in my way en route to some more Gordon Freeman adventures.

A bit later, there was talk about Steam’s digital content store. I remember wanting one or two things from it, but I didn’t get to it. There were three reasons for this. I didn’t have a card back then; I hadn’t yet bought into the idea of digital content; and most of all, I seem to remember that it was region-restricted back then. That is, in the same way the iTunes Store didn’t–and I think still doesn’t–fully work here. I could be mistaken, but that’s definitely how I remember it.

So for a long time, I didn’t get anything off of Steam. It was just my portal to Half-Life 2.

A while ago, I wanted to play Half-Life 2 again. That was, say, half a year ago, I think. There was a problem. My game was on CDs, and even though there wasn’t anything apparently wrong with the discs, there was always some trouble with the installation. So I poked through my Steam window and realised that I could just download it onto my computer. I did, and away I went, back to the land of City 17.

That experience gave me quite a good impression of Steam. Being an idiot, it didn’t occur to me then that I ought to check out the store.

Last week, as you know, I bought Mass Effect 2 for the PC. You’ll also know that my copy of Mass Effect was on the 360, which I’m hoping to sell. So I figured that eventually, I would have to get Mass Effect on my PC. I looked around for a cheap old copy of it. (By the way, I was glad to read that the DRM nonsense had been taken care of.) I failed. And then I thought I’d look for it on Steam.

There it was. Not being in a hurry, I thought I’d wait for an offer, except… Well, you know, I didn’t know if the Steam store worked here. So I did a test. I wanted to get Psychonauts, which was going at a ridiculous price for the week, but having too many things to do, left it for the weekend. Of course, I didn’t realise then that there were new deals during the weekends.

But it was fine too, because I ended up getting Freedom Force and its sequel. I actually have the first game, but I’d buy it for 2USD even if I had both.

This was all a test, of course, just to make sure that I could one day get Mass Effect on Steam. However, I think I’ll certainly be paying more attention to the store now, especially with these lovely offers and a host of games I’d like to be playing after such a long absence on the PC gaming front. (Including, I want to add, Company Of Heroes.)

My one hope is that I’ll one day be able to register the BioWare games I own on disc on Steam, so that I won’t ever have to worry about my discs conking out. Well, one can hope, no?

In the meantime, keep on being awesome, Steam, and you’ll definitely be getting more of my cash.

d