MTV Cribs - Sanctuary Hills Edition

It's no surprise to anyone that I love Fallout 4. I'm not a casual gamer - I don't dip in and out of games, I don't impulse buy, and I squeezed every drop of gameplay I can out of games. So the games I go for tend to be those I know in advance I'll love (Assassin's Creed can stay out of this for now).

So, I love Fallout 4. But, even though we've had it since Christmas, I've not completed the main mission yet. I've spent my time tooling around doing side quests, accumulating companions, and establishing settlements. Oh, such settlements.

In fact, the one thing that's consistently disappointed me in the Fallout series is the main storyline. The denouement of Fallout 3 irked me, I disliked the whole business in New Vegas where we had to pick sides in order to progress, and in Fallout 4... well, it's telling that I've halted my game before the end of Act I, preferring instead to build towns in mirelurk-infested swamps.

Here are five things I love-love-love about the game:

1. VATS

I suck at first-person shooters; no one's surprised by this either. My coordination's rubbish, I have no spacial awareness, and the controls of anything more complicated than Llamatron confound me. So HURRAH for a game that lets the good players use iron sights and the sucky players use a dedicated targeting system (an opinionated targeting system, I've realised - what internal criteria lets it decide whether a certain enemy is "Raider Scum" or "Psycho Raider" or whatever? How prejudiced.)

Without VATS, I wouldn't enjoy Fallout nearly so much. I like dumping all my bonuses into intelligence / charisma and not having it significantly hamper my character. I'm certain I never progressed far with Skyrim, in contrast, simply because I was rubbish at combat.

2. Watercooler moments

This is what Fallout (and Skyrim) does best, isn't it? When four or five people get together and start comparing stories:

My sister accidentally seducing her companion in a crowded submarine when all she'd wanted to do was have a nap. My son dressing Jun Long in the Grognak costume to cheer him up. The Fat Man my husband modded to fire eight nukes at a time, with which he frequently blows himself up.

Some of the moments are scripted (the teddy bear reading on the toilet! The sentry monkeys in the insane asylum! The Witchcraft Museum filled with nope!) but the best are the random stupid things you do, then immediately run to tell someone about.

3. Settlements

Not so much my own settlements, which are functional and un-ridiculous (with the exception of Sanctuary Hills, see below), but everyone else's. My husband (who never got into Minecraft or Sim City or anything like that) freakin' loves building settlements. His towns have market places and bars with disco balls and dining rooms with play areas for the kids, and all his walls line up and all the lights work. He has towns you could live in. I have two shacks and a confused brahmin wandering through the vegetables.

Every time my husband logs in, he has to give you the tour of his latest settlement. God love him, he is so proud.

4. Trolling

Something we discovered along with the husband's keen love of virtual towns is his equally keen love of physics. Or, more accurately, his vast annoyance when you ignore the gravity and, say, build a stairway in the middle of your settlement leading to a shack balanced on nothing. He twitches every time I walk past it.

Logging in on someone else's save is also popular. I changed Jacob's username to Jaybum, he changed mine to TitsMcGee. I removed his power armour, put him in a dress and selected TAKE ALL from his workbench. He built another staircase in the middle of Sanctuary, put a platform at the top, stood my character on the platform, then removed the staircase so I was left balancing fifty feet in the air with no way to get down. He was careful to take off my power armour first so I couldn't jump, and to place the fast travel pad up on the platform so I couldn't fast travel to the ground.

I am currently plotting revenge.

5. How much we care

Everyone else in my extended family has played the main mission, so when they want to discuss it, they go up to the bathroom, shut the door then complain in overexcited whispers. When the husband puts an extension on his swamp-mansion, he calls us to come look. We giggle to ourselves when someone is strolling unawares towards a queen mirelurk. We complain about our favourite companions. We've each picked a different faction to support, and complain greatly about them too.

We love this game.

The reasons we love it, sadly, have little to do with the main storyline. We've found our own fun. Which is great in one way, but I'm sad that the story itself hasn't captured us. And, I'll be honest, even though we love this game, we don't love it as much as we could. I'm not invested in anyone like I was with Boone, for example. Or even with Charon.

But then again, I haven't finished the game. Maybe it'll change my mind yet.

practice

This is something you'll know if you're a musician, or have ever tried living with a musician:

Practice is a sonovabitch.

My husband plays the guitar. Plays it pretty well, in my slightly-biased opinion. He's owned his guitar since he was young but it's only in the last few years that he's started practicing properly. Like everyone, he started out with three chords and Green Day's Time of Your Life; two years later he has a dozen chords and maybe twenty songs (of varying difficulties and competencies). He has calluses and is always losing his plectrums. So, he's a guitarist, basically.

(I also maintain the fiction that his guitar infuriates me. I'm always accidentally kicking it or knocking it over or spilling coffee on it. Actually I quite like it. Shh, don't tell.)

Anyway, the point is that my husband didn't become amazing at guitaring overnight. There were days and weeks and months of Time of Your Life and scales and bloody Tenacious D and failed bar chords. There's the "Does this sound in tune?" question every day (twice a day if I've kicked the guitar recently). There was nearly the loss of an eye whilst replacing an A string.

But he's stuck at it, and over the days-weeks-months there's been gradual but obvious improvement. And he's still practicing. Every day, in the free moments while waiting for me to get ready to go out, or while running the bath for our youngest, or when I'm watching TV (see, the annoyance is mutual). And he's still getting better, every day.

Practice is a bastard. But sadly, it's a necessary bastard.

action < reaction

Judith Beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio, probably my favourite ever painting.

I have a postcard of it pinned to the wall above my desk, partly because everyone needs decorative inspiration, and partly because I love what it says about storytelling.

The focus of the picture should be the throat-cutting. That's the most important thing going on at that precise moment. And yet whenever I look at it I can't help thinking the gout of blood doesn't look... right. Certainly not as good as Caravaggio's usual exemplary style. At times it looks almost cartoony, or tacked on as the end.

That's because the real focus is the reactions of the participants. Even if you know nothing of the legend of Holofernes (which I didn't, first time I saw this picture), you can see so much of the story just by the expressions of the three people. Without their reactions, this would just be a beautifully painted moment of violence.

What I always take away from this is: Action is important. It's the focus of the story. But more important is how the characters react to the action. Their emotional response is the heart of the story. It's what draws people in, and draws them back to look closer, again and again.

swearing at 11

You've all seen Glengarry Glen Ross, right? If not, don't worry, you probably already know that you're missing out on one of the best films of the last twenty years.

*counts*

Twenty-five years, sorry. Damn I'm old.

But anyway.

Glengarry Glen Ross, as well as being brilliant, is also full of swears. You likely already know that too. It's a film I'll never be able to show my dad, for example, because he'll spend the whole time tutting at the language.

Having said that, my absolute favourite bit is when Al Pacino breaks out the c-word.

You can probably guess I'm not a fan of the c-word, and 99.9% of the time I don't think it's warranted. However... when Pacino uses it here, you can tell he's saved it for a very special occasion. He spends the entire movie swearing at people, but keeps this one word in reserve for when he needs to turn things up to eleven. If there was a more liberal sprinkling of c-words throughout the movie, it would have diluted the effect, but here it raises eyebrows, despite the vast sweariness that preceded it.

The lesson, I guess, is that if everything is already at eleven, you've got nowhere to go when you need emphasis. Always keep something big in reserve for when you really need to hurl it at Kevin Spacey.

just quickly

A thought for a Friday:

If the universe can take away Lemmy, Bowie, and Alan Rickman in the space of a week, then all bets are off. We're none of us here for a long time. So that thing you've been meaning to do, the one you've been putting off doing? DO IT NOW. Get it started, get if finished, get it done. Your excuses are looking increasingly weak.

And don't forget to hug the people you care about. Also, hug your cats. They'll act like they don't appreciate it, maybe even with claws and biting, but trust me they'll secretly love you for it.

2015 - end of year writing stats

That's a boring heading, isn't it? Anyways, fresh from the Rakie-spreadsheet, some stats about my writing progress in 2015:

Total Word Count: 359,224
(Total for 2014: 295,670)

I'm happy with that. The main projects I worked on this year were:

Finishing The Extra (my Nano novel from November 2014 which I finally completed in March and have ignored since).
A small amount of work on YA superhero story Search & Destroy.
Rewriting and editing Fourth to the Devil (including dreaded synopsis and query letters).
Finally redrafting my YA time-travel, haunted house bonanza 2114, which was started for Nano 2013 and has now been renamed 2116 in honour of how unnecessarily long it's taken me to complete.
Notes on a supernatural crime story, White Death, that I really want to start work on.
Completed NaNoWriMo 2015 with Animal Bones, a rewrite of one of my earliest stories.
And the first draft of Floor 156, a dystopian thriller which I'm pretty sure no one will ever get to read, ever (some things are only written for our own funsies).

Oh, and the ebook of Home Ground came out. :)

One resolution for last year was to write every day, which I just about managed, although it was a close call on a few days and frequently I achieved only a few scribbled notes. Even so, I appear to have averaged approximately 980 words a day (allowing a margin for my shoddy maths), which is very respectable if true.

I also resolved that drawing counted as writing. This was to encourage me to devote more time to drawing, and I assigned an arbitrary word count to time spent (given a picture's worth a thousand words, and all that). I didn't finish anything major, aside from some wedding invites for my sister that turned out okay, but I'm happy that I spent a little more time than usual on a skill I've sadly neglected.

Soooo... projects for 2016...

First and last I need to finish the rebranded 2116. I'm at the horrible stage of editing where you read everything aloud and agonise for hours about word choice ("Do I mean bright or do I mean clear? Is spiderwebbing a real word? Is a culvert what I think it is?"). After that I need to redraft all the crap I wrote last year.

And then I have a stolen idea about dragons that I want to pursue...

In 2016 I will write. I will read. I will draw. I will blog. It's also likely I will drink too much wine and shout at cooking shows on TV. In my spare moments I might sleep. Also, Fallout 4.

Best wishes to you all for a shiny 2016. ("SHINY! That's the word I want!")

2015 review - awesome books

Books are the best. You've maybe heard this, either from myself or others. But really, books are the best, and this year has been full of some lovely, lovely books. These are a random selection of my favourites (not all of which came out this year, but I only discovered them this year so shush).

The Fold - Peter Clines
Clever, witty, creepy sci-fi that reminded me why teleportation scares the bejaysus out of me.

Positive - David Wellington
Quite probably the best zombie book since... well, since David Wellington's Monster Island books. Smart and scary, with a couple of delightful little fan-service nods, brilliantly written characters, and not nearly so much DOOM as certain other post-apoc books.

The Rest of Us Just Live Here - Patrick Ness
I feel bad for all the time I spent NOT reading Patrick Ness. This new one is easily my favourite, so funny and clever. I spent the whole time being delighted by the characters and writing (and reading the funniest bits aloud to my patient husband). Also, coincidentally, it's the first Patrick Ness book that hasn't made me bawl like a baby.

Railhead - Philip Reeve
SENTIENT TRAINS IN SPACE. At one point I thought there was going to be space dinosaurs and I legitimately lost my shit. The most fun book I've read all year.

Atlanta Burns - Chuck Wendig
I should've hated this book. It's exactly the subject matter I avoid at all costs (bullied kids stand up to bullies, yikes). But Mr Wendig has a nasty habit of grabbing you by the neck and dragging you through the story with such manic enthusiasm it's very difficult not to get caught up.

The Zoo - Jamie Mollart
American Psycho via One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a creepy and dark psychological tale.

Revival - Stephen King
Wow, a new Stephen King book that I really liked? I'll take that.

The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow - Katherine Woodfine
Murder and larceny in the grand environs of a newly opened department store in period London.

Runemarks - Joanne Harris
This fun retelling of the Norse legends definitely wasn't released this year, but I loved it so I'm including it. :)

Bird Box - Josh Malerman
A neat idea, very well executed, and scored a triple whammy in our house: it made me sleep with the lights on, it resided for a time in the freezer, and it distressed the crap out of my husband.

A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J Maas
Well, obviously I'm going to fall in love with any book featuring a sarcastic red-headed faerie named Lucien, that was always a foregone conclusion.

In total I've read approximately eighty books this year (I kept a spreadsheet), which is a vast improvement on previous years. I'd therefore like to give an additional thank-you nod to The Year of Reading Dangerously - Andy Miller for encouraging me to get back into reading as a full-time habit. Fifty pages a day or bust!

With that in mind, I'm also determined to finish A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James (which is neither brief nor limited to seven killings, but IS very good) before the end of the year. My resolution for 2016 is not to let any book defeat me.

(My other resolution is MORE BOOKS, of course)