It's been a while since I did much with this site other than writing in the microblog. I haven't really been doing anything earth-shattering except playing a lot of videogames and going shopping with Riza. Well, I guess Terraria is pretty earth-shattering. Because you have to shatter the earth. To do mining. You know. You get it.
I've built up Woodwood about as much as I can, so now I have a new character in a world called Greenweed; a guy named Marlo. So named because he wears red and blue, just like that jumping guy from the Nintendos. Anyway, I actually want to do as little mining as possible with Marlo. Kaylee has died down the mines so much, there's not a single cavern that hasn't got a gravestone in it. Well, I say that and then I have Marlo dig a long tunnel and build a scaffold. Basically, this was out of necessity, as there was a really high cliff that Marlo fell down from, which wasn't high enough to make him take damage, but it's too high to jump back up and the cliff face is too random for Wood Platforms. So, in order to get home, Marlo dug a long tunnel under the cliff, then another one up to the summit and built a scaffold out of Wood Platforms so he could get back up. In general, though, I want Marlo to deal strictly in lumber and building. I just dug that tunnel out of sheer desperation.
Also, I remembered why I stopped playing New Leaf— it was largely because I had run out of improvements to make to Westfold. The only things left to do, basically, are build benches and street lamps and maybe redecorate my house a couple different ways. Incidentally, I randomly decided to make my house into something like an alpine cabin at Christmas, rather than the summer backyard I had been planning on. Not real sure why I decided to just pivot in mid-stride like that, but at least the office is gone now. All I seem to do now is run errands for the villagers and steal fruit from Tortimer Island. Even so, I still load Westfold up everyday to see what's going on and who I can bring into the RV park.
Also, what the actual hell was the point of making a stereovision Sonic the Hedgehog? Especially when they didn't even bother making it fill the entire screen. Like, if you've got 3D mode enabled (3DS and variants only), then you can see a very uninteresting and unconvincing 3D effect, otherwise it's just Sonic the Hedgehog, only with fucked-up audio emulation. Not as fucked up as the GBA port, but it's still pretty bad. The only thing that could have made it worthwhile is to make it fill the whole screen, which was not done. I know they ported Sonic 2 in the same manner, at which point it wouldn't have been possible to fill the screen during the special stages (Jon Burton @gamehut explained why), but there's not really any reason why they couldn't have made the sidescrolling bits fill the screen. Certainly the 3DS had more video memory than the Mega Drive, so, like, why not? Quite honestly, there's no benefit in playing the 3D Classics versions of Sonic 1 & 2 relative to simply running the original ROMs on Picodrive.
Finally, Riza and I have been doing a lot of shopping. Mostly at the grocery store (damn is she a savvy shopper! I'm pretty sure she's managed to save us nearly $100 finding deals and discounts), but we also went to the clothes giveaway at the unitarian church. She was kind of hesitant about going, initially, very much as I was at first. However, I, the Jewish trans girl, went to that clothes giveaway 3 times before she arrived and nothing bad happened. The church is pretty small— the giveaway is held in the sanctuary. There's references to verses from the Epistle to the Galatians on the wall, so that's pretty encouraging. As you may recall, Galatians 3:28 goes, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile [or Greek], neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus". The particular verse in this case is 5:22, which Wikisource tells me goes, "The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, and faith." Anyway, scripture notwithstanding, we both found some super cute fits, one of which I even wore to my job interview on Monday.
Further to my interview, I think I've finally cracked how to walk like a woman. All it took was wearing a purse (something I swore I would never do, I know), whose shoulder strap I can grasp with both hands. Standing like this with the feet together and the gaze canted downward slightly presents a feminine standing posture for waiting to cross the road, then a quick, deliberate step that doesn't slow until the destination has been reached. Basically, imagine you're a piece of meat that has to slip past the wolves unnoticed. I know that's sort of an extreme simile, but that's what I was feeling, walking around Downtown [REDACTED] dressed full fem. Fortunately, the interviewers didn't seem particularly transphobic... though their eyes mutually glazed over when I mentioned that I'm Jewish and so I would need special consideration for erev shabbat and would need to keep my head covered. I don't think I'm getting that job. But at least it's for good old-fashioned antisemitism instead of transphobia (sigh...).