Status update

Well, I can type with both hands, although stuff requiring the ring finger on my right hand is generally typo-riffic. Almost typing quirk level, actually, since I tend to hit zero or 9 instead of the letter o more often than I'd like. I've got Neosporin with painkiller and Band-Aids (sticking plasters to all y'all who're in the UK) on both injured sites now, although I haven't completely removed the direct dressing the doctors put on the ring finger; some of it stuck to the wound site and I'm too chicken to try to peel it off in case the bleeding starts again. Tonight will probably involve a long hot soak of that hand in the hopes that the damn dressing falls off on its own.

Remarkably little pain. It's not numb, you understand, but it only hurts a little and most of that is on impact rather than throbbing or anything.

(no subject)

Hey, question. Given the rise of narrative and character interaction in video games over the past ten years (I seem to recall a studio executive/writer saying something last year about 'if you go to a James Bond movie, you're with our characters and intellectual property for two hours, but if you buy a James Bond video game you're with our character for twenty'), does the Bechdel test apply to video games these days? Or does the fact that in video games without cutscenes, the only characters you see or hear interacting are the ones in your immediate vicinity skew things?

I'm mostly curious because I was thinking about the Fallout games I've played and the various depictions of women and minorities. FO3 has a decent number of women in non-exploitative roles (Moira Brown, Agatha, Dr. Madison Li, Sentinel Sarah Lyons, Star Paladin Cross, Amata Almodovar, Machete, Princess, Lucy West, Karen Schenzy, etc.) as video games go, but since NPC conversations are lucky to last more than sixty seconds regardless of the participants, you're only going to pass the Bechdel test if your Lone Wanderer is female. Similar deal in FNV- Colonel Moore, Old Lady Gibson, Daisy Whitman, Jeannie May, Veronica Santangelo, Rose of Sharon Cassidy, Ghost, Lily, Sarah Weintraub and plenty of other non-exploitative female characters*, but since NPCs don't talk to each other for more than a minute regardless of gender or lack thereof and since you can't have more than one humaniform follower in your party at a time, I'm not sure if you can apply Bechdel at all due to the limitations of the format.

Mind you, not all video games have these limitations. Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2, for example, allow you to have multiple party members, and they banter with each other regularly. Bring two women with you for about half an hour of play and you'll get a total of five minutes of conversation that has nothing to do with a man, almost guaranteed. So there's that.... I guess what I'm asking is, what's a decent way to judge female-female interaction in narrative-intensive video games, given that they're a different form of storytelling from movies, TV or novels.


*uuuuuunfortunately there are also many exploitative-as-hell female roles but then again a major percentage of these are characters in the Gomorrah casino, and Gomorrah has as many guy prostitutes in ridiculously stripperific outfits as it does girl ones, for whatever that's worth

Oh, for-

LJ.

Again.

With the friendslist remaking.

It's only in beta for now but given that the Russians shut down the US offices for LJ and everything else... I'm going to follow bcgphoenix's example and shut down crossposting and commenting on my LJ. I'm really sorry to those of you who're still there but I'm just tired of their bullpuckey.

G'night, LJ. It was fun while it lasted.