—awkward conversation between people who don’t know each other—
Guy 1 to Guy 2 and 3: Hey, are you guys bringing any game systems with you?
Guy 3: YEAH- me and my roommates have already delegated them out. Ahaha. I couldn’t live without my Xbox.
Girl 1: -uninterested- I can’t play video games.
Me: Oh, I’m bring a PS2.
Guy 2: …
Guy 3 to Guy 1 and 2: So which games are you bringing?
—etc—
Yes, I got the stare. The stare that means, “Are you from another planet? Women belong in the kitchen!” (Okay, I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea.) While in many other areas of the world, the gender line is slowly becoming erased, with video games it’s still fairly prominent. If girls say they play video games, guys assume it’s something like Tetris. Maybe if they’re a bit more open-minded, they think it’s something like Final Fantasy- which is true for many people, me included. And Final Fantasy’s a good game, a renowned RPG series, but now many guys label it as an “easier” game or, as my male friend put it in a recent (as in this morning) message, a “weird asian game,” that is somehow not on par with more “manly” games, as in shooters and Real Time Strategy (RTS), simply because of its popularity with none other than the female population. But what’s wrong with being an RPG fan? Many guys are RPG fans. Oh, but, as they shall protest, they are OLD-SCHOOL RPG fans. They don’t just play the recent, mainstream, pretty stuff like FFX. No, no, they’ve been around since SNES RPGs, like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound; it’s not the same thing at all. …As if girls haven’t touched an SNES console. That was the first system I touched- Street Fighter II, if I recall, when I was 5.
And it’s not like girls only like RPGs. My favorite game is actually Soul Calibur II, a fighter. I know girls who are good at shooters, even those that prefer them. I have been told by my boyfriend that a lot of girls are good Starcraft players (thank God he’s open-minded about this), though I admittedly have not explored RTSes very throroughly. Girls can and DO play video games too, alright? I’m so fed up with the chauvinistic attitude in that area…well, I’m fed up with chauvinistic attitudes in any area, but this one more so.
There’s only one perk: when you beat guys in a game, as I have many a male at SCII, you can feel content knowing that they are crying on the inside from being beaten by a girl.
Feel free to use the resources for your layouts,wallpapers,avatars or any kind of graphic but please give credit. by linking us back
Oh how quaint. They want a link back for their resources, ignoring the utter hypocrisy of that statement. I’m fairly sure that the sites they ambiguously lumped together as “resources” also wanted a link back, instead of a bypass that was too pathetic to even qualify for stealing. And under the general Graphics category, they say:
Do not claim any o the graphic as your own doing, me my mistress as well as my staff worked really hard on every one of those graphic peaces.
“Really hard.” I may question that, but for all I know, they may have. Yet I’m sure the (unfortunately, nameless) people who made the resources with which “me my mistress” make their graphics also worked “really hard” on every one of their “graphic peaces.” (I don’t really want to dig at their English, because I checked their profiles and English might not be many of their first languages, but it’s hard to resist sometimes. Yes, I admit it; I’m just being petty.) Their designs, compared to their terms of use, reflect a completely different set of values. I can’t make them coincide. Perhaps all these numerous “textures and brushes [...] and gradients” were from their own site? But obviously not, because the design creator admits to not knowing where the brushes came from. And anyway, if that were so, there would be no need for the line, “Resources©to the respective owners.” No, what’s going on is clear: these girls are taking resources from other sites, using them with little discrimination on their own, and committing the greatest crime to roam the internet: complete lack of common sense.
Please, discuss. And somebody, please e-mail them and inform them of their wrongdoing. I would but…I don’t want to hurt any feelings.
]]>But first, earlier in the day:
I have finally made the jump to making Firefox my default browser and I must say, wow. All these plugins and themes make everything so much better. I don’t think I’ll need to use another program, now that Firefox is my music player, my FTP client, my screenshot taker, my validator, and all sorts of other things. I even got something that allows you to render a webpage in IE so I can check cross-browser compatibility. It’s just too amazing. @.@
Oh, and I changed the theme. This one’s pretty cool. And I was going to make a more contemplative post, but I’m just too astounded by Firefox right now.
Now:
Those of you involved in the graphics community here on the internet may have noticed a disturbing new trend: famed sites of old are closing down in quick succession, citing “life” or “lack of interest” as the insurmountable obstacle. That’s perfectly understandable; I’ve experienced that ruthless prioritizing myself, though I just let nD stagnate until I regain that interest rather than closing it down. But, now, as always when the top of the food chain removes itself, now a gap is waiting to be filled, and a slew of graphics sites are springing up or stepping up their game to try to take their place. And over the past week, as I was surfing the web, I am not ashamed to say that I’ve never even heard of some of these sites before, yet their talents are surprisingly (I say ’surprisingly’ because I thought I had rooted out all the good sites in my first two years) good. I’ll give you an example: Reminiscent Designs. It looks great, right? A high-calibur site if ever I saw one. Yet prior to last week, I’d never glimpsed it before. And no wonder: it only opened half a year ago, and moved to that address 1 month ago. Change really happens quickly in this niche of the web.
But what’s that mean to us, people who’ve been around and stayed around? Now that there are all these new sites out there, it almost reminds me of the landed gentry and the noveau-riche from many countries’ histories: though I haven’t found much evidence of it out there, I myself will confess that it is tempting sometimes to snub them because they haven’t been around as long as I have, or haven’t developed that sense of netiquette needed for graphic sites. (There; now you know I secretly harbor aristocratic feelings. If I were alive during the French Revolution, I probably would have been at the top of Robespierre’s list for the guillotine.) And quite often I do an internal snicker at some of their names- I won’t mention any, because it’s mean and I do have some morals, but you know what I mean, the really over-the-top ones that seem like they just stringed together ‘mystical’ sounding words. (I’m kind of hypocritical, aren’t I, when my site name’s in freaking Latin. How much more pseudo-mystical can you get? I’m thinking about changing it soon…suggestions?) But even I admit that as comforting it is to stick to the familiar, the web designers who have been around forever (as in before I got into this) and stuck around and proved themselves to be adept designers and coders, it probably would be a good idea to venture into this new world of new names and bridge the gap between the two designing generations. Because they are, technically, the future; if this cycle plays out some more, then even more of us, the Old Brigade, will drop out and move on and then the big names will be them, the Young’uns. (I come up with such amusing names; it almost makes it sound like a fantasy novel.) And to make sure you aren’t forgotten, you need to leave a mark on the new sites. At least, that’s the business reason. I would go into friendship and all the abstract, feel-good stuff, but you can go to Reminiscent Designs, I didn’t recognize a single one. And maybe I should. I mean, I visited them all, and I still think Reminiscent is the best out of the bunch, but the others aren’t half-bad. But I’d be hard-pressed to connect any of them to any of my affiliates. That indicates a divide in the community. And maybe it would be better if there wasn’t one. That’s all I’m saying.
The thing is, that list represents my high school life. I did those things all throughout the 4 years I was in that institution. Now I’m in college, and I thought it was a new era. That’s half of why I’m so disappointed, I suppose, because things do not just pick up immediately after graduation; summer drags on and on, like a purgatory prior to heaven. Not that college is akin to heaven, but in terms of life and activity, it will certainly be a step up from this.
But of course, when I get to college, thrust into the bustle and the work and trying to get a 4.0, I’ll wonder why I didn’t value my free time in summer more. Because, grey though the days are, at least now I have no obligations. And I wish for some. Ironic.
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