vatstep said:
I don't really have a problem with the faster charts for me, it's the orange button and that's it. I always played medium in GH, as it left the orange button out but offered enough difficulty. In RB, I five-starred every song on my first try in medium. It was so incredibly easy and boring compared to GH (more authentic charts though, I know), that I was finally going to make it a point to move up to hard with RB2.
Oddly sometimes my biggest problem with GH3 was that the orange button wasn't used more. I'm very comfortable with using it (actually, I want a few more buttons and if it was possible to represent on-screen without being a confusing mess I'd like to have a few more rows so we can have multiple strings... but that's going a bit too far for a game) and sometimes I'd like to play a slightly easier chart for a song that isn't going to brutalize me, but that still respects my fluency with the controller. I guess moving to orange was a bit tricky when I first did it, but honestly GH1 had such a great learning curve that I found it really easy to move over. "Hey" was particularly good for me to get used to casually moving up and down the fretboard without even thinking about it. "Sweet Child 'O Mine"'s intro is much the same, but I'd been playing for a lot longer when I got to that.
vatstep said:
I didn't have my first drink until I was 23. I started to claim edge in 8th grade when I discovered Victory Records (lolz), but kind of quit using the label by the end of high school. After that, I still didn't drink, but just didn't want to so definitively label myself. Eventually, I just got to a point where I wanted to try alcohol; just to see how it felt, I guess. Obviously, it wasn't a social, peer-pressure thing, considering that I had gotten through my high school and college years where that sort've thing would've had the most sway.
I'm still not a big drinker, though. I just have a few beers occasionally (and by that I mean maybe a couple of times of month) with a good meal or while watching a ball game with friends. I don't think I'll ever have a desire to purposefully get drunk that's when, as Belgand mentioned, your consciousness and behavior are altered. Having a buzz isn't exactly like that; it's more like being slightly happier and warm while still inherently feeling like yourself. Anything beyond that doesn't really interest me.
I'm just not at all curious. It holds very little appeal to me and I don't want to introduce a harmful substance into my body when it's much easier to avoid compared to pretty much anything else. I'm also at fairly high risk for alcoholism from
both sides of my family, but that honestly has absolutely nothing to do with it, just a lucky chance that I'm otherwise choosing to abstain.
At the same time I don't hold anything against people who just drink casually, moderately, and on occasion. I do, however, have something against the sort of people who would choose not to eat at a restaurant just because they don't have a liquor license. The kind who feel like alcohol is a necessary part of all social functions. To whom "going out" means "getting drunk". I think that this is a dangerous and weirdly pervasive part of our culture and while we recognize and condemn it in teenagers and college students a lot of adults continue to hypocritically engage in the same behaviors. But a glass of wine with dinner or a beer with friends? It's certainly not my choice, but not the sort of thing I'm going to have a problem with.
Hell, I like hanging out at bars which is honestly a bit of a problem. Before moving I used to go to one in particular because I played trivia there weekly, was friendly with the staff, and a friend of mine who didn't have a car and did drink liked going so it worked out perfectly with me as a constantly designated driver. If anyone here watched The Amazing Race Dave Spiker was a waiter and bartender there (I certainly didn't, I only became aware of it one night when I showed up for trivia and wondered why Dave was on the big TV) and we were pretty friendly and would hang out there on Monday nights when it was otherwise pretty dead and he tended bar. It does seem odd to me, however, that such a basic sort of social interaction is so exclusively related to alcohol as it would seem to have no other reasonable relationship. This social concept of alcohol is just something I don't think I'll ever entirely understand. Sort of like why parties seem to inherently involve drinking or why getting really drunk is apparently fun to so many people.
The biggest problem for me is one of cooking. It's occasionally a huge pain in the ass to try and deal with various recipes. Yeah, it'll often cook off, but that's not really the point. I don't need to a have a bottle of whatever minus maybe a few tablespoons just sitting around the house doing nothing. Especially wine where it'll go bad rather quickly. Non-alcoholic wine (the Ariel brand is probably one of the only ones even worth mentioning) generally works fairly well though although even I can taste where it's clearly lacking body (mainly the red) that the alcohol would have imparted.
vatstep said:
Plus, drinking is fucking expensive (unless you exclusively drink PBR like most of my friends), and I just don't have the money to support such a habit. I'd rather spend my cash on more constructive things like, you know, the $600 I've put toward Rock Band games, instruments and DLC. :lol
Yeah. My girlfriend and I still try to buy soda for around a maximum of $5 for a 24 pack which used to be pretty easy to find before we moved. It's one of the few things where prices are actually noticeably higher. I can't possibly fathom the amount of money people spend on alcohol.
vatstep said:
I really have the utmost respect for you guys who've stuck with it, though. After spending many years in the hardcore community, I've seen countless edge friends drop the label and become heavy drinkers and drug users I've don't think I have a single one left who's stuck by it. So please don't interpret this post as a dig against you straight edge folks. I don't mean it that way at all just sharing my experience.
Yeah, me too. I suspect just about everyone in the community has had the same experience. I find it interesting that a lot of people seem to have the same problem that we tend to get with abstinence pledges where they're just holding themselves back from something that they really want to do and when they finally give in it's almost always with disastrous consequences. The people who find that it's just not for them and are reasonable about it though I have the same respect for. It's definitely not my choice, but if you're going to be responsible then I have no qualms with it, especially when I see a lot of other people who don't have particularly responsible attitudes.
I mean, I don't want to be anally fisted in the middle of the afternoon on a city street while a small crowd of people watch*, but if that's what you're into then hey, feel free. I don't see how that could be harming anyone.
*An incident that occurred about two weeks ago at Folsom Street Fair: a major civic event celebrating the leather and BDSM communities, especially the gay leather community. It's one of the reasons why San Francisco is one of the best damn places on Earth for having something so otherwise fringe and offensive to prudish sensibilities be a major, well-known, public event that's criticized in some circles for being too mainstream. A friend saw a female domme urinating into a man's mouth through a short tube she carried for this purpose just standing around on the sidewalk and same-sex fellatio, while I believe it's become less common, is still readily going on, say, in front of the port-a-potties.
vatstep said:
My girlfriend likes them, and she has terrible taste in music. So you're not the only one. But really, they're not bad; I just haven't given them a decent listen.
They're pretty much just good modern shoegaze. I think I discovered them either directly off of the Shelflife records website while looking at some other bands or possibly through a mention on the now-defunct blog
Teaching the Indie Kids To Dance Again. I just assumed that they were still a pretty minor act distributed on a largely unheard-of indie label. Since I've never really heard anyone else ever mention them I never even knew people had heard of them.
