Location: @Work
Time: 2:58AM Nov 11, 2009
Batteries: 75% (but, I'm feeling in good health so that's a strong 75 that won't drain easily)
Morale: A-
[Supergirl] invited me to her apartment last night to meet her mom, who is in Montreal temporarily. I forget the details, but considering that she's from either Kuala Lampur or Hong Kong, that's an interesting story right there.
Meeting her was kinda cool. She's very different from my mom, or, my parents in general.
One big thing is that she's a lot more socially adpet than my parents. Maybe it has something to do with a personality that develops out of years of bouncing around Asia, Europe and North America or something, but put it this way: I felt really comfortable around her, in contrast to my prediction that my parents will make Supergirl unfomfortable. My Dad tends to have nothing to talk about, or to lack the English to really get his thoughts across concisely, wheras my Mom tends to come off as being a moral elitist.
Anyway, Supergirl's mom cooked me this crazy dish of Salmon with something on top (I later discovered it was mayonnaise or something, mmmm) and it was delicious. I guess I'm just constantly impressed by a dishes that might be common to caucassian families, since my family tends to stick to Chinese food mainly. It was kinda crazy though because it felt so rich that I felt a bit nauteous at some point-- you know that feeling when something tastes so good because of that buttery taste, but then, at a certain point it's too much? I held it down though and it was a really interesting dish to have.
There wasn't much conversation that involved me, but that was mostly because Supergirl and her mom talk so much together. I was pretty surprised. Their relationship is so different from my own to my parents, because my parents and I don't talk nearly as much. It's almost as if Supergirl and her mom are friends more than anything. The relationship I have with my parents are like with work colleagues.
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Location: @Work
Time: 4:08AM Nov 11, 2009
Batteries: 65%
Morale: A-
After dinner yesterday, I tried my hand at a game of Go/Baduk. Supergirl goes to some Go club at McGill, and it came up in conversation a while back that she plays. I didn't really know much about Go, except what little I'd learned online from a bit of dabbling on Yahoo! games since [SiB] is an avid player who at some point forced me to watch at least a handful of the first episodes of Hikaru No Go.
I must say that I had more interest in the game this time around because of the time I spent in Korea.
While I was teaching in SK, some of my students actually attended Baduk (the Korean name for Go) academies. They had textbooks and everything, and they were expected to solve a certain amount of problems for homework everyday. It was like doing math homework.
Anyway, I played a couple of games with Supergirl on a second hand board that we'd bought off of SiB. It was actually the same board that I'd bought for SiB years ago when he first started playing. We didn't use the whole board, and thank god, because otherwise the games would've taken forever.
I made a few really bad mistakes but because she was giving me a lot of mulligans and hints, somehow I actually ended up winning the first game. The second game, I suppose the kid gloves were off and she beat me by more than 10 points.
It's an intersting game to play because it's so different from the way that I'm used to playing games-- which is more 'chess-like.' Maybe even RTS-ish. My point is that the paradigm is fundamentally different-- in chess-ish games (chess and chinese chess) and RTS games (Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Starcraft, Warcrafts, etc) one of the big parts of the strategy is the different unit types you deploy. That is to say, the effectiveness of the position of your pieces is affected in large part by the abilities of those particular pieces. A good square for a rook to be sitting in might not be a good place for a pawn to be sitting in, for example.
The big thing about baduk is that, like in checkers, there are no different unit types. There's just a stone. Like in checkers, it's easy to underestimate that despite that there is only one unit type, the pure reliance on position and prediction make it an insanely compilcated game.
Last week when Supergirl first mentioned that she played baduk, I started looking it up online and she even ran me through a couple of tutorials to get the basics in my brain. I played a few games on Yahoo! Go but those were mostly useless-- somehow I won 5 games because my opponents quit, and I was destroyed in 1 game where my opponent said that he'd need a 9 stone handicap for me to even have a chance of beating him. Which is pretty hardcore as far as handicaps go, apparently.
Anyway, playing with Supergirl was the first time that I played any worthwhile games of baduk, and it really got me thinking about this game. It's something that's hard to describe, but I really appreciate how up until now I've never played a game that requires this kind of thought process.
I mean, if you look at games, there are different 'mindsets' you have to put yourself in. A lot of times I appreciate a game because of the gameplay system-- that is to say, how a game requires you think.
You could have a game like chess, for example. Units have different abilities. It's turn based.
Something like an RTS is similar to chess, but obviously, there are no turns.
Then you might have an FPS-- yet the kind of mentality for a game of Halo is significantly different from what you'd use for a game of Rainbow Six, or Gears of War.
Completely different from the kinds of strategies you'd employ in a game of MarioKart, which is different from Forza, or Gran Turisismo.
And while Final Fantasy games certainly have their similarities, the system and tactics involved in playing a game of Tactics, differ signficantly from XII, which differs from IV.
I kinda liken it also to how the philosophies of different martial arts differ. If you do european kickboxing for example, most of the attacks are done with closed fists, the heels and the shin. On the other hand, if you look more at okinawan based arts, there is usage of the blades of the hands and feet for example.
Little differences in the systems or the 'rules' of the way to do things change the way you have to think significatly and I think that in large part, part of the joy of being a dedicated, open-minded gamer is to find a game that makes you think in a different way.
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It's kinda cool to just kinda feel like your brain is developing in ways that it didn't. Maybe it's because it's been been a while since I've specifically been a student, but it's been a while since I've really gone into something totally out of my repetoire. Most of the time nowadays, I'm doing things that sort of branch out from existing interests. But nothing is causing that "hurting in muscles I didn't know existed" feeling like baduk right now, because it's really quite different from anything I've played before.
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Supergirl suffers from all the stigma that one does when she's a girl gamer. When she walks into a game shop, dudes make comments.
It's one of the things that's important to me about our relationship-- that she is a gamer. That she thinks about things in a certain way that gamers do. That she understands me when I put my hat on her and say "You've just got a Hat of +1 Hat!"
But what's great about the gamer that she is is that she's not the same kind of gamer that I am, in the sense that we play different game types. There's enough overlap that we can understand eachother, but there are enough differences that we (or at least I) don't get bored of the subject. I play Street Fighter or SF derivitives (such as the MvsC engined games, or CvsSNK types) wheras she plays Guilty Gear, whose engine makes like NO SENSE to me whatsoever. I play chess, she plays go (whose engine makes like no sense to me whatsoever). I play FPS, she plays MMORPGs.
"POS?" I mumble, while we're watching The Guild. "What's POS mean? Is that a Warcraft thing?"
"It means Piece Of Shit," she nods knowingly.
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I'm kinda glad that Supergirl introduced me to baduk. It kinda pains me that even as I grow more and more comfortable being around her, and dare I even say, more dependant on her being in my life just in general, at the same time this function over time is inversely proportional to the amount of time we have left together.
I guess it's odd but if it's to be a game like baduk, at least this is something that even after she's gone I'll have to grow as something that she brought into my life. It's one of those things that I can get better at, as opposed to all the other memories that don't grow...
