Hey, so I did a thingy. It's the first thingy in a long time. I know most of you don't like vidjagames all that much, but I figured since I mentioned not being able to do thingies lately, I'd share this one. Still don't think it beats my Mario Kart 8 win, but I guess it's personal preference.
The topic can be applied to a broader range as well, so I'll just ask it again in broader terms here: What's something that you used to hate, but now love?
Tomatoes. Brie. Coffee. No, I never hated coffee, but it's now an important part of my morning. (Hey, this is already turning into a 'kleinbl00 is officially old' post, let's just cap that shit, eh?) So I used to have a saying: "Horses, hot tubs, sailboats and children are things I like my friends to have." The point being: they're all pretty awesome, but they require a lot of maintenance. My wife, back when she was just my girlfriend, objected on a couple levels - one, "children are not things"; two, she wasn't interested in her friends' kids, she wanted her own. So here's the thing. The little hellion slept like ass last night, woke up in a shitty mood, and can name every relative in every picture but "daddy." She still thinks screeches are compelling, she tells you she needs to pee after she's soiled a diaper and 6am is PARTY TIME in this house. She's pretty cool, though.
I had one video game phase after I dropped out of college. I played Skyrim (I had played / watched my brother and high school boyfriend play Oblivion in High School and loved it) and Mass Effect and eventually Final Fantasy. Keep in mind, I'm not good at video games in general so I usually play about 30%-50% through until it is too hard or I'm too bored. Mass Effect kept my interest for the longest. I still occasionally sit back and explore Skyrim. Final Fantasy - I got maybe 10 hours in and ditched it. It wasn't that it was slow or the story was bad - it was just not enjoyable to actually play and let the dialog play out but it wasn't fun to run from place to place and level up all that jazz. I couldn't figure out why I was tediously walking through this world. Then I realized I was playing way to many video games and got a second job and everything turned out okay. As far as what I hated and now love - conversations with older people. Those stories that grandpa used to tell you every single Christmas or that drunk oldschooler at the bar who keeps interrupting your story to tell you. They're crazy. They may not be entirely true. There may or may not be a point. They may ramble until oblivion and miss 4 different points and end up on Mars. But fuck - if you stop thinking about all the better shit you could be doing with your time and questioning every sentence's validity, they are the most informative, interesting, fun things to listen to. I have one dive bar that I go to solely to get hit up by lonely 85 year olds and listen to them talk about their experiences in the workplace or their bizarre viewpoints on women and all the shit that's changed. I met one guy a few weeks ago that told me a story about how he was an accountant and eventually started his own business and was very successful. The computers kept getting better and better but he never took the time to learn how to use the computer because he was rich and powerful and didn't need to - he had people to do that for him. Then he retired, got sick of not being able to keep up with his grandkids and Facebook, took a computer course at the local community college, realized the power of excel, and now is back running a small business shorting stocks or something intense by computing things in excel. That's amazing.
I'm with you on this one. I used to find those stories so boring. Old people are awesome, and I've learned a shit ton from being around them. I love that they can answer questions like, "is this reaction to Benghazi very different from the Iran embassy hostage thing in '79?" Their answer may lead into a tangent about some significant other they decided to hate in hindsight, and they may go on a tirade about how Obama is a "jive-ass motherfucker from Chicago" afterward, but it's always interesting and often funny nonetheless.As far as what I hated and now love - conversations with older people. Those stories that grandpa used to tell you every single Christmas or that drunk oldschooler at the bar who keeps interrupting your story to tell you. They're crazy. They may not be entirely true. There may or may not be a point. They may ramble until oblivion and miss 4 different points and end up on Mars.
I used to co-moderate a small subreddit with a very nice lady in her 50s. She gave up on Reddit because she got sick of all the missed opportunities. The basic facts of life that, to her, were self-evident, were called into question every day... and in order to add anything to the conversation, she'd have to go "okay, I'm 50, I've been on the planet two or three times as long as you, and I've learned a few things" and then put forth her notions for defense, not for edification. Not to say "respect your elders" but I find that if you are open and interested and accept what someone who's been around longer than you has to say, you'll get a perspective you likely haven't considered. And to say that one of the primary hindrances to Internet communication is that in person, we know whether we're talking to a kid or a grandmother. On the Internet, we have to assume we're talking to a grandmother that acts like a kid or a kid that acts like a grandmother or a grandmother pretending to be a kid or a room full of preschoolers that know how to type. it's a hindrance to legitimate information transfer.
FFX is one of my favorite games. Except for the laughing scene, which will always make me and everyone else cringe. Music things off the top of my head: 1. Neil Young. Early in high school I couldn't stand Neil Young, his voice annoyed me and I thought his guitar playing was meandering and sub-par. Now I love him though. 2. Punk Music. I'm talking New York Dolls, The Wipers, and stuff like that. I was never into older punk but over the past year that has changed a lot. Watch out, next thing you know I might grow a mohawk. I, too, used to dislike tomatoes but they're pretty rad. I could eat them on a lot of things. Onions are the same deal. College. My first year of college I really didn't like it, not until the summer session at least. I was in a new place, and constantly busy with classes and athletics so I didn't make many connections until late in the year but then I pulled a 180 with my interests and everything else the second year and wouldn't have traded the past few years for anything.
To be honest, alcohol. I didn't "get" drinking until basically once I graduated college. I drank, sure, and I threw up a couple of times, but my problem was essentially that I didn't know my limits or how to moderate my drinking, and as a small person my max capacity is usually about - oh, six drinks. So if I drank in college I was pretty guaranteed to have a bad time, or not drink enough (like, have a beer) in order to hit that sweet spot of "I'm drunk and I'm having a great time." It was either "I'm mildly buzzed and can't tell" or "God I'm miserable and I've been pouring poison into my body and WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE _refugee_???" Coffee I've grown into but don't love, still. Like kb, tomatoes - I love my tomatoes now but used to be completely uninterested. There are some tastes I identify as "adult tastes" that I think some people grow into as their palates mature and evolve - dark chocolate, for instance, and coffee is another one. Can we do "things you used to love but now hate"? That one's easier. :)
Handwriting. I grew up with computers, and my handwriting has always been garbage, so I just never really did much of it when I could avoid it. At some point in high school though, I began to write a lot. I think it partially started because my first job was working as a news writer for a small newspaper, and interviewing people required me to take notes. I ended up becoming the Editor in Chief of the school newspaper as well, and despite building the first website for the paper, I found myself keeping a notebook with notes. Eventually, as I started to write more and more, I found that handwriting things first made my writing a whole lot better. It was structured better, phrased better, and just all around... better. I bought a cheap fountain pen as well, and that made writing fun. I wrote my first book with that pen, and I've wrote a lot of research with my current one. My handwriting still sucks though.
I'm having a similar experience with Zelda: Wind Waker right now. I played it for like 20 minutes at a friend's house when it first came out. I hated it. It was childish, cartoonish, and the controls were awkward. I just got Wind Waker HD for free with Mario Cart 8, and it's not that bad. The cell shading looks better in HD, and the controls seem fine now. There are things I like and dislike. I prefer Zelda games where Link is older, but I like the open-world feel. Hard to say if my preferences have changed, or if it's better in HD on the Wii U. But overall, I'm enjoying it. Not my favorite Zelda game, but certainly worth playing.
Real quick response to FFX at least: I used to think that game was mediocre, now I think it's just terrible. That story is bananas. It's everything I hate about JRPGs. And that voice. That fucking voice. I don't care if it fits his character, it's grating. I can't do that high-pitched voice in any JRPG. The put out Tales of the Abyss on the 3DS which I decided to buy because why not, I had heard good things. And then the whole game just fucking shits itself all over my hands. That game was just a travesty of storytelling. I'm not talking about character development, which I'm sure gets better because if you can't develop a character you shouldn't be writing anything, I'm talking about shit like having a character want to investigate the engines that let a land battleship work and then the main character going "nah!" But that wasn't it, no, I could deal with that. Worldbuilding is one thing. It's that rabbit thing you get. That fucking rabbit. Every goddamn time I press the button to shoot a fireball and that squeaky, nasal, high pitch voice screamed "FIRE!" I begged for it to end. And it's there. I will always remember that fucking nightmare voice, this stupid rabbit thing that shoots fire, I cannot fucking handle that shit. I can't take that kind of shit seriously. There were little moments when I almost cared about the game and then the rabbit talks and I just die. The whole suspension of disbelief shatters and then the game picks up bits and pieces of it and shoves it up my urethra just to torment me with that voice. Fuck. Why does that ever have to be a thing? It's not cute or nostalgic, it's horrible. It's actually the worst. You know what they could've done instead of those stupid rabbits? Maybe have, I don't know, the main character use fucking magic to get past the obstacles? So that I have agency in the world instead of relying on a talking plush toy whose sole purpose is to make my life a living hell? Goddamnit. I wanted to forget about that game. Okay back on topic. I used to hate rap. I thought it was trashy in high school. Then I gave Kanye a listen and started to explore from there. Went from being the kid that was like "all rap sounds the same" to trying a new album in my drive to school every week. Kanye is still my favorite. There are certainly better artists and certainly better albums, but he's always consistently great and you can listen to any of his stuff at any time no matter what the mood. I still hate tomatoes though.
Eh. It's not something I'd be down with doing. Video games take a lot of time to finish, it's not something you can plop on the television and just observe for a couple of hours. Plus, they're expensive, and that's just not something I can afford at the moment. I wouldn't be able to approach it with my usual vitriol either way for a pretty simple reason. I want to develop games, and in the process of even writing a really simple maze I can tell that games take a lot of fucking work. The practices and methods are not as established as film, and so really going off on a team is harder because there's almost no resources to help people who don't know what they're doing. If a game is really good, or really terrible (or really overly praised like FF13, 13-2, and 13-3 were/are) then I might talk about it, but it wont' be angry screaming foaming at the mouth JTHipster, it'll be a bit more down to earth. Remember that a movie has teams of potentially hundreds of people, and a game is made by teams of anywhere between 2-100, with most not even going over 20. A lot of the criticism will come down to "it would have been better if they had been given more time and money." Because of the amount of work and talent that a game needs just to be a functioning product, let alone good, you tend not to see a lot of really delusional developers, not like in movies. In films you can have directors who are fucking crazy and try to make this hyper ambitious movie that is just awful. For a game, if you try to be hyper ambitious, the game just won't get finished because you can't get it to QA to compile because you ran out of money. Unless you're talking about Too Human. Fuck Too Human.
3D Legend of Zelda games for me. I tried Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, and just could not get into them, rarely making past the first dungeon. I loved the 2D games (particularly Four Swords on Gamecube) but could not get into the 3D no matter how many times I tried. Then, years after trying the last time, I got Ocarina of Time 3D, and absolutely loved it. Its now one of my favorite games and series. Re-tried Wind Waker with the HD version (for the same reason I tried OoT in the first place: lack of game on their respective systems,) and loved it this time, and I eagerly look forward to whatever Nintendo has planned for Legend of Zelda HD.
Collard greens. Sushi. Coconut. Weed. (still on the fence about weed, but I need it)
Sushi. For me, it was definitely an acquired taste. The first time I had it, it literally made me gag.
I didn't quite gag when I ate sushi for the first time, but I didn't like it. Now I love it. I'm usually quite skeptical of things that are called an acquired taste but with sushi I understand why you would.
3D RPGs. Pretty sure it is the result of technology evolving, rather than my tastes changing, but I used to hate 3D RPGs when they first starting coming out. With rare exceptions like Tales of Symphonia they were worse off for it. But thanks to games like Xenoblade, The Witcher 2 I don't really think that anymore. ArcSystemWorks fighters. Guilty Gear X wasn't really my thing, but I'm extremely exited for Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-