Shallow Depths

Recently, I had a nice, relaxing evening to myself. I caught up on The Guild, played some Dragon Age, and generally bummed around. Sometimes that's all I really need.

I'm not very good at motivating myself to cook for one, so I wandered down the street to get a veggie burger for dinner. All well and good, until someone decided to pester me on the way home. It's quite common for people to stop and ask for directions from their cars. I get flustered because I'm not great at directions, but I usually do my best. I really did not need an incident to put me further off the experience.

I don't think this guy even really needed directions, because he got annoyed when I walked off after giving said directions, beeped his horn and did a U-turn in a busy street, just so he could pull into a driveway in front of me and ask if I wanted to go for a drink. He was pretty aggravated at the "no thanks" and beeped his horn some more, complaining that there was nothing wrong with "liking someone".

It was still early in the evening and there were plenty of people around, so I didn't feel particularly unsafe. Although, if he'd kept following me I'd have been worried about him finding out where I lived. But it is still not nice to be someone who often feels like they are being watched walking down the street, and then sort of have it confirmed. It's the sort of thing that can get inside my head and mess with me.

What does all this have to do with gaming? Well, arguably not much. But, as I mentioned I had just been playing Dragon Age. Specifically, I had been experiencing some of the romance options. Mostly the romance with Alistair, who I surprised myself by falling for both in and out of character. Zevran will jump into bed if you so much as look sideways at him, but he is less my type.

The sex scenes in Dragon Age are really quite painful. We have sudden slow music, odd-looking underwear, and characters making silly expressions at each other with their plastic faces. Sometimes a fade-to-black may do just as well, Bioware.

And yet, I did laugh a little as I kept walking down the street. I was returning to my computer-generated lovers, and thinking that even someone who doesn't exist and has no physical form is far more sexually satisfying than someone whose idea of romance involves harassing random women in the street :)