Gaming, dude

i admit: i am a secret gamer.
secret because if i were to admit this...addiction (i'm feeling honest), non-gamers would scorn me and true gamers would deride me for my faux-gamer-ness. i would hang in societal limbo (despite the pope!) between the cool, normal people who don't communicate solely in acronyms and the cool, nerdy virtual people who manage to come across as casanova AND einstein simultaneously online.

no, my gaming habit brings me neither profound joy nor copious amounts of virtual women wanting to form virtual relationships. usually it is done in the morning, alone, as a sort of catharsis from all those creepy, non-cathartic dreams i had the night before. and usually the game is one that came as a free demo on my computer, FATE.

FATE's premise is idiotic, quite frankly. you are given various missions, which invariably consist of killing various monsters, and you can choose from assorted hairstyles, names, faces, and pets to make your character. well, two pets: a dog and a cat. even with my best efforts, i could not get the pet colors to change (hey, if you can change your hair color, you should be able to change fur color)....no, the cat is hopelessly ginger, and the dog benignly white and brown. this pet cannot die. it can "flee" when its life is low, which means that it runs in maddening aimless curlicues around you while you are being pummeled to death, but it is, in fact, immortal. you can "perish," but you can also pay to have your life restored. besides immortality, your pet is also endowed with a ridiculous amount of strength (it can carry a pack that's the same size as yours) and the uncanny ability to morph into bizarre creatures if it eats certain fish. oh yes, and you can fish in this game. you must have a pole, naturally, but no fishing license....you simply drop the hook, and when an exclamation point appears above your head, accompanied by a "thwuk," you have approximately 1.146267 seconds to press "set the hook." if your reflexes are just right, "you just caught a fish!" and much jubilation is allowed.
i spend a good portion of my time faux-fishing.
but i do enjoy hacking things to bits. mindlessly, of course---the great thing about FATE is that nothing looks remotely humanoid, so you needn't think. here is a list (not comprehensive, as in demo mode i cannot progress past level 3):
1) nocturne stalker: a purple tiger
2) nocturne fungus: a purple giant mushroom
3) myconid: a pink giant mushroom
4) topaz, emerald, ruby gels: giant blobs named for gems for inexplicable reasons
5) noxious gel: the toughest gel to kill; unlike the others it can poison you
6) goblin: green semi-human thing
7) goblin scout: bigger than the goblin, and blue
8) bat: a bat
9) rat: a rat. there are also sewer rats, which are bigger.
10) skeleton: a skeleton; diabolically fast and difficult to kill without magic
11) timberwolf: a timberwolf
12) gnoll: big and blue with a tail
13) bugbear: big and brown, no tail
14) kobold: imagine a rhinoceros walking upright
15) wereboar: smaller, brown, 25% fire weakness
16) tunnel crawler: a long creepy caterpillar. this one gives me nightmares
17) mottled lurker, creeping widow, tunnel spider: various spiders.
18) mummy: not to be confused with...
19) zombie: one of these is immune to basically all magic. i just let my minions finish them off so as to not confuse myself and accidentally wind up dead.
20) forest imps and imp shaman: they generally appear in groups of 3 to 4, with one imp shaman at their head that can do things to you like slow you down or electrocute you. short and green with orange hair, or in the case of the shaman, a magenta-ish color with dark purple hair.
21) basilisk: giant green lizard that breathes something that looks like purple bubbles.

so my mornings run thusly: roll to my right side and reach for the laptop on the floor, place laptop on stomach with knees propping it up. turn on computer, open FATE. pick one of three previous games i have started, or trash them and begin anew. fish. travel into the dungeon and use spells to create rat, spider, and skeleton minions (6 allowed at a time). feed my pet a fish so it turns into a "dire unicorn" or my favorite, "the brain beast" (literally, a giant brain on legs with two flapping tentacles). poke a few gels with my choice of spears, or whale on a kobold with my trusty bone club. feel immense satisfation at having slaughtered a walking rhinoceros with naught but a piece of bone. commence the day.