My aunt was visiting and we were having a wonderful time talking and eating hot fudge sundaes and admiring the things she and my mom bought on shopping trips, so it was a really fun week and now my mom and I have post-holiday-blues-like feelings. I’ve been consoling myself with hour upon hour of a game called Sonny, and I REALLY cannot explain to you why I am playing it. I mean, I CAN: it was Henry’s fault, because he was DESPERATE to play it but couldn’t figure it out, and so I started helping, and then somehow it was two hours later and I’d been playing a SHOOTING game all that time.
I don’t think of myself as LIKING shooting games, but Paul tells me it’s because I think of them all as being First-Person Shooter games, which I hate because I hate scared-anticipation and I hate being startled and I don’t think quickly. When in fact some games are Turn-Taking games like Sonny, where you can take your time and figure out your move, and then when you’re all set you say go, and then it waits patiently for your next move. Plus, it’s not gory or gross. Still, there’s no getting around the part where I’m aiming guns, shooting them, and saying “DARN it!” when they don’t do enough damage.
As soon as Rob got home, Henry and I made HIM play it TOO, because we kept getting really stuck and not knowing what was going on (now we have a Striker’s Helm, but how do we get it out of our inventory so we can use it? and what’s a “helm” when we are not steering any ships?), and we needed someone else to play it so we could ask questions. Now Rob, Paul, Henry, and I are ALL hooked on it.
Speaking of out of character, I also watched and loved an action movie: Red (Netflix link). We watched it with my aunt one evening, and I was all “I don’t know about this,” but then I LOVED it. Bruce Willis plays this totally charming, deadly ex-CIA agent. I’m pretty sure the director just had him look at the camera with a wry, amused, affectionate, sidelong-glance tough-guy expression, and put a green screen behind him so he could put that expression in every single scene, and I think I speak for all the ladies in our group when I say IT WORKED.
There was plenty of shooting and action, but nothing gory. And although it got a little scary at the peak of the action, MOST of the action was broken up with humor. And almost all the characters were, like, baby boomers coming out of retirement to kick some mid-thirties next-generation butt, so this is a good movie to watch with your parents. And Helen Mirren is in it, and Morgan Freeman, and John Malkovich playing on the funny/endearing end of his creepy/scary/crazy spectrum. Plus there’s Karl Urban for the ladies who prefer a man in his 30s, though it was Bruce Willis who had all three of us looking up his age on Wikipedia to see if it was creepy for us to like him. AND, the female romantic interest is Mary-Louise Parker, who is only a decade younger than Bruce Willis and only LOOKS young enough to be his daughter, so that’s kind of awesome too!
And I’m reading Divergent, but in my last reading session something icky and scary happened to one of the characters, and now I feel nervous that that’s going to escalate.
I’m with you about shooting games. I’m not a huge fan of guns. However because I live in Texas all my friends not only have guns but also have permits to carry a concealed weapon.
They dragged me out to the shooting range this summer. It nearly gave me a heart attack. But I have to admit it was pretty fun after I stopped thinking about how I could easily kill anyone I wanted.
I want to be Helen Mirren when I grow up.
I liked Red. It was a perfect Friday night at home movie.
I have to tell you that Red has become one of my favorite movies. Hub dragged me to it last fall when we were away for the weekend, and I didn’t want to go. I loved it so much that I made my mom, aunts and cousins watch it when we had our annual girls’ weekend last spring. Great movie.
This is so hypocritical of me because I was just calling out sycophantic commenters on my last blog post, but this post makes me LOVE YOU SO MUCH. I had brutal post-holiday let-down after my visit with my friend last week-end. Shooting games – YES (everything you said). Red – YES. Bruce Willis – YES YES YES. Bruce Willis and M.L. Parker – QUADRUPLE QUINTILLION YES. Happy sigh.
We watched RED while we were in the hospital, awaiting the arrival of your nephew! It was perfect–entertaining enough to take one’s mind off the contractions. I think your dad recommended it, actually. Good stuff.
Red was a quirky movie and I didn’t expect to like it but I really did. I generally like action but what I really liked about it was the humor. And Helen Mirren is rad.
The game sounds sort of like Angry Birds. I probably should not start playing it.
I’d liked Red, too. It was a lot funnier than I thought it would be.
I love Red! We actually watched it on Valentine’s Day this year. I was surprisingly into it for an action movie.
Swistle – I love your Christmas Card calculations. Now I’m wondering if you have an equation for age differences and creepiness levels. You could make this funny.
– subtract one year difference for each time he glances sideways into the camera.
– add another creepy mark if mom thought he was sexy when she was in high school.
HAHAHAHA, I am the SAME exact way with video games! I get anxious and confused and flustered . . . and then I’m dead ;) Plus there are so many buttons to push, usually! But if it’s turn based, or like Final Fantasy where you click buttons to say, “attack that monster” and then it does it for you, I’m good to go! But whenever my hubby looks at video games I might like, I have to ask him, “Is it a fighting game? Is it MY kind of fighting game?” :) It’s nice to know I’m not alone!
Anonymous- Ha ha! Add creepy marks for each child the actor has who is older than the love-interest actress! Subtract creepy marks for each year between “year I would have thought actor was” and “year actor actually is.” Add creepy marks for if actor is old enough to be actress’s father. Subtract creepy marks if actress looks older than she is.
THat is really cute that you got sucked into Henry’s game. Whatever works to beat the post holiday like blues, I say.
Unrelated to anything you actually talked about, but I just finished reading through your entire blog archives over the course of a few weeks of workday lunch hours, and now I feel a bit sad to only get one blog post worth of Swistle at a time, rather than large chunks.