My New Love: Dragon Quest VIII

I bought Dragon Quest VIII with my Best Buy gift card. It was on sale, too. I didn't realize that I would enjoy as much as I do, and that it would suck up so much of my time, but it's my break, so there's no better time to devote myself.

I'm pretty depressed about being back in the office after the holidays, so here's some links that I've been reading (instead of writing, or thinking, for what that matters) to check out:

Mile Zero discusses female avatars in Second Life, along with discussing the issues behind why there are only naked skins for female characters in World of Warcraft. Utopian Hell weighs in similarily as well.

Mile Zero (again) and Kotaku discuss Something Awful's "Worst Gaming Articles of 2005" which leads to an interesting discussion of the term "Gaming Journalism" and how calling reviews journalism is problematic.
I have issues with Something Awful itself, seeing how they rely on phrases such as "If you’re the sort of person that gets Darwinia then the game is for cunts." However, Feministe points out a thread on Something Awful that makes fun of a misogynist site, but as one commentator on Feministe puts it "And really, when SomethingAwful is mocking you for misogyny, you’ve got it *bad.* "

Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy takes on the sexism of the pill. I could go on and on about this post pointing out that the creators of The Pill made the cycle of pill-taking mimic the rhthym method so that the Catholic Church would give their seal of approval (we all know that they didn't), and how I think the good-ole fashioned diaphragm is a birth control method that is largely ignored because no one really makes any money off of it, and women are taught to be afraid of "down there." Also it is important to think about how affording the pill is a privilege. The post also talks breifly about female sexual dysfunction, something I wrote a paper on this past semester. All I can say is that much more research needs to be done for women and this issue, putting women on large amounts of testerone seems a bit dangerous when the research hasn't been done. The focus, research and money has been mainly on men's sexual dysfunction--women need it badly too.