Petty rant

I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I am so, so tired of this idea that pronouncing "gif" as "jif" is the most ridiculous thing ever "because it starts with a G".

Giraffe, gin, ginger, gigantic, gif.

Both are legitimate pronunciations, arrived at by different linguistic reasoning, so can we please just accept that and move on, instead of flooding Tumblr with stupid text posts and macros and other nonsense?

Thoughts and general squeeing

I don't usually pay much attention to E3 or other events like it -- I figure I'll get my information from the write-ups after the fact. But we were promised information about Dragon Age 3, so I've been keeping an eye on the date, and then my Tumblr dashboard exploded in liveblogs and commentary for the various press conferences, so I ended up following along for most of the day (except for an hour in the afternoon when the construction noise from next door got to be too much to deal with, and then early evening when our power went out). Naturally, with that much data, I came up with some thoughts and impressions, almost all of it making me very happy.

1. First, of course, the DA3 trailer, which has grabbed me completely:

Fall 2014! This is a little disappointing, but on the other hand I would really rather they take their time and make a solid game -- I enjoyed DA2 a lot, but it was clearly rushed, and I wish I had been able to play the game the developers intended. I'm glad they don't seem to be making that mistake here. Also, it will be available for both current and next gen consoles, which I know is good news for a lot of people (although I'm highly likely to buy a PS4 -- see below).

( Thoughts and speculation are spoilery for trailer )

2. Also good news: there continues to be absolutely nothing of interest to me that's exclusive to the Xbox, thereby validating my choice not to get one. :P

3. Sony announces that the PS4 will support used games and not require always-on high-speed Internet for single-player games. This is probably the single best announcement out of the entire show: Sony will not be playing along with Microsoft's attempt to destroy the used game market and price lower-income gamers out of their content. As I speculated on Tumblr, I have to wonder whether Sony was originally going to go down that road, then backed off when they saw the uproar that MS provoked over the Xbox One. But it doesn't really matter -- they aren't doing it, and given how much they poked MS in their presser, it seems pretty clear that they aren't going to. Score one for consumers. Does this mean that the console wars as we know them are drawing to a close? Only time will tell. But regardless, I know which company is getting my money.

4. Final Fantasy XV! Which is actually a rebranding of the long (long, long) anticipated FF Versus XIII, a fine decision on Square Enix's part. There's a new trailer, which is very pretty if a little heavy on the dudes. But I'm willing to cut Square a bit of slack in this, at least in the Final Fantasy series, as long as they have good female characters in the game. No release date, but still, more movement on this game than I've seen in a long time.

5. Last but not least: Kingdom Hearts 3. I didn't know how much I wanted this until I saw the teaser trailer, but now I'm a bundle of squee. No release date on this either, of course. I'm going to guess sometime next year, which would suggest that 2014 is going to be really, really busy on the game-playing front.