First off, Happy New Year to everyone. Thank you all for the holiday wishes, especially slfcllednowhere and violentfemmebot for the pleasant surprise snail mailings.

I blame City of Heroes for my recent LJ hiatus. The amount of leisure time I want to spend at the computer is finite, and that game has been hogging most of it for a while now. Writing a journal entry feels like work in comparison, so I’ve been slacking there. Hate to say it, but I told me so.

At first I was kind of disturbed by the fact that the game basically encourages profiling. You can reliably identify villains with a cursory glance, and you don’t need to worry about their civil rights or anything pesky like that. Simply loitering in the equivalent of gang colors is criminal enough for my big armored hero to come after you with his battle axe and “arrest” you (by which, in his case, they must mean “cardiac”) with no repercussions. But it obviously hasn’t bothered me enough that I don’t enjoy the game.

All of my other characters are much less violent than that, anyway. I’ll resist the urge to bore you with details about them, at least for now. But I will share one more observation: There are bus stops all over the city, but no buses ever come.