Another Fucking Tattoo

Here, have a horrible photo from Mass Effect 3 that's not even a proper screenshot it's just a phone pic I took of my TV (which is really a computer monitor)! Because I'm gonna talk about Mass Effect some more. It's been what... seven weeks? Almost two months straight of intense Mass Effect feels over here in my too-hot corner of Portland (news flash: all of Portland is too hot and I hate it), so settle in for more where this came from in the days to come! You're welcome!

On Saturday I had a consultation for my next tattoo. I bet you can't guess what sort of tattoo I'm getting. Hint: It's a Mass Effect tattoo. I'm getting another one. An even bigger, stupider one than the N7. It's going to be my Shepard, in her armor and holding a gun with like, some fucking botanical shit framing her because I guess if I'm gonna spend upwards of $500 on permanent fan art on my body, I may as well throw in some flowers.

I'm a nervous wreck pretty much 90% of the time, so when I showed up at the consultation I was literally shaking and felt like a complete FREAK because I was like, zooming through my printed out references, all, "And this is her gun, ahaha and this is her armor (but ignore that head use this other reference for her head), and I like the way this tattoo looks, haaa, and this is her head, and this is a picture I drew of her but it's horrible I'm sorry, please don't hate me." But the artist was really cool about it all! When I showed her my drawing of Shepard she said it was really good, and then said my horrible "screenshot" of Shepard's face was beautiful, and then I got really happy/embarrassed and even more awkward and tripped over my words even more.

So clearly I'm an emotionally stable, responsible adult who should be making decisions like putting $500 video game fan art on her body permanently.

It's just that I haven't been this excited about something since Doctor Who. Maybe Sherlock? But that wasn't quite the level of obsession that this Mass Effect mania has reached. And there's no Steven Moffat here with a mission to ruin everything I love.

I just... I feel like a total freak trying to talk about Mass Effect because I know how I sound to other people. "Oh yeah, it's this video game, but it's special because you actually make decisions that affect what happens. Oh and you can sleep with various aliens. And it made me cry!??" Wow okay, yeah, that makes total sense, please get a bunch of tattoos of that on your body where everyone has to see them.

I dunno. I figure at this point only the people who have played a game and really, really really loved it will understand. Or maybe people who have read a book and become overwhelmingly obsessed with it. Or maybe even anyone who's loved anything? I'm not sure. I feel sometimes like I enjoy things far too much, to the point of excess, but then I realize that life is way more fun if you can get so fucking excited about something that you can't sleep and all you wanna do is immerse yourself in that thing. So really I guess I'm about passion. Getting passionate about things. Mostly aliens, though. I could get passionate about aliens for days.