Speaking of Guitar Hero, it’s about time for another progress report. I’m no longer the sniveling wuss I once was, complaining about not being able to hit the blue button. These days I’m fighting to hit that damn orange button, but I mostly manage.

I was feeling pretty proud of myself, having received my first five-star review on Hard, after playing "Bulls on Parade" (for the first time on Hard), but then I ran into Ling on AIM, and she was bragging about, like being good at GH on Expert. I haven’t even tried it on Expert  yet, except to try the Dragonforce song, which is so hard, the loading screen simply says "Good luck" before you attempt it. I’m proud to say that I made it 1% into the song before failing. If you really want to feel bad for yourself, check out this nine-year-old kid playing it on Expert nearly perfectly.

So, I’ve mentioned before that I’m obsessed with this game. I’ve got all four of them, and progressed through all of them on Medium, and have now started to play them on Hard. I can get a five-star rating on pretty much every song on Medium (well, not the Dragonforce song), but on Hard I’m mostly getting three-star reviews, though I’ve only just started.

Because I’ve been playing the game so much, and because I’m like old and decrepit and stuff, my fingers started to get really sore–especially my pinky, which kind of felt like it had been slammed in a door or something. Resting my hand didn’t seem to do much, but I couldn’t rest it much anyway, because I couldn’t resist the siren call of the game. So to rest my fret-hand, I taught myself how to play GH lefty.

Did I mention I’m obsessed?

I’ll say one thing about playing it lefty — the guitar designers really didn’t think that whole thing through there. When you play lefty, you can’t use the neck strap, which is annoying, but more importantly, using the whammy bar is almost impossible.