Wii Strikes again

We had a family friend over, and we of course showed him the Wii. He is not really a gamer, but is a golfer, so we set up a game of Wii Sports golf and by the end he was asking how much a wii costs and where to find one. I find this a little ironic since most people I'd imagine are not buying it for Wii sports, but for the other titles. The game did after all, come free with the console. At the same time, this is really cool to me, because it proves that Wii really is a console that can really apeal to "non-gamers", something that I've been looking for a long time, so now perhaps it will be easier to share games with non-gamers and bridge the gap.

Thanksgiving

Happy thanksgiving! We're having some family and friends over today (and tomarrow since some won't make it today). Have a safe and happy holliday!

Weeee! I mean Wiiii!

We got our Wii on Sunday. We had a blast playing tennis, baseball and bowling. Havn't tried too much of golf yet (I seem to be terrible at video game golf, never tried the real life kind), and we only have one "nun chuck" so we can't play boxing multilayer yet.

We also have twilight princess (Which I'm waiting to play, since there's only 3 save files) and Red Steel. Red Steel is pretty fun. It's cool to be able to actually aim the controler at the screen to shoot, giving a more real feel to it. I especialy like the one-on-one sword duels. Beyond that though, it's pretty much a standard first person shooter.

Overall, I'm not disapointed with the Wii, it delivered what it promised, another good Nintendo system that breaks the mold of what you'd think of a standard video game system.

Practice of Reading

An article I just read blew me away. Quoted:

From an interview with novelist Zadie Smith on KCRW's Bookworm program:

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

I had never thought of reading as something like an art, but it makes perfect sense, and is really just a break through to me.

....

I just got through watching the first DVD of Full Metal Alchemist. This is the third time I've seen these episodes. If you are a fan of anime, I really, really recomend it.

The story follows two children, Alphonse and Eduard who were abandoned by their father and whose mother recently died. They try to bring her back to life with alchemy, (a "science" that really is more akin to magic), but it goes horribly wrong. Alphonse looses his body and is forced to live possessing a suit of armor and Eduard looses his left leg and right arm, which is later replaced by robotic "automail" arms. Now the two resolve to go and beocme state alchimists to recover the bodies they lost to this terrible mistake.

The show has some mild swearing, and some story elements that will be disturbing to younger viewers (Alchemy can be rather messy). The cable channel that aired the show in america, Cartoon Network suggests 14 or older, but even then you might want to watch it with you kids, or watch it before hand.

Blow me down...

We had a pretty bad wind storm a few nights ago. The electricity dimmed a few times, but thankfully didn't give out. Out side there was a pretty bad mess of fairly large branches on the lawn including one branch actually impaled in the lawn (No joke!). Thankfully there was no damage like broken windows.

FPS glasses

Haha. First person shooter glasses,
hallarious. I had to get my own. I couldn't get them to really work, but that might be because of my eye condition. Also the hooks are very flimsy so they keep falling off. Funny idea though. El-oh-stinking-el.

Some Writing Resources

I havn't really been posting much, because frankly I havn't havd much to say. So to fill the gap, here's some interesting writing articles and resources I've found.

The Snowflake Method is a article about writing just a sentence and building on it, and building again.

A wikibook about making your own conworld (Fictional fantasy world). I'd rather not try to explain what a wikibook is, just check it out. There's some great material there about everything. Another good site for those who are creating their own world is a list of questions to ask yourself on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America website.

Ofcourse you have to have this excelent book, Shrunk and White's Elements of style. It should be a requirement to have for every writer. I have the paper "low bandwidth" version, but here's a link to it in electronic form for free.

Hope these are helpful.

UFBSR Poster

EDIT: I got some ccomments I received from Russian residents elsewhere that they felt insulted by the image. It wasn't the intention, and I apologize. In order to show I mean to ill will, I removed the image.

(Image Removed)

I'm working on a series of political posters from the point of view of Napoleon from the novel "Animal Farm." this is my first one.
I came up with the name "United Free Barnyard Socialist Republic" for their group since they arn't really given a name in the book. It's a little clunky but it's one I found that fit and isn't already an acronymn.

I'm not a sociolist/comunist or anything, but I like the book and the idea intregued me.

Tide

When one interest grabs me, my other interests naterualy suffer for it. I just got Half-Life, and discovered the allure of Counter strike and revived my old love of map making and modding. Coding sounds dull, but I love designing how the code will work in the game (What it will play like especialy) and the problem solving aspects. This means I Havn't been writing much this week of course

I'm about half done on a map for Counter-Strike that's based on the classic movie "The great escape". A great movie that's I saw for the first time a few years ago. The map is based on the now defunct "escape" mode where the terrorists try to escape and the counter-terrorists try to stop them.

In this map/mod I'm working on, the CT side actually gains cash for not killing off their prisoners, so it will hopefully make it more interesting and more like the feel of the movie and put some new life in a dead and unbalanced mod.

Blogmarks

Just the other day I came apon a site called blogmarks.net, a site for keeping track of and sharing links. This is an idea I actually came up with a few days ago, but aparently it's already done. Oh well, saves me the trouble of doing the work anyway.

The site has private tags, the abillity to hide links as private and a system that shows your tags so you can see your most common tags (Larger text).

My blogmarks page is here.

Halloween Costuming

Well, I don't exactly endorse the calibration of Halloween perse, though I find it fun to dress up and go to parties, so I went to a party a Christian friend was throwing. I dressed as Dr. McNinja, an Irish immigrant who is BOTH a skilled ninja and a doctor. It's from an awesome web comic www.drmcninja.com , which has excellently funny dialog and humor of the bizarre; that I think exemplifies great comedic writing. Ok, also it's a great comic that I like that I'm trying to plug.

I got a picture and I'm going to get it posted sometime in the future.

The costume actually was a last minute idea late last night. My brother suggested it when I was commenting how I didn't have a costume and I wished I had one. He is also a Doctor McNinja fan, and knew I was too (He's the one that showed me it), and commented how we had basically all the parts needed lying around.

At least two people at the party knew who I was, the others I had to explain it to, but that's the price for having an obscure costume. Lets me tell about the greatness of a great Web comic. :) Anyway, hope you had a good, safe Halloween.

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Unrealted to halloween completly, I finished reading "A wrinkle in time" and can't wait to start reading the next book "A wind in the door" soon. I realize I should probibly read more recent stuff, I tend to be a classics purist.

On the writing front I'm getting some quite good feedback from actually two groups at once, one from critters.org, the online Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror writer's group I mentioned before and a non-writing site where I play a game called "Mafia" Still not sure where I'm going with the story exactly, but I think I'm developing more stuff that should give it more deph and texture.