Argh.
I stayed up until 3am reading The Hunger Games. -_-
70 Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies to Watch Out for in 2012 →
Oh, here it is. :P
The Top 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2012 →
“The Hobbit” trailer took me by surprise, actually… a kind of quiet thrill.
2012
Oh, hello, New Year.
Everything seems to sneak up on me, with a full time job… I always forget to write/muse/reflect on my circumstances. When I check my last year’s New Years log, I’m shocked at all the serious changes that have been wrought in my life. I’d been out of school for half a year, but still looking for work. I was still living at home.
Now I’m employed at a highly visible company, doing something that I actually went to school for. I moved out and adopted the kitties I so badly wanted (and adore). I’m pretty proud that I managed to make a realistic resolution and actually meet it, but the trade off is that now I’m not sure what I should follow it up with this year.
As ever, the losing weight resolution was a miss. I was doing pretty well exercising, actually, this last month… but then I got really sick and missed a bunch of days in a row and haven’t quite forced myself to start again. In any case, it wasn’t really enough to really lose weight… just maintain it.
I’m a little tired these days, probably from the simple fact that I’m finally embroiled into the full-time-work force and it basically means less free time than ever. Sometimes I really miss lazing around and doing nothing.
Holy Crap, Skyward Sword.
Look here, Nintendo. As a reasonably hardcore gamer who has enjoyed every (non-handheld) console Zelda game released in the N64 era and beyond (okay, that’s not that many…), I was prepared to endure just about any heinous mechanic you wanted to throw at me, because I’m a fan and fans do stupid things for the games they love.
And I forgave you for turning me into a rolly-polly goron (and other equally awkward things) in Majora’s Mask. And for forcing me to sail the seas for interminable lengths of time to get from place to place in Wind Waker. And for making me do this really tiresome nunchuk-wiimote-shakey-thing whenever I apparently fail to disguise my incoming strike at Ghirahim. And for the intense growling frustration I feel when I fail to shake it enough (because my wrists are tired, omg) and he whacks me into next Saturday.
But this explore-an-area-you’ve-explored-before-already-and-collect-three-thousand-little-things-to-get-this-one-little-part-and-not-even-the-whole-thing shit HAS GOT TO STOP.
Seriously? The “Silent Realm” gimmick was kinda cool the first time, like some kind of weird Pac Man parody. But I was really disappointed to enter the second Silent Realm to find out it was exactly the same — couldn’t you have given me a variation at least? Mind you, this isn’t just the voice of someone complaining because I found it difficult… I managed to get through the first two Silent Realms in a single attempt, and the third one in two (and the second one took two because I naively thought that Nintendo could not be cruel enough to hide tears on the mountainside — har har). I just found it incredibly annoying.
Trekking around in areas you’ve already explored, even with weird artsy effects applied, is not fun. Collecting pieces on a timer is not fun, and definitely not if it’s the fifth time you’ve been asked to do it. I know you guys must have gotten feedback from Twilight Princess that said this was okay and hey, guess what, in Twilight Princess… it was! Because there was NO TIME LIMIT and you were only asked to do it three times. And when you were collecting these things, you were making something that would help dispel the twilight (read: turn you back into a human) right there and then, it wasn’t just some subquest of a subquest, like ALL of these have been.
Now I’m being asked to collected TADTONES????????? Not just like fifteen of them either, but … jeez, I can’t even count that high. AND AND … you don’t even have the decency to give me the ability to douse for them until I’ve already found half of them! And I have to do the whole thing underwater, which has harder maneuverability AND I HAVE TO FIND AIR BUBBLES FOR BREATHING:LKJR#:UJ${#)UJIRESFKMC
I’ll still finish the game, there’s nothing that’ll keep me from doing that. Just wanted to vent about how very tired I am of picking up the pieces. Sigh.
Happy Christmas. (yes, the kitties did not appreciate this practice of holiday cheer. I’m a mean owner. ;x. ) (Taken with instagram)
Pearls Before Breakfast →
It’s not really a good “experiment”, if they were looking for serious data, but kind of an interesting story anyways.
A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.
The Curse of Cow Clicker: How a Cheeky Satire Became a Videogame Hit →
More Cow Clicker rumination. I’m really fascinated by this, it seems. This article has a lot of the same as previous ones I’ve linked, but tidbits of additional insight as well.
EDIT: this friggin’ article has a FB APP embedded into it! Every instance of the word “cow” is clickable and brings up a prompt to give permissions to an app called Wired Cow Clicker, for the sake of spreading word on the article!
Bogost watched in surprise and with a bit of alarm as the number of players grew consistently, from 5,000 soon after launch to 20,000 a few weeks later and then to 50,000 by early September. And not all of those people appeared to be in on the joke. The game received its fair share of five-star and one-star reviews from players who, respectively, appreciated the gag or simply thought the game was stupid. But what was startling was the occasional middling review from someone who treated Cow Clicker not as an acid commentary but as just another social game. “OK, not great though,” one earnest example read.
…
Bogost delivered his response to this line of argument in a well-read blog essay called “Shit Crayons.” In the piece, he compared Cow Clicker players to the imprisoned Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka, who composed poems from his cell using whatever writing material he could find. Bogost writes that Cow Clicker—and, by extension, games like FarmVille—are akin to the Nigerian prison, trapping players in a barren environment. The fact that people are able to exercise creativity despite the cruel limitations of the game—to craft crayons out of shit—is a sign of the indomitable human spirit but no reflection whatsoever on the merits of Cow Clicker. “Even if creativity comes from constraint, there’s constraint and there’s incarceration,” he writes. “A despot in a sorcerer’s hat does not deserve praise for inciting desperate resilience.”
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