I will be out of the woods when I finish the paper I am currently working on (ETA: about 5AM), but it is difficult to concentrate when I feel so racked* with guilt for having neglected my blog for so long.
Until I am able to pull myself out of the literary quagmire I find myself floundering in at the moment, any looking for insight from me will have to satisfy themselves with these videos. I am a huge fan of the Mario Kart series, and I can’t wait for the Wii incarnation to come out. Can’t wait, I tell you! It looks awesome.
-@
[update - 5AM: I need an hour's extension on my self-imposed deadline. Just for the record.]
*Other grammar and usage nerds may balk at the lack of a “w” prepended to this verb; they can click here.
She’s fast asleep in a sunny spot, somewhat twined around the wheel mechanism of my desk chair. I’m afraid to move because I don’t want to roll over her tiny sleeping paws. She will never know what I give up for her.
I did end up sleeping last night, because I was able to finish the Hamlet text adventure game rather quickly. I have read Hamlet a few times, as well as most of the other Shakespeare plays referenced in the game. I also worked on the New Student Week production of The Compleat Works of Willm Shkspr (Abridged) this year so even for the plays I haven’t read, I know what parts are comedy fodder and that’s all you really need to get through this game with a score of 100%. I found upon further exploration of the site that Hamlet was written simply as a proof-of-concept for the game engine. No wonder it was so easy!
The other text adventure by the author, though, is another story. Aunts and Butlers is (or so far seems to be) a full-length text adventure comedy of the highest degree. I’d explain further, but frankly, I’d rather get back to playing it, and I suggest that you do the same.
A hastily-chosen photo to satisfy the day’s requirement:
I took my laptop to school and left it there for a few days. So when blog inspiration struck while I was sitting on the couch these past few days, the daunting task of trying to keep warm in my frigid bedroom to get it onto the Internerd through my desktop kept me firmly planted in place.
Here’s what’s up, though.
I have essentially finished Endless Ocean. By “essentially”, I mean that I have completed the vague storyline and figured out what triggers the credits. (No spoilers, but despite the relaxed, hands-off, lazy plot, it was actually super cool.) I haven’t explored the whole map, though, or discovered every type of fish, or spent nearly enough time just kind of swimming around and playing with my dolphin friends, or riding whales, or lying on the beach chair on the deck of the Gabbiano – my “small but sturdy ship”.
You can do that, you know – sit on the deck and look at the virtual ocean for however long you want. It’s an island vacation right on your couch! (Blegh.)
I managed to discover all this in between the onset of midterm season and the start of Tattoo Girl rehearsals and the casting process of the Bacchae. I forgot how insane my life is when I’m not taking time off from theatre. The thing is, it usually doesn’t take me this long to get used to it and start liking it again. So tired! No wonder I’m becoming an English major.
In other other news, I bought a thoroughly secondhand copy of this book:
I bought it because it contains a recipe for “Sweet Potato Lobster Loaf”. I don’t think I have any excuse for not bumping this up to the top of my Recipes to Try list.
Other enticing dishes from this tiny (30 pages!) cookbook include avocado soup, mango steak, guava catsup (??), mango whip (sounds much more promising than prune whip, don’t you think?), and banana fudge.
To pick up where I left off yesterday: I’m sick, but not dead yet. My ears aren’t infected but there is fluid present. The doctor irrigated my right ear which I must say was the coolest thing ever! It was like a warm bath for my eardrum. It felt great. I was out of the doctor, Sudafed (with pseudoephedrine, none of that sissy on-the-shelf-at CVS stuff) in hand and bloodstream, in time to make my last class, which was good.
Then the onslaught started. I’ll spare you all the details but suffice it to say that stage managing two different shows, one of which is trying to last-minute schedule impromptu callbacks while the other is having a personnel crisis and having to cancel its first rehearsal because one of our leads dropped out, is pretty taxing.
The good news?
I bought Endless Ocean. For the uninformed:
I haven’t come across a blue whale like the one in the video yet, but I did make a dolphin friend (I named him Jeff, God of Biscuits) and hang out with some sharks for a while. That was pretty cool. Endless Ocean is a pretty great game once you get over the fact that all you do is swim around. I mean, sometimes you have objectives – take a picture of a certain kind of fish, explore a certain area, take a foundation bigwig down diving with you, whatever – but you don’t even have to complete them. You can just swim around.
It’s the best soothing, bedtime game I’ve ever seen.
I’m going to stop feeling guilty about doing nothing but posting links to other stuff on this here blog o’ mine. You know why? Because the Internet is a really big place and there’s a lot of really cool stuff out there, and if certain things end up chewing up a lot of my spare time, or making me laugh really hard, then darnit, I’m going to share them!
And by “them”, here, I specifically mean The Fancy Pants Adventure World 2. I never played World 1 – which refers to the first Fancy Pants game, not the first stage or world like the Mario games talk about them – and I discovered World 2 the other day through… something?… and boy did it eat up my time. Between baking muffins and a zillion hours of running auditions over at school, that is.
Here’s how the game works: you’re a stick figure with fancy pants and a bunny steals your ice cream. You run through worlds trying to get your ice cream back, and also playing a little shell soccer to get yourself new colors of pants to wear. It’s really simple, but what’s so fun about this little flash game is the physics and the movement. Just click the link and wait for the credits to go and jump around the opening menu a little bit. I could do backflips in there for hours.
Also the music’s really great.
Between Fancy Pants 2 and finishing Super Mario Galaxy, I have a hunch that I’m not going to get all the reading, laundry, apartment-cleaning, exercise, and email-writing done today that I meant to originally.
The news of the morning is that Emily’s notoriety continues to grow all over the Interwebs, now that The Gamer Gene and Grrr have hopped on the “look how cute these are!!” bandwagon. Em’s knitted mushroom desk pals are pretty much the most adorable desk pals ever created so there’s really no surprise there.
In other news, my mother emailed along the recipes I asked for the other day. Unlike last night, today I’m posting super secret family recipes that you or I might actually want to eat, and that might actually go together. I don’t know about you, but prune whip and meringue cookies seems to me like the food combination from hell. Or worse?
Anyway, see the legitimately tasty recipes after the break.
