See– and forgive me if I end up getting the facts wrong (though I don’t think it is particularly important)– I don’t think she was actually much of a teacher at all. If I recall correctly she was originally involved with theatre; an actress or something. I don’t know why she decided to teach elementary school. But she did.
She was very “different”. She was the definition of “artsy”. She played show tunes on the piano and she was married to a Jackson Pollock-esque abstract artist who was probably almost three times her age.
Not surprisingly, her class was not your typical third grade class. When other kids were doing the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of their class day, we were singing songs from the “Annie” musical and reciting poems by Robert Frost. She spent hours a day reading us the works of Roald Dahl. “Storytime” after lunch was only supposed to consist of one chapter but she was so good at doing the voices that we would beg her to read three or four of them at a time, and of course she couldn’t resist.
Let’s see, what else did we do in that class? We wrote haiku. We painted still life paintings. We did creative exercises that involved closing our eyes and imagining that we were mouse-sized elephants that lived in burrows.
One day we sat in a circle and went around and one by one every single kid talked about their religious beliefs or lack there-of, and what we did on a typical Sunday. There was no prejudice, there was no bigotry, no debate, just pure and simple curiosity, understanding, and acceptance. And we were a pretty eclectic and multicultural bunch. To this day I have never seen religion talked about so civilly as it was that day in a classroom full of third graders.
We performed a play of “Where the Wild Things Are”. It was pretty art nouveau. We monsters wore paper sacks over our heads that had been painted by the teacher’s husband so we looked like walking Picasso paintings. We had a jazz number in the middle of the story and lots of crazy abstract props.
Of course this was all too good to last– if I understand correctly we were her first and only third grade class. I don’t know the details, and I was what, 8 years old back then? …so I wasn’t even paying attention, but I caught a whiff of rumor that there was some contention between our teacher and the school board and some of the parents. They said she was too weird, too “out there”; we spent too much time daydreaming and doing art and not enough time doing actual third grade coursework, or something. So she disappeared the next year. I never saw her again. I heard a rumor that she went to teach high school, but I don’t know.
I had a lot of really good teachers growing up, but I find myself wondering about my third grade teacher more than any of them. I wonder what happened to her and what she’s doing now. Wherever she is, I hope she never stopped reading stories or letting kids pretend that they were mouse-sized elephants.
1. Oh hey, SC2 Beta ends tonight. I wonder if it actually works on Linux/Wine yet.
2. *boots up*
3. *tweaks settings*
4. …wait, did it load?
5. OMG
6. PROTOSS IS HAPPENING NOW
7. OMG LOST TEMPLE, YES, THAT MAP IS HAPPENING NOW
8. *presses the + key a bunch of times, out of habit, even though she probably doesn’t have to*
9. OMG THIS IS JUST LIKE THE ORIGINAL, BUT AWESOMER *tears of joy*
10. MINERALS
11. PYLONS
12. GATEWAY
13. ZEALOTS
14. THERE IS ONE ANSWER AND THE ANSWER IS DRAGOO– wait, where’s the dragoons?
15. Oh hey, new unit called “stalker”. AKA re-named dragoon. THERE IS ONE ANSWER AND THE ANSWER IS STALKERS
16. YAY LET’S EXPAND
17. Ok, we are doing this old school. Old school means zealots and dragoons stalkers and archons and dark templars, and about fiftymillion observers. *tech tree*
18. …did I box myself in?
19. *sighs* *makes shuttle*
20. Oh man I need to guard my expansion. PHOTON CANNONS.
21. Oh yeah you guys, you can’t stop my army. You are going down Easy Mode Computer.
22. Okay, clearly we need more Dark Templars–
23. YOU REQUIRE MORE VESPENE GAS.
24. auuugh I see Dark Templars haven’t changed.
25. omg what is this horrible lovechild of Battlecruiser/dropship he keeps sending into my base? And why is he not doing anything with it? Computer AI is as hilarious as usual I see.
26. Okay we are going to expand again and then YOU ARE GOING DOWN COMPUTER
27. I have my zealots and my archons and my dragoons stalkers and my dark templars and like ten observers, ARE YOU READY FOR THIS?
28. *sends units across map*
29. *regroups*
30. ATTACK!
31. … *blinks* …
32. ERROR REPORTING: Please tell us what you were doing when the crash occurred.
I hear it a lot. The people who say they would install Linux, but they want their stuff to “just work”. All the daily posts on Ubuntu Forums (which I lurk) from people saying they tried Linux, but are leaving it because it doesn’t “just work”. You know, that is a perfectly acceptable and understandable answer. But it’s not one I can relate to.
Stuff that just works is boring.
Stuff that just works makes me complacent.
Stuff that just works doesn’t teach me anything.
Stuff that just works doesn’t let me fix it.
I have a little secret to let you guys in on. I am addicted to fixing things. Broken things are enticing and magnetic. If you dropped some sort of ceramic ornament or vase on the floor and it shattered into a million pieces I would be on the floor picking up those million pieces and attempting to piece them back into place like a puzzle and trying to glue it back together. This has actually happened. More than once. Do I succeed? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t stop me from trying.
I value my sleep– I value my sleep very much. But if my computer is broken I don’t sleep until it is fixed. Period. Abandoning some broken project at home because I have to go to work or something is sheer torture. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished calling in “because something is broken” was as valid an excuse as “calling in sick”, because heaven knows I’m certainly in no mental state to actually do any work when my entire mind is preoccupied with my project.
Fixing things is mind-clearing and you learn from the experience. If you fix something, you come out of it knowing how to recognize and fix that problem in the future. You feel rejuvenated and useful.
…and you’re telling me you want an operating system that you don’t have to rip apart and completely fix every six months?
I would die of boredom.
I respect you, Millions of People With That Opinion. But I don’t understand you. No hard feelings. <3
Since I have a lot of crap going on in my life right now, I decided it would be a good time to cheer myself up by visiting a place in my hometown called the “American Computer Museum”. Somehow I’d never actually gone there before, which is sort of shocking when you consider the types of things I saw there:
Old phones!
Old switchboard!
There is no way this thing isn’t a Tricorder.
Replica of the Antikythera mechanism; this looked so much cooler in real life than it does in the picture.
This is a calculator.
And so is this, and I want both of them so I can figure out how they work.
Arithmometer, aka mechanical calculator. Did I mention that I want this also?
Actual letter written by Ada Lovelace, I may have possibly fangirled over this for about ten minutes. (Directly underneath was a first edition copy of Charles Babbage’s autobiography, complete with technical drawings of the difference engine– cue similar fangirling.)
I decided that the time was right to present the most ridiculous picture of me ever taken. This, my friends, is the Pike-o-graph. Eh? Eh?
This watch went to the moon. I now find myself endlessly curious about the effects of low gravity on the movement. *mental note to look into this later*
This thing was full of blinking lights and made clickety-clackety noises if you got close to it. I have decided that I must have one. (You know, like I decided with basically everything else in this museum.)
A room full of computers, including at least a couple Commodore 64s. <3 The big red cabinet in the corner is Computer Space, the first commercially sold video game.
ENIAC…
UNIVAC…
8 megabytes of storage on this baby! Never mind the fact that it’s like twice as big as me. Seriously, you can see my reflection.
There was so much stuff here; it was fantastic. Also I bought a book called “The Victorian Internet”. With a title like that, you just can’t go wrong.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I got a game called Warcraft III. I was super excited to play it because I was expecting something very akin to my beloved StarCraft but with better graphics.
…unfortunately, it failed to live up to my expectations. Not saying it was a bad RTS, but, well, when you’ve been spoiled by StarCraft there is very little that WILL live up to your RTS expectations. The lore didn’t exactly grab me at the time either (don’t shoot me, THAT WAS THEN AND THIS IS NOW), so Warcraft III and its expansion, The Frozen Throne, went by the wayside for a bit.
Enter DotA– Defense of the Ancients– a Use-Map-Settings game that does away with the RTS style of the original WCIII completely and replaces it with this really interesting game involving Hero Units and armies trying to advance to the other side of the map. And holy cogs, it was fun.
Also there was a hydralisk.
My favorite character? Netherdrake. I think they called him “Viper” or something, but he was a netherdrake, and I loved him. I messed around with a few other characters as well, but You Can’t Stop the Netherdrake.
Did I mention that they look ridiculously cool in WC3?
The gameplay had lots of deep little nuances to the point that the DotA forums were rife with theorycrafting the likes of which my virgin eyes had rarely seen before– there were dozens and dozens of items and upgrades, all with their pros and cons. And a chicken delivered them to you, by the way, which was awesome. I, for my part, ignored the theorycrafting and figured out what worked best for me and I don’t think I was too bad, either.
Before rez sickness tainted this icon, it was a really good item in DotA.
I played it online multiplayer a few times but the DotA community always had this weird sort of “ONLY SUPER PRO PLAYERS ALLOWED” attitude and so I, not wanting to burden any unsuspecting team with my nub-ness, stuck largely to a map that let me play against the computer. No worries, it was just as fun. Ultimately, that’s what I want in my games, you know?
DotA of course gained considerably notoriety with the release of the Basshunter song “Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA”, which, if I understand correctly, is Swedish for “We’re sitting here in Ventrilo playing DotA”. It’s what the entire song is about, and as everyone knows, the chicks dig Ventrilo at their LAN parties:
Have I mentioned that I have a thing for Swedish guys? No? Have you seen their curling team? …what? You know what, brb, I’m moving to Sweden. (As an aside, practically every male friend I have flies into a murderous rage upon hearing that I think Basshunter is eye candy, and I’m still not sure why.)
ANYWAYS, I haven’t played DotA in a while. I think it had to do with a combination of issues getting Warcraft 3 to play nice with Linux and simply moving on to other games, such as one that starts with a “W” and ends with a “orld of Warcraft”. Still, I look back fondly on that little game. You were one fun trip, DotA, and hats off to the gaming community that imagined you up.
Normally I don’t post on weekends, but this is too awesome to not share.
Two of my friends who I have known forever got married today, because I’m old so that’s what all my friends are doing these days, so of course I went to the wedding and, afterward, the reception. It was the best of those receptions, one of those Super Geeky Types, which meant that the dance music consisted of stuff like the DotA song and Dragostea din Tei, which were promptly met with cheers upon being heard.
Now I don’t know exactly how and when this particular request got started, but at some point our little group of friends was standing around and someone wanted to know if the Safety Dance was on the playlist. Cue sheer panic from the bride and groom… “No, we forgot the Safety Dance”… followed by disappointment from the requestee…
And then, because my friends know me very well, all eyes were on me.
“Pike,” they said, because yes, people call me Pike in real life. “Pike… do you have the Safety Dance?”
Of course I did. It was on a CD in my car.
“Pike. Only you can save the wedding reception.”
So I got the CD. We queued up the song. Then we all did the Safety Dance, complete with the “S” motions with our arms.
“You know,” says the guy next to me halfway during the dance, “This song always reminds me of that boss in WoW.”
Ayup, that’s my friends’ circle for you.
And that is the story of How Pike Saved the Wedding. /deep bow
“Write a book” is one of those things that is on most everyone’s list of things they’d like to do at some point in their life, so much so that it’s almost become cliche, itself. Well as most everyone knows by now, I’ve written a few, and while I can’t claim to speak for the professional side of things seeing as I have not yet been published or anything, a lot of people still seem to be interested in the process I’ve gone through because they want to do NaNoWriMo or whatever. So here is my list of five things I wish I’d known beforehand, in the event that it helps anyone else! <3
1.) NaNo/Deadlines are AWESOME
Prologue Story:
When I was about, oh, 14 years old or so, my parents gave me a watch. It was accompanied by a little ceremonial sort of thing wherein I was informed that the present was because they knew I always made good use of my time. I don’t remember anything about said watch, I don’t recall what it looked like or even where it is now, but it was my first real “grown up” watch and I wore it everywhere, and thus launched both an obsession as well as the terrible feeling of nakedness I have if I am not wearing one.
Going without a wristwatch for a week while waiting for this thing to arrive was utter torture.
I digress, though. The point is that looking back on it I have no idea what my parents were on about when they said I made good use of my time. I really don’t. I mean yeah, I generally have a good idea of what time it is, because I am an incessant clockwatcher, but then I procrastinate… and procrastinate… and procrastinate…
Enter NaNoWriMo, which not only throws a deadline at you, but peer pressure, too. I dunno about you, but for me, this is a dangerously effective combination. NaNoWriMo’s little daily-word-count graph prodded me into writing 50,000 words in 28 days, all while I was working a full time job and trying to keep up with my WoW blog. In contrast, the seed of “Windshifter” had been percolating in my brain for at least a decade, through countless summer vacations before I even had a job. All that time to write, and I didn’t, because I had no motivation.
It’s funny because I had heard of NaNo before but never participated, primarily because I didn’t like the idea of having one’s creativity confined to a timeline. It sort of bothered my inner free-spirit-artist. Never again will I doubt, though.
Now, I will say that NaNo does not work for everyone. I know of some people for whom the deadline is a serious hindrance or distraction. But keep in mind that I felt that way, too, until I actually tried it. Any aspiring writer who has trouble with motivation should give this a shot at least once, in my opinion. If it works for you, the results will be amazing.
2.) Have an Outline
When I wrote my book for NaNo I quite honestly made it up as I went along. While a few of the characters had technically existed in my brain for years, they were completely revamped for this book, as was the entire story and even the setting of the story. The idea of my book when I started writing was very different than how it ended up being.
…somehow it managed to turn out all right (hopefully), but a lot of editing was needed to hammer everything into place. This all would have been a much smoother process if I’d had a basic outline (even just a couple sentences) that I was working off of, instead of just a nebulous concept.
3.) (If you want to be published) Don’t Just Write For “Everyone”
If you are one of those people who is of the mindset that your book is for whoever wants to read it, regardless of age, then congratulations, you are just like me and like tons of respected authors. The trick, though, is that publishers and literary agents don’t see it that way (did you know there are a such thing as “literary agents”? I sure didn’t, until I had actually finished my book. GG, me!)
I have come to the conclusion that you have to sort of balance the belief that your book can be for everyone but can still be marketed to a specific audience, because that latter one there is what the publisher is looking for. This is more complicated than one might expect, because for example, did you know that there is a type of novel known as “middle grade”? Yeah I didn’t know that either, until a couple months ago. From what I understand it’s the type of stuff you read in middle school. Well I look back at the type of stuff I read in middle school (Watership Down, His Dark Materials, etc.) and most of it falls into the “But that was a pretty deep book that I still enjoy as an adult” category, further muddling things up. As you can see, this whole thing can be pretty complicated.
As such, I wish I had known all of this before I started writing. I don’t think it would substantially change my book, but it might have helped to focus it a bit and perhaps given me some inspiration from similar books.
Man, this book is just an allegory for Linux! Pike must've written it.
4.) Your Main Character Needs Some Sort of Tangible Personal Problem/Character Arc
For the first draft of my book I went off of the idea that my main character was sort of a socially awkward geekface, and that would be his character flaw. Unfortunately I got some feedback that this didn’t work very well, because while being a socially awkward geekface is all well and good, it’s not really a tangible flaw, unless he stops being a socially awkward geekface at the end (which he really didn’t.)
Readers don’t really buy it unless the character has an actual flaw that manifests itself throughout the book and which said character learns from or corrects by the end. It sounds pedestrian and like something you’d see on saturday morning cartoons but there is a reason it’s pedestrian, and that’s because that’s really how stories work.
I managed to get away with this problem in the first draft because I had a secondary character (who I think could be argued as the “true” main character of the story) with lots of Emotional Baggage so I think I was able to keep the audience’s interest that way, but that is tricky to pull off and I think it’s best to make the most prominent character of your story have his own character arc.
And so here I am again doing tons of editing with a big ol’ scalpel which could have been prevented if I had planned this from the start!
5.) Ask Your Characters Questions
This is one of those ones that probably sounds either silly or insane, but it is endlessly useful. Learn how to pretend that your characters are real and that you are interviewing or chatting with them. Ask why they are helping your hero, or what their motivation is for doing some plot point that happens seemingly out of nowhere. This will help tons in the long run not only for making realistic characters but also for making your inevitable deus ex machinas seem not quite so deus ex machina-ish.
~
Welp, I hope that list was of some use to someone out there. NaNoWriMo is coming quick and it’s never too early to get a headstart on thinking about it. Regardless on if you plan on participating or not (and yes, I fully intend on doing it again… I want to make this a yearly thing from here on out, seriously), happy writing! <3
Ten days ago or so, the battery on my wristwatch died. Rather than buy a new one, I decided it was time to do something I’d wanted to do for a long time: namely, I decided it was time to graduate from a cheapy Wal-Mart watch to a nice real one.
For the uninitiated (aka sane people who aren’t watch geeks like me yet), most watches these days are battery-powered by way of electrical pulses sent through a quartz crystal. This makes for a watch that is very highly accurate, but the downside is that opening up the back to look inside is pretty disappointing because it is made of so few parts. Clearly this would not do for someone like me who is enamored with the beauty of real mechanical action. So it was that I went online, discovered a very nice watch for a very nice price, and ordered it.
And waited…
and waited…
and waited…
And finally the UPS Truck arrived today when I was in the middle of eating lunch. I had the biggest ever smile on my face when I was opening the box and was met with the most beautiful object I’ve ever laid eyes on:
This is a real mechanical watch– it was painstakingly made the same way they’ve made ’em for hundreds of years. It will never require batteries, and it winds itself via a rotor that spins when I move my arm. It is not quite as accurate as a modern quartz watch, and I’ll probably have to adjust the time when it ends up a few minutes slow each week, but to me that is a small price to pay for the Epic Factor.
And for being able to gaze lovingly at little tiny moving pieces anytime I check the time ^_^
It is also gigantic. Here it is compared to the Wal-Mart watch that served me well for the past few years:
Size matters.
It’s heavy and sits a bit awkwardly on my scrawny wrists (which are already small to begin with because I’m a girl) and it’s a good half an inch thick– at the least. But holy cogs, it’s beautiful. No matter how much respect I have for your utilitarian quartz watch for being accurate and being a pretty awesome technical achievement in its own right– you really can’t beat having the whirring heartbeat of a real mechanical wonder on your arm.
At first I was sort of undecided regarding my intentions to make a Classic Video Game Monday post today. See, as a general rule I don’t post on the weekends (at least not very often), and for a lot of us American-types, today is still technically “the weekend”, being Memorial Day and all. However, I didn’t want to let a Monday go by without a CVGM post, and so here I present a rather light-hearted one: an entire genre of the wonderful thing known as TOWER DEFENSE.
I was first introduced to this genre with Use-Map-Settings games in StarCraft, a game that I played religiously for several years.
I actually stomp my boyfriend in Starcraft, but he stomps me in Age of Empires so it works out
“UMS” games were games where instead of playing a straightforward StarCraft match, you would play different sorts of games that had been specifically set up for you. There were a couple different styles that were perennially popular, such as “Golem Madness”, which involved combining units into hero units, and there were also various tower defense games. “Team Matrix D” was the biggie back then, if I recall correctly, and I was pretty immediately addicted to it. It involved waves of enemies coming for you– each wave getting stronger– and you had to build various defenses and patrolling units to keep them at bay. It was amazingly fun and unbelievably addictive.
So zip forward a couple of years and you’ve got Tower Defense games cropping up, Flash-style, across the Internet, so you can build and destroy to your heart’s content. Desktop Tower Defense has always been my favorite:
The depth here for strategy is endless. Endless, just like the kicking I do to myself if I let so much as a single mob pass through. Yeah I’m a perfectionist.
Desktop Tower Defense isn’t the only one that’s out there, though. And when I come across a Tower Defense game somewhere, I am always immediately gripped by an uncontrollable urge to drop everything and master said game.
Neopets was not spared.
The saddest part about Tower Defense is that you’re really not sure who to give thanks to for inventing the genre. I suppose you could say it had its roots in “Rampart“, but even that isn’t telling the full story. Wikipedia says “Early tower defense games appeared post-2000 in maps for StarCraft, Age of Empires II, and WarCraft III.” You know what that means? That means that this awesome genre was pretty much invented by the community. By your everyday RTS player who wanted to have some fun. Whoever you are out there, you are a genius and you rock. Same with whoever invented DotA, but that’s another story.
…but Obligatory DotA Song Insert is Obligatory.
…I now know what next week’s CVGM will be. Eeeeexcellent. *arches fingers*
So, the title of my last post. While I was amused by the number of comments on here/Twitter who thought I was actually coming out as gay, I was even more amused by the number of comments on here/Twitter who thought I was coming out as a furry.
So you know what? Let’s do this. I’m Pike, and I’m a furry.
Most anyone who has been on the internet for more than a few hours knows what a furry is: someone who likes cartoon or anthropomorphic animals.
I can hear a few of you now. “Ewww, Pike! This is seriously your weird fetish?”
Actually, (for me anyway), fetish has nothing to do with it. And I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to dodge admitting weird fetishes. Heck, I am basically one of the most open people ever when it comes to my weird fetishes (c wut i did thar?) But furry isn’t one of them. No, it’s simply an art and storytelling style that I have always been fond of.
It has its seeds in the Disney cartoons I grew up with, I’m sure, and the way I’m pretty sure the Comics page of the newspaper is largely responsible for teaching me to read. The “Redwall” series of books and “Watership Down” cemented it. When I was about 8 or 9 years old I was drawing my own “comic strips” starring talking cat characters that I’d invented. And by the time I was about 15 years old and decided it was time to finally sit down and “learn how to draw”, it’s… a pretty obvious guess what said drawings involved.
You can do a lot with a cartoon animal that it’s difficult to do with people. Ears and tails are immensely expressive, which is perfect for the pantomime and exaggeration based medium that is cartooning. Master artists use this to much advantage (Fact: I would sell my soul to be able to draw half as well as Tracy Butler).
And you know what? Cartoon animals are just plain fun to draw:
Goggles Bear tanks with magical eyewear.
There is a lot you can do with anthro characters from a storytelling perspective, as well. How does the character’s “animal-ness” effect their… “human-ness”? Do these conflict with each other? Does the character or species struggle with it? Or perhaps you are trying to make a point, like an Aesop’s Fable. There is a lot to work with.
Now that all of that is out of the way, though, comes the next side of the confession, which is that I really never became a part of the “Furry Community”. I mean, I dunno if you’ve noticed, but there is a huge network of furries on Twitter/Livejournal/etc. and I swear they all follow each other. I never really fell into that group. Not so much because I don’t want to, but because there are other things that rank higher than furry on the Pike Self-Identity Chart. I’m a F/OSS geek, I’m a member of the WoW blogging community, I’m a steampunk, and I’m a sci-fi nerd/Trekkie… and I’m a furry, too, but that’s farther down the list, see. I’d probably go to a Fur Con if one happened to be in the area (not happening), but not before I went to a Linux Con or BlizzCon or a Steampunk Con or a Star Trek Con. Get what I’m saying?
Still, I don’t beat around the bush regarding my furriness. I used to sort of call myself a “closet furry” but then I realized how many people figured it out without me telling them (apparently I make it obvious?) so trying to hide it is pretty pointless. I like drawing (and writing about) cartoon animals– so there.
Also I wear goggles and am made of brass. Everything Pike loves, in a nutshell...
