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Mod Breakdown:
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+2028 / +931 |
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Karma Level:
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+ 47
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| Signed up: |
4 years ago (5/19/05) |
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Last signed in:
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12 hours ago |
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Total time online:
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51d 11h 1m |
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Another sleepless night
Wikipedia is going to kill me through sleep deprivation.
It's 1:30 a.m. and I'm reading up on theories in linguistic relativity.
Next thing I know, it's 8:09 and I'm looking at the filmography of Audrey Hepburn (the most beautiful woman to have ever graced this planet).
Ah, the everlasting search for knowledge.
And don't bother asking about the thought process which brings one from this particular A to B
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IE8
Broken browser is broken. I'm fed up with it.
Can someone Firefox 101 with me? How can I set homepage tabs?
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Wow...
I was banned from 4chan...
Now what's going to distract me from my homework and make me fail college?
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Damn it...
I've plunged downward on the one-way road that is becoming a japanophile.
I've found an anime that I like (Jigoku Shoujo--"Hell Girl").
And Maximum the Hormone is fucking awesome (Someday I hope to understand all of their lyrics. Yes, that means becoming fluent in Nihongo O hanashimasu).
God damn it...
And on an unrelated note, Internet Explorer 8 really sucks. Is there a way to revert back to 7 (Without losing my addons and bookmarks)?
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Crazy English
1. The bandage was wound around the wound.
2. The farm was used to produce produce.
3. The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4. We must polish the Polish furniture.
5. He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6. The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7. Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8. A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9. When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10. I did not object to the object.
11. I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
12. The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
13. How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
14. There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
15. They were too close to the door to close it.
16. The buck does funny things when the does are present.
17. A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
18. To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
19. The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
20. After a number of injections my jaw got number.
21. Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on. English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn't a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.
Also
I did not do this. But, damn, I wish I had.
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Hats off to the video game community
Author's Note Our day will come. Even if I have to show them myself, in scholarly argument-essay form.
And, on a more serious note, here is my argument essay, the last paper for English101. My purpose here is to show games' validity as an expressive form of art that deserves its rightful place among the more traditional great forms, while still acknowledging the limitations, to the people who disagree or simply don't know about games.
Video Games: The Future of Storytelling
The water of the Atlantic Ocean is chilled like the breath of Death, and it threatens to swallow everything in the same way. The towering tail of the airliner, in flames and sinking, is no exception. The burning fuel on the ocean's thrashing surface casts Hell's wild and fiery illumination on a not-too-distant lighthouse. Sure, it's ominous and sinister-looking in the light of the flames, as well as oddly placed in the middle of the north Atlantic, but it's a better alternative than drowning, right?
Stairs encircling the lighthouse's foundation lead up to a pair of great steel doors, one of which is open. You slowly step into the darkness. Automatic lights, showlights that are likely to be found in an art gallery, are ready to greet any who enter by switching themselves on. They reveal the solitary piece in this particular gallery: a great bronze bust of a man, suspended over the room, observing all with a look of intense scrutiny. Below him spans a scarlet silk banner, heralding the gilded words “No Gods or Kings. Only Man.”
More automatic lights reflect off the regal shine of another staircase on the periphery from the door. In the center of the landing at the bottom is a pool of water, its depth incomprehensible. In the center of the pool is a metal spherical submersible, its door ajar and beckoning. You succumb to curiosity. You step in, pull the lever, and make the descent. Welcome to Rapture.
Neat story, is it not? It's compelling, wrought with mystery, with foretellings of an epic scope. It's a story fit only for a great novel, you might say. However, I, and millions of other zealous fans, will take pride in telling you that you are wrong. The exposition to the story of BioShock may very well have looked like this, had it been a novel, but it wasn't. It was a video game. And it was one of the first and few that countless many will follow-- a video game with a good story to tell.
Before the genre can truly realize its potential, it must first work its way out of the mire of ignorance that it's amuck in. The reigning mainstream image of video games today is not much different from that which it has held in previous decades: simple, childish playtime toys. They rot the mind. They're bad for you. You'll waste your life (and money) obsessing over them. Without an ignorant mask on, however, statements like these couldn't be further form the truth.
“All this time we got the fable of sleeping beauty wrong. The prince doesn't kiss her to wake her up. No one who has slept for a hundred years is likely to wake up. It was the other way around. He kisses her to wake himself up, from the nightmare that has brought him there.”
-Max Payne
When asked if video games are an art form, Remedy Games writer Sam Lake states “prose is an art form, movies and acting in general are art forms, so is music, painting, graphics, sculpture, and so on. Some might even consider classic games like chess to be an art form. Video games use elements of all these to create something new. Why wouldn't video games be an art from?”(1) Lake says well what is on the tongues of almost every supporter of games as art. Humans over generations have developed music, visual art, and theatre to creatively express ideas and emotions. Having come a long way form the 8-bit boops and bleeps and individual pixels of the 80's era, each major title today has behind it literally hundreds of hardworking artists who make visions into interactive reality. While designers are laying out physics engines and mapping gameplay, writers are busy creating worlds and characters. Concept artists are constructing visual representations of these worlds as voice actors personify the characters who will inhabit them. Sound effects technicians are busy creating subtleties and ambiance that make the world breathe with realism, while composers lead entire orchestras in original scores to make the world compelling through mood and suspense. Games today blend visual art with musical composition and acting performance, all experienced through interactivity, to make a unique new medium through which ideas and emotions can be expressed the way operas, paintings, novels, ballets, and movies of old did. The only difference is now the audience is no longer a passive onlooker.
In fact, the audience is quite far form being passive. Evidence shows that video games improve cognitive functions like eyesight(2), quicken reflexes(3), and even help in “leaning how to think, how to design, and how to be active in getting information and knowledge.”(4) James Paul Gee, Ph. D., is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied in depth on the effects of video games on taking in and processing information and decision-making. Gee believes that interactive gaming can be a more efficient learning tool than more traditional methods through the way it employs systems that give players “certain goals, and [the player wants] to achieve those goals. That's what makes it entertaining, like the world you are in. You all of a sudden are playing a character with goals in that world to make you successful and then you are motivated.” Professor Gee argues that video games not only help players learn educational content like chemistry or history, but also provide a context to apply such knowledge and develop complex thinking skills.
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