RE: Liam’s Post

In defence of the good people on Firefly, since the show was cancelled: - Nathan Fillion (Capt. Malcolm Reynolds) was cast as a main character on FOX’s Drive which - although cancelled - would prove to give him time to star in the internet sensation Dr. Horrible. He is now filming the second season of his hit ABC dramedy, Castle (of which he plays the lead). - Adam Baldwin (Jayne Cobb) was cast as NSA agent and total badass John Casey in the extremely popular NBC series Chuck, which is entering its fourth season this fall. - Morena Baccarin (Inara Serra) has bounced from a few recurring television roles, including a principal character in Stargate SG-1, and finally landed a series regular in the television series V (which I believe is a remake). - Jewel Staite (Kaylee Frye) became a series regular on Stargate Atlantis for a season and a half, playing Dr. Jennifer Keller. - Summer Glau (River Tam) landed the role of the Terminator named Cameron in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on FOX. - Alan Tudyk (Hoban Washburne) had a really successful career before Firefly, and still largely does. He has been in a whole slew of popular or cult films, and starts occasionally on Broadway. He’s also been cast in the recurring role of Alpha on Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. - Gina Torres (Zoe Washburne) has done a lot of work since Firefly, although she doesn’t seem to really stick out in much of anything. But she’s been in a number of movies and television shows but - sadly - nothing that would ever be a draw to her original cult audience. So…it seems as if she hasn’t done anything. - Sean Maher (Simon Tam) … No comment. - Ron Glass (Shepherd Book) He has had work, that’s for sure. But, again, nothing that would appear particularly noteworthy amongst “our kind”.

So, yeah. I think many of them have gone on to land successful roles, although with the exception of the three male leads (Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, and Adam Baldwin), none have managed to escape the grasp of science-fiction.

Interesting controversy.

Curious to know how some of you feel about the whole thing. I know that many of you are fans of Orson Scott Card.

Source

EDIT: Alright. Here is the actual source, which was linked to in the first post in the forum I linked to.

Better Source

I do not know whether it was the IGN reviews or testimony from gamers online that led me to purchase this game initially, but I acquired it nonetheless. Now that I have completed the game in its entirety, I am sceptical that there was any positive testimony at all regarding this game.

I possess no aversion to the genre of point-and-click adventure games, and I am typically enthusiastic about any well-made offering by a first-class company like Capcom.

But Zack and Wiki is a true disappointment.

Zack and Wiki is a game that attempts to do something innovative with the controller. While I am aware that the game is older than most on the Wii (since it came out closer to the system’s launch), I am still really disappointed by both the simplicity and unreliability of their motion controllers.

Since it is a point-and-click adventure game, Zack and Wiki revolves around the tried and true mechanic of finding items and using them on anything in sight until it works. However, the game designers took it one step further, by introducing gesture based usage of items. To use a saw, you saw. To wind a crank, you crank. To pull a switch, you pull a switch. It is a nifty idea, and makes the experience feel very tactile.

Of course, that would only be completely true if the gestures worked half the time. More often than not, the item will flail inexplicably or require some sort of obscure precise movement that is nothing like using the item on screen.

Another one of my biggest complaints about the game is the unrelenting punishment for failure. As I mentioned above, games of this type are typically about experimenting with items in different ways to find a solution to a problem. I’ve played through the entire Myst series, and a whole slew of classic adventure games that openly encourage experimentation. Sometimes you can combine items into an essentially useless combination. Sometimes your experimentation will be laughed at by a narrator or NPC. But you are never so fiercely punished as you are in Zack and Wiki.

In fact, I would describe Zack and Wiki as the anti-adventure game. Going even further, Zack and Wiki is an anti-game. There is no experimentation. There is no creativity. The game operates on such a rigidly defined path set out by the game developers that the walkthrough is a simple list of bullet points. Events must be done in the order that was decided upon during development, otherwise the player is penalized or killed.

The threat of this is terrifying, as the game offers no intermediate save points in a level. You have three choices: 1. do the level flawlessly on your first try 2. operate through trial-and-error while using up vast amount of “resurrection tokens”, which substantially reduce your score 3. experiment (as the Gods of Gaming intended) and be forced to restart the level from the beginning every time you deviate from The Plan.

It is a grim future.

I’ve spoken negatively of this game before, but now that I have completed it and seen the ending, I can honestly say that this game has no redeeming qualities. Poorly designed and unrewarding gameplay, virtually zero actual mental challenge (since your creative solution will never be correct), deplorable storyline and one-dimensional characters. Even the dialogue is awful, and it seems to suffer from translation issues (or it was written that way to give the appearance of a kitschy translation issue).

If you have a Wii, and you’re looking for a game to buy for cheap, stay away from this one. Even with a low price tag, it isn’t worth it. Try hooking your nipples up to a car battery. It will be more thrilling.

Well, they are gone.

And here we are. Less than 24 hours after they removed the teeth, and I am no longer in pain nor am I bleeding. I believe Andrew earns a point for a good call on that.

It was interesting. They got me in late. I was seen by several doctors, including a somewhat shifty nurse. I was nervous about her unexplained presence, so I wrote her description down so people could avenge me (I insist on swift vengeance if I am murdered).

Anyway, I joked around with the surgeon, nurse, and anaesthetist before they put me under. Right before I passed out, I saluted them and said, “See you on the other side.”

I woke up in what felt like an instant. Which was pleasant, because there wasn’t any waking up in the middle of the procedure. During my “eye teeth” (or I-teeth?) removal, I woke up during the procedure. Very awkward to feel people cramming their fists into your mouth.

None of that this time.

I woke up. My mother came in to the recovery room. I was chatting it up with her and joking with the nurse. The nurse said she was expecting a cute little child with the name Jordan. I asked her if she didn’t think I was cute. She told me I was. We were hitting it off very well. She says most women cry after anaesthetic, while most men are obnoxious, but she said I was a perfect patient (I made her laugh a lot). She was fairly young too. Likely could have gotten her number had I wanted it. Don’t worry though Katie (if you’re reading this). I’m a one woman man (and you are that one woman).*

Anyway, yeah. I’ve eaten pudding, chicken, and Carnation Instant Breakfast since the procedure. Doing pretty well. It doesn’t even feel like anything happened. And I’ve only had 7ml of liquid codeine (because I cannot swallow pills). I’ve iced the area to reduce swelling, but I’ll likely still bruise. Oh well. I can deal.

*I’m sure many of you read that sentence and thought “Jordan, I doubt you were that charming.” And you’re probably 100% correct. I was heavily drugged up, and I felt like I was drunk without any of the nausea or anything of that nature. So, I had perceived charm. It probably didn’t exist.

Well, less than 13 hours now.

In the minuscule chance that something goes horrifically wrong and I am slain, I want you all to know that I will take turns haunting you, and will give you some sort of visible sign that an afterlife exists (if there is one). If not, no, you cannot have my stuff.

:P

Recently got back from Katie’s relatives’ cottage. Fun weekend. We went up on Saturday after our Developmental Psychology exam was done. I brought up my dad’s camping supplies (tent, thin mattresses, sleeping bags). The cottage is up in Buckhorn, which is near Peterborough.

It was enjoyable. We pitched the tent on her uncle’s lot while eating our meals and whatnot in the cottage. The weather was shitty for a lot of the time, but I was fortunate enough to get on the water a few times. We went out in the paddle boat twice (blah), and we also went out in the canoe.

That was an ordeal. We went out on the lake over to one of the small islands. Katie wanted to explore, so we got out of the boat and tied the boat to a tree. We explored the island for a bit, and then decided to leave.

In the interest of being gentlemanly, I figured I would let Katie hop in the boat first. The rocks were slippery on our way back, so I didn’t want her to get hurt. She got into the boat while I held it close, and then it was my job to hop in. I slipped on the rocks and fell waist deep in water, and couldn’t get back up.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just get it from the water. I have the necessary upper body strength.

I say to Katie “Brace yourself in your seat. I’m about to jump in.”

So, she braces herself. And I jump in.

Katie tumbles out of her seat backward onto the left side of the boat. I’ve landed stable in the back seat, and I’m alright. But, the shift in weight to the left from Katie’s fall has the boat tip sideways slightly and start to fill up with water. I leaned to the right quickly to get the boat upright. Katie struggled to get up.

We start to float away from the island, and I tell Katie to throw me the bailing bucket. She does. And I start bailing out the canoe.

She starts panicking. Sitting at the front of the canoe, Katie finds herself unable to look over her shoulder at the rest of the boat, so she cannot see that everything is fine. She starts to panic about how we’re going to die.

I tell her to calm down and stop paddling, and that I will get us back to shore. I kneel down in the boat, which opens up an injury in my knee from earlier*. So, I tell her that I’m bleeding again (which I was…and a fair bit too) and she starts freaking out more because she thinks I’m going to bleed to death in the canoe and leave her floating in the middle of the lake with a sinking canoe and an unconscious (or dead) boyfriend.

We were fine though. I paddled us back to shore, and we lived to fight another day.

Bottom line: Katie will never go out in a canoe with me again.

*The knee was injured when we were moving a floating slide for her young cousins. The slide is a standard pool slide that is attached to a dock floating in the middle of the water. For storage, they pull the dock over to the side.

I swam out to the dock and got onto it. Then, I found the three rusty metal cables that her uncle used to attach the cinder bock anchors. And I pulled them up. One of the cinder blocks had a tree attached to it. Hauling that one up was an ordeal, but I brought it to the surface and her uncle removed the tree.

Anyway, Katie asked me to push the dock out further so they could slide into deeper water. Well, my legs got pulled under the dock, and something (presumably whatever holds the buoyant pieces in place) cut my leg.

It looks like someone ran a cheese grater along my knee. There are many small cuts all over my knee, some of which are deep. At the time, I told Katie how I was going to head back to the cottage to wash it out. She said I was being a big baby. Of course, when her family looked at it after, they start telling me how I should drown the wound in hydrogen peroxide, and Katie insisted that I would require stitches.

Good grief.

Anyway, that was my weekend the extent of the cottage related excitement. Got an unhealthy dose of second hand smoke from her grandfather, which was lovely.

On the way home, we stopped at quite a few geocaches. We even checked out a cool one at an old cemetery in Caesarea. Very interesting stuff. All-in-all, I think we found something like ten caches that day in Lakefield, Cavan, Buckhorn, and other surrounding towns.

Fun times. Now I have to go and log them on the website. The ones that require wilderness exploration are so much more satisfying than metro-caches. Getting a nanocache in a Chapters parking lot is unsatisfying.

Anyway, until next time.