This game won the Casual Gameplay Design Competition over at jisgames.com. If you hate productivity, but like innovative time wasters, then this is the site for you.
I can’t recommend Small Worlds enough. At first, it may look like an old Atari game, but without the awesome graphics. Give it a moment to win you over. You don’t need to know anything about games or solve any puzzles to enjoy this one.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Cassie today. She’s the kind of girl who stays on your mind. Well, she’s the kind of girl who stays on my mind. Being a fictional character I invented, there are really no other minds for her to stay on.
I’m a little over halfway through this novel, and I’m not sure where Cassie should go next. I get the feeling betrayal should be involved though. That’s always a nice mid-novel concept.
For those who are unaware – and thus far, only one person has actually read what I’ve written – Cassie has some troubles. She lives in a future that doesn’t offer too many advantages to a girl without means. She has been brought into a criminal gang and taught how to kill, with the aid of a series of implants that have been surgically added throughout her body. While this might seem like good steady work, her addiction issues have cost her a lot and she hasn’t always made the right choices.
I’ll come back from time to time to discuss what is going on with Cassie. Including whether I ever get far past 25,000 words.
“I-sing-in-this!”
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
Jessica and I sometimes have to pay close attention to understand what Abigail is singing, if we ever actually do pick up the words. But the girl certainly knows how to put on a show.
“In-sane-let-tuce!”
Flailing hands. Flailing hands.
Actually, she’s got a few songs down. For example, she can sing the entirety of Ring Around the Rosey.
“It-is-wet-ness!”
Spin, stomp, flail. Spin, stomp, flail.
It’s not all at what you’d call the right speed, and if you don’t prompt her for the next line, you get an endless series of “Ashes,” but it’s a whole song and she can sing it. She is also pretty good at falling down, which is a key part of that song.
“I’m-Stan-wit-ness!”
Jump, laugh, jump, laugh.
She has also been known to grab her stuffed Halloween cat and shake it up and down singing, “Jingle Bells! Jingle Bells!” I think that forms a nice juxtaposition.
“In-the-win-this!”
Arms up, big finish.
We’re still working on “Evita.” She keeps coming in too early and then starts crying for Argentina instead of the other way around.
As the first part of an ongoing series, I shall take excerpts from great works of literature and philosophy and offer them up for your amusement. Really, they’re just things I found funny in old books. The first offering comes from “The Three Musketeers”.
“Her hair, which, from being light in her youth, had become chestnut, and which she wore curled very plainly, and with much powder, admirably set off her face, in which the most rigid critic could only have desired a little less rouge, and the most fastidious sculptor a little more fineness in the nose.”
Abigail and I had a brief debate this morning. She had strong feelings on the issue of the orientation of her blanket relative to the floor as well as in relation to her stuffed lion. She also felt that I wasn’t taking my job of organizing these items seriously enough and had concerns as to whether I even understood the entire vision to begin with. In order to express her opinions on the matter, she used a communication system that is now becoming fairly standard in our household, that of crying and jumping, punctuated periodically by sentences that are either entirely incoherent or have only the barest resemblance to sentences that would prove useful in a scenario like this one. Something else you can do in these cases, it turns out, is express your disapproval of the current work that has been done by picking it up and either crumpling it or waving it around wildly to emphasize the depth to which you feel that the workmanship has, to date, been sub par.
It turns out that my pr
imary strategy of trying to engage calmly and discuss the issues of blanket and lion layout schemes – which proved quite successful initially, albeit temporarily – was only adding to both the level of Abigail’s frustration as well as the quantity of fluid streaming from both her eyes and nose. Several tissues were employed over time to deal with those drainage problems.
After some consideration, the board – ie, me – decided that we should table – ie, crib – the issue for the time being and focus on the pressing issues of what Abigail should wear today and what she would be eating for breakfast. After initial opposition to this plan, Abigail seemed to realize that her shirt drawer was, in fact, pretty interesting. Some speculation was also made about what the dog was doing, and she was invited to go find out, provided she waited until a new diaper could be strapped to her bottom.
And all of this created a surprisingly strong bonding experience. I’ve seen her throw tantrums before, but I hadn’t realized that they’d been minis until the full-blow Vesuvius of this morning. We ended up having a very nice time this morning, including some real-life hopping on pop. Which is actually not recommended. She goes for the full diaper slam on the belly.
So Neil Gaiman will be writing for Doctor Who next season. THAT should be an interesting mix.
The scratch of her voice jolted me out of sleep. I’d been dreaming about shooting stars. Another in a long line of might visions around the same theme. Another short-lived thing.
“Daddy!” Came the tinny voice again and I threw my feet over the side of the bed, nearly cracking my knees against the wall. I reached up and pulled my robe down from the hanger, wrapping it around my shoulders as I stood up and tying it around my waist as I pushed my toes, one foot after the other, into my slippers. Still groggy, I stared at the slippers for a moment, thinking about the hand-me-down pair. They had been well worn by my feet long before I’d ever put them on. Should I call them hand-me-overs?
I sighed and reached down to turn off the baby monitor where it lay by the bed. Then I opened the door and shuffled out of the closet where my narrow cot lay and out into the hall itself. I glanced to the left, toward the closed master bedroom door and thought of the two of them, lying there, warm and comfortable for the next hour or two at least. It couldn’t be more than 5:30.
I turned to the right and opened up the door at the end of the hall. Juliet was standing at the edge of her crib and her little face lit up when she saw me. “Daddy, up!” She said, with her standard excessive level of enthusiasm, considering the hour. I smiled as I walked to the crib and lifted her over the bars. She nestled her tiny head of blond curls into my shoulder and I felt at peace. My time with Juliet was almost the only human contact I had any longer. Certainly my wife … but no, I couldn’t call her that. She wasn’t my wife. Not really.
I carried Juliet to the chair and sat down, and she lay leaning on my shoulder for a while. This was our morning habit; a snuggle, enjoying each other’s company before we started the day. I looked up at the books on the shelf over her crib, although I could barely make out their titles in the pre-dawn light. I knew them all by heart, since I looked at them compulsively whenever I had the chance.
There were the standard behavioral books, covering everything from getting your child to sleep through the night to teaching them how to read earlier than other children. Had to give her that edge after all. But it was the book on the end that held my gaze. It was the one I couldn’t look away from, that I couldn’t help but frown at whenever it so much as crossed my mind.
It was the one that taught parents how to make the second daddy go away. At some point soon, they’d have to start reading that one in earnest. I looked down at my forearm, where they’d tattooed my serial number when I’d been born. The hyphen-2 sat at the end like an exclamation point. Two year life span. Juliet was more than a year and a half old now. For all that time, she’d had two daddies. Soon she’d only have one and they’d have to explain what had happened. Transition her, as the book called it.
I often wanted to tell her that I was real, that they were going to tell her that I’d gone away, that she only had one daddy now, that her second daddy wasn’t important. I wanted to make her remember me. But I knew it wouldn’t matter. She’d never be able to understand and it would only ruin the time I had left with her. She was my daughter after all.
I failed to post anything yesterday, but not due to a lack of love for the blog. I’ve got a (very) short story I’m looking to post here in a little while and I wanted that to be the next item up. Still working out the kinks.
Google Toolbar tells me that this page is in Danish and wants to know if I’d like to have it translated.
This can mean only one thing: nefarious Danes have infiltrated our government at the highest levels*, bent on bringing down our way of government, replacing it with a culture of drugs, free health care and a love of bizarre winter sports!
*If you consider the person who creates web pages for the postal service to be high.
Writing is always work for me. I hear stories from other writers about how they spend hours at a time in front of the keyboard, the words coming quicker than their hands can transcribe them into print. I have the compulsion to write. And sometimes, I experience that same joy I just described, when the hours fly by and you’re left with a little masterpiece.
But most of the time writing is work. I enjoy it, I get immense satisfaction from it, but getting myself to sit down and start typing is no different than getting myself to get up and go to the office or do chores around the house. I have a full time job that doesn’t involve writing at all. I have a daughter who is barely past a year and a half. I have a million other thoughts and commitments running through my mind. But writing stories is the one thing I have always come back to. The ideas, the characters are always there, waiting for me to sit down and the computer and set them free.
I have actually been going through a more prolific phase recently, partially because I have found new focus. I want people to read my work. This blog is a touchstone that I will use to write something, at least something small, every day. I will be presenting some of my work here in the coming days and weeks, which I hope you enjoy. Certainly feedback is always welcome.
Nonsensicles 