miffy495

Yeah, in response to not being able to afford anything new right now but wanting to play SSX, I just started on Amped 3. Pretty good, actually.

Steam tells me there's a thing going on at 1:30 today. If this is true, I'm totally in. Who else is going to be there?

Extremo. (callbacks are appropriate here, right?)

They all are. This one in particular get's me excited for the prospect of running around in natural settings as well as man-made: The more I think about this, the more stoked I am. Pretty much any choice they could have made for the AC3's setting would also have a tonne of missed opportunities just by virtue of the fact that they can set these games pretty much anywhere. Just have to do my best to forget about all the potential AC3s and let myself get into this one. As I said before, the idea of a native character that's actually handled (hopefully) well is so alien to games already that I'm excited just to see that happen.

Yes. Yes it was. Weird.

I got my practicum placement yesterday! I won't specifically say the school in case that's some privacy thing, but it's only about 8 blocks from my house and when I told classmates where I was going they were super jealous, so apparently it's a good'un. I'm stoked as hell now! Oh, and I now know which grade I'll be working with. 5th graders. 9 and 10 year olds, for those who may not be familiar with how old Canadian kids are at what grade. Very exciting stuff.

I'm both excited and bummed. First off, there's a game with a native lead character whose name isn't something borderline racist like "Tommy Hawk" (I'm looking at you, Prey) and coming from a developer surrounded by whatever artifacts of Algonquin civilization Canada has managed to hold onto, I'm curious to see what they do with that. Second, as someone else has said, it's a setting that has only really been done by the grognard-iest of games, so that's new. Third, it's more AC, and I'm still way too into that series, not feeling at all burnt out halfway through Revelations right now. That said, I would have preferred the French Revolution setting that had been rumoured, so I'm disappointed that that isn't happening. Still, cautiously optimistic. As with all things AC however, I must point out that this is coming from someone who played the PSP version to completion twice and actually enjoyed it. It is definitely something that I am inclined to be stoked on.

I've been playing it in what down time I've had lately. If you're an established fan, it's pretty good still. I can see why others are saying the series is wearing out its welcome, but I personally still have plenty of welcome left for it. Constantinople is a pretty rad setting, too. The only part that feels meh are the Desmond segments that you unlock by collecting "animus shards" or whatever they call those stupid things. Those are not great. Also, they are for some reason a different executable, it would seem, as when I enter and leave those levels the game dumps to my desktop and then restarts in the level I went to. Weird shit.

Man, Nach, you've been bringing it hard lately. Well put indeed.

Love you too, Pat. Yeah, when you sent me the link to that article on Steam and I read through it, the stupidity of his statements was flat-out mind boggling. A person defending themselves by saying "it's just a joke" is one (still stupid and wrong, but at least understandable as a stance) thing, but when he's saying things like it is "ethically wrong" to try and get the fighting game community to change the way they are (asking the fighting game community to give up sexism is apparently, to paraphrase another of his statements, like asking basketball players to play with a(n American) football instead of a basketball), I'm pretty sure I had a stroke from confusion and anger. If you want your day ruined, expose yourself to this cretin's views on his community. If he really wants the fighting game community to never branch out from frustrated assholes, he's doing a great job of maintaining his peer group. I take some comfort from the fact that a lot of them are pissed off at him now. Not a lot of comfort though.

Agreed. Especially given fairly common issues with ipods in which the left side has a lot of issues due to the jack slipping inside the casing. I have a 5 year old ipod because I can't afford a newer mp3 player, and despite cracking it open and manually re-adjusting the headphone jack whenever this gets to be overbearing, at the best of times I don't have a reliable left channel. The podcast being stereo would pretty much make it not worth listening to for me as I'd only be able to reliably hear half of it. As I've given more money to starting it back up than I really should have, I'd appreciate being able to listen to it.

Pushmo is bloody excellent. Play that game.

This. This right here is why I want to be an English teacher. We've been practise-marking journal entries that look just like this for the last couple of weeks, evaluating where the child is at and how we would help them to develop in whatever way they need to. Every time I come to class I squee at things like this, and the thought that it will soon be my career makes me incredibly happy.

You're on the last boss. Yeah, to that point you could kind of scrape by by just being pretty good with the basics of the mechanics, but to beat this guy you need to be in full contol of everything. Man, did it ever feel amazing to beat him though.

I'm actually finding it to be the hardest of the 3, but that may be because of HDTV lag. I'm getting superb on most of the games on the first try, but perfects continue to elude me. Of course, I've only had a bit of time with it. I'm just at Remix 3 right now.

I actually have this Sunday off. It'll probably be the only one I have free for a while, but I'm totally down for this week!

The presentation I gave was specifically on the idea of getting a junior high school science class engaged with the debate on what science is by deliberately teaching them lies and setting up class experiments that will prove what you've been teaching them wrong. What it boils down is two things: The first and simple assumption that a kid is way more likely to remember something if they've proven their teacher wrong on it. The second is that having a vivid example of science being about disproving what you think you know rather than confirming it will drive the point home and get the class talking about science as more than a collection of crap to be memorized. It's really disheartening for me how many science programs are just a list of facts, and if I end up teaching at that level (despite training for 3rd/4th grade, who knows where I'll end up employed?) I want to at least try and get that into the lessons. I'm only a first year student in education, so the idea of representing my school at a national conference (the name says "Western Canadian" but there were people from both coasts there) was scary. Still, people seemed to like my ideas, and the professor who was down with what I was saying hinted at wanting to supervise graduate work with me if I were to pursue the topic. As for methodology, I have only had two weeks of classroom experience so far. I get another month starting on the 26th, so that will be nice, but I feel like I won't really know how I'm going to do it until I get there. I know from personal style that I'm more willing to feel the flow of a classroom than try to structure everything just so. As I'm studying to teach Primary English, most of what I'm learning pertains to different theories and methods for teaching young children to read. I am quite sympathetic to the Critical school, teaching reading as an equalizer, force of social justice, etc rather than as simply for the joy of it. Not that reading for the joy of it is bad, just that those kids will already be plenty motivated. To get the whole class on board, they need to be reading and writing for a cause that they care about. It's up to me to encourage the action and find ways to channel it into learning. That's not to ignore the fundamentals, of course. I'm a stickler for spelling and grammar even in my most relaxed moments. There are plenty of ways other than rehearsal to get that down though. I fully expect that as a result of trying to adapt my lessons around the kids passions, my first few years will be dominated by staying incredibly late trying to find ways to plan the next class' events around whatever may have come up during the school day. Eventually, I will hopefully have built up enough of a library of activities that I'll have something from a previous year ready to go when for most times when a class really digs into something. There will still, I'm sure, be panicked nights of "oh crap, I didn't think they'd talk about that. How the hell can I make tomorrow's lesson relevant to it?", but hopefully after a few years it will only be once a week or so. In the meantime, coffee coffee coffee.

Dude, ska is awesome. Just because a lot of people here are big into electronic doesn't mean the rest of us don't exist. EDIT: On listening, I quite liked it. Good stuff. The vocals were a little clean for my liking though, I have to say. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, it's just with punk/ska stuff my tastes tend towards the lower of the fidelities. Still, if there's a free EP to be had I'll certainly check out what else they have on offer.

Just as a general update on all kinds of things, here's a rapid-fire account of my last two weeks. Some is new to this thread, some old. Point is, it's been a busy and stressful time, and I'm looking forward to being out the other side of it: - Quit the job that has been frustrating the hell out of me since a management shake-up 8 months ago - Got a new job as a shift supervisor at Starbucks. Less cool than indie projectionist, but close to home, only for a year, and with a non-infuriating boss (when he learned I used to manage the games section of an HMV, he just wanted to stop interviewing me right there and talk about Mass Effect. Nice guy, too). - Gave a 45 minute presentation at the Western Canadian Association of Student Teachers Conference (WestCAST) in front of delegates from over 30 universities. Had some of my professors in attendance as well, which was extra pants-shittingly-terrifying on top of representing my faculty. I noticed two specifically who were sitting next to each other, one obviously super into what I was saying, the other obviously NOT. The fact that the positively responding professor cornered me after for a talk about my idea was encouraging though. - Feeling guilty about going into English teaching and not being up on current young adult fiction, read The Hunger Games. Pretty fucking good, actually. - Had two exams. - Ran tech for a double feature silent movie program with live music. Cops and Sherlock Jr, both starrring Buster Keaton. Not a bad way to spend my second last shift as a projectionist. Still, the joy of the show did not outweigh the way my boss jerked around the people who rented us out to run it. Their vow to never work with him again only helped to strengthen mine. I was CC'd in an email just now telling my boss that the only good part about renting the theatre was working with me, then shitting all over him for letting the place fall apart. That felt nice to read. - Finally got a beat up old Rav 4 fixed with help from my uncle in Edmonton (with about 3 hours between our cities, he's the closest relative I have, proximity-wise). I now not only have my license, but a viable car to use it with. I just need to practise on back roads for a while before going anywhere real, since I got my license 2 months ago and still have yet to use it. Worried I'm forgetting stuff already and need to remedy this fast. So yeah, been busy. I'd say I'm looking forward to a break, but starting Wednesday I'm babysitting a hyperactive Scottish Terrier for six weeks (this is actually awesome. I love animals and can't wait to start taking care of Stan and his obese cat sister, Stitch) and in three weeks I'll be doing a month of practicum at an elementary school. I think one of the weeks of that month is the Calgary Board of Education's spring break, so I'm desperately hoping that I actually have that week to myself. I guess we'll see. EDIT: Oh, and TP, one other thing is that my partner has just finished the 4-ish week wind-up period with a similar medication to yours and is starting to feel much better. It was a rough few weeks being on the supporting side of it, so I can't even imagine what it was like to be her, but it does seem that she's feeling that it was well worth it. I hope it works out as well for you.

I agree very much with the recommendations for both the Muppets and Breaking Bad. Rather than go to a bar or something, I specifically requested that my partner and I go to see the Muppets for my 24th birthday back in December. I'm an adult, I can have a muppet birthday party if I fucking well want to. It was rad. EDIT: This may seem overly defensive, but I've had to justify this to far too many people already.

I dunno if it's necessarily the capital. Here in Canada, most people forget Ottawa exists except when there's something big up in parliament or an election. Everyone always hates Toronto though.

He's getting ready for the full release of DotA2.

Awesome. So glad that I (apparently, by popular opinion) posted that.

Huh. I was going to say a thing, but then Nach jumped in and said it far better than I could have. That's what I get for only paying passing attention to the life thread for a bit (ironically, I was attending a seminar at a teachers conference on the difficulties of teaching students about things like white and male privilege without accidentally dividing your class against itself). Glad to see how quickly and eloquently that shit gets shut down on Thumbs though. I probably would have just ended up agreeing with Subbes' "I hate it, but sometimes I laugh and then feel really bad after" rather than contributing something on the level of what Nach wrote anyway.

Have you played Skyward Sword? It does that. Your items and shield can be upgraded at shops. Not necessary, but makes them more effective as you go. It's actually kind of sweet. This thread has got me to jump back into it. I'm about 9 hours in now, still very hand-hold-y, but I'm enjoying it a lot.