miffy495

Wait, Murray Smith? Where is this writer based? That's the name of the head of Calgary's Cinematheque, who also teaches at the University here and may be my boss come February if the proposed theatre takeover happens (which I desperately hope it does). Do I know and sometimes drink with this author?

I fully intend to have purchased it on Steam by the end of the year. If it goes on sale for the Christmas/boxing day thing, then awesome! If not, I intend to use some of the money that a grandparent will inevitably give me for birthday/christmas to purchase it anyway. I'd be up for a game on PC now and then.

Yeah, I was about to give you a special shout out for being super helpful so far. Also, Hermie and Thompson. I just put up a response to your last one that was something my group talked a little about but was a really hard question for us to answer.

I'm with Rodi. Not to the same extent, as I still think that AC2 was an improvement over AC, but I love the first game way more than a lot of people seem to and it was the breath of fresh air that AC2 wasn't. I like both settings a lot, especially as they're places that games pretty much never explore, but was such a fan of AC1's sense of place that I played all the way through Bloodlines, the sub-par PSP spin off featuring Altair on Cyprus. Twice. And I sill liked it.

Yeah, Breaking Bad is quickly becoming about Jesse being way in over his head in a world of ridiculously corrupt "real" adults. Granted, I'm watching them as they come to DVD, so I still haven't seen any of Season 4, but shit that show is amazing.

Yeah, you basically feel like that but a bit pervy-er.

Ok, the actual presentation isn't until Friday afternoon, but I'd like to populate the history of the account with things that aren't just group members making sure it works. I've sent out the starter question "What would your reaction be if you were told that a class you were enrolled in required a Google account?" I can see that Ben and 'Blix are both following already and may (?) respond, but if anyone else wants to say a thing, tweet your thoughts to @EDUC404. I'm going to try to post a couple of these seeder questions each day leading up to Friday, at which point hopefully my class will pick up on the idea and start asking things. I'll also encourage the other members of my group to think of some to post. I hope this turns out at least a little interesting, as right now it's just sort of a weird experiment.

I beat it earlier this week. It doesn't get much harder than that first fight, honestly. Maybe a couple of the boss fights, but really it's not much. There will be dudes with swords, armour, shock sticks, and shields as the game goes on, but aside from having to take them out in specific ways, the difficulty of the dudes you're fighting in the opening is about equal to that of the dudes you fight at the end of the game. I guess that's one of the things about open world. As for wrap-up thoughts, I have to say that the ending was ballsier than I expected. Really though, it never does THAT much that's different. I put about 25 hours into it according to Steam, and I never hated it while I was playing, I was just always waiting for it to get better. It's mechanically solid and I can't really point out anything wrong with the gameplay (the things I DO think are wrong with it are its confoundingly dumb story and the troubling issues regarding the game's depiction of women, but I've already talked about those) but nothing felt particularly amazing either. Further, the Riddler stuff is ridiculous overkill. I spent WAY too much time hunting down stuff as I went through the story and according to the achievements have only seen half of the Riddler things. I want to fight him, I really do, but I don't know if I can bring myself to slog through all this shit to get to him. Oh well. I'll play something else for a while and make the call as to whether to uninstall Arkham City or finish the Riddler stuff.

Hangovers are solar powered, it's just a scientific fact.

You guys are secretly muggers, aren't you? "Carry lots of cash. LOTS of it. Walk through only the darkest alleys."

Also, the main menu isn't "A Unix System."

She's already thinking about the flavour of your brains! Stop while you can!

If you imagine GTA San Andreas to be a splitting point for GTA, where they were focusing both on having a sprawling crime drama story and ridiculous shit like stealing a jetpack from Area 51, GTA IV is from the universe where they decided to focus on the story after that and Saint's Row is from the universe where they decided that the crazy shit should be dialed up to 11 and to hell with the story. The first game was a little unsure in that regard, the second was much more crazy as they seemed to find their flow, and now this third one seems like the pinnacle of fun times in a sandbox. I want it soooo bad, but am waiting for christmas break from school and possibly a sale. Shit though, this game. It's been top of my "must play" list for a while.

Thanks for interest, folks! As I said, it's a course on teaching literacy. My own focus is on Elementary school (grades 1 - 6 here) and, in this course, has trended toward trying to find ways to find authentic audiences for kids (via student blogs and such) and prepare them for participatory text creation while balancing administrative and parental safety concerns (for example, if a high school assignment includes keeping a blog, it is legally required in my district for their parents to have signed a permission slip). In some ways, it's weirdly become the same kind of argument people have over sex ed here, where the debate is between people trying to scare kids away from using social media at all and those trying to teach them how to use it well and to positive ends. Really, I'd like to have a conversation going around the @EDUC404 (class number) account and the #EDUC404B06 (class number and seminar code from the U of C) hash tag. Even just to get some back and forth going before the presentation happens next Friday so the account isn't just empty when we start up would be good. Any thoughts on introducing kids safely to social media so it's not just this thing that they start throwing all their personal information on when they hit 13 and don't have to lie about having parental permission anymore, or ways to get kids involved in the emerging "remix" literacy, or whatever may occur. If you have any thoughts and want to share them, throw them up there. I'd really appreciate anything that people would want to add to the conversation.

Almost exactly a week from the timing of this post, I'll be giving a presentation to my Literacy Education class on using Social Networks and Social Media in teaching students literacy practices. As part of this presentation, my group has created a twitter account that we will be taking live questions from the class on and responding to them while we are giving our twenty minute presentation. I thought it may be a fun idea to ask for any potential questions from this community too, just to include a bigger sample of people (the presentation is on the last day of classes, so it may be sparsely attended). If you'd like to help out with it, add my account @miffy495 and when the presentation is starting next week I'll send out a tweet with the presentation account's info. Any takers?

Yeah, I probably wouldn't have died so many times on special worlds 3 and 4 if I hadn't been getting every star coin along the way. That said, it does start to ramp up fairly quickly right around where you're at, Twig, so don't despair yet. I assume by the time I'm back at 8-boss in the special mode, it'll be quite difficult. Not Mario Galaxy 2 difficult, but significantly more than I'm used to.

Man, total digression, but I really want to see that movie again. I liked it a lot when I saw it in high school.

A bunch of them have checkpoints! There are only a few I've noticed that don't. I'm onto world 5 of the special levels now, and my stock of lives has gone from the 180 that I had when I finished the "main" game, dying only a couple of times, to about 100 now after playing through four worlds of the post-game, so it definitely gets a lot harder. And yeah, I noticed Luigi's suit. It's pretty damn awesome. I even texted a friend about it who'd been playing the second file on my game whenever we hang out, being too cheap to get her own damn copy. She was disappointed that the real tanooki suit was gone and absolutely loves Luigi, so to drop that double-whammy on her was pretty great. Of course, now she'll just be trying everything she can to do nothing but play the game next time I hang out with her...

That actually sounds amazing and hilarious and I think I need to see it in action.

Yeah, I hadn't realized they'd taken away the super leaf now. I love the countdown levels (levels that give you 30 seconds on the timer and have small timer boosts sprinkled throughout, almost like a Mario checkpoint race) but the shadow Mario ones can be brutal. That ghost house in World 3 with a shadow Mario was super tough. This is the comet equivalent from Mario Galaxy, but the comets just added new challenges to the same levels. This adds new challenges, but totally changes the actual map as well. Very cool. Oh, and Tanu, even though they removed the super leaf, you should at least be excited that they brought in the proper tanooki suit. if you have a gray leaf instead of a brown one, hold R in mid air to become a statue. Freaking rad that they did end up putting that in the game, sort of a bummer that you need to finish 8-boss to get it.

I gotta say, now that I'm through the first three worlds of "SPECIAL" levels (the ones that you can unlock with medals after beating the game), this is where 3D starts to make a lot more sense. I actually cried out with a "Holy shit!" at one point. This game makes good on the 3DS so far. If Nintendo can do more like this, I'm pretty damn happy. I caution anyone playing this game against stopping after beating Bowser the first time. At least save Luigi ("SPECIAL" World 1-boss) and keep the momentum going to see the crazy later remix levels. The late world 7 and 8 levels that started to show how cool 3D could be in this game start being equalled somewhere around SPECIAL World 2-3 and it starts really ramping up. This game gets CRAZY after you have "beaten" it.

WANT. SO. MUCH. ...just waiting for the required funds to purchase it.

Like El Muerte, also almost posted this yesterday but decided to leave it for Ben. Big ups to Dan on that one though! I loved playing through Privates, thought it was great fun.

I dunno. I just know that episode one is on my telltale account now...

I got the Jurassic Park Blu Ray and to my delight it had a coupon for episode one in it! I had been on the fence, but the universe wants me to try this apparently. I'll be playing it in the near future I believe.