Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.
I posted an entry each day during my 26th year of life.
I just played a hole of golf on Tiger Woods 10 with the Wii MotionPlus, which confirms for me that I am not a good golfer.
I also played Micro Machines, which is a surprisingly good multiplayer SNES game.
Either way, I’m excited for future games that will use the MotionPlus, like Red Steel 2, as Tiger Woods delivers on making it feel as if everything I do with my remote is directly translated into what happens on-screen.
It’s an exciting and humbling experience.
This weekend was relievingly work-free, so Katie and I spent a good portion of time yesterday tending our front and side yards.
Today, we both helped make a delicious meatloaf dinner.
Overall, it feels really good to be homeowners. Our roof’s insulation is fantastic – we have not felt any of this year’s hot days while inside our house.
And it’s great to know that the money that leaves our bank account each month goes toward something we own, instead of making money for a faceless landlord or rental agency. Even I’d mortgage rates have fallen since we locked down our loan.
Also, it’s fantastic to be able to accidentally create a hole in your wall and have it be no big deal.
I need to cut my fingernails. Like my hair, I never cut them with any regular schedule. I just wait until they’re an inconvenient length and the cut them out of spite. I need to work on that.
Scribblenauts is a game that I am excited about.
The funny thing is, it’s one of the few games where I don’t even particularly care too much how the gameplay turns out. It’s like being excited for Encarta to come out.
Remember Encarta? It was one of the first CD-ROMs I ever had for our first major home PC and it was essentially an encyclopedia. It was just a way to search through articles that contained information on your computer. It wasn’t a game (although it did have a kind of wacky visual knowledge quiz part of it), but it was exciting because of how it presented the information. Interested in a related article or want to see a picture of the fruit that this seed grows into? Just click! No need to find another volume and flip through it until you found the right article.
Scribblenauts is kind of the same thing. It’s the dictionary, presented on the DS, with the ability to spawn nouns. Sure, there’s a puzzle aspect to it – you have a little guy and you’re trying to collect stars and you can write down any word and it’ll appear in the game world.
I know what you’re saying: that’s impossible. Every word? Those are the same doubts I had when I first heard about the game. But it demoed at E3. There are videos on Youtube. And it looks…shockingly robust. So, sure, I’ll get it to play the main “game” portion of it. But like The Sims 3, you also buy the game to experiment, to see how far it’ll go.
So this fall, Katie will be busy on her DS with the new localized version of Professor Layton, and I’ll be trying to think of nouns that couldn’t possibly have been included in Scribblenauts. I imagine we’ll both be pretty happy.
I have a phrase a day calendar that teaches me a German phrase that I usually forget by the next day.
Katie wants to learn Chinese to become more Asian.
Do either of us have any hope? Is it possible to learn a foreign language when it isn’t a requirement (because you live or are moving to a foreign country in the near future) and when it is only something you think about briefly and/or sporadically?
Is there an easy way to try and get ourselves in a better mindset? Software like the Rosetta Stone? Free podcasts we may find online? Enrolling in a local community college class? Moving to Germany or China?
It doesn’t look too promising with how busy our lives are. I don’t often come home from a long day of work looking to learn and practice German, and that may be the root cause of why it won’t happen easily.
It may also be because I spread myself too thin. If I focus on less things to learn at a single time as opposed to trying to acquire German, guitar, novel writing, and various other work skills all within the span of a year, I may have more success.
But where’s the fun in that?
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