Grrr....stupid enter button. *Stabs it with Master Sword* Anyway, this is my first review for "The Sims 3" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I love it! My favorite part of the game is the Sims creation. You have so much more freedom in customization. Skin color, hair color, clothes, eyes, personality, their likes...I can't begin to describe how much freedom you get. I'll try it by introducing a character I made. Her name is Victoria and she has green skin, yellow eyes, purple hair and wears a reddish-orange gown. This is just a regular Sims woman, mind you. I've done nothing like make her drink a potion, run a glitch test on her, etc. All I did was took a regular Sims woman and tweaked the skin tone so she looked the way she did. Oh, and she's artistic, ambitious, green thumb, hydrophobic, and neat. Her voice is high too. The controls are fairly simple, but a bit confusing, especially when you're navigating between household to neighborhood and when you want to switch to a new one. However, I did like the seemless way it switches from house to neighborhood, and if you make a Sims go to a certian place like a hospital, you can actually FOLLOW them. My dislikes were that unlike in Sims 2, I've found that you can't just plop a Sim family in an empty plot and build the house as I used to. Also, it appears you are no longer able to have multiple neighborhoods. Being a morbid fellow, I also wanted to know what would happen after a Sims died. So I purposfully made a group of adult Sims resembling Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini and shut them in a tiny room and watched them starve (It was amusing to see Hitler pee in his pants, btw). The Grim Reaper does his thing, but it appears that unlike Sims 2 when the Sims become an urn/tombstone, they turn into newspapers. Again, I haven't had a lot of Sims die on me yet, so I really don't know. THE GOOD: = Character Creation (I was able to very nearly make the Sims match the characters of my book exactly. Nearly because it doesn't have clothings from the Colonial time.) = Seemless neighborhood. = Customizing the Sims. Like I said with Victoria, you can make your Sims appear however you totally want them. If you want a family of blue-skinned, red-haired Sims, then you can do it. THE BAD: = No more putting Sims in empty lots. BONUS: = Seeing Hitler wet his pants in front of Stalin and Mussolini. Not so powerful now, are ya? XD So, I'll give it a rating of 9/10.
Like the title said, I'm considering using my blog as a review station where I review what I think of videogames and movies. I know there are a lot of them out there, but I feel like having my own little corner of the interwebz to review stuff. So, that's my idea. I'll just post what I thought of what movies and videogames I watched/played. What do y'all think of it?
With my X-mas vacation coming in just three days, I just realized something: What am I gonna do during the 35-day vacation? Knowing me, I'll end up spending about 98% of the time playing videogames and surfing the internet. I can't drive (nor bike), that pretty much keeps me in the house. I can ask for a ride though, so that's a good thing. However, I don't want to spend the 35 days I have off doing nothing but videogames. I've got a small list going: 1) Read a book I like. 2) Build models. 3) Go for a walk. 4) Watch a movie. 5) Write the story and really push myself to write at least 1,000 words per day. That's all I can think up of now, but the problem is that I'm so dang lazy. XD Mostly because I probably don't have a whole lot of stuff to do besides chores, but they're no fun. I'm not shutting internet or videogames off, no. I'm just trying to think of what else I can do besides devoting my time and attention to it. Any ideas?
Today I just had a conversation with a friend of mine who had to read a book written about a man in the 1930s in a circus. My friend told me the book was terrible for two reasons: #1= The large part of the book was about a pshyco being cruel to an elephant, and the writer got so lazy at the end about two supporting characters that she just kills them off by flinging them off a bridge. #2= She's writing from the POV of a man and apparently, she wrote his love/sex life the complete wrong way. She obviously doesn't know what it's like to be a man. Potential sexisim aside, I'm intriuged with #2. The friend has a good point. You'd have to be a masterful writer of first-person to convincingly convey the feelings of a MC that's of the opposite sex. For example, I'm a guy so for me to write about a girl, I'd have to be pretty damn smart in order to convincingly write about how she'd feel to another man, and how she'd experience child labor, or how she feels when she first comes home with her beautiful baby all wrapped up in a warm blanket and snugged in her arms. Speaking of child labor, this reminds me of a book I once read where a male author had his female protagonist describe childbirth as easy, gentle, and painless. Now, I'm, again, a dude, so correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't childbirth hurt like heck? If I wanted to write about her in labor, I think I'd have to either skip the entire scene or have a friend who's also a mother write it. There's no way I'll ever be able to properly protray it. It's about intimacy, it's something that's so personal that no author will be able to grasp it unless they themselves experience it. Basically, I've just learned that when I write in the first person POV, there are certian aspects I will NEVER, EVER know. It's possible to write from the POV of a person who is blind or deaf or in a wheelchair, or hungry because you can actually go out and see what it's like. (I'm half-blind and deaf myself, so that's two things off the list.) However, describing what it's like to give birth, that's only for the women, and describing what it's like to have a (ahem), that's only for a guy. Funny how one learns about writing when they're not activley searching for it. XD
Sometimes I dream of being a professor at my univeristy. I dream of standing behind a podium with a chalk in my hand, being enthusiastic about my material. Sometimes I dream of being a father-figure, so to speak to struggling students, especially those who may think they fail at life or destroyed their future because of their grades. I often dream of taking them aside and saying: "Don't believe that. You didn't fail. You just explored one path, didn't work. Now go back and find another." I think I owe it all to Mr. Hollingsworth, my Freshman composition professor. He's what I want to be if I became a professor. An eccentric, passionate man who's able to bring laughs out of the students, even if the subject itself was probably dull. I also think it's so I can relive my childhood by drawing/writing on the board. A bit of that, maybe. I've had teachers who were downright dispictable and shouldn't have had the job, and I've had teachers that clearly were passionate about their subjects and truely cared about the students. If I ever was a professor or in any profession that required mentoring, I'd want to make sure that if nothing else, my students could look back ten, twenty years later and still remember me. I don't think I shall ever forget Mr. Hollingsworth. Good teachers last forever, but the bad die out almost immediatly.
I just realized something. I may not have all the tools I need to craft a fully-fledged novel yet. I have the basic understandings of it, and have the "Do-Nots" logged in, but in most part...I'm still clueless. I mean, take my "Heridon Copper" mystery series. I don't even know how to construct a proper mystery plot, creating the right kind of suspense so that A) the characters aren't just wandering around aimlessly and B) the readers don't figure out who did it half-way across the book. I think I should not write just yet. Perhaps wait a few more years, maybe even ten years to hon my craft, come to understand what makes a mystery story and what's been done to death already. But I'm afraid. Afraid of one big thing: 1) Heridon Copper will have been written by someone else. What if, after the ten years or so that I hon my craft, it's too late? Someone else already took my ideas and worst, their main characters are exactly like my own main characters? What if, just when I am about to write the first draft of "Heridon Copper", I look in my bookstore and find that it had already been written. I feel like I need to rush, that I'm in a race to get "Heridon Copper" out before someone else. How long should I wait? How long should I put it off? Basically...I don't feel like writing anything short of "journals" and term papers for school. I don't want to write a novel yet because I don't think I'm ready, yet I feel like I have to race before someone else prints out "Heridon Copper". So, what are your thoughts?
I've begun writing my first draft of Heridon Copper, a mystery story. I'm keeping one thing in mind to keep me going: "Write with your heart first, then your head." I've also noticed that I can only write in 30-minute incraments before I get bored and not want to write. So this is what I'll do: I just write in 30-minute blocks, take a break, write again, and so on. I don't think there's a rule that you must write at least an hour whenever you write.
I don't think I'll be having much trouble with deciding where I should put my story in now. See, my first topic was about if I should put my mystery story in Colonial America or the 1850s. One of the posters there had a genius idea: Just do both in the same universe. Like people of the 1850s may remember the detective of Colonial America. Also, I'm bringing my first genuine character, Heridon back into the fold, so now there are THREE! Colonial America set in the 1770s. 1850s Alabama. Present day Alabama. I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner. XD Now I can relax and do character bios to my leisure. EDIT: Call me paranoid, but at times I get uncomfortable posting my ideas because I feel like someone's gonna take it or my characters, like Heridon, and use it for their own. Is that too paranoid of me or no?
My first real entry in my blog. Y'know, for the longest time there's been a character that has been near and dear to my heart: Heridon Copper. I made him up after reading the third Harry Potter book for the first time in 2003. I got stricken with "The Writing Bug" as they called it and wondered if I could do something with Heridon. Heridon's been everything. He's been a boy, an adult, an elf, captain of a space ship, everything. I would think up of glorious adventures to put him in. He was...badass. My own little Chuck Norris, no I'm wrong, he was better than Chuck Norris. He was Napoleon, Leonidas, and Teddy Roosevelt all wrapped up into one. Powerful, courageous, and cunning. As I got older, I stopped thinking about Heridon, yet he is so engrained into my memory that once every now and then, I think about him. I smile as nostalgic creeps over me. Heridon "badass" Copper comes back, if only for a few minutes, to entertain me before departing once again. So, how about you? What was your first character?