The Language of Flowers

Sorry that I suck at blogging, okay? Steve keeps threatening to kick me out of the blog if I don't post. It was a very busy year which made my terrible blogging skills even worse. I did however keep a list of what I watched and read, so I decided it would only be right for me to do my part in reaching 400 posts this year.

The Language of Flowers is a lovely book about a girl turned women who has had a rough upbringing. She has some real trust issues which lead to misbehavior and she bounced from foster home to foster home growing up. One foster parent tried real hard to connect with Victoria. She first introduced her to the so called “Language of Flowers”. Each flower represents a meaning and can be used to depict emotions and feelings. Something mysterious and awful happens with this foster relationship which leads to her running away and not speaking to Elizabeth (foster parent) for a very long time. When she is 18 and living on the streets, she finds that she has some skill in arranging flowers and grows close with a local florist. She begins to make a living and even reconnects with someone from her past, Elizabeth’s nephew.

Spoiler Alert! What brought me through most of this book was the intrigue at what the large event was that forced Victoria away from a loving and almost permanent home with Elizabeth. Turns out she burnt down Elizabeth’s wine vineyard and blamed it on Elizabeth’s nephew, who actually felt guilt about the whole thing. After you find out that, it seems odd that the nephew would forgive Victoria and actually have a relationship with her. At one point, Victoria and said nephew have a baby but she doesn’t tell him and she freaks out and leaves the baby unattended for a bit. She then decides she can’t take care of a baby (partially because breast feeding was painful…) and drops the baby off at nephew’s home in a bed of moss which means maternal love. Generally, leaving your child is not considered maternal love, but oh well. He doesn’t know he has a child but he takes care of it then takes Victoria back years later. Seems a little unrealistic, no?

The Best American Infographics 2013

Is this even a book worth blogging? It's a collection of infographics (obviously) reprinted on paper with only a paragraph or so of text on each page. But if we're going for 400 posts this year, well, I'd be remiss not to post this. I did, after all, just complete it.

I love good infographics. I think most people on the Internet with some form of regularity feel the same way about them. There's just something so satisfying about seeing a point, or a series of points, being made in a clear cut way using a mixture of data - the statistics, numbers, measurements - and artistry. And this book is, naturally, chock full of good infographics. A few quick complaints, because otherwise I'd have nothing more to say here.

• Many - perhaps most - of these infographics were originally created to be displayed on computer screens; the center seam of the paperback book interrupted a few vital blurbs and pictures here and there, and while this was by no means an experience-ruiner, it defintiely detracted from a few of the infographics.
• Ditto on the text size. What is legible on a computer screen isn't always legible in print, especially in dynamic circumstances that allow for zooming.
• And, of course, interactive infographics just weren't the same at all. It's one thing to take cool static infographics and present them in a book, but to try and show three or four different screenshots of an interactive graphic? It doesn't work. I admire the inclusion of a few such graphs, but a still page simply isn't the right medium for the content.

Those three complaints aside, this was an enjoyable enough, um, "read." It is also only the twelfth and certainly the last book I will post in 2013. That's a book a month! Pathetic!

The Bad News Bears: Breaking Training

This is nowhere near the movie that the first one is. Gone are Buttermaker and Tatum O'Neal. Instead, the new pitcher is a Mike Teevee look alike. This time they go to the Astrodome because they are California Champions even though they didn't win it last movie. Whatever. Don't bother with this one. Tanner wasn't racist enough.

Proteus

There's a game I played a few months ago that was extremely similar to Proteus, and that's Dear Esther, which I called "the most pretentious game I've every played." Proteus doesn't even come close to dethroning that one, but it is certainly along those lines. Just like Dear Esther, Proteus has you wash ashore on an abandoned island with nothing to do but move around and explore. You don't even get to jump in Proteus, you just wander around. It's a randomly generated island that contains a few common landmarks every time, like a graveyard, a little castle-looking building, and a series of statues of people and animals. The game's most notable aspect is its constantly changing soundtrack- walking around the landscape and into packs of little animals will constantly change the music. Eventually day turns to night, which changes the music some more, and when you stumble upon a huge gathering of fireflies you're whisked into a completely different season, affecting the landscape in all sorts of ways. It's all very passive as every single thing that happens in the game is caused simply by wandering around, and after the game's 40 minutes or so there's no sense of accomplishment or finality, but more of a sense that the island is done with you for now. There's no attempt at a story like in Dear Esther, but I think Proteus is slightly better for that. It's hardly a game and I wouldn't recommend anyone play it like it is; to combine a few comments I saw on a review site, at its best Proteus is a like a brief therapeutic vacation, and at its worst it's more of an interactive screen-saver.

Congo

This was a good book, but man was it a bad movie. The special effects sucked. All the gorillas were puppets. Bad puppets. One of them talked and called Laura Linney ugly. The rest shot people with lasers. Ugh. Michael Crichton has great books, but not all of 'em translate well to movies.

Starship Defense

Here's that other 3DS downloadable title I've been playing. This one's from the DSi era, born in 2010 and hidden in some real obscurity ever since. Seriously, there are no walkthroughs for this thing anywhere online and Wikipedia doesn't even have an article for it. The "cover art" you see above is just the title screen, and even that proved to be a difficult image to find. It's almost like this game barely exists at all.

And that's too bad, because Starship Defense was pretty fun. It's a tower defense game set in outer space, and that's more or less the entire description. Thirty fairly unique levels gave the game a decent length and longevity, and while I can't say I was left wanting more, I'd be happy to play another game like this again.

Alright. That's enough DS downloadable games for now. Back to Dragon Quest IX.

Mario's Picross

Mario's Picross is a 1995 game I've long considered buying, so I was thrilled when it appeared as one of the latest Club Nintendo 3DS download games. Alright, "thrilled" is a stretch, but this is seriously something I've had my eye on for several years. I've even had the 3DS version in my Amazon cart once or twice before, but never could quite pull the trigger on the puzzle game.

First, just what is Picross? It's a collection of nonograms - also apparently known as "griddlers" and "paint by number" puzzles - which are grid-based puzzle games not unlike sudoku or crosswords. Check them out on Wikipedia if you've got even the slightest interest; it's much easier to see them than to try to glean an understanding from them based on a verbal description. All in all, there are 256 puzzles in the game. The first 192 are broken into three sets of 64 each, increasing pretty linearly in difficulty from the immediately solvable to the truly complex. Then it appears that the final 64 puzzles are just time trial versions of previous puzzles. In this time trial mode, the game won't tell you when you've made a mistake and won't give you one row and column for free at the beginning of the game, as had been the case in the first 192 puzzles. For this reason, I considered these final 64 puzzles some sort of bonus challenge mode, and can safely call the game beaten. It was a decent little distraction, and something it was easy to play in front of the TV, but as I'm sure you can imagine it grew repetitious and monotonous as hell. I found myself falling fast asleep doing the puzzles in bed by the end of the game. Hey, whatever. Onward to bigger and better games now.

Hector: Badge of Carnage

Here's a random one from the Telltale Games bundle I bought recently. Unlike most Telltale adventure games, Hector: Badge of Carnage wasn't made from an existing franchise, and with this new freedom Telltale decided to get really weird with it. The core gameplay is the same as any other point-and-click adventure game, but it's got a completely different tone than any game they've put out. For one, Hector is British, and it's laid on thick- half the time I couldn't understand what people were saying due to accents, there's tons of chav culture, references to EastEnders and Helen Mirren, all sorts of stuff like that to make the game really blatantly British. Actually one of the puzzles required me to find a "spanner" to fix something and I was completely lost. Does anyone know what that is without looking it up? It surprised me. Anyway in addition to being very British, the game is also very dirty and dark, unlike the absurdist humor of the Sam and Max series. One early puzzle requires you to pass off a passed-out heroin addict as a sex doll. Dozens of cops get their heads blown off before the opening cutscene finishes. A final puzzle requires launching a giant vibrator in the sky. Still though, it made for a pretty solid game and seems like a good introduction to the genre if anyone's got the adventure game itch- it's fairly short and not too hard, so if you're curious I say give it a shot.

The Rainmaker

I knew next to nothing about this moving going into it. Even its description was somewhat misleading. It follows Matt Damon, a new lawyer who has yet to try a case against a big insurance company who unjustly denied a claim by a poor family with a son suffering from Leukemia. He, with the help of Danny DeVito, took on Jon Voight in the court room. If you like movies about courtrooms, this is a pretty entertaining one. Matt Damon is likable as always and Jon Voight is easy to hate. Danny Glover presides over the proceedings and Claire Danes is thrown in for fun. Though enjoyable, I found this movie to be rather odd in some ways. For instance, it felt very much like a TV Show in that it had weird cuts with long black pauses that felt like commercial breaks. Also, a lot of scenes seemed to be cut short and some even appeared to be out of order even though they weren't. I guess I feel like some weird editing decisions were made. Also, I was flabbergasted to learn that Francis Ford Coppola directed this movie because everything about it seemed to be made by someone who didn't quite know what he was doing. That's ironic because Matt Damon throughout was shown as a lawyer who didn't quite know what he was doing. Anyway, it was entertaining, but nothing you need to go out of your way to see.

The Bad News Bears

Wow. This movie is so racist. It's crazy. Well, Tanner is really racist. This movie is just a bystander who does nothing about it! But anyway, this is thoroughly enjoyable. From the swearing to the bullying, this all feels like the 70s. None of this shit would fly anymore. The star player smokes and rides a motorcycle without a helmet despite being 11. Their shortstop utters every racial slur in the book. The coach is drunk the entire movie. If he doesn't have a beer in his hand, he is blowing the smoke from his cigar into the face of innocent children! But behind all that, this movie has a lot of heart and one hell of a catchy name. There are sequels and even a remake, but none of 'em are quite as good as the original. If you haven't seen it, I suggest it. You can't help but smile.