The acute accent, in English most often found above an e in French loanwords like soufflé or café, is one of those nice little touches you can do that makes your writing look classy. At least, I'd like to think it makes you look classy. At the very least, I'm mildly impressed when I see someone bother to get their é's right in an informal setting like the Internet. As an added bonus, nobody will ever think you mean "I'm wearing a lame dress" when you say "I'm wearing a lamé dress."
It's not that hard to type, even though there's no é key on a standard American keyboard: on a Mac, type option+e followed by an e; on a PC it's a bit less natural, hold down the alt key and punch in 0233 on the number pad for é or 0201 for É. An apostrophe is not a substitute for an acute accent, and do take care not to hastily throw some other kind of mark over the letter like ē or è or ë.
And now that you know how to make an é, let's talk about when. When you've got an "e" making an "ay" sound at the end of a word, it's a fair bet that there ought to be an acute accent there helping it out*. When you've got two e's at the end, as in fiancée** or Renée, the accent always goes over the first e. Most spell-checkers will flag your word if you've forgotten an accent, though if the world sans accents is also another word (as in lame, resume, expose, etc.) it'll slip by. Another easy method to look up the proper accented spelling is to do a Wikipedia search for the word without accents and see if you get redirected to an accented version.
Alright, I'm done lecturing at you now. Class dismissed!
* One notable exception is the not-strictly-proper use of é in Anglicizing Spanish loanwords like mole and mate by changing them to "molé" and "maté." Doing so looks perfectly natural to someone like me who took French in high school but probably drives the Hispanophones batty.
** You can earn bonus points by remembering that if you are engaged to a man, then he is your fiancé -- one e -- but if you are engaged to a woman, she is your fiancée -- two e's. Same rules apply to divorcé/divorcée. When you use the wrong one, I like to assume that you used the right one and I merely did not know your sexual orientation as well as I thought I did.
]]>... and as an added bonus, I've made a Tipsy Velvet character (based on Tira, with the hula hoop) for Soul Calibur IV and I've spent some time this evening kicking the crap out of nasty mofo's.
]]>1. My debut season as a roller derby mascot has come to a close. The Vixens' winning streak was broken during the championship game, but they made a great go at it and it was way fun being a VV mascot. Those of you who made it out to a bout to see me, thanks so much -- and those of you who didn't make it this season may have missed your chance to see me mascotting, since very soon now I'll be once more reporting to tryouts, with a vengeance.
2. I signed a sweet movie deal. Universal Studios contacted me about using my world-famous "All I Need to Know I learned from video games" poster as a set dressing for their Spring 2011 movie "I Hop."
3. I've got a game published!!! Primrows is a unique blend of logic, chance, and horticulture, and it's available for purchase in the App Store. Needless to say, this is a huge milestone for me professionally, being the first game I've ever gotten published commercially as well as breaking a decade-long spell of fumbling around with unfinished projects. Sales have been modest in the first few weeks, but I'm hoping to kickstart them with some more promotion soon enough.
That's things in a nutshell... I'll try not to be such a stranger.
]]>1. Get in the habit of using @property for every memory-managed object. If it's data you don't want to expose to other objects, you can still make a @property in a private category. Getting in this habit will shield you from a digital hellscape full of memory leaks, prematurely discarded objects, and infuriatingly difficult-to-track EXC_BAD_ACCESS errors. Had I known this trick when I started, I probably would have saved myself about 30-50 hours of headaches.
2. Accept that just because a word means a certain thing in English, does not mean that the same word means the same thing in Cocoa. Particular problem words with me were "View" and "Layer." Sure, they do define what they mean in the appropriate documentation -- but when you're just looking at an index of the (very extensive) programmers guides, it's easy to to say, "'Working with Animation Layers?' No, that's not what I want," which will then cause you to bypass the paragraph explaining that a 'Layer' is in fact exactly what you are looking for.
3. Remember that Objective-C is a dialect of C, not a dialect of C++. I grew up on C++, which means there's a handful of syntax things that I don't automatically associate with C++ that are in fact not allowed in C. Some subtleties of constants and typedefs and whatnot. This led to a lot of "I don't understand why you won't compile my code" moments.
]]>V/V... as in "Va Va," a vocalization which evokes a certain band of vulpine varietists, in previous events, victorious in vetilation over the vendors of vice and vengeance, who vanquished with velocity the vampish vermeil venepuncturists, who vaulted with vivacity over virid volant vigilantes: the Vaudeville Vixens.
It is these same Vaudeville Vixens whose rivals now vie for vindication in two vernal events -- the evenings of the eighth and twenty-second of May. The venue: Veteran's Memorial Coliseum. The vulgus might view these vetilations if first they avail themselves of our virtual vendor.
Va va!
]]>Kellee Santiago, I like your thesis but don't think you ought to be conceding this point.
I'll state right out that I have neither watched Santiago's presentation nor read Ebert's response in full. I've had my own strong opinions about this subject for as long as I've been old enough to formulate ideas about what "art" is. And I'd rather let those ideas do the talking then let my short-term memory drive me into point-by-point rebuttal mode.
The statement in contention is this: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers." Ebert said that. Even Santiago, when defending video games as art, conceded this point. I will offer no such concession.
Citation 1: Space Invaders (Nishikado, Taito, 1978)
I will make an admission here at the risk of destroying my old-school cred: I don't really like Space Invaders. I respect it. I honor it. I even love it. But by jove, I just don't have much fun when I sit down to play it. What, then, makes it so damned important? By my reckoning, Space Invaders represents the moment video games found their way. There were games before it, but nearly all of them were just crude approximations of ideas we'd had before. Space Invaders was something new -- but novelty alone does not qualify something as "art" (if it did, we'd have to fill the Louvre with PedEggs and Slap Chops, and I pray that day never comes). What pushes Space Invaders from toy to art is not its function, but its aesthetic. Nishikado could have thought up the same exact mechanic, but with moving blocks and called it "Target Shooter." But he didn't use blocks. He used aliens. From space. And they weren't just moving around -- they were invading. We had a story. A conflict. A hero. Villains. All of them crude, yes... but they spoke to us.
So clearly, it's art. But is it art worthy of comparison to the Great Artists? Despite a vast time difference, I'd compare Space Invaders to the people, forgotten by history, that first pushed their utilitarian means into the realm of art. The folks who realized that that there newfangled 'writing system' could be used for something other than recording business transactions. The folks who decided that their cave wall could really use some painted hand prints to spruce it up.
Citation 2: God of War (Jaffe et al., SCE Studios, 2005)
Imagine if someone made a movie, and the lead actor was told to 'just go ahead and do whatever you feel like doing,' and the director and cinematographers and production team and whatever was able to capture it so well that you couldn't know everything was being done on the fly -- and managed to do it all in one take. That's sort of what happens in God of War. This game succeeds in looking "cinematic" at pretty much every step of the way.
Citation 3: Ōkami (Kamiya et al., Clover Studio/Capcom, 2006)
I've so far only played the first couple levels of Ōkami, but I've seen enough to issue my verdict. Case in point: when I was looking for a screenshot of this game, I had the hardest time determining which pictures were screenshots and which were hand-painted promotional artwork. Because it's that freaking good. If you were to suggest to a 14th-century Sumi-e painter that we would one day have Sumi-e paintings that moved according to the will of the viewer, you would probably been declared a witch and fed to dragons.
Citation 4: Technic Beat (Tsubouchi, Mikawa, et al.; Arika/Mastiff, 2002)
I picked this game up as a supermarket impulse buy, and among random on-whim purchases go, it's one of the best I've made. Art isn't always about the big-budget spectacles, you know. I've sampled a good chunk of the 'rhythm' genre in my years as a gamer, so when I say that Technic Beat is the most musical game I've ever played, that statement ought to carry some weight. When I sit down to play a game of Technic Beat, I feel more as if I'm dancing than I do when I'm actually moving my feet to play Dance Dance Revolution. It's fluid, it's simple, and the 'game' portion fits in as a natural accompaniment to the music that's playing.
Citation 5: Pokémon Red/Blue (Taijiri et al., Game Freak/Nintendo, 1996)
OK, I can already hear your groans... but before you go rolling your eyes, let me have my say. I'm sure many would call Pokémon out as an example of a game that is commercialized drivel and not art -- but we must not let Nintendo's marketing blitz cloud our view of the work itself. We don't discount as art the works of composers in the employ of the court, do we?
So, anyways. Pokémon. Remember the Age of Discovery? Of course you don't -- that was a long time ago. In this age of push-button knowledge, it's hard to believe there's anything out there left to discover. Indeed, the only people who are discovering 'new' objects are the folks with access to giant telescopes and particle accelerators. But what hasn't left us is the drive to discover new things. Then this Taijiri guy -- a bug collector in his youth -- shows up with a game called Pokémon to help us fill this strange but undeniable subconscious urge. Sure, any author or poet could have come up with a list of fanciful things for us to memorize, but it took the video game medium to actually provide us with the satisfaction of hunting through a world to find them.
Citation 6: Soul Calibur (Yotoriama et al., Namco, 1999)
This game is a work of art, and if you pick it apart, each individual piece you'd end up with would still be a work of art. Despite all the advances in polygon counts and processing power made in the decade since Soul Calibur's release, it still stands as a benchmark of visual awesomeness that most games even today fail to live up to. It's not so much as a 'fighting game' as it is full-contact competitive choreography, and it's loaded up with some of the most beloved and despised characters out there, even though the 'story' plays second-fiddle to the rest of the game.
So far, the games I've brought up can throw down with the greatest of their contemporaries. Clearly, Molyneux and Miyamoto have every right to step on the same pedestal as Warhol, Rowling, or Lucas... but Ebert was talking, I presume, about the all-time Greats. Is there any game out there I'd have the audacity to suggest could contend with Shakespeare and Homer? Well... There is one game I've been saving one for last.
Citation 7: Link's Awakening (Tezuka, Yamamura, et. al; Nintendo, 1993)
I don't mean to sound like a broken record, always raving on and on about how great Link's Awakening was. But it's true!
Before I talk about Link's Awakening specifically, let me discuss a phenomenon that is, among artistic media, unique to video games. It's something I call the "first-person shift" (maybe other critiquey-type folks have a more proper name for it), and it's something readily evident in our language. I want you to think about the last time you played a video game with a single main character protagonist. Now talk about what you did, but force yourself to refer to the character in the third person. "Ratchet used the plasma coil to defeat Giant Clunk." "Sonic found a hidden passage way to the Chaos Emerald." "Q*Bert escaped from Coily on a floating disk." It feels unnatural, doesn't it? Try the converse for a book or a movie -- "I carried the One Ring to Mount Doom," "I returned to Verona to find that Juliet had taken her own life" -- and you sound like a crazy person. We are a tool-using species, and our brains are hard-wired to consider anything under our direct control, be it a bone club or Mario, to be an extension of "I". It's the same primal reason that people who regularly carry a watch or a cell phone feel naked without it.
What does this mean for Link's Awakening? Well, this game is a bit of an odd-ball among the Zelda series. It lacks one notable thing that every other game in the series has: (spoiler alert) a happy ending. Sure, at the end of the game, the hero -- that is to say, you -- beat the bad guy... but at a terrible cost. The game takes place on an island called Koholint. It takes pains to introduce you to every last one of its residents, its nooks and crannies, its natural features. Meanwhile, bit by bit it reveals to you that the only way to defeat the evil that's been plaguing the island is to wipe it clean out of existence. Tough choice, eh? Wouldn't it be nice if this were some hero you had the luxury of watching from a distance? Tough beans. It's not. It's you. You are presented with a choice not explicitly scripted into the game... you can muck about the island hunting octoroks indefinitely, or you can confront the driving evil force behind them and in the process make the whole island disappear. Authors have been putting their characters in tough positions for centuries, but only through the video game medium have they been able to make the audience live through them.
There are certainly more games I could cite here, but I think I've come up with a fairly good cross-section. I probably won't change any minds, but I would contend that anyone who plays through all of these games and can't see at least one of them as a solid work of art simply isn't trying.
]]>OK, so, I was perusing my copy of the 1791 medical textbook "Goode and Acurate phyſiologie of the Human Bodie and its Maladys" (as I often do), and I came across a rather startling fact about Deuteranopia, known colloquially as red-green colorblindess: It is caused by demonic brain worms that live behind your eyes and feed off the specific range of the luminiferous aether that carries green wavelengths of light. As anyone knows, this is the very same area of the brain that regulates your ability to decide not to kick puppies, answer your cell phone in a movie theatre, or make the movie Event Horizon.
As an American, it is my sacred duty to overreact. And so, I have refashioned my blog in a manner that renders it completely undetectable to a deuteranope's eyes. My hope is that this site will become a safe haven for us to discuss what to do about the situation without provoking the ire of the world's deuteranope population and cause them to throw bricks through our windows or put strychnine in our guacamole.
]]>OK, so, when I made the saved game file structure for Primrows, I thought it prudent to encrypt the game data to curtail cheaters -- particularly since I've got a global high score board going on. As design decisions go, it was a real no-brainer... or so I thought.
While trying to hunt down a bug with my encryption/decryption code, though, I came across a startling fact: If you use encryption at all, even if you're just using a standard, publicly-available algorithm that comes pre-loaded onto every iPhone, you need to file something called a CCATS. I don't know what that stands for. I'm not even 100% certain about what it is. All I know about it is that
So in the end I'm left with a new design choice to make: deal with this nonsense (which could, in addition to being a headache, delay the release of my app by three months), or deal with the nonsense of the inevitable asshole who will go to the trouble of hacking their save files with implausably high scores just so they can see their own jag-off name at the top of some list. Sigh...
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Izanami is a digital powerhouse worthy of her creator goddess namesake. Animated by the very forces of nature itself (no, seriously), she boasts eight processor cores, each one clocked at nearly twice the speed of her predecessor, and enough RAM to hold my college computer's entire hard drive twice over with wiggle room. Her two displays -- one of which can be drawn on as if by magic -- have between them enough pixels that I could give one to every man, woman, and child in Wisconsin and still have enough left over to play StarCraft.
Sorry to have to brag, but something like this just begs to be shown off...
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