A few days ago, I released a game I'd been sitting on for a while: Entropy. To quote the description:
Entropy is a game that takes place in multiple energy levels of a single room. Fight ever more powerful monsters in this dungeon-crawler-with-a-twist. Now with complete mobile support: consider adding it to your home screen! Made for LD37.
In an isolated system, entropy can only increase.
So, I made this game for the most recent Ludum Dare that I did around 6 months ago. I didn't feel it was quite ready to release and I wanted to fix it up first. Well, I never really got around to that until a few days ago, during break, in which I did a lot of work, especially on making it work on mobile.
It almost works on mobile. The really hard part is convincing mobile browsers to go fullscreen, or minimize their UI. As of now, the only way to do it on Entropy is to Add it to your Home Screen, through the browser UI. When you do so, it ... (Read full post)
I actually really enjoyed In Cold Blood. Also sorry these all have been lacking italics, I write these blog posts in plain text so the copying doesn't really "get" it.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote addresses a real-life event that he presents in a calculated narrative with some clear arguments. His presentation of the Clutter family, for example, though factual, has a clear intention to establish them as a stand-in for the possibilities of the “American Dream.” Richard “Dick” Hickock, one of the Clutter killers, sees this connection and resents it. Hickock grew up in the upper working class position that told him that he could survive, but not make anything great out of himself. Ultimately, Capote portrays Hickock’s plans to kill the Clutters as a search for an identity within the power dynamics of capitalism. This act is, perhaps subconsciously, a personal revolution which provides him with a sense of power in defiance of a system that leaves him feeling ... (Read full post)
This was a timed prompt from the AP Lang and Comp prompt. Then we edited it. I did that part during a 20 minute advisory.
It's a common joke - that of the 40-year-old parent who “knew Spanish - or, new it back in college anyway.” They knew all these conjugations and stuff, but now they struggle to build a sentence even to mock themselves. Though they may never have reached the proficiency they profess to have, there's no doubt that their skills have rusted from disuse. The American push for foreign language is neither new nor particularly aggressive, but its presence makes high school foreign language classes a common experience. Why, then, are Americans (and Brits too, though to a lesser extent) criticized for monolingualism? Americans, despite the claims of the universality and usefulness of foreign language, have trouble using and applying it. The fact of the matter is that, while foreign language could be used to reach new heights and cultural understanding, global ... (Read full post)
This writing dump is actually from this year. My class is on rhetoric, so it's a lot more boring IMO, but I'm bored and procrastinating. So here, some Jon Krakauer. I was just breaking out of 5-paragraph.
The literary genre of Bildungsroman is one in which the protagonist seeks self-discovery through experience in the world that eventually results in psychological and moral growth, specifically from youth to adulthood. However essentially, the genre is defined by the tension between self-integration and social integration. Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, is a Bildungsroman that separates these two elements structurally. Christopher McCandless, an idealist who travels out to Alaska alone, sets himself completely off from human contact, providing a separation that Krakauer exploits to make a point about the tension between self-integration and social integration. Krakauer argues, against literary analyst’s perceptions of social integration as preceding self-integration, in ... (Read full post)