On a scale from 1 to terrible, this movie was pretty terrible. The writing was bad, the lines were delivered poorly, Brendan Fraser sounded like he was overdubbed by Sylvester Stallone, the cuts and transitions were often jarring, the story had too much deus ex machina for my tastes, and the humor seemed aimed at a 4th grade level. All in all, pretty disappointing. Maybe I'm misremembering the other ones and they were this bad too, I'll have to watch the first one again sometime. Jet Li was pretty cool, but he only had like 5 minutes of non-CGI screen time.

So evidently there has been some kind of stomach bug going around, and Sarah and I got it today. We've been up since 5am in various states of sick to sick++. Sarah has had it a lot worse than me, which is hard. I don't like whimpering and yelling with pain like that.

Not to mention that I don't handle being sick well -- I just want everything to go away while I crawl into a little hole and snap at anyone who walks by. So I probably haven't been taking as good care of her as I should be. Pray that I can be a better husband and watch out for her while she's sick.

Has anyone else been keeping up with the controversy about The Golden Compass movie? When I was in college, I got the first book of the series (The Golden Compass, which the movie is based on) and really enjoyed it. It was a great story, set in an interesting universe with interesting characters. So I got the rest of the series. The second book was good too, although there were a few wtf parts. The third book was the most blasphemous thing I've ever read.

The author, Phillip Pullman is a very outspoken atheist, and sees his series (His Dark Materials) as kind of an anti-Chronicles of Narnia. I've read a number of articles with different views on the meaning behind the series: an attack on God or Christianity or the Church, or any organized religion. Interestingly, I read an article about how the movie (which is toned down from the books) is making both Christians and atheists angry -- the athesits think it isn't anti-God enough.

Anyway, this long, boring introduction is just for this link. In it, Scalzi references an essay by Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy writer. He has some interesting things to say about the nature of fiction (especially fantasy fiction) and censorship.

A couple of further links. This is from Sanderson's blog, and has some background about why he wrote the open letter. And there is a Snopes entry on the Golden Compass movie.

Good news first :)

This Thanksgiving vacation Sarah and I got a new (to us) car! When we were down in Hilton Head and the Malibu broke down, my Grandpa mentioned that they were thinking of consolidating their two cars into one. He decided to give us his car as a gift, and we picked it up while we were in Pittsburgh last week. I can't tell you how much of a blessing this was for us as we've had a couple frustrating vehicle problems recently. The new car has less than half as many miles as the Malibu, and it's been well taken care of. It's even more of a blessing because...

So we got back from our trip on Wednesday night, and the very next day, Sarah goes out grocery shopping and the Malibu breaks down. Seems we have some kind of battery leak that was spewing acid into our car, and it ate through the cable that goes from the shifter to the transmission. Park was Reverse, Reverse was Neutral (or sometimes Reverse), Neutral and Drive still worked. Craziest thing I've ever seen. But it's awesome that this didn't happen until we'd gotten a replacement car, or we'd be in trouble. It's always exciting to see how God is providing and protecting.

Over the past 6 months or so I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that everything I enjoy is work. Specifically, the kind of video games I like to play -- Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, mudding, and even to a lesser extent things like Zelda. They all involve tediously spending time doing the same thing over and over and over for long periods of time, in the hopes that your character will be marginally better.

Why is that appealing to me? Why is it appealing to so many other people? My favorite part of these kind of games, and especially RPGs like D&D or Shadowrun, is the character creation. Designing your avatar in another world, understanding the rules, loopholes, and intricacies of different systems, imagining different scenarios and how your unique set of skills will be able to overcome -- this is the stuff that I find the most exciting (more about character creation in another post). But somewhere between this idea of a character, and actually becoming the character lies hundreds or thousands of hours of... work. That's the point where I usually give up: it's not worth the investment to make my idea come to fruition.

I can definitly understand why game designers end up writing games this way. For things like console Final Fantasy games (I'm in the middle of FFXII), you don't want things to be easy. You want the player to feel a sense of accomplishment, to feel like they've earned something. And FFXII is pretty good in this respect, there are only a couple of times I've had to grind to make enough money to buy something.

On the other hand, there MMORPGs like FFXI and World of Warcraft, or things like the mud. These present a huge challenge to the developer: how can the same game be fun for someone who plays a couple of hours a day (or a week) and someone who plays 10-12 hours a day (or more). If accomplishments come too easily, the more hardcore players will blow through all the content in no time and either stop playing, or whine and clamor for more. If you slow down the pace enough though, the casual players will be frustrated and never accomplish anything. It seems like an impossible balance.

I'm moving into a time in my life where I don't have 4+ hours a day to devote to gaming like I used to, but I still love this genre of game. I had a friend in high school who said that she prefered reading short stories over novels because they were "low commitment." Do they make games nowadays that are fun, but don't require this kind of commitment?