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Although I’m still in the beginning phases of this game, I find it quite enjoyable. The game is a Japanese RPG for the PlayStation 2, (fortunately localized, however) where you enter the game having amnesia and explore a large country with many quests. (Unfortunately I tend to be too linear and it takes me longer to explore etc.) Along the way you learn to play music, (so far I’ve played the harmonica, trumpet, piano, and pipe organ) and explore several towns/cities. The core of the game however is the Trotbot, sort of an automobile with legs. The main character uses these to travel in between towns, and although the controls are a bit odd at first, involving the use of both analogue sticks, it does become quite fun to fight enemies with them. My favourite method would be to uproot trees and throw, or even picking up your opponent to throw him. Although a bit hard to find, I picked up a used copy for $18 on an obscure corner of the internet.
Well, I suppose a new category will have to be added to this blog: fatherhood.
For those of you who don’t know: my wife and I are expecting our firstborn. The due date is late August, early September.
The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.
- J. R. R. Tolkien
Finding parallels with ancient Greek drama, J. R. R. Tolkien coined the word eucatastrophe to describe the sudden turning of events from bad to good. In his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ Tolkien notes that most fairy stories have this experience; when the story turns from the protagonists being surrounded by insurmountable circumstances and a single unlooked-for event turns the fortunes of the characters. Consider also, in the Return of the King, when hope is all but lost, the host of Mordor vastly outnumbers the armies of the West; the last hope, Frodo, cannot destroy the One Ring. But, of course, this changes when Gollum/Sméagol takes the ring finger from Frodo, and in comical sequence, dances with pure excitement, loses his footing and plunges into the depths of Orodruin. Since most of Sauron’s power is bound in the ring, he loses this with the ring’s destruction and the forces of evil are defeated (although the characters still fight against remaining evil/sin, cf. The Scouring of the Shire [which was left out of the movie]).
Tolkien laments that eucatastrophe was absent from the modern novel, (cf. Jude the Obscure written 1895) but notes it is found in the older fairy stories and other literature such as Greek drama. (Star Wars: a New Hope also typifies the device with the destruction of the Death Star.) Although often misconstrued, the eucatastrophe is not the ‘happily ever after’ of fairy tales but the event which effectuates the state of ‘happily ever after’.
Yet (as foreshadowed by the introductory quote), the best example of eucatastrophe is the life and death of the Saviour: Jesus Christ. When man had eaten of the fruit of knowledge he enslaved himself and all his progeny in slavery to sin. Man cannot emancipate himself, and worse yet he does not care to do so. While he struggles under the wages of sin, he show inordinate fondness to the master. Stolen waters are sweet (Proverbs 9.17). But, in spite of all this, God takes on human flesh to accomplish redemption for his people! Even when God’s people do not have the sense to cry out to him, he takes delight in rescuing them from the mire (cf. the stories of Judges). He does not do this from afar but steps right into our world, and takes on physicality. To further expand on this, in the darkest hour after Jesus’ friends deserted him, after the weight of sin crushed him on the cross and brought him into the depths of hell, after the Christ had been dead three days: eucatastrophe. Our Saviour rises from the dead, the power of sin and death is broken (though not removed) and the folly and rebellion of Adam is reversed. While all of this is not yet realized and we live between Resurrection and Glory, we see that this event, the life and death of Jesus, his active and passive obedience, is what causes the sin of Adam to truly be a fall into grace. Not only this, but it effects the reformation and renewal of the entire universe.
As previously posted my new iMac came in on Thursday; I’m quite impressed with it. The first thing I noticed is the screen. My screen is a widescreen 16:9 format, 20″ along the diagonal. Coming from a 12″ laptop screen, this is ginormous! I have let to watch a DVD on it but am looking forward to it. At first I figured it would have less area than my 4:3 20″ TV, (and the total area is. [The reader is encouraged to work this out for himself.]) but neglected to consider that since a DVD plays in widescreen there is more viewable area on my widescreen monitor than the TV. (How much is more math than I cared to attempt since I had the epiphany last night.)
Other subtle effects are also nice; I love the way the keyboard feels; the keys respond at less pressure than a traditional keyboard, which translates into less movement and more comfortable keying. Also the keyboard has 19 F-keys which are nice if you want to assign Exposé, Dashboard, or Spaces to an F-key.
Speaking of which, the program Spaces is quite nice. Essentially you can set the computer to have up to 16 different ‘spaces’ where you can have different programs or instances of a program, (like web browsing for item x in space 1 and browsing for item y in space 2, etc.). The cool thing is that you can rearrange the spaces and even drag a window from one space into another! Switching between spaces is as easy as hitting ctrl-# (or ctrl-№) of the space you want.
A program I’ve been playing with is GarageBand of the iLife suite. Garageband lets you put loops of music together as well as record real or software instruments (which can be played with the keyboard) to put together music tracks or podcasts. I, being not terribly musically inclined, can’t play the instruments very well but enjoy the feature where it’ll take a genre give you a choice of instruments and put loops together to create a song.
I tested out the video chat feature with my brother yesterday, which was quite fun, I’ll have to encourage more of my friends to get video cameras.
iWork is another phenomenal program suite, it completely blows MS Office out of the water. Keynote (Slide show program) has such great 3-D transitions, although my favourite is the cube, where it appears that the slide is rotated as if were on a cube to reveal the next slide. Confetti is also fun where the slide exploded into virtual confetti to show the next slide. Pages (word processor and page layout program) is great for making family newsletters and posters. (We’ve used it for our Nativity letters.) Now in the ’08 version there are more themes and templates. New to the suite is Numbers (spreadsheet program), which I haven’t had much time to play with.
And finally, is Front Row and the Apple Remote, Front Row turns the computer into a media centre, allowing you to play music, movies, look at previews for movies, and show pictures from iPhoto. Also the remote controls Keynote and iTunes, (and probably others but I haven’t found them yet).
Well that’s it for now, next post will (likely) be on eucatastrophe, as requested by popular demand.
My new iMac came today and I’m quite excited, I took a picture of me taking a picture of it before I realized you all probably didn’t want to see a picture of me but of the computer. As soon as I get that picture off the camera (which I’ll do after I go search for the cord) I’ll post it, until then I’m going to play around some more; expect some posts on the iMac on the computer this weekend.
I recently received the board games Carcassonne and Puerto Rico. Both are quite enjoyable games, and plenty of fun to play. Both are German-style board games, meaning that they are themed games (not abstract like chess or draughts/chequers) where players are not eliminated during the course of the game.
Carcassonne is a tile laying game (for 2-5 players) where players compete to have their followers score the most points. The game starts with one tile (or in a variant, players can build a river as a starting grid) already placed and players draw title and deploy followers ‘meeple’ to one of several features: roads, cities, cloisters, or fields. The tiles have to match with the tiles around it. When a feature is complete (except for fields), the player takes her follower off the board and scores the points; she may now use the follower for another feature later on. Meeple placed on fields become farmers which cannot be removed until the end of the game, when they are scored. Judicious placement or farms can swing the game several points at the end, and a person may win from behind. A nice thing about Carcassonne is that there are several expansion packs which allow for several variants. (I have not got any expansion packs yet, but I’m looking forward to purchasing some.)
Puerto Rico (for 3 to 5 players) has a novel concept; players chose which ‘role’ to play each round. A governor (which rotates each round) chooses the first role and the associated actions are followed by the players, then the 2nd person chooses a role and all players follow the corresponding actions, etc. The player who chose that role gets some special advantage (e.g., the builder gets a reduced price for building an edifice). The roles let players produce goods, acquire settlers, and ship goods back to Spain, among others. My wife and I have been playing as two players each, but I just found a two-player variant online, that we’ll have to try.
All in all these are very good games and along with the Settlers of Catan (which is perhaps my favourite board game so far [We have all the expansions.]) serve as a good introduction to German-style board games, and I’m sure I’ll be buying additional titles in the future.
As a final note, I came across this war game, now I have to get it, but what a price tag!
