You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April, 2008.
We have a new blog for our growing family! Check out our Halls of Tucson website. I have reproduced my pregnancy and fatherhood posts on the new site, and the site contains other fun things such as links to our registry and friends’ baby sites.
I hope you enjoy the adventures of the House Hall.
Just this week I finished playing Myst IV; it was an enjoyable game with several fun puzzles (and a few irritating ones). I played the previous three Myst games several years ago.
This game mechanics were similar to Myst III in that you linked to nodes where you could view 360º in any direction (as opposed to the stills of Myst and Riven). Zip mode was redone, now you can pull a menu and zip to a particular location, instead of bypassing a few nodes.
The story of this game involves the two brothers, Sirrus and Achenar, escaping from their prison ages and capturing their sister, Yeesha. Like other Myst games, the player must solve various puzzles to complete the game. Many of these puzzles were similar in difficulty to those in prior Myst games. Achenar’s age, Haven, was very acoustically oriented, much like the Selenitic Age in Myst I. Small primate creatures had to be called by name using a machine with rotating dials to produce differently pitched sound.
The final age, Serenia was quite bizarre with several of the puzzles happening in a parallel dream world. To avoid giving too much away the final puzzle was challenging but fun to logically fit all the pieces in their proper place.
I am looking forward to buying Myst V soon.
While often quoted in several fields of discipline, the prolific author Ibid has no anthology of collected works and no biography. All that is known of him is from other authors’ quotations. In spite of this paucity, much can be gleaned from an author by the quotations that survive.
The works of Ibid originate in great antiquity, he is quoted alongside Homer. Judging by the amount he is quoted, his works rank among the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle. His works on religion are cited as frequently as Moses, Zarathustra, and the authors of the Vedas.
While the subject Ibid commented on in the ancient world were diverse, as time progressed, he expanded his interests. Not only is he quoted among the doctors of the Church, but also the doctors of medicine. In the modern era his quotes encompass anthropology, athletics, biology, literature, metallurgy, parenting, poetry, technology, and zymurgy to name but a few subjects.
With such a longevity of writing and broad spectrum of knowledge, a strong argument may be made that Ibid is not one writer but several. Perhaps there is a secret society of Ibid, never openly publishing its works but from time to time allowing authors to quote various passages.
However, this concept seems unlikely, not least because Ibid frequently contradicts himself; authors with opposing viewpoints frequently cite Ibid to support their position (or detract from their opponents’) With such different quotations, qualifications for entrance into the secret society would be quite lax and we probably would have heard of the cabal before reading of it in an obscure blog. Perhaps each of us is Ibid (as long as we’ve been quoted twice consecutively).
