I took full advantage of the break between summer classes and fall classes, and went on a little road trip to Wrightsville Beach with my friend. Lovely place overall, but I think the best part was when I got up early and went to the beach by myself.
Morning
I Guess That’s A Thing
During the semester, the rhythm of new students and returning students and recent grads and professors and college staff is a beehive of activity in Chapel Hill.
There are endless warnings that the semester is starting, like a speedtrap behind every bush, and a Help Wanted sign in every restaurant. Balloon clusters advertising move-in specials. Residents moaning about the noise level increasing and the lack of parking. Still, I only remember that I live in a college town when I see hordes of people wearing light blue for sportsball, or when someone asks me if I’m a student (Aww.), and I remember that there’s actually a reason to live here.
It’s buzzing with activity now, getting ready for the semester, and one lone bee kind of wondering “Oh, pollen? Honey? Flowers? Yeah, I guess some people here are into that. Whatever.”
Hello Kitty Curriculum Vitae
My career retrospective, as told through Hello Kitty:
I gave out Chinglish Hello Kitty stickers in class to reward my Beijing students.
The sad evening when I took my Hello Kitty desk toys home, after my last day at Next Island.
But soon I had a new Hello Kitty and a new desk at a new MMO!
Training new teachers at work, so I used Hello Kitty figures. As one does.
Mayflies, Collage, and Music in Super Chop Games’ Ephemerid
Super Chop Games’ new iOs release Ephemerid is a musical game, but fortunately, very little of it involves tapping in time with the background music (Ugh. How is that a genre?). Instead, players explore a paper collage world of flowers, leaves, and snowflakes as a mayfly, using the game’s music as a guide.
Ephemerid has no points, no winning, no failure messages. Actually, almost no messages at all. Except for a little icon of headphones next to a thumbs up, Ephemerid doesn’t directly communicate with the player. Instead, the player is gently encouraged to tap and swipe different parts of the papercut art to explore the world and see what the interactions do.
The best puzzle. Beautiful and simple.
Each scene asks the player to interact with something different, usually in a new way, but always inspired by the music. The music adds to each scene, or hints at what the player might want to try. Taken together, the scenes tell a story of an inquisitive mayfly’s life. Sometimes, you’ll take part in moments of joy and excitement, calling up ancient Chinese dragons or bouncing through the starry sky. Some scenes are puzzles, which can be solved with a little experimentation and exploration. Ephemerid is playful without being childish or cutesy.
There’s no way to screw up in Ephemerid. Not everything you see will help you progress through the world, but there’s no “wrong” thing to tap or touch. This creates an environment for relaxed exploration, allowing plenty of time to enjoy the world, but it prevents players from deviating from the mayfly’s intended path. You might slow down to enjoy the flowers, clouds, leaves, stars, or boombox-bearing dancing spider, but no matter what, your life as a mayfly involves finding a mate, procreating, and then dying.
Turntable Seasons
When you complete the life cycle of a mayfly (that came out sounding very 4th grade science fair), you’ll be back at the beginning on the Ephemerid record, ready to begin again as a new mayfly. Symbolically, as the vinyl circle of life, it works very well, although I don’t know if there’s much replay value in mayfly reincarnation. I only used the record-menu to return to sections in which I’d been too absorbed to take a good screenshot.
Actually, I wanted to screenshot almost everything.
I first checked out a demo of Ephemerid at SXSW, and I loved the childlike exploration and simple elegance of the intro version. (Although I have to admit it was pretty odd playing such a gentle musical game amid the craziness of the SXSW gaming pavilion.)
- If you follow @SuperChopGames right now, it’s entirely likely that a spider somewhere will dance with his boombox.
It didn’t seem even a little odd to have a cardboard spider light up and dance for followers. Other folks at SXSW offered me breakfast tacos, t-shirts and cocktails for @ mentions, and at least a musical cardboard spider related to a musical paper mayfly, right? When I played the full version, though, I laughed to find my funny spider friend as the mayfly’s dangerous enemy.
Ephemerid is available on the App Store and is currently on Steam Greenlight for a computer version as well.
Posted in Austin, Chapel Hill, Game Reviews, Gaming Culture
Tagged Ephemerid, games, indies games, iOs, ios games, Super Chop Games, SxSW
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Purple
Post Purpling
My friend Allison from college lives in Texas now, with her husband and adorable little son, so I don’t get to see her very often. I mean, we talk and Tumblr and tweet at each other, but it’s not the same thing!
This week, we both independently responded to completely different stress by dying our hair purple. We happened to choose the same brand of purple dye and to work from home while the dye was setting, so I imagine it seeping into our hair, while we responded to work messages from our respective tech/edu workplaces, hundred of miles apart.
I’ve only gotten to see Allison twice since she’s moved to Austin, but it’s good to know we’re still the same.
Posted in Austin, Chapel Hill
Tagged allison, athene-numphe, Austin, my friends are awesome, purple hair
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Small Blessings
Small Blessings, by Martha Woodroof, is about a small college town where everyone cares about each other just a little more than usual.
Professor Tom Putnam is planning to live out his life quietly teaching English and quietly caring for his mentally ill wife. But a series of sudden events, beginning with the arrival of a new bookstore clerk and a letter from an ex-lover telling Tom he has a son, change that for him.
I want to tell you about this story, but listing the events just sound like random plot twists. Sure, there’s insanity and alcoholism, and a paternity test, a surprising death, a backpack full of cash, and a kidnapping. But mostly what matters is each character trying to connect with others.
This is, despite all the dramatic events, a really gentle story about fallible humans trying to care for other fallible humans.
No Way Out of ‘Depression Quest’
I’ve decided to share a post I wrote for IGM last year about text-based Depression Quest. There’s an ongoing conversation about depression and suicide, and talking about games is also how I like to talk about feelings. Depression Quest is a simple text-based game, but it succeeds in using the gameplay format to mimic the hopelessness and frustration of depression. The game brings empathy and highlights the difference between having a bad day (or week. Or month. Or when feeling like garbage is connected to garbage events.) and depression.
Depression Quest is an interactive story in which players take on the role of a twenty-something living with depression. Players attempt to manage family, work, a romantic relationship and a creative project, while struggling with the challenges presented by the character’s depression. Depression Quest resembles another indie game experience, Actual Sunlight in that the game makes a statement about the effects of depression through the player’s interactions.
The game uses a format I particularly enjoy, with a segment of narrative and and list of player options. I’ve already written pretty extensively about how much I love this type of interaction in text-based games like Heroes Rise. This format distills gameplay to its simplest form, a series of situations and choices for the player to make.
Depression Quest very successfully plays on this expectation by presenting a narrative passage describing the character’s experiences, and then offering several player choices, with a range of possible outcomes, but makes some of the readable choices inaccessible to the player. Players can read options like making the most of a social situation, getting a good night’s rest, and so forth, so it’s very clear that these are possible reactions to the presented narrative segment, but they just aren’t able to choose those options.The player might want to call a therapist or get out of the apartment for a change of scene, but the depressed character literally can’t.
Some of the attempts to make the experience universal — a project for an unspecified hobby, a vague but menial job, some awkwardly non-gender-specific pronouns — make it harder to relate to the character’s experience in the beginning. I’m not sure if so much generalization was necessary, readers can connect well to protagonists with names and individualized experiences in novels.
But as the game progressed, the vagueness did create a feeling of isolation. I knew my character was overwhelmed by his job, and worried about screwing up in unspecified ways, and so was I, especially since I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing at work, anyway. I felt like the named characters – older brother Malcolm, coworker Sam, and college friend Amanda – were bright spots in a vague and somewhat confusing environment, a very effective part of the game’s portrayal of depression.
Player choices influence the progress of the story, but it’s not always a simple cause and effect. Players can’t, for example, decide to seek a therapist or pursue antidepressants. Instead, players are told that a co-worker’s cat has had kittens, and one of the litter needs a home, and then decide whether getting a kitten is a fun distraction or another overwhelming responsibility, for example. Giving players some choices with a little agency, but not a clear way to fix things or counteract depression is an accurate representation of living with depression.
Although it’s not a “fun” gaming experience, Depression Quest successfully uses interactive fiction game mechanics to tell an artistic and informative story about the effects and experiences of depression.
Depression Quest is available online. Players are encouraged to pay what they can, although there is no minimum requirement to experience the game. A portion of the proceeds earned from the game will be donated to iFred, a non profit that works on depression research and education.
Crossposted from Indie Game Magazine, this article originally appeared here: Battle Depression In ‘Depression Quest’ — Meg Stivison | Indie Game Magazine.
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Posted in Chapel Hill, Game Reviews, Gaming Culture
Tagged Depression Quest, games, Indie Game Mag, indie games, serious games, text-based games
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Bonnie Rozanski’s Upcoming Novel ‘The Mindtraveler’
In the tragic ending of The Mindtraveler, physicist heroine Dr. Margaret Braverman wins the Nobel Prize.
No, wait, I’m doing this in the wrong order.
Bonnie Rozanski’s The Mindtraveler tells the story of aging physics professor Margaret Braverman, disgraced 25 years ago when her secret experiments with time-travel led to an embarrassing electrocution. At sixty, she lectures in physics, lives alone, and half-heartedly attends faculty meetings, while indulging in the odd daydream about what might have happened if her great experiment had succeeded.
Margaret is pretty blunt about losing her love, about years spent alone, and her academic failures, at first, like the acceptance of age or the clear-eyed rationality of a career researcher. But it only takes an offhand comment from her grad student assistant to encourage her to give that great experiment one more go.
Back in her 35-year-old body, Margaret is re-experiencing her life and seeing the small events that set her on her current path. Margaret’s curiosity is always her strongest motivator, and she remains a blunt and not terribly emotional narrator. It’s hard not to sympathize with her here, re-experiencing a love affair that has ended quite badly in her own past, re-experiencing an embarrassing professional failure, and seeing her friends in the physics department back when they were young, healthy and hopeful. But if she can make a tiny change in the past, maybe she won’t end up sidelined and alone.
Blending wild time-travel with daily details of academic life gave this story the feel of magical realism. Margaret accepts the physics behind her great experiment, as well as the amazing opportunity she has with time travel, which makes it easy for reader to accept both.
The romance between Margaret and Frank is layered and believable. In one scene, 60-year-old Margaret hears and understands what 35-year-old Margaret is told by Frank, and didn’t fully understand at the time. But the story isn’t a romance — Margaret’s friendships with her colleagues in the physics department are very important, and she puts asides her own worries to try to help these bright, young men at 35 to avoid the problems she’s seen them encounter at 60. In one case, returning to 35 with the wisdom of 60 gives her new insights into her friend’s character, and not for the better.
She’s also a rare female heroine with deep professional ambitions, motivated by endless curiosity and a desire for glory. Academic backstabbing and departmental infighting are frighteningly realistic, although the sleazy department chair is just a little too shameless and predatory.
With multiple timestreams, crossing and affecting each other, and different versions of Margaret’s self, The Mindtraveler has so many opportunities to devolve into confusion or technobabble. Instead, Margaret’s no-nonsense narration keeps the story clear. Almost too clear for those of us rooting for happy ending, because she’s shown us her weakness for impulsive and selfish decisions many times, leading to an ending that is both heartbreaking and strangely inevitable.
Posted in Books, Chapel Hill
Tagged bitingduck press, Bonnie Rozanski, The Mindtraveler, travel
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Summer Sky Nails from Beauty Without Cruelty
Beauty Without Cruelty’s ‘Summer Sky’ Swatch.
I received this Summer Sky nail polish from BWC’s line of lovely, bold nail colors. Beauty Without Cruelty is a line of cosmetics created without animal testing and without using any animal products, I think I’m supposed to write about ethical fashion choices, but first let’s talk about what a freaking amazing color this is. It’s just a shade bluer than that mint nail color that everyone’s wearing this summer. (Yes, I have that minty one too…) Summer Sky is completely opaque, too, which means only one coat is needed, which means less drying time for me to smudge up my wet nails.
When I got this polish, I was a little worried that all-natural makeup might go the way of gluten-free cupcakes. You know, you see it in the glass case at the coffee shop, and it looks like a delicious cupcake, but it tastes like… something entirely different. Because flour is an integral part of a cupcake! This Summer Sky nail polish was smooth and durable. It was no different from my drugstore discount nail polishes or my fancy French manicure polish. (French mani is for days when I need to look like a responsible adult. Those days are stupid.)
My BWC polish matches my Birds & Arrows bag!
Beauty Without Cruelty has chosen to make cute and bold cosmetics in a thoughtful and ethical way. I became interested in ethical fashion companies like Beauty Without Cruelty when I talked with Mor from Redress Raleigh for thalo. Mor reminded me that we can make small choices in our everyday purchasing to support ethical companies and distributors. I like the idea that no animals were harmed in creating this polish, either for animal testing or for animal products, and I like that an all-natural polish is still smooth, opaque, and cute.
Beauty Without Cruelty’s “Summer Sky”, Instagram-style
Products in this post were provided from Beauty Without Cruelty. Thank you! Opinions and nails are my own.
Posted in Chapel Hill
Tagged #bblogger, #bbloggers, Beauty Without Cruelty, BWC, coffee, Instagram, Sponsored, thalo
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Nail Polish Rainbow
Found this while tidying up, and really liked my summer nail polish rainbow.
Posted in Chapel Hill
Tagged #bblogger, #bbloggers, Hello Kitty, Instagram, nail polish
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