I’m really proud of building these myself. Putting up my own furniture is pretty new for me, but also really satisfying and fun.
Traffic Control Algebra
Edupup’s Traffic Control Algebra asks players to review their algebra skills, while keeping crazy drivers from crashing into each other.
I was assigned to review any educational game on eduXtive, and I was really happy to find this one, and others like it, because in my experience edu minigames tend to be variations on flashcards. (Don’t get me wrong, when I was teaching ESL, I was always happy to use a flashcard game in class, and I created some of my own vocab matching games. But it’s always good to find an edu game that’s more than matching-plus-graphics.)
Do a math problem to turn on a green light and allow the cars coming from that direction to drive, and then do another problem to turn it red. The object is to try to get as many cars as possible through the intersection, without letting them crash. Apparently none of the drivers are paying attention.
The math starts out easy while players are still getting the hang of the drivers’ paths, but becomes more challenging as the game goes on, making it a good way to review middle-school math. Back in my day, we would have worksheets of simple algebra problems, and fifth-grade me would have preferred playing this game.
The game is more forgiving of math errors than car crashes. Players have up to 5 mathematical mistakes before the game ends.
You can be a little evil and just leave some drivers sitting at one corner while traffic backs up, but once there’s no place for a new car to go, the game is over. (You can also give green light in all four directions and let cars drive however they want. This play mode, inspired by drivers in the leftmost lane on 40 who suddenly realize they’re going to miss their exit, results in a big wreck. I’m just saying.)
This post was sponsored by eduXtive. The game was chosen and played by me, and obviously reactions and comments on the game are my own.
Posted in Chapel Hill, Gaming Culture
Tagged eduxtive, Flash games, games, sponsored post, Traffic Control Algebra
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I Like Boats: ‘The Girls at the Kingfisher Club’
Genevieve Valentine’s The Girls At The Kingfisher Club is out today! I wrote about it over at Yahoo, where, unfortunately, my original title “I like boats” was not as funny to others as it was for me, and I had to change it to something more professional. Good thing I have my own blog where I can title things whatever I want.
The Girls At the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine blends Prohibition nightclubs and the Twelve Dancing Princesses for a tale about sisterhood, loyalty, and happy endings.
In 1920s Manhattan, twelve sisters are kept trapped in the attic by their father, recalling Twelve Dancing Princesses, and highlighting their position as sidelined and powerless women. Jo, the oldest sister, is the General, the boss of eleven younger sisters, and the organizer of their midnight adventures. The girls all learn to dance and love sneaking out to Prohibition era nightclubs. For readers, it starts out impossible to keep track of all the princesses, but in a surprisingly short time, their personalities separate and it’s impossible to get the sisters confused.
Valentine is particularly good at blending the mundane and the fabulous, and The Girls At The Kingfisher Club is a wonderful magical realism adventure through the roaring twenties. A delightful period piece / fairy tale blend would be quite enough, but then rumors of twelve dancing sisters reach the Hamilton father, who decides to marry them off as quickly as possible to avoid any more embarrassing rumors. Jo takes desperate measures to protect the sisters from being married off and ending up in twelve different attics.
Each sister’s storyline is satisfying, true to their different personalities, as they try to find different forms of safety between the nightclubs the girls have known and a daytime New Manhattan they’ve never seen. Jo’s arc combines Prohibition bootlegging, sisterly love, and a bittersweet letting go of her General ways. A fairy tale ends with living happily ever after, and The Girls At The Kingfisher Club explores how one could possibly live happily, after growing up trapped in an attic.
Overall, a vibrant, magical story of Manhattan, dancing, and building a family in The Girls At The Kingfisher Club.
via The Twelve Dancing Jazz Age Princesses in ‘The Girls at the Kingfisher Club’ – Yahoo.
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Posted in Books, Chapel Hill
Tagged Book review, Books, Genevieve Valentine, reading, The Girls At The Kingfisher Club
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Hey, You Guys, Sleep Is Pretty Great
So I’ve had a bit of a problem that’s made it hard to sleep, but now that problem is sorted, and I’m sleeping properly, and, you guys, sleep is the best! Did you know it’s completely amazing? And makes you feel great?
Now I don’t wake up every morning already exhausted, so I’m not strained every single day because I’m so tired. I also don’t spend every night lying awake thinking about the terrible things that only come to mind in the middle of the night. (That stupid thing I said three months ago. What if tomorrow my boss fires us all and closes the company?) Getting enough sleep has dramatically improved my life!
I think I’ll go tell everyone know how nice it is to sleep and how awesome it is to feel rested. Sleeping! It’s good for you!
It was only recently, after all, that I noticed the relationship between eating and my mood. I almost never feel hungry, which sounds good because diet guides always talk about becoming thin by showing you how to curb your hunger, right? If left alone, I’ll get caught up in what I’m doing, until midafternoon when everything I’m doing becomes very difficult and everyone around me becomes extremely annoying. When I worked with Chip, around this point one of us would go find the other one and ask, sheepishly, “Did you remember to eat today? Because I forgot again.” After I have a meal, everyone stops being such annoying jerks.
Eating, you guys! It’s really good! It keeps everyone around me from becoming an insufferable jerk! Like magic!
Morning
Different work desk. Different MMO. Different Hello Kitty.
Pretty happy about the way things are going.
The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet
The story opens with handsome med student Bing Lee moving into the biggest McMansion in town, with snobbish sister Caroline and hipster friend Darcy in tow. Lizzie is a communications grad student and secret vlogger, who spends her days in the library with her friend Charlotte. Jane is a perpetually cheerful fashion designer, although she’s living at home while fetching coffee and samples for more important designers when the story opens. It’s a lovely reimagining of classic Jane. (Look, some of us actually have sisters who are cheerful and genuinely nice to everyone, and I always like when Jane is seen as smart and successful, as well as nice.)
Mr. Collins is a tech startup wannabe, who’s secured a massive investment from venture capitalist Catherine de Bourgh, although his company hasn’t made much of anything yet. He’s spot on, spouting corporate platitudes and elevator pitches, completely full of himself, and yet not entirely unsympathetic. (It’s actually a pretty kind reinvention, considering another Pride&Prejudice spinoff has Mr Collins getting chased by a swarm of bees into a cowpond where he drowns.) So good. And then Lizzie gets a gig at Pemberley Digital, where a certain brooding hipster is the CEO.
Charlotte is offered a job with Collins’ new company (after Lizzie turns it down, of course), and instead of Austen’s fairly depressing depiction of Charlotte choosing to marry Collins over being an old maid, this Charlotte decides to put her graduate work on hold to accept a lucrative position at a new media startup.
In the original P&P, Lydia’s elopement brings embarrassment and dishonor to the whole family because she ran off and lived with Wickham before they were married. Fortunately, Darcy steps in to convince Wickham is actually marry her, by paying him an undisclosed sum. This is a rough event to modernize. We don’t have the same disapproval for a young couple spending the night together anymore, and also a modern-day hero would be pretty disturbing if he paid a reprobate like Wickham to marry a teenage girl.
So what could a boy-crazy, attention-starved thoughtless young girl like Lydia do to wreck her life? She makes a private sex tape with Wickham, and it leaks, of course. It’s a perfect modernization of Lydia’s elopement, a small mistake with Wickham turns incredibly embarrassing for the entire Bennet family and threatens to destroy Lydia’s entire future.
The novel has some sweet Darcy and Elizabeth moments, with cute nods to the original, but where it really shines in Lizzie’s relationships with her sisters and Charlotte. The authors have managed to create a grad student Lizzie, with authentic reactions to modern day challenges of her relationships, living at home as an adult, and starting a new media career, all while still reminding readers of Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett.
I received and eARC of this novel from the publisher. All opinions are my own.
Just in case that’s not enough Darcy and Elizabeth for you, here are some of my other posts about Pride And Prejudice spinoffs:
- Unleashing Mr. Darcy
- Betrothed to Mr. Darcy
- Stride And Prejudice
- Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star
- Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife
- The Independence Of Miss Mary Bennett
From Other Austenites:
- The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennett by Bernie Su and Kate Rorick (caitieflum.wordpress.com)
- My Love for the Lizzie Bennet Diaries (myrenaissanceblog.wordpress.com)
- A Closer Look at The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: Episodes 1 – 16 (austenprose.com)
Posted in Books, Chapel Hill
Tagged Bernie Su, Books, coffee, Kate Rorick, Mr. Darcy, pride and prejudice, The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet
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Seed 4
Seed 4 is a new fantasy MMORPG, available for Android from Gameberry. The game is free to play, and monetizes on in-game purchases. Players can choose a fantasy hero — or heroine, there are plenty of playable females — and set off on their adventures.
Players can choose to play Quest, Raid, PvP, Subjugation, Intercept, Exploration, Guild Battle or Conquest. Quests were the simplest and easiest to engage in for a new player, because new players don’t need any allies or equipment to get started. Battles are simple, the app calls them “one-touch quests”.
After each successful battle, the player will receive one or more items as loot. Players end up with a lot of armor and weapons from questing, and they’ll very quickly be swapping out armor pieces for better ones, and filling every item slot. The app says there are “over 130 different types of items,” and fortunately there’s a simple one-click way to sell all of your unwanted loot back for Tarions, which can be spent on better loot or on hiring troops for your next battle.
After a while, players can form groups and Guilds with other players. Successful battles increase Guild and individual honor.
10 out of 10 for a playable female character. Wearing glasses, even! Now, about that shirt…
Seed 4 uses several forms of currency, blurring premium and in-game currency. Tarions and Hextarions can be earned through battle or received as daily login bonuses. They can also be purchased with real cash.
AP, or Action Points, are required to complete actions. When a player is out of action points, he can either stop playing and wait for them to refill over time, or drink a potion to refill this meter. Potions are available in the cash shop, received as gifts, or they can purchased with crystals. Crystals are also available in the cash shop, as well as premium weapons and armor, cosmetic improvements, and extra Tarions.
You can get the Android version of the game right here, and for Apple users there’s also an iOs version, too.
This post is sponsored by Seed 4, because if you play enough games and write about enough MMOs, eventually someone will pay you to do so.
Posted in Chapel Hill
Tagged Android, gameberry, games, mobile games, Seed 4, Seed IV, seed4, sponsored post
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The Girl With All The Gifts
Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class.
When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh.
Melanie is a very special girl.
A little ways into The Girl With All the Gifts
I was so wrong.
This contains about a million spoilers. Seriously, you should stop now and go read the book before I give the whole thing away.
Ok?
Seriously, spoilers.
I should admit that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of zombie stories, because I’m not at all interested in blood and gore and limbs coming off and all kinds of yuck. I like when internal organs stay on the inside, thanks very much. What attracted me to The Girl With All The Gifts was the world building, and I was completely pulled me into the post-breakdown society.
The beginning is told almost entirely from Melanie’s perspective, and she accepts without question that she will spend her days strapped in a wheelchair in class and her nights triple-locked into a cell. She also accepts that she will be sprayed down with disinfectant once a week and that she can do higher math and memorize facts with ease. This is the same kind of narration that I enjoyed in The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time (Blogging! In case you want to reference book reactions you wrote 9 years ago!).
I began to see that Melanie and her classmates are high-functioning hungries, a mix of zombie and human. They retain their human minds — in most cases, becoming extra smart — instead of becoming brainless zombies, but also keep a zombie’s hunger for flesh. This is the part where I told my friend that the superpowered little girl was going to cure the zombie virus.
(I was so very wrong.)
Melanie’s favorite teacher, Miss Justineau, reads the hungry children stories and teaches them about the Greek myths, and encourages creative writing. She does everything a humanities teacher would do, on a science and research base, in post-Breakdown world, and teaching the kids myths and history turns out to be how she saves the world. Sort of.
After even the limited society of the research base breaks down, there is one scene where Miss Justineau punches a researcher who wants to run very important, very fatal experiments on Melanie, and I think that maybe readers were supposed to realize how far organized society has fallen when we have schoolteachers punching their scientist bosses in the face. But I don’t know, I kind of got it.
The book is set in post-apocalyptic England, so occasionally a place name would have a familiar ring from my time in London and Cambridge. After the battle in Stevenage, I couldn’t help hearing an echo of the Tube announcement This train is for Stevenage. My friend Jennette wrote about noticing all the Indy locations while reading The Fault Is In Our Stars, and while I don’t know that area anywhere nearly as well as Jennette knows Indy, the half-remembered place names made the fallen society even creepier.
Even though I’m not usually a huge fan of zombie survival stories, I really enjoyed the sections where survivors build and fortify their locations to prevent attack from hungries. I mean, the coworker who’d asked me about this book works with me at a certain game studio working on a game that involves a lot of this. I kind of wanted to shout instructions to the characters to build better and more hungry-proof bases.
When I am not working at that studio, though, I’m teaching middle-school kids. I’m not saying that I’d sign up to teach zombie children in the apocalypse — No, wait, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
The Girl With All The Gifts is so hopeful, telling the story of a young girl who’s constantly dreaming about being the rescuer and about having a nice safe home. It’s also so freaking desperate and hopeless, with society basically over and the few people left are alive by random chance, broken and wounded. The end of the novel manages to be both, and in reading such a right and appropriate ending, I wondered how I could have expected anything else.
The Girl With All the Gifts
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Posted in Books, Chapel Hill
Tagged Book review, Books, M. R. Carey, Netgalley, The Girl With All the Gifts
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Specific
Every morning, I put on pretty earrings for work, and then take them off almost immediately when I launch the game and put my headphones on. #blog
Posted in Chapel Hill, Instagram
Tagged Instagram, photoblog, problems only I have, Tardis
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