My friend Chris wrote me to tell me about a game in which you play as a pediatric optometrist. Ugh.
“What kind of player fantasy is that?” I wrote back. “How is giving pretend eye drops to pretend squirming kids a good gameworld? For that matter, how is telling kids they need new glasses a compelling game story? Ugh. That does not sound even a little bit fun!”
I sent the email and went back to digging holes in Blockheads.
My mom recently inherited some kind of special flatware (sorry, forks all look like forks to me) from my dad’s side of the family, and asked me to check and make sure there are enough for all the Christmas guests. I report back that there are exactly enough for thirteen guests.
My mom: I can’t believe it’s exactly service for 13! Flatware doesn’t even come in thirteens! Who has service for 13?
Me: Jesus at the last supper.
My dad, laughing hysterically: And look how that turned out for everyone.
Later on (after we had used the special flatware for dinner), my mom offered everyone dessert.
My mom: There’s a lemon cake, and Auntie’s almond ring, and a red velvet cake, and Andrea made cookies, and here’s a vegan cake, and a Christmas trifle, and —
My dad: Forty.
My mom: What?
My dad: The Biblical number for uncountable excess is forty.
This is a gentle story, about personal crossroads and relationships. It’s also a love letter to distant friends, and to blogging, and to cooking delicious food, with an underlying theme of screw those rules, I’ll make my own. Yes.
I’m not saying I read a lot of formulaic chick lit, but I was braced for the predictable falling-out between the four friends (in order to set the stage for the teary reconciliation, wherein they realise the Value of Friendship, obvs.), and I was pleasantly surprised when that never happened. The author sends four characters on four personal arcs, that happen to intersect in interesting ways.
The story has some unabashed chicklit moments — Val, Ruby and Ginny all just happen to have gorgeous campers to drive out to Lavender’s gorgeous farm, and Val just happens to know a costume director in the next town who outfits them all in goddess/fairy ensembles — but why not, in a magical story? Why not end up with the four friends, plus Val’s teenage daughter Hannah, dressed as barefoot goddesses under a blue moon in fields of lavender?
The villains in the story aren’t mustache-twirling evil-doers, either. Lavender’s nephews, who stand to inherit the farm, aren’t greedy money-grubbers, just guys trying to keep their aging aunt from giving the family property away to random internet strangers. Ruby’s ex-boyfriend comes off as not so much evil as hopelessly self-centered and a bit confused. Even Ginny’s controlling mother means well. The true antagonist in each woman’s story is time.
I particularly liked Ginny’s drive from Kansas to Portland, a solo adventure after years of being an agreeable wife. I hate to drive, and I don’t think I would enjoy towing a camper in the Colorado mountains, but solo traveling is always great. Or maybe the best part was Ruby admitting she was named after the Galactic Gumshoe, The name always reminds me of that radio play, and I’ve called several game characters after her, too.
Although Ginny hasn’t gotten the best reaction from being outed as that cake blogger, The All You Can Dream Buffet loves blogging. Sometimes the characters will literally say it to each other, that writing this blog changed my life. Reading your blog makes my life better. And author O’Neal says it too, over and over, in different ways, that blogging is the wonderful interaction of creativity and friendship, of solitary hobbies and public sharing.
This review is based on an eARC from the publisher. Thank you! Opinions are my own and free copies have never stopped me from snarking about a bad book before.
Happy holidays, everyone! I hope you are enjoying food and friends and making your own rules!
Very often I’ll write something that I think is perfectly clear, and be amazed by what readers take away from it. Sometimes this is educational for me, and helps me improve my work by discovering areas where my words were not as clear as I’d thought. (Typos! Sentences that sounded better in my head! Jokes that are only funny if you memorized all the insult-swordfighting from every Monkey Island game!) Other times a commenter will so thoroughly misinterpret what I’ve written, that I wonder if I’ve phrased something really poorly, or if the commenter is willfully misreading.
My review for Geek of The Facebook Diet
What was quoted:
A light-hearted giggle on how everyone’s addicted to Facebook.
Geek Magazine, Meg Stivison (Jan 31, 2013)
What I actually said, in the real piece for Geek Magazine:
Reading through the intro and the jokes, I couldn’t tell if the book is meant to be a light-hearted giggle on how everyone’s addicted to Facebook these days, and we’re meant to all recognize ourselves and our own habits in the cartoons, or if it’s meant to be denouncing kids today and their pointless internet socializing and how much better offline, “real” interactions would be. Either way, there’s unfortunately not a lot to relate to in the comics or jokes.
I mean, it’s not made up out of thin air, but I’m pretty sure this is not a good faith interpretation of what I wrote.
Is it spring yet?
Just did a guest piece over at Game Industry News about Prehistoric Park. GiN is a great outlet, with a great team, and it was awesome to be part of it! Sadly, I wasn’t quite as impressed with the game I reviewed.
Each new attraction must be placed with entrance and exit on a path, and all paths must be connected, because amusement park visitors can’t step on grass. Only the most considerate Neanderthals visit the park! There is, of course, the obligatory prompting to spend premium currency to speed construction along, a pretty standard mechanic in freemium games. Choose rides and attractions, add amenities like a water fountain and a resting bench for tired cave people, and design a charming prehistoric theme park for little cave people to enjoy!
From there, it is a fairly typical round of upgrading attractions, repairing attractions and adding new attractions, while being prompted to spend premium currency to do these things.
Complete text of the lesson I gave my students on choosing sounds for their games. (Parents can thank me later.)
Surprising no one, I make a pretty snarky bot.
New What Would I Say? app pulls and respins your Facebook updates into new updates. Think Darius Kazemi’s @TwoHeadlines mashup bot on Twitter, but thoroughly infused with your Facebook personality.
Users need to sign in with Facebook on the WWIS site to create their own WWIS updates, and then choose which ones to share. Woke up with Ex-boyfriend is one that I decided to keep private, but in general it’s something I actually wanted to share. My friends’ botted and shared updates were hilarious, if grammatically painful, capsule versions of their personalities.
via I Heart Chaos — New What Would I Say? app :: Meg Stivison
The Blockheads is a free-to-play iPad and Android game, in which players explore a sandbox-style, procedurally-generated world, where they can build with with blocks. The game has a strong resemblance to another, very popular game full of, um, mining and crafting, if you know what I’m saying.
Only Blockheads is cuter, and offers a better UI. (In the time it took me to quit walking into things and punching trees in Minecraft, I had a Blockheads house and garden going.) The world is surprisingly pretty, considering almost everything is a cube, and includes distinct biomes to explore. Or just raid for resources, I’m not judging. The world cycles through seasons and times of day, creating lovely sunrises and snowfalls on my blocky domain.
Players can customize and name their Blockhead avatar, allowing for much more personality than Minecraft’s default Steve, without complex modding. Avatars can be female too, to the great excitement of several Minecraft-ing ladies I know. I love mining and exploring even more if I can do it with pretty hair.
Unfortunately, Blockheads also resembles Minecraft with some of the tedious inventory management. Does anyone enjoy this? Does opening trunks and baskets add anything to gameplay at all? (Is it for realism, after I just hit a tree with a shovel until it became cubes of wood?)
Blockheads can be a big world for a little avatar, so warp in a second, playable Blockhead, play a local game with a friend, or join multiplayer games through GameCenter. Most of my local, multiplayer game experience was Civ marathons in college, which usually involved about an hour of network troubleshooting before a game could start, and so I’m still amazed when it only takes a couple of seconds to send a Blockhead into a friend’s world.
Like most free-to-play games, Blockheads offers real money options to speed up game progress, Players can either buy time crystals to spend on speeding specific actions or buy a speeding powerup for everything. And, like most free-to-play games, Blockheads slows down game progress enough to make those in-app purchases tempting. My complaint is not with Blockheads itself — this charming game is well worth a much higher price point — but with the common monetization model of demanding payment to correct game balance in freemium games. It’s sad that floods of freemium games make it harder for iOs developers to just set a price for a game, and there’s something particularly soul-crushing in suckifying a game and then charging to unsuck it.
Blockheads offers the addictive gameplay of exploring a randomized world, and uncovering treasure-filled caves, growing a sweet little garden, making and dyeing clothes, building homes (but why build a house when you can build greenhouses and igloos and underwater palaces?), making furniture and decor, and generally creative gaming. Blockheads further encourages imaginative play by giving achievements for everything from the obvious to the ridiculous, from the exciting entrance to the iron age or the discovery of the North Pole, to the ridiculous creation of a tin-foil hat.
I will spare you the detailed descriptions of all my blocky building adventures, but I’m pretty pleased with my indoor plumbing, secret treasure room, multi-biome greenhouse, and of course the Blockheads version of my favorite outfit.
Oh, and you don’t need a wifi connection for single player, making the Blockheads world an ideal escape from wherever you’re stuck.
