Josh Writes a Blog has been temporarily relocated to Blogspot, while my primary domain name gets transferred. Until then, please listen to my Great Songs Spotify playlist, and be prepared to read blogs on this site until further notice! Thanks!
This is no longer true! But you can still listen to my Spotify playlist, because it’s pretty cool.
here it is! thanks to glitterberri for the translation. click the image for a larger version.
For the 25th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, Shigeru Miyamoto and his team did something I never thought they would ever, ever do: they announced an official timeline for the game series. Zelda fanatics like me spent copious amounts of time during our socially awkward youth trying to figure out how the games all fit together, chronologically. Turns out, the split timeline theorists were right all along, but only partially so: they thought there were two timelines split from Ocarina of Time, but in reality, there are three timelines. It’s a pretty ballsy move, if you ask me. When I was younger and fascinated by trying to figure out the chronology of the games (I even attempted to create a website trying to make a chronology based on what items Link retrieved on his various journies — I figured if Link had an item in one game, and it existed in a subsequent game, then that item proved that that game followed the previous one. Needless to say, it didn’t work out so well), I was a staunch “single timeline” advocate. All Zelda games took place on one timeline, I thought, using descendants of Link and Zelda (Ganon, of course, was resurrected) to tell the tale. It worked, for a while, but each new game brought with it new troubles. At first, Ocarina of Time was considered the “first” game in the timeline. Then, Minish Cap came out, and it was considered the first. And now, the newest game, Skyward Sword, is the official first game in the mythical timeline. All these new games were presenting new problems, but it was also becoming obvious that Nintendo knew that their fans were clamoring for origin stories and creation myths, and they delivered.
Now that I’m older, and have spent time philosophically pondering the merits and defects of quantum physics1, having a split timeline like this makes a lot of sense. But let’s break it down first, shall we?
My girlfriend’s mother sent me this gift for Christmas:
It’s not a game, per se, but a writing prompt box. The general idea is that there are two cards: gold cards and copper cards. The gold cards have character types on them, such as “amateur boxer,” or “person with a devastating secret,” while the copper cards have plot points on them, such as “locked door,” or “sudden return of forgotten memory.”
The general idea is that you pull two copper cards, which create your character, and two gold cards, which create your story. Then you write a story. I think it’s really genius, and hope to implement it many times during Fiction Fridays. The only two rules for Storymatic is that 1. Your main character must change from the beginning to the end of the story, and 2. Your main character cannot die.
One of the alternate ways of playing is called XYZ: you draw two gold cards, make that character X, then draw another gold card and make it character Y, then draw one copper card, and make it the conflict between the two characters (Z). On the instruction booklet, it says that this is a great way to start an actor improv, but for me, it’s an excellent start to a short scene. For the purposes of scene writing, I’ll augment the second rule above to “Your main character cannot leave the scene.” So I thought this week I would write a scene using these cards. Here’s what I drew:
And here’s the scene:
storymatic week one [it's a PDF file]
It’s kind of a dumb little scene. Hopefully I’ll get better at this as the weeks go on. I also plan to write short stories and stuff like that as well as scenes. Aaand that’s about it!
In less than a week, I start my second quarter at Portland State University. I have registered for three classes: Development of Dramatic Art I (aka Theatre History), Dramatic Writing II, and Intro to Theater Research. The first two classes are on Tuesday and Thursdays, and the last class is only on Wednesday. So basically I have Mondays and Fridays off, and no class on Tues/Wed/Thurs is earlier than 2pm. That’s pretty awesome.
I thought I’d talk a bit about my theatre textbooks, because honestly I have little else to talk about on this, the inaugural Theatre Thursday. You’d think I’d have more, but no, you would be mistaken.
First off, let me just say this: I had to buy the MLA Handbook. I am really disappointed that I had to do this. Somewhere out there are a handful of people who think citing things is the Pinnacle of Their Lives. Those people become writers of the MLA Handbook. Those people debate about the importance of the oxford comma. Those people drink wine alone at home with their cats instead of going to a bar. There is nothing wrong with that, by the way. But their output is the MLA Handbook, which, as far as I’m concerned, should be the only book burned.
Here are some photos and accompanying early reviews of my other textbooks.
hardcover? hot damn!
I’ve taken theatre classes for a long time now, and this is the first time I’ve actually had a theatre textbook. Usually we use anthologies, books full of different plays that are printed chronologically. You examine the history of theatre through the plays themselves. But this is a textbook! Good lord! Luckily, it’s not very thick. But it has pictures and infographs and bold chapter fonts and all the fixings. It kind of freaks me out, to be honest. I mean, theatre history is just a specific type of history, so it makes sense to have it come in a history book. Still. It creeps me out. I haven’t read a proper textbook in ages. Who knows, it might be easier to read than a shitty play. I guess we’ll find out.
Since Development of Dramatic Art I deals with the early, early stuff, I have a couple of Greek and Roman play books. Here they are:
Greek comedy and tragedy, at least the stuff you read in college, is pretty good. I think they had the play festivals for a reason, and the plays that survived did so because they were better than most other things. I haven’t read any Roman plays because I was taught from the get go that they were worse than Greek plays, when they weren’t just stolen outright from Greek playwrights1. The plays in this anthology include: two Aristophenes plays, Lysistrata (of course) and The Birds; Menander’s play The Grouch; two Plautus plays, The Menaechmi and Mostellaria; and Terence’s play The Self-Tormenter. I’ve only read Lysistrata, and that was a long time ago, so I guess this is a good book for me to own!
Aaaand here’s the other half. Tragedy. A bunch of sad people being sad. Boo hoo and the like. So what’s interesting about this book is what’s inside: We got Aeschylus’ The Orestia and Prometheus Bound; then Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (called Oedipus the King here; stuuupid) and Antigone; then Euripides’ Medea and the Bacchae (called The Bakkai here; sttuuuuuupid). THEN we have Seneca, who just rewrote Oedipus Rex and Medea, apparently. Very interesting! It seems like comedy was something one could branch out with, but tragedy was kept to specific subjects. Also, I hope we don’t have to read Prometheus Bound, because it is so, so awful.
"genius" is a bit much, book.
The Genius of the Early English Theater! Here’s a book absolutely no one except a theatre major would own. Seriously, no one needs to read Abraham and Isaac or The Second Shepherd’s Play, unless you were studying the history of pageant plays. And Everyman, too. Ugh. Fortunately they plopped Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Macbeth in there for good measure. I actually haven’t read Marlowe or Ben Jonson, or Milton for that matter, so that’ll be nice. Unfortunately I have to plod through the pageant plays and read some theatre historian’s old, moldy opinion on how great they are. Faaantastic. It’s like going to your grandmother’s house and listening to her talk about how wonderful phosphoric acid is. Yeah yeah, grandma, maybe back in the 1920s, but come on now.
And last but not least, we have the one book for my Intro to Theater Research class (besides the evil MLA Handbook):
Oh man! Essays on the Historiography of Performance?! SIGN ME UP!
This class is going to kill me, I can sense it. All I have to do is get through it. Ten weeks, just ten weeks …
In reality, I enjoy having deadlines for reading plays, mostly because I won’t read them on my own, because, you know, Skyrim. Even though Greek plays can be pretty long and boring, the comedies are genuinely funny, and the tragedies have a lot going for them, though they do tend to ramble on a bit too long. I think maybe our perceptions of tragedy have changed in 2,500 years, which is interesting, because comedy has pretty much stayed the same. That’s why you see Lysistrata being performed all the time, because it’s funny, and because it highlights gender inequality in a funny way.
Lysistrata’s a pretty fascinating piece on its own, really. People in modern times like to use it as some sort of proto-feminist play, where women “get back” at the men, but really, most Greek plays written by men were about the contemplation of women, whom they, for the most part, considered very powerful and were even a little frightened of. A lot of Greek plays involve strong, powerful women (Medea) and relatively stupid or naive men (Oedipus, Jason). I think women had a place in the home back then that we just don’t recognize today. We see it as male suppression. But a lot of it was just safety; places back then were a lot more dangerous than they are today.
Either way, I don’t want to suggest that the world wasn’t patriarchal back then, but more that it was a different form of patriarchy than we see today. Just like tragedy was different back then, or religion, or the concept of tyrannical rule. Doesn’t excuse everything, but it’s important to see things from all sides, rather than just putting our modern bias on the past.
Well, that was quite the digression. Fortunately, I have lots of time to read plays, write essays, and hopefully write more blog posts, perhaps on the subject of women in ancient times, which I know relatively little about because all of the history written back then was written by men. I guess that says more about the world back then than anything I say now.
Weight: 252
Goal Weight: 215
So here’s the thing: I lose weight pretty quickly when I start these kinds of things. Even before I started, during this entire Christmas vacation, I was eating candy and cookies and shit, but when I weighed myself on New Years Eve (before I went out and partied, of course), I weighted 255. My highest so far has been 260. So I seemingly lost five pounds, just because I wasn’t working, wasn’t using my time to snack constantly. Even though I was eating stuff that wasn’t so good for me, at least I wasn’t eating it constantly.
So now, day four of No Sugar January, and with the exception of New Years Day, where I ate Chinese buffet to stave off a hangover, I’ve kept my calorie intake well below the 2,200 suggested to me by myfitnesspal.com. And apparently I’ve lost three more pounds. I’m not cheering yet, because I know that some weight sloughs off fairly quickly when you start to take care of yourself like this, but that it will quickly plateau if you don’t keep taking care of yourself.
It’s kind of weird that we live in a country where attempting to lose weight is such a high priority. People make a living now keeping other people from getting too fat. Obesity, as we hear time and time again on the news, is an epidemic in America, because we’re the land of the free and the home of twenty Twinkies in my mouth. We don’t have to go out of our way to get food, and the food we do get is more than just satisfying — it’s delicious. And even the food that isn’t delicious is stuffed with chemicals and sugar to trick your brain into thinking that it’s necessary for your survival.
Couple this with jobs where we all sit at desks and stare at computers all day, and you’ve got a recipe for fat people.
This year I am going to be working extra hard to lose about fifty pounds. Not very much if you think about it, but the lifestyle changes needed to lose this weight are significant. No more sugar, first and foremost. This month is No Sugar January. The only sugars that will be consumed are those found naturally in fruits. In two weeks I plan on starting Couch to 5k and my exercise routine again (hopefully it won’t start raining). The only reason I picked two weeks instead of right now is because it takes time to let new routines become old routines, and jumping right in to doing everything at once will not work. It’s hard to develop that kind of mindset. To say, “I will focus on one thing now, and then add to it later.” People mistake it for being lazy. “Oh, he’s not working out because he’s lazy.” Well, yeah, I am lazy, but part of the reason I’m lazy is because I take on too much at once, and it becomes too much of a burden, so I drop it all. By focusing on my diet first and foremost, I can change my lifestyle, which will allow me to bring in exercise and eventually make me into something more in shape than “pudgy.”
That’s really all I got this week. Keeping the calories down, keeping my spirits up. Walking everywhere. That’s a decent start.