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October 17, 2005"Romancing Saga: Minstrel's Song"
"Romancing Saga: Minstrel's Song" came out for the PS2 last week. I voiced Prince Neidhart, one of the NPCs you can eventually recruit into your party. No idea how far into the game you have to be to make that happen, but if you choose Aisha as your main character, you encounter Neidhart almost immediately. If his stats and the strength of his attacks are any indicator, he's not going to join my party for a good, long while.
Anyhow, he's the first video game character I've ever done, and it fills me with geekish glee. If you're into RPGs, give "Romancing Saga: Minstrel's Song" a look.
Posted by patrick at 12:14 AM | Comments (3)
October 16, 2005
Salinger and the Duggars prove nothing ever changes...
I've been getting a lot of traffic on the site this month, due in no small part to the fact that Michelle Duggar has had another child.
I ranted about the Duggar family in April of 2004, when Michelle was given a mothering award. I was surprised at how many people ended up leaving comments on that post. Comments have since been disabled in the old blog, thanks to spam-bots, but if anybody feels compelled to chime in on this issue, just reply to this fresh post.
Now, a bit from J.D. Salinger's "Franny and Zooey," by way of the Department of The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same:
"...Advanced Writing 24-A loaded me up with thirty-eight short stories to drag terfully home for the weekend. Thirty-seven of them will be about a shy, reclusive Pennsylvania Dutch lesbian who Wants To Write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect."
A pithy enough moment, but those stories are exactly--in feel, if not in specific set-up--what my MFA classmates had to read as TAs running their own creative writing courses. Some of them continue to read them now as lecturers.
Ah, my undergraduate fiction courses. The department wasn't too large, and once you picked your field of concentration, you were sure to see the same people in class after class. For better or for worse. Usually the former, sometimes the latter.
I remember this one guy. He kept writing first-person accounts of a shy, socially awkward young man getting shot down by the ladies. It wouldn't have been nearly so bad if he hadn't insisted on naming each of his unfortunate protagonists after himself. There was no doubt in anybody's mind that his work wasn't fictional, but it was easier to just not say anything and make eye-contact with his shoulder than to call him on it.
That was the class where we were forced to write stories in the style of other authors--Elinor Lipman, for example.
Lipman's stories, if you haven't had the pleasure, are filled with characters mired in mid-career academia, fretting over their relationships and biological clocks as those last few viable eggs rattle around their ovaries like the last few gumballs in those highly-suspect candy machines you find by the entrances of grocery stores and car washes. Just the sort of characters every 20-year-old guy longs to create, no?
Posted by patrick at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)