The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord is, appropriately for its title, the most optimistic book I’ve read in a long time. Reading it felt so good that, when I finished, I immediately wanted to turn the book over and start again, to spend a little longer in Lord’s cozy, diverse world and become even better acquainted with its characters.
Monday, June 25, 2018
Monday, June 18, 2018
On Books 13: Akata Witch and Akata Warrior are not just "Harry Potter in Africa"
Note: I am a white American of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. These books are about the experiences and cultures of black people, both in Nigeria and in the United States. I am probably, therefore, not the ideal person to review them. Still, I would like to talk about the impact these books had on me, in the hopes that more white people will read and appreciate them, and express my gratitude to Dr. Nnedi Okorafor for telling her stories.
Nnedi Okorafor’s novels Akata Witch and Akata Warrior tell the story of Sunny Nuwaze, a Nigerian-American girl with albinism struggling to fit in after her family moves back to Nigeria. She discovers that she, and a number of her classmates, have magical powers that make them part of an international secret society, and begins to learn how to use those powers to save the world from demons.
Parts of this are going to sound familiar if you’ve read J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The two have often been compared. But Akata Witch and Akata Warrior go above and beyond the wizard-school tropes of my childhood in a great many ways. (Spoilers ahead.)
Nnedi Okorafor’s novels Akata Witch and Akata Warrior tell the story of Sunny Nuwaze, a Nigerian-American girl with albinism struggling to fit in after her family moves back to Nigeria. She discovers that she, and a number of her classmates, have magical powers that make them part of an international secret society, and begins to learn how to use those powers to save the world from demons.
Parts of this are going to sound familiar if you’ve read J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The two have often been compared. But Akata Witch and Akata Warrior go above and beyond the wizard-school tropes of my childhood in a great many ways. (Spoilers ahead.)
Monday, June 11, 2018
On Games Gone By 1: Tetris (Windows 3.1)
Many video game reviewers go out of their way to emphasize their personal connections to the games of their childhood, and to review games they remember fondly to see how they hold up. While I don't have a whole lot of fond memories of classic games from when I was a kid, I might as well start with a game I do remember well.
The version of Tetris that came with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack is my childhood Tetris. It's the version I learned to play on, and the one I'd occasionally catch my parents playing after my bedtime, and it's the one I always wish I had when I get frustrated with the controls on mobile ports. Of course, now that the Internet Archive has a collection of Windows 3.1 games, I can play it in a Windows 3.1 emulator in DOSbox.
Basic keyboard controls: left and right to move pieces, up to rotate, and down to drop a piece to the bottom and lock it in place. In multiplayer, one player uses the arrow keys and the other uses JKL and the spacebar. The game can be paused and unpaused by pressing P. There are ten levels, and beating each level requires you to clear five more lines than the last one.
It's missing some of the quality-of-life features of later Tetris releases: there's no soft-drop, you can only rotate pieces in one direction, you can't swap out pieces for later use, and you can't hold down an arrow key to make a piece move more than one space left or right at a time, which leads to a lot of button-mashing.
But it does have the option to show what piece is coming up next, and it has a feature that I've been disappointed not to find in most later Tetrises: the option to start with a specified number of partly-filled rows on the board. This not only gives the player more control over the difficulty, but also makes the game feel more like a puzzle at the beginning, instead of simply being a test of dexterity.
The two-player mode is a lower-speed precursor to Tetris Battle games. One player can, by clearing multiple lines at a time, send extra lines to the other player to deal with. (This can be turned off in the Options menu.) The level progression keeps pace with the faster player, which can make it harder for a player who falls behind to catch back up. (This cannot be turned off.)
Accessibility note: This version of Tetris has brightly-colored and visually busy backgrounds that change after each level, and there isn't an easy way to change the backgrounds or import new ones. The movement of the pieces is also not smooth, especially at higher speeds. If you are photosensitive or prone to headaches, this is probably not a game you will enjoy. The flickering is even worse in the Internet Archive browser version, so if you do want to play it, I recommend downloading it and setting it up in DOSBox.
With the exception of the loud backgrounds, this is Tetris at its most basic and least confusing. It doesn't have microtransactions, powerups, or countdown timers, and it doesn't rank you relative to other players unless you choose to save your high scores with your name on them. Your only goal is to play for as long as you can keep the game going, and even then it's easy enough to pause in between levels to take a break.
This is my favorite version of Tetris, though I wouldn't mind less button mashing. I don't just love it because it's the version I grew up with. It's simple and clean, has almost no gimmicks, and feels more like puzzle-solving than a lot of speed-based puzzle games.
Rating: I would play this until my arthritis begged for mercy.
The version of Tetris that came with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack is my childhood Tetris. It's the version I learned to play on, and the one I'd occasionally catch my parents playing after my bedtime, and it's the one I always wish I had when I get frustrated with the controls on mobile ports. Of course, now that the Internet Archive has a collection of Windows 3.1 games, I can play it in a Windows 3.1 emulator in DOSbox.
Basic keyboard controls: left and right to move pieces, up to rotate, and down to drop a piece to the bottom and lock it in place. In multiplayer, one player uses the arrow keys and the other uses JKL and the spacebar. The game can be paused and unpaused by pressing P. There are ten levels, and beating each level requires you to clear five more lines than the last one.
It's missing some of the quality-of-life features of later Tetris releases: there's no soft-drop, you can only rotate pieces in one direction, you can't swap out pieces for later use, and you can't hold down an arrow key to make a piece move more than one space left or right at a time, which leads to a lot of button-mashing.
But it does have the option to show what piece is coming up next, and it has a feature that I've been disappointed not to find in most later Tetrises: the option to start with a specified number of partly-filled rows on the board. This not only gives the player more control over the difficulty, but also makes the game feel more like a puzzle at the beginning, instead of simply being a test of dexterity.
The two-player mode is a lower-speed precursor to Tetris Battle games. One player can, by clearing multiple lines at a time, send extra lines to the other player to deal with. (This can be turned off in the Options menu.) The level progression keeps pace with the faster player, which can make it harder for a player who falls behind to catch back up. (This cannot be turned off.)
Accessibility note: This version of Tetris has brightly-colored and visually busy backgrounds that change after each level, and there isn't an easy way to change the backgrounds or import new ones. The movement of the pieces is also not smooth, especially at higher speeds. If you are photosensitive or prone to headaches, this is probably not a game you will enjoy. The flickering is even worse in the Internet Archive browser version, so if you do want to play it, I recommend downloading it and setting it up in DOSBox.
With the exception of the loud backgrounds, this is Tetris at its most basic and least confusing. It doesn't have microtransactions, powerups, or countdown timers, and it doesn't rank you relative to other players unless you choose to save your high scores with your name on them. Your only goal is to play for as long as you can keep the game going, and even then it's easy enough to pause in between levels to take a break.
This is my favorite version of Tetris, though I wouldn't mind less button mashing. I don't just love it because it's the version I grew up with. It's simple and clean, has almost no gimmicks, and feels more like puzzle-solving than a lot of speed-based puzzle games.
Rating: I would play this until my arthritis begged for mercy.
Monday, June 4, 2018
On the Blog: A Change in Format
The blogging experiment has been going well so far. Posting three times a week has helped me practice keeping up with deadlines and, most importantly, it's gotten me to sit down and write even on days when I don't feel like I have anything to say.
The downside is that I'm writing when I don't feel like I have anything to say, and pushing myself to get posts finished instead of taking the time to make sure they're as good as they can be. So I'm going to spend the next few months focusing on that part of the process. I will be posting less often, but using that extra time to edit and polish my essays, including Parts 3 and 4 of Intro to Magic. I will still post crafting updates, but only when I feel like I've made progress on a project. This should let me focus on improving my writing and give me the time to work on some longer and more detailed articles that I currently don't have time to do justice.
I'm also planning to start a new occasional series called On Games Gone By, in which I will be reviewing classic PC games from the 1990s and 2000s. I was born in 1992, and was always either too young or too busy reading to play the games that reviewers my age and a little older all seem to have fond memories of. In On Games Gone By, I'll review games I miss from the old days and try and find out what I was missing out on.
The downside is that I'm writing when I don't feel like I have anything to say, and pushing myself to get posts finished instead of taking the time to make sure they're as good as they can be. So I'm going to spend the next few months focusing on that part of the process. I will be posting less often, but using that extra time to edit and polish my essays, including Parts 3 and 4 of Intro to Magic. I will still post crafting updates, but only when I feel like I've made progress on a project. This should let me focus on improving my writing and give me the time to work on some longer and more detailed articles that I currently don't have time to do justice.
I'm also planning to start a new occasional series called On Games Gone By, in which I will be reviewing classic PC games from the 1990s and 2000s. I was born in 1992, and was always either too young or too busy reading to play the games that reviewers my age and a little older all seem to have fond memories of. In On Games Gone By, I'll review games I miss from the old days and try and find out what I was missing out on.
Friday, June 1, 2018
On the Needles 18
Writing
Chapter 3 of my Planeswalker fic is up on Archive of Our Own. Zofia introduces her latest invention, and Esther finally gets to teach Gideon to meditate.Knitting
The Twitter MKAL is done, and my nose will never be cold again.
Drawing
Today is Pokemon day 551. Today's Pokemon is Sandile.
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