NaNoWriMo and Me

Hi all! Sorry for the radio silence, I've been re-organizing my writing priorities (and have sometimes been just plain lazy). I had a heck of a busy summer, too. I'm writing to direct y'all to my NaNoWriMo page. That's where I'll be writing for the next month. I'm going to do it too, damn it. I'm going to write and write and EDIT IT LATER. It will be good for me.

In other news for all 1-2 of you who haven't read it elsewhere, I'm now working as a newsie for RPGamer. Whee!

Rock Point Provincial Park - Lake Eerie, Ontario

Would You Like Waste with That?

I'm not the world's greatest environmentalist, but I try. I'm particularly proud of the fact that in 10 years, I've only put about 40,000 miles on my car. I would far rather go to work via walking, biking, or public transit than deal with a driving commute, so my car is used only for weekend errands and vacations. Yesterday I went to the gas station to fill up in anticipation of one of those vacations, and some poor credit card company employee approached me while I was a captive audience.

"Do you want to know how much you can save on the gas you buy every week?" he asked me. "Actually, I only fill up about once every other month," I answered truthfully. His eyes widened in shock, but he dutifully attempted to continue his sphiel until I informed him that I already had a credit card, thanks.

After taking the ol' Saturn in for its tune-up, I took my semiannual trip to McDonald's. Can't stand their burgers, but I love their fries, and you can get grilled chicken sandwiches on fairly yummy buns there now. So I ordered a sandwich and a medium fry. The perky cashier looked almost offended when I refused her offer to get a drink, since a combo was only ten cents more. "I don't need a drink," I said lamely, since I didn't feel like explaining that I try not to drink soda because of all the sugar and my dental health, you see, and why waste a paper cup and plastic lid when I've got a bottle of water in my backpack, anyway? Then, as she finished filling my order, she reflexively grabbed a handful of about 10 katsup packets for my medium fries, which I also refused. That time she shot me a glare of annoyance, I suppose for so rudely interrupting her routine. "I, uh, I'm going home..." I blurted out before wondering why I should feel like apologising for refusing to take katsup that I wasn't going to use.

It's telling that I managed to shock two people in a single day by simply going about my daily tasks and refusing offers for things that I neither need nor want. Crazed consumption is just so tightly woven into the nature of North American society, I wonder how in heck we think we're going to actually reduce our waste and our emissions? I mean, I'm aware of the fact that I frequently compromise my environmentalism for reasons of affordability and convenience. Yet it seems that the small things I do are considered strange and unusual by the people around me.

I'll just have to feel gratified in the small victories. Now that shopping bags cost 5 cents each in Ontario, I no longer have to interrupt every check-out person with a hasty, "We brought our own bags!" before they start throwing everything automatically into the plastic ones. And our local grocery store reversed its decision to start packing their pre-made samosas in wasteful individual plastic containers after I complained. I'm hoping that means that I wasn't the only one who complained. I'm hoping more and more people start taking the time to complain in the future.

Media Doofus of the Day

"We all have to remember that Michael Jackson wasn't just about music. He was about so much more. He was about... um... pop culture. And.... um.... he wanted to change the world."

Don't bust a brain cell, random entertainment talking head guy.

Herding Cats

After talking to a kitty behaviour specialist, I'm working on training Chet, my bellicose boy cat, to respond to me rather than always expect to be responded to. He's a bit of a bitey boy, even though he loves people and enjoys cuddling. The cat lady thinks he's trying to be the top cat in the household, so she's got me clicker/treat training him to come to me when he's called.

So far we've had mixed results. Chet has always known his name; he'll look up if we mention him in casual conversation. He only responds to "Here, Chet!" about half the time, though. The other half of the time he just stares at me like, "You think I'm moving, you're crazy, lady."

However, our other cat, who doesn't really know her name, has quickly learned that "Here, Chet!" means "Mommy's giving out treats!" So she now comes when I call for him, even though I never give her a treat unless he's actually come and has eaten his treat first. (I want him to respond to me, not to the other cat getting a treat.) My husband laughed at me last night when I was calling, "Here, Chet! Here, Chet!" in vain, while Abby ran enthusiastically over to me and waited for her treat.

Darn cats.

Recipe: Red Bell Peppers with Chorizo Stuffing

Made this recipe up today with a few fresh ingredients and stuff I scrounged from the fridge, and it was delicious!

Red Bell Peppers with Chorizo Stuffing
Serves: 4-6

Ingredients:
4-6 medium sized chorizo sausages
2 cups cooked rice (white or brown)
1/2 cup crumbled feta or 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (optional)
1 cup frozen corn
1/2 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
4 cloves chopped garlic
1 tbs chicken/pork grill seasoning (or salt and pepper to taste)
1 large red bell pepper per person being served. Select peppers that will sit upright on the baking tray.
Bread crumbs and/or parmesan cheese, if desired

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 375
2. Split open chorizo sausage casings. Remove sausage filling from casings and chop or crumble filling into small pieces.
3. In a large bowl, mix together sausage filling, cooked rice, cheese, corn, parsley, garlic, and seasoning.
4. Cut the tops off the red peppers. Hull and rinse them, then place on the baking tray and fill with the sausage mixture.
5. Top with bread crumbs and/or parmesan cheese, if desired. Bake for 45 minutes or until peppers are done. They will be done when the skin starts to wrinkle, but before the peppers have browned.

How to Do Business 101

We're planning some great outings with friends this summer. A weekend camping trip to Rock Point Provincial Park with some World of Warcraft buddies and a week in Mont Tremblant, Quebec with some of my college friends.

Of course, that means somebody else has to take care of our feline "children". It's our first set of trips since we got Mr. Chet, our second cat, so I decided it was time to find a cat sitter instead of boarding both cats.

After searching the Internet and narrowing my choices down to licensed and insured places, I thought I'd found the perfect choice. Unfortunately, we were outside their service area, though they were very nice over the phone. OK, I moved on to the second choice, which seemed fine on paper, but I wanted more information because the "fees" section of their website was mysteriously broken, even at the source code level. So I called the local number given for the company.

"Hello, Company Name X. Garblegarble volumedroppingoff."
"Hi, I wanted to get more information about your cat visits."
"OK, let me get some information about that." ::Medium length pause, then starts reading the text I'd just read on the company website::
"Uh, thanks, could you tell me if I'm in your service area? I'm in North York."
"OK, let me get some information about that." ::Extended pause:: "We have offfices in every city in..."
"Yeah, thanks but I don't think you're able to give me the information I need." ::click::

I don't have a lot of patience with poor business practices. For the love of the commerce gods, people. Put somebody who knows what the hell they're talking about on your main contact line!

I ended up doing a more focused web search and finding a company not far from where I lived. It was a family-owned outfit, and the owner (who answered the phone) was kinda quirky and a bit abrasive. That really doesn't bother me in animal people, though (well, quirky never bothers me at all). They're animal people and not people people for a reason. The important thing is that she knew what she was talking about and asked the right questions. Her sister the "cat expert" is coming over to meet our critters next week.

Business. It's about confidence, competence, and taking for than 5 minutes to train your employees. Man, I should be one of those consultants that gets paid way too much to go to businesses and tell the employees really obvious things. Except then I'd have to use buzzwords, and I fucking hate buzzwords.

E3

Been watching E3 with my usual mix of interest and amusement. Reading the Penny Arcade forum commentary on the various press events is often more fun than watching the live feeds themselves.

I'm not thrilled with all the Microsoft stuff, since most of it was shooters, and I don't do shooters. I continue to hope that the woman being highlighted in all the FF13 coverage is actually the main character, because JRPGs could really use more female protagonists who aren't the white mage/token love interest/leather-clad slut. Really, Ashe of FF12 should probably have been the player character, and Vaan didn't need to be in the game at all.

Aaaanyway, Nintendo's showing generally pleased me, certainly much more than last year's. Golden Sun is fun, and I'm sure I'll enjoy Mario Galaxy 2 as much as I enjoyed the first one. The trailers (and the game itself, when I'm not cussing at the more difficult platforming challenges) just evoke such a feeling of simple joy.





For a final note, I don't have Rock Band, and I'm not sure I want it. As a vocalist, I much prefer to be able to improvise than to be put on rails and told I need to sing just like the original. However, this trailer for Rock Band Beatles is pretty awesome whether you're interested in the game or not.





We'll see what Squeenix and Konami have to offer today!

Big ol' Raspberry Game Review - Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked

So the latest game to come my way from my friendly rental service was Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked for the Wii. Let me begin by stating that I love sim games and I love exploration games. I can spend hours and hours with Harvest Moon, and I thought Endless Ocean was pretty nifty. I'm generally forgiving of a few interface issues, some translation glitches, non-top-notch graphics, etc. if I find the main game satisfying. Unfortunately, I found Lost in Blue: Wii edition to be far from satisfying.

Since I didn't play the game long enough to give it a thorough pannning, let me just state the following:

1. Bars that go down constantly and must be refilled are a tricky game mechanic to do right. The Sims is still trying to get it right, and they've been making the bars less demanding with every iteration. Lost in Blue's bars go down steeply, and the food bar goes up veeery slowly. They did not get the balance right.

2. On the topic of getting the balance wrong, forcing the player to make their little guy down 20 coconuts, 18 berries and an entire boar in one day in order to meet his nutritional needs while attempting to explore an island is not fun. At all. That stinking boar should have lasted days. DAYS, I say!

3. So the little guy meets a fellow shipwrecked passenger, a blonde ponytail girl who somehow thinks it's a good idea to keep wearing her high heels on a deserted island. Despite the fact that she's been smart enough to set up her own base camp and keep herself alive for days before you meet her, she turns suddenly helpless at the sight of the player character's raging testosterone, or something. Maybe she's seen his metabolism and is afraid he'll eat her. Either way, you have to do everything for her and don't have the option to send her off to do her own thing. This is both sexist and not fun.

Back to the rental service with you, Lost in Blue!

Neighbourhood Trail Walk

I love how very green the leaves are in the spring.

Recipe: Super Tender Pork Chops and Zucchini Cakes

The pork chop recipe was adapted from somewhere on the Internet, which I unfortunately can't credit because I lost the printout some time ago. The zucchini cakes are all me.

Natural Eating Tip: I always keep a container of organic, low sodium chicken broth in my fridge. Chicken broth is excellent for giving flavour to many dishes. I often use it as the base for cooking rice or soup, giving a lot more body to the dish than cooking in water.

Ingredients (based on serving 2, double to serve 4):

1 large zucchini, grated
1 large egg, lightly beaten
2 tbs flour
1/4 cup bread crumbs
white cheese of your choice, to top zucchini cakes
2 pork chops
1/4 cup cooking wine
1/2 cup cooking broth
olive oil, salt, pepper

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven or toaster oven to 350 F

2. Mix grated zucchini, beaten egg, flour, and bread crumbs together with a fork. Mixture should stick together, but doesn't need to be super sticky. If it's too wet, add more bread crumbs. Shape mixture into 4 discs.

3. Add 2 tbs olive oil to pan over medium high heat. Brown zucchini cakes for 2-4 minutes per side. Remove cakes from pan, place on baking sheet, and top with cheese (if desired). Bake in the oven for 10 minutes.

4. While cakes are cooking, trim fat from pork chops and season with salt and pepper. Remove zucchini bits from frying pan, and add a bit more olive oil. Sear the pork chops on medium high heat for 2-3 minutes per side. Add wine and cook until it is mostly evaporated, flipping pork chops once. Add chicken broth and simmer until done, 4-6 minutes per side.

How (not) to be an Ally - Obama and Gay Marriage

Sometimes, to be an ally of a community that lacks, civil rights, you must be willing to accept personal consequences. You'd think that Barack Obama would understand that very well, but I'm not feeling it with his stance against gay marriage. This self-described fierce proponent for equality rights for gays and lesbians openly opposes gay marriage because of his religious beliefs. Mr. Obama, I'm sorry, but if you believe in full equality for a group of people, you can't go halfway.

Compare Mr. Obama's stance to Paul Martin's. Paul Martin was the Prime Minister of Canada who introduced the bill that legalized gay marriage throughout Canada. He did this despite being Catholic and facing threats of excommunication from Catholic leaders in Canada. Here is what he said about the issue of voting for gay marrage despite his religious beliefs:

"Religious leaders have strong views both for and against this legislation. They should express them. Certainly, many of us in this House, myself included, have a strong faith, and we value that faith and its influence on the decisions we make. But all of us have been elected to serve here as Parliamentarians. And as public legislators, we are responsible for serving all Canadians and protecting the rights of all Canadians.

We will be influenced by our faith but we also have an obligation to take the widest perspective -- to recognize that one of the great strengths of Canada is its respect for the rights of each and every individual, to understand that we must not shrink from the need to reaffirm the rights and responsibilities of Canadians in an evolving society."

This, Mr. Obama, is how to be an ally to the gay and lesbian community. We cannot support civil rights while allowing our personal religious beliefs to determine how far we're willing to take equality. I know it's a difficult choice to make, and that there are consequences for supporting civil rights. Mr. Martin faced possible excommunication from his own church, and a number of Catholic priests and bishops in Canada stated that they would refuse holy communion to Mr. Martin. He still did the right thing, because he truly believes in civil rights.

Here's Paul Martin's full speech in favour of his bill. It's an excellent speech.

Everybody was Swine Flu Fighting

This whole Swine Flu debacle seems more worthy of the comedic stylings of Jon Swift than Jon Stewart. It's the perfect storm of bureaucratic bumbling and media madness.

First off, we have the CDC and the WHO, both of whom appear incapable of communicating effectively with either the media or normal human beings. The renaming of the Swine Flu into the utterly unmemorable H1N1 Flu Virus was truly comic. Then there were the CDC reps I heard on the radio all weekend, attempting to calm everyone down by explaining that labelling a disease a pandemic simply means that it's widespread, not severe. At the same time, as my husband so reasonably pointed out, they've got a pandemic alert scale that they've raised to five and are threatening to raise to six out of six. In a world of colour-coded terror alerts, can you blame people for thinking that six out of six is supposed to be, like, really bad?

Then there's the usual media, "Oh my god IT CAME FROM MEXICO we're all going to DIE!!!" screeching. I can almost hear the disappointment in the Canadian TV news personalities' voices whenever someone fails to die of swine flu here. They're so sad about the lack of apocalypse so far that they've switched from "We're all going to DIE!!!" to the slyer "Is swine flu a threat... to your CHILDREN?" I swear, I feel worse for North America's criminally overprotected kids with every news report. I really hope they all rebel when they have children of their own, and actually let their kids go out and do fun stuff again.

Beyond the screaming headlines, however, you can get a fascinating glimpse into the labyrinthine world of US/Mexico relations. The typical US xenophobes are spouting their usual anti-immigrant rhetoric, and of course trying to use this as an excuse to rid the US of all "illegals", never mind that said "illegals" have been in the USA, not Mexico, and are no more likely to have swine flu than anybody else. More interesting (and insidious) is the casual equation of Mexico and other third world countries with uncleanliness and unsanitary living, never mind that the flu exists everywhere, and that North Americans really aren't all that great at washing their darn hands after using the public washroom. In the meantime, the Mexican public, fed up with US anti-Mexico rhetoric, is happy to entertain various conspiracy theories of Swine Flu actually starting in the US and being exported to Mexico.

Me? I continue to believe that driving on the streets of Toronto is far more likely to kill me than a global flu pandemic.

Edit: Update! The CBC News has helpfully informed us that the median age of all Greater Toronto Area swine flu sufferers is 25. Yes, that's the median age of all 36 cases of swine flu in the GTA. I'm so glad I have been provided with such important and statistically useful information!

De-chemming Your Diet - How to Eat More Naturally Without Going Nuts

Everyone has their own reason for wanting to eat a more natural diet. For me, it was the suspicion that a sensitivity to MSG (monosodium glutamate) was responsible for a number of nagging health problems I've had over the years. Others might be interested in losing weight, eating more environmentally/globally responsible food, or simply increasing their well-being in general. Whatever your motivation, it can be difficult to alter your cooking and eating habits in order to reduce the number of artificial ingredients in your food.

While I started my journey by simply avoiding MSG in my diet, the time I spent reading food labels sensitized me to foods with large amounts of processed and artificial ingredients. I soon decided that I would also avoid eating foods containing high-fructose corn syrup, and would in general try not to buy foods with large numbers of artificial ingredients. It hasn't been easy, but through careful shopping I've managed to both greatly reduce my consumption of processed/artificial foods and significantly reduce my grocery bill. I no longer suffer from regular intestinal problems and dizzy spells, I've lost weight, and I have more energy. It's been great for me, and I thought I'd share my tips for others who'd like to eat better, but who also want to eat affordably. I make compromises - I'm not sure if the organic foods I buy are truly organic and completely pesticide free - but I've made a good start without breaking the bank or driving myself insane.

Here are my shopping tips:

1. Shop on the periphery of the grocery store. I noticed a popular nutrition/diet book out that gave this same advice about a year after I'd started doing it myself. The vast majority of my current food purchases are from the produce, meat, and dairy sections of the store. The middle aisles of the store are Processed Food Central, and shopping there usually involves a lot of label reading for me.

2. Read labels and decide which ingredients you will definitely avoid, and which you will tolerate. If you want to avoid MSG, look both for "monosodium glutamate" and any "hydrolized" ingredients on food labels. Also avoid buying foods that list "soy" + anything that isn't "beans", such as "soy protein isolate". Soy lecithin, however, is not associated with MSG and seems relatively non-toxic.

In general, when comparing products, I will go with the product that has the simplest, least polysyllabic ingredient list. Since I now know which ingredients are most important for me to avoid, I've gotten much faster at choosing what I'm willing or unwilling to buy.

3. Check around town for inexpensive ways to buy organic/natural food. Many organic/natural food stores (hello, Whole Foods) are expensive, but luckily organic and natural foods are becoming more popular. Sometimes you can find them in surprising places. For example, in Canada, Shopper's Drug Mart is currently selling an affordable line of organic canned and boxed foods. Finding MSG-free soup at Shopper's has been a godsend for our emergency food supply. In the States, you may be one of the lucky individuals who lives near a Trader Joe's. If you are, I am very jealous. Tell them to open a store in Toronto, damn it!

Just like for regular groceries, you'll have to read the labels on so-called organic and natural foods. Many supposedly healthy or natural foods are full of the exact same artificial ingredients as normal processed foods.

4. Take a serious look at store brands. This may not be true of all store brands, but I've found that the store brands at my local grocery stores contain far fewer artificial ingredients than the big brands. Foods with a lower price and with natural ingredients? Yes, please!

Hopefully, this will help budding natural eaters get started with the shopping. Next time, I'll talk about eating naturally while keeping your cooking time down and your flavour level up.

Note: I have linked to Wikipedia in this entry because it's an easy central location from which to get basic information. Of course, if you want to get serious about researching food processing and artificial ingredients, find better scientific sources than Wikipedia.

Virtual Farming and Other Technological Indulgences

Like many gamers, the Harvest Moon series converted me from, "Virtual farming? That sounds boring" to "Just a minute dear, I'm harvesting pineapples" with its addictive mix of farm care and relationship building. Just as the Harvest Moon formula of transforming a farm (and usually a town) from poverty to posterity via plowing prowess began to get stale, Marvelous Entertainment introduced the Rune Factory series, which added dungeon delving and monster raising into the farming sim mix. I'm currently playing Rune Factory Frontier, the first Wii installment of the Rune Factory series, and it's an excellent game.

Although I'm only midway through my first summer, I can appreciate how well the Rune Factory series is evolving. RFF controls very well and avoids many interface annoyances that have plagued both the Harvest Moon series and previous Rune Factory games. Tools are easy to select and use, crops and other items stack automatically, and you are given time to pick up any object you accidentally drop. You can even move items in and out of your shipping box freely until the daily pickup, which farming sim vets will recognise as a welcome improvement over the usual "black hole" shipping box.

I'm most impressed, however, by the character interactions in the game. The characters in RFF are some of the best realized characters I've seen in a virtual farming game. They have a wide variety of things to say, and most of them seem to have their own storyline that will play out throughout the game. They write letters to you, sometimes asking for your opinion on things (which you select when you reply to them) or for items that they'd like you to send them. They drop hints about the items that they enjoy receiving as gifts, especially as you start to raise your friendship level with them, so that you don't need to consult a FAQ or use tedious trial and error to discover what they like. You can give them accessories, which they will wear if they enjoy them. They give you quests to go on, which often advance the storyline, help you learn more about them, or even change the town. The protagonist isn't silent, either, so he actually takes part in a number of dialogues. Overall, the game gives you the feeling that your character has an actual relationship with the townsfolk, and that they care about his opinion. It goes a long way towards making me care about the game.

Of course, RFF is as addictive as all of these games, and has led me to take notes in order to maximize my farm's fertility. I felt bad about using so much scrap paper, though, so last night I turned my DS on and started using Pictochat to take notes. That's right, I was playing a game on one Nintendo device while scribbling notes via stylus on another Nintendo device. I should totally get some kind of nifty Nintendo swag for that show of pure nerddom.

I'm looking forward to playing through the entire storyline, and I'll be sure to post a review here once I do so.

Spring Blooms - Allen Gardens, Toronto

Game Review: De Blob

De Blob

Platform: Nintendo Wii
Players: Main Single Player Campaign with Multiplayer Minigames
Official Website: http://www.deblob.com/
Genre: Quirky platformer

Concept/Storyline: At the beginning of De Blob, the player is presented with a happy, colourful city inhabited by Raydians, cute rainbow-coloured blob people. It is quickly invaded by dreary black and white aliens called Inkies, who drain all colour from the town and enslave the populace. A small band of rebels called the Colour Underground aims to restore colour to the city, liberate the Raydians, and fight off the Inkies. The player controls Blob, the newest member of the Colour Underground. Blob, pictured above, rolls through a series of levels, collecting colour energy and using it to paint the town and defeat enemies.

The levels, which make up different areas of the city of Raydia, are quite large, and the player is guided through them by other members of the Colour Underground, who give missions such as painting buildings a specific colour, racing from one location to the next, or defeating Inky enemies. However, the player can completely ignore the missions and simply paint the levels. As long as the player gains enough points via missions or painting, the next area of a level will open. This happens much faster if missions are completed, but if the player doesn't like a particular kind of mission or finds a particular challenge too difficult, it can be skipped.

Along with the main story campaign, there are unlockables such as short challenge missions, a free paint mode for every level, multiplayer mini-games, and media such as concept art and short movies.

Aesthetics: De Blob features slick, vibrant graphics that are just right for the Wii. Its menus and cutscenes ooze humour and style. The player is even able to scribble on the screen with the Wiimote when in the menus or on loading screens (which feature comic panels telling the story of the level as it loads). The levels themselves are cleverly designed, and are generally quite interesting and diverse. Blob can collect patterns throughout the levels that make the buildings even "funkier" and add to the visual interest of the game. Most of the levels are visually distinct from each other and have a particular theme (the sports district, the arts district, the hanging gardens). A few of the levels in the middle of the game have too much boring industrial architecture, but otherwise it's a treat to see how the city is transformed by Blob's painting.

The sound design in the game is top-notch. Each level unlocks a new jazzy track, and the player can select any unlocked track they desire to hear while playing. The tracks are dynamic, reacting both to the amount of colour energy the player's been collecting and to the colour the player is painting with. It's delightful to hear the music hum along when you are doing well, with licks from various instruments added as you switch colours. If you make a mistake that causes Blob to desaturate, the music grinds to a halt, slowly building up as you recover. Thus, the music design is both an auditory queue to how you are doing and a motivating factor to do well. Any gamer who is also a fan of music, especially jazz, should give this game a try for the music alone.

Controls/Interation: The game is controlled using the Wiimote and nunchuck, with the nunchuck used for movement and the Wiimote used for jumping and attacking. The controls are generally responsive and fluid. Blob paints an object by simply touching it while loaded with paint. A simple flick of the Wiimote jumps Blob, and it's generally not difficult to predict where he will land. A downward stroke launches a slam attack, used to quickly collect paint or to slam enemies.

There are a few issues with the control scheme. Sometimes Blob sticks to buildings too easily, so that when the player hopes to jump forward, Blob instead launches backwards. He can also occasionally get stuck on the scenery, especially when he has a lot of colour energy and becomes very large. Using slam attacks against many enemies or quick moving enemies can be difficult, because it's not easy or intuitive for the player to quickly select which nearby target to slam. I cursed a few times when attempting to slam an enemy, only to have Blob launch himself at a paintbot half a screen away. These issues are fairly minor to the overall experience of the game, though they unfortuantely crop up more often later in the game, as the challenges become more difficult and the player needs to be more precise.

The camera is semi-controllable and generally good. The game also does a good job of making main campaign accessible, while providing optional challenges for advanced players. The levels and challenges have forgiving time limits, which can be extended in various ways. It's not difficult to complete a level, but it's much more difficult to complete the optional challenges in the levels, such as rescuing all the Raydians and painting 100% of the level. Players who go the extra mile to do well on the levels and the mini challenge levels are rewarded with unlockables.

Conclusion/Recommendations: De Blob is a stylish, fun game that is easy to complete but difficult to fully master. It's definitely worth renting, and has enough replayability to be worth a purchase. I'd recommend this game to gamers who are fans of art or music and to most fans of platforming games. This game should appeal to a broad audience of all ages. It's not recommended for gamers who think that colourful games are "kiddie" games or gamers who prefer very challenging platformers. This game does have a very mild anti-Capitalist bent to it, though one would have to be fairly sensitive to be offended by its message. If you're interested in supporting high quality, innovative third party games on the Wii, I strongly recommend that you purchase De Blob.

Note: Images used in this review are available for download at the game's official website.

In Praise of Nice Guys

I just learned that an old friend of mine, now in his early 40s, recently met his special lady and got married. I spent the next hour grinning from ear to ear, because this friend is one of the most genuine, sweetest men I've met. He's like a big brother to me, and for years I've been disappointed in hetero womankind for not realizing what an amazing catch he is. Now I can happily welecome his lucky wife into the Spouses of Nice Guys Club. We married Nice Guys and we've never regretted it.

I mean, I understand. Mysterious people, challenging people, charmers with a dangerous air to them... those people can be very alluring. I've been on the crazy roller coaster ride of a relationship that sparks like crazy. It's exciting, and you feel like you're in an adventure or a romance novel. It can be all-consuming and exhilirating, but also exhausting.

A nice guy probably won't have a mystery to hide or an air of intrigue. But he will listen, really listen, when you've had the shittiest day and you just need to vent about it. He will cook or wash the dishes, and he probably likes to cuddle. When he makes love to you, he wants to make sure that he pleasures you. He might be a bit shy or a bit nerdy or geeky, and he'll probably cry sometimes when he's sad or upset. If you deserve a nice guy, you know that those things don't make him any less of a man. In my books, they make him more of one, because the greatest courage is being true to yourself even when society comes down on you for it.

So here's to nice guys. Not the Seth Rogan schlubs that the movies want you to think are the nice guys, but the real ones. They aren't perfect, but who is? I've seen far too many of them overlooked by people who have swallowed the stupid message that nice guys are "friendship, not relationship" material. Forget that shit, single people, and go snog a nice guy today!

On the Edge of Spring - Toronto Photos

Taken on a walk to the grocery store, through York Cemetary and the North York Civic Centre.

My Little Piece of Obamarama

The hubby went to a convenience store trade show for work, and brought me home some Jones "Orange You Glad for Change" Cola. Jones is funny. I'm pretty sure they're the company that produced the "Pink" soda I bought a few years back. The stuff actually tasted like pink!

Poor Canada, we're suffering from major Obama Envy right now. We had an interesting Prime Minister when I first moved up here. Jean Chrétien was a former boxer who, upon discovering a guy lurking in the PM's residence late one night, took him out with a statue to the head. Chrétien's record was mixed... he kept Canada out of Iraq, but he also presided over some major scandals and financial boondoggles. Still, I wonder if Canadians are missing Chrétien a bit. Our current PM, Stephen Harper, is a wolf in sheep's clothing, combining cutthroat politics with an exceedingly bland personal image.

So many Canadians are looking over at the USA, wishing we had an alternative with more colour and more compassion. Unfortunately, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has a personality that's about as compelling as that copy of The New Yorker sitting in a California dentist's office. Though I'd certainly prefer his politics, boy I'd love to have an Obama instead. Guess I'll have to settle for my Jones Cola.

On Video Game Reviews

Why write video game reviews? Franky, I've been dissatisfied with the reviews I've read over the last few years. It seems like today's world diverse gamers and cross-genre titles is difficult for mainstream reviewers to handle. Recently, I've seen reviewers give an RPG a low score simply because it had turn-based combat, and they preferred real time. I've also seen sites mishandle their Wii game reviews simply because they prefer a traditional control scheme or because they want to see HD graphics in every game they play. As a reader, I don't care if you don't like turn-based combat or using the Wiimote. I care whether the game implements turn-based combat well or whether the Wiimote control scheme is intuitive and fun.

I'd like to write the kind of reviews I've been missing. My reviews won't use a numeric system to measure games, but will break the games down by control, presentation, and fun factor. My goal will be to introduce readers to unusual games that they may not have heard about, and to give an honest assessment of the games' strengths and weaknesses. Because this site is aimed at the wider community of gamers rather than the hardcore gaming crowd, I won't always review the latest releases. You should still be able to buy the games I revew, hopefully at a discount!

I hope you enjoy my reviews, and your comments are welcome!