Saturday, November 5, 2005

Bitchings about English, anti-Revolutionaries, and the Quest for Ultimate Loserdome.

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Shin- Doesn't beat the ghetto pirate though.

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I very rarely understand a math concept until after I've taken the test on it.

It's mostly due to laziness, I think- since my teachers don't ever actually grade our homework, we can pretty much bullshit a score and they'll never know.

This year's been more troublesome, though, simply because my teacher expects more of us. He'll show you an example and expect you to figure everything out about a new concept by yourself, which is a rather rude awakening, but I suppose that's how things are.

So I always do about half of the homework if I don't get it (the answers are in the back of the book, if push comes to shove), unless I'm feeling motivated and take the time to learn all of it. After that I sort of half-ass my way through a chapter until we get a test on it.

That's when the questions are actually being checked, and when there are higher stakes. That's when I put effort into it, and that's when I get the subject matter.

Of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum, I can't remember the last time I've been challenged at all in English this year.

Every year it's the same thing: They assume your previous teachers didn't show you shit, and then you learn all of the same stuff over again. For example, this is my third consecutive year of learning how to cite resources. Example:

The students were subjected to the frantic, unorganized teacher's bullshit, "which undermined their potential" ("Sen's Rantings" 245).

My English teacher this year is the reincarnate of my crazy-ass Yearbook organizer (if you could call that organized). Frantic and unorganized, with what you can infer is a rather shaky social life, we've spent quite some time doing random bullshit with To Kill a Mockingbird while all of the other classes are actually keeping up to the state standards. I wouldn't mind the Mockingbird review had I not spent a straight week writing approximately twenty pages about that shit during the summer.

She gushed over my done-in-45-minutes autobiographical narrative about the Pixies show, for its "sophisticated diction," when I seriously wasn't thinking about it at all (the only editing I did was when I had to rewrite it in pen right before it was due, and I switched a couple of words around). Now we're being forced to write an essay about different theories about the specifics of Edgar Allen Poe's death, which is nothing more than an exercise in, you guessed it, citing resources. We're not even supposed to research- it's "look at four mini-articles in this book and cite them a lot."

So, I wrote a halfhearted thing in about half an hour there too, and now I feel like I'm withering away in that class. It's the only class I've ever fallen asleep in.

Also, all of the pleasant people are in the other class the period before mine, which makes things worse. Not to mention the fact that they actually learn things in there.

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So the new EGM came in yesterday, ironically featuring an Elder Scrolls IV "Coming this winter to 360" glue-on to the cover, featuring Tokyo Game Show coverage.

So there wasn't much new in there, but it's nice to have a physical copy of things, I guess.

As is my ritual with EGM (especially with shitty issues), I tend to pass issues I've read enough of to my numero uno hombe, if you will, and being the not-quite-gaming-knowledgeable person that she is (though she does enjoy games- I recently got her hooked on Devil May Cry 3, and she's quite into Halo), had little to say of the Revolution controller other than "There's still not enough buttons."

Though I showed her this two months ago and she had similar complaints, but whatever.

So anyway, the point is that in a fit of fanboyish rage I spent all of English and part of Art furiously scribbling Revolution things onto lined paper. It was partly to tell her off, but I also found it entertaining.

I started off with comparing the number of buttons between the Revolution to a "traditional" controller.. For her Haloness I just went with the Xbox 360. I went with the Metroid Prime-ish idea that a D-pad as four face buttons, so that would leave the A and B for shoulders.

Analog stick + motion sensing = two analog sticks, D-pad = ABXY, A + B + Z1 + Z2 = four triggers. The only thing really missing is a D-pad, but most games hardly ever use the D-pad in conjunction with both analog sticks anyway.

Then I went into various examples of Revolution gameplay. I started off with Zelda, since she decided to bring that one up.. But rather than randomly spurt out information I thought about a Revolution Zelda, and what a great way it could be to show off the system's capabilities.

All of the different weapons in Zelda could be applied creatively to the motion sensing.. The hookshot and boomerang are my favorite thoughts, personally, not to mention the sword.

But then I had the question of "first or third person," which I pose to you all.

Then there was Metroid, Trauma Center, Mario Paint, any racing game you could imagine.. Bottom line, it got me way more excited about the Revolution than any article about the Tokyo Game Show tech demos has.

She seemed rather impressed with it too, though maybe a little put-off by the fact that I wrote, "Plus they're making a traditional 'shell' for the controller, so quit yer bitching" on the last page.

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In Latin today we had an actual "difficult" test, making us translate rather than do the standard bubble-in ones we've had up until this point, but once I was done I decided to draw the scene in Star Wars with Vader spilling the beans about his.. Relation to Luke (Spoiler: He's his dad). But for the sake of not completely wasting my possibly study time, I decided to make the word bubbles in Latin.

Vader: Ego sum pater tuus
Luke: Eheuuuuuuu

..Yeah. Originally I had the wrong interjection for Luke, so he was shouting "hooraaaaaay" instead, but my teacher corrected that.

God, I suck.
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