I kind of went overboard on the “not writing” thing this week, so instead of fun facts and a rebirth of some nerdy scifriday topic, I give you this:
Have a Happy Friday! Any fun plans this weekend??
Category: SciFridays
SciFridays: Machinarium
That little "click here" just can't be denied
So, last night, my husband stuck his baby (aka, iPad2) on my lap, and queued up his latest obsession: Machinarium. Now, I like video games as well as the next nerd, but I was really tired from my (looooong) day, and needed what remained of my eyesight to do things like read, and possibly write.*
Well, wouldn’t you know it, despite my effort to ignore the atmospheric music (and the poor little robot waiting to be put together), curiosity won out**, and I started playing. And, of course, I loved it, and became addicted to solving all the little problems, and moving on to the next scenes. (My hubs knows me so well.)
Anyway, what I love about this game is that it focuses on puzzles and problem-solving, without the death and dismemberment of little robot if you make the wrong move. Since the whole killing thing is not an issue, you’re encouraged to explore the world and figure out how to get from point A to point B. (Plus, little robot is really cute when he dances after solving something.) And, after you solve it, you get to know more about the story and little robot’s world.
Little Robot giving hints about possible next steps
If you happen to own an iPad2, I would encourage getting this little game. I’ve only started, so I’m about a third of the way through this world. Each stage gets increasingly challenging, but that’s part of the fun. You can unlock cheats by playing a little spider game (which kind of reminds me of those Atari games from back in the day) but don’t do it too often. It’s not fun when someone tells you how to do something. I mean, the purpose of the game is to figure things out for yourself, after all, and since you can’t die, there’s no punishment for taking extra time to solve a problem.
Have you played this game yet? How do you like it?
Even if you haven’t played, isn’t Little Robot cute?? 😀
[*There was one part involving a Rubik’s cube type puzzle that completely triggered my motion sickness. I FINALLY got it sorted out, but I earned myself a headache and slight nausea doing it. For those in the know, it’s that red/green puzzle in the prison cell. Needless to say, I didn’t do much reading after that.]
[**Looking at the junkyard scene overwhelmed my curiosity mostly because it had the same landscape that I envisioned for my current work-in-progress, Scrap Metal.]
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SciFridays: Jules Verne
Image via Wikipedia
Jules Verne is my parent’s favorite science fiction author, and though it’s not obvious, is a partial namesake of mine (the other namesake being Liza Minnelli, which I hope is kinda obvious).
For most of my life, I didn’t appreciate my name as I should. Chalk that up to the constant butchering of said name (correcting people who think they’re pronouncing my name correctly gets really tiresome), and also that dreadful Ernest TV series/movie(s). However, the older I got, the more I appreciated my parent’s thoughtfulness in naming me. I like having an instant connection to the foundation of science fiction.
A little too recently (*cough like a few weeks ago cough*), I’ve come to admire Verne’s science fiction because his stories go a step beyond extrapolating current scientific trends to an imagined, yet inevitable, future. Verne seemed to prophesy when he wrote his stories. I mean, come on, From the Earth to the Moon? He practically predicted (or paved the way for?) the international space race that would come 100 years later, even placing the rocket’s launch site in Florida. In a world before gas-powered automobiles were invented and mass-produced, he imagined a story wherein his characters manned a rocket into space and orbited the moon, somehow navigating the gravitational field.
Of course, Verne didn’t just dump a bunch of scientific facts into his works. He wrapped them nicely into charming adventure stories, sprinkled with bits of romance and intrigue. Actually, the adventure aspect of his stories is really what hooked me to read his work, especially since several of them are similar to some of the motifs that run through my current work in progress (WIP2). Notably, The Child of the Cavern, The Propeller Island, The Aerial Village, and The Mysterious Island*, which also happened to be the main inspiration to my beloved TV series, Lost.
I’m happy to know that I have a lot in common with my namesake. Even though I’ve only scratched the surface of his life and works, it’s somehow motivating to me to know his writing journey and career. And, I’ll admit, even though, for all intents and purposes, we have no other connection other than our names, I’m oddly proud of the fact that Jules Verne is my namesake.
Has anyone else experienced this? Have you ever felt proud of a connection to someone you didn’t even know, yet has inspired your life choices?
{*I put links to these works just so you can read their summaries. And, I also thought WIP2’s alpha readers would get a kick out of it. Or not. *shrugs* 😉 }
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SciFridays: Dune
“And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!”
To most people, that line will probably mean absolutely nothing. But, for this science fiction nerd, it was the best end-of-climactic-scene line uttered since “Luke, I am your father.”
I’m talking, of course, about David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.*
Back in the eighties, when HBO still played movies, I was riveted by the long voice over introduction that set up the story of Dune.**
A religious revolt against thinking machines? Space-folding Navigators? Bald, mind-controlling women? Genetic breeding programs? Spice??
The way this movie unfolded defined epic for me, and even to my seven-year-old mind I knew that EPIC=LARGE SCALE.
Multiple planets, set twenty thousand years into the future. Sweeping panoramic vistas. Centuries-old political conflicts. A spoiled boy prince maturing into a nation-saving messiah…riding gigantic sandworms.
Gigantic. Sandworms. Come on, if that’s not EPIC, I don’t know what is.
Ok, I know, theoretically, that the movie was far from being the best movie in the world. In fact, it’s often proclaimed as the worst movie of 1984. However, I hadn’t read the book yet, so I didn’t have a “story prejudice” when I watched it. And, quite frankly, I was barely able to follow the storyline anyway.
What fascinated me about the movie, and what has stayed with me, was the feeling I had while watching it: a ridiculous sense of AWE. What the film lacked in narrative art, it made up for in action movie eye candy (keep in mind, this was the eighties: the effects look silly now, and the soundtrack is a bit warped).
Anyway, the movie may have been a cinematic flop, but its most redeeming quality, at least to me, is that it made me want to read the book.
By the time I decided to read the book, I was eleven. I didn’t have any memory of the movie’s storyline at that point (thank goodness!); only the memory of the movie’s settings remained. My mind used those images as backdrops to bring to life the story Frank Herbert imagined, and through subsequent re-readings, they are still the images I see.
Dune will always be THE science fiction story to me. That EPIC SCOPE, that AWE fueled my imagination, and made me hungry for more. It awakened my young imagination, and permeated it with archetypes that will always be a part of my consciousness.
How about you? Do you have any stories that set the standard for your imagination?
*Most consider this movie a gigantic flop, and I’m not going to argue. I just want to point out that Frank Herbert was quoted as saying, “They’ve got it. It begins as Dune does. And I hear my dialogue all the way through. There are some interpretations and liberties, but you’re gonna come out knowing you’ve seen Dune.”
**I rewatched the beginning prologue that intrigued me so long ago, and nearly died of boredom from the long droning exposition.
Liza Kane 