Happy birthday! Here are 10 things I love and 10 things I don’t love about you!
Gaming
“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock n’ roll.”
-Shigeru Miyamoto
“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”
2 years, 552 posts, and 1,132,132 words later… The Well-Red Mage is now entering Year Three!
Over two dozen wordsmiths lent their voices to this collaborative project, which must certainly be among the largest and most diverse undertakings ever to honor Final Fantasy in writing.
Few video game series, to me, have effectively transcended their native genres, journeying outside of their elemental roots into new territories.
FFVI, it’s often cited as one of the best and the brightest in the Final Fantasy canon of titles. Why is that exactly?
People who play video games have been shaped and affected by the popular perception of that medium.
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
-Aldous Huxley
mage-splain
verb
1. “to make an idea, situation, or problem unlikely to be clear to someone by describing it in snide, jocular, or underhanded remarks, relevant facts or ideas.”they magesplained that one game with feigned disdain”
I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been
“Shall the axe boast over him who hews with it,
or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it?”
-Isaiah 10:15 [ESV]
If video games are an art form (as the majority of those who participated claimed) then why is there this absence of teaching games critique respectfully and if possible correctly such as there is for other art forms?
“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.” -Maurits Cornelis Escher …
“You can’t negotiate with a zombie. They have only one impulse – that’s to eat us or our brains.” – Stephen Graham Jones
Uh oh. Irresistible mirth is settling in. Christmas Day is almost here.
“We wake and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.”
-Walter de La Mare
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
-Roald Dahl
“Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.”
-Roman Payne, The Wanderess
“Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.”
-Thomas Carlyle
“Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.”
―Langston Hughes
“A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”
-Christopher Reeve
“I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part
“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
-Ayn Rand
“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
-André Gide, Autumn Leaves
“I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.” -W.B. Yeats, The…
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
-Ernest Hemingway
Role-Playing Games can be fun and engaging. Often times they try to put you in the shoes of a relatable protagonist in a fantastical world – the ultimate escape. But as hard as they try there are some things that would be questionable, bizarre, or just outright hilarious if we lived in their world.
“He was after a sensational story and this, of course, could not be constructed out of mere truth; not out of officially released truth, anyway. It was essential that the news-reading public should feel, first, that the community was in danger and secondly that people—well-off people, “official” people—who ought to have known better, were to blame for it.”
―Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs
“Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
-Billy Shakespeare
