Tumblelogging

I’ve been enjoying Tumblr for the past few weeks. I even made their front-page with a post I made. I haven’t given on this blog forever.

Advice For Initiating A Writing Project

I have no real purpose to this other than relating my experience and recording some of the advice I give for posteriority.

This week I have to read papers for my writing tutor job. It’s a peer-tutoring program so the people I work with are students like myself, and they are a pretty diverse group in terms of writing skill, academic experience, and English proficiency.

Procedurally, I am assigned to a group of ten or so students each semester, and I work with these ten on two papers. All of these students are from the same class, working on the same assignments, so over the course of the papers, the same trends emerge: (a) my contentual advice tends to become more distanced as I familiarize myself with the more common lines of reasoning used on the assignment and (b) my structural advice tends become more nuanced as my familiarity with the content allows me to adopt a more formal perspective. The result by paper number ten is advice that is axiomatic but also relevant to the concerns of that one paper.

After four semesters of giving advice, I have a whole set of spiels, analogies and metaphors I can give on the fly and adapt for any paper:

Angel Land Story

I got some NES games in the mail this week, namely, Kid Icarus, Duck Tales and 3D World Runner. Icarus comes with a fair degree of hype as it is one of those sleeper/cult NES hits like River City Ransom which pops up every so often on great game lists. Unlike RCR, Icarus has the added expectations of being developed by the same group responsible for Metroid.

Brainstorming: Moral Ambiguities In Call of Duty 4

For one of my first critical essays on gaming, I plan to follow up a compelling Kotaku post about a parent’s moral ambivalence towards Call of Duty’s shift in enemies. For the first three games, players fought and killed Nazis, and for most players, there isn’t much morally questionable about shooting Nazis and fighting the good fight. In the latest incarnation of the series, Call of Duty 4adopts a modern context where the opponents are now Middle Eastern insurgents and Russian ultranationalists. The parent states:

The war that’s going on right now. The one I don’t believe we should be fighting. The one I vow my son will never take part in.

…And there he is playing it out on his Xbox 360. Offing Iraqis for entertainment’s sake, as other Americans sacrifice their lives on real-world battlefield…

Collecting, Cleaning NES Games

I recently developed a hobby of collecting NES games. I’m not the gung-ho type; I’m not after boxes and booklets. But I would like to have a decent collection: the killer franchises (the six Megamans*, the four Dragon Warriors, etc), the console’s sleeper hits (Kid Icarus, Duck Tales), and maybe some oddball collectibles (Tengen Tetris, Bible Adventures). So far the stand-outs from my collection are the usual suspects (Marios, Punch-Out, Contra, Final Fantasy, two Castlevanias, etc), Dragon Warrior III, Hatris, Tengen Pacman, and Wally Bear and the No Gang (an anti-drug game where you play a bear who tries his darnedest not to submit to rampant peer pressure, an anti-drug game made without Nintendo’s permission).

Last week, I bought nine games for about $18 including shipping. The sellers were obviously not collectors, as they wrote auction’s title IN CAPS, didn’t put any specific games in the title, and neglected to mention anything about the quality of the cartridges, let alone whether they work or not. As far as Ebay goes, these people are both the joke and the very target of online game-hunting.