Sebastian

Lots of Sebastian news to tell. He has Fifth disease - also called "slapped cheek" disease, I believe. For the last two days his face has been very blotchy and red. The blotchiness is all over his upper body too; it looks as if he's wearing a blotchy red t-shirt. It's odd, because the red cuts off exactly where the short sleeves of his t-shirt end. Nonetheless the doctor is sure that it's Fifth, and not a reaction of any sort. It's viral, there's no treatment, and it will go away in a few days. He's not really suffering, although his energy is a bit low.

He went to the dentist last week, and we got a bit of sad news: he has two cavities. They're in two adjoining baby teeth. There's also another tooth (a baby tooth) that they're watching. Toothbrushing has been a bit of an issue for us; we really haven't been as good about it as we should have been, obviously. That's changing now. We'd been letting him brush his own teeth, but now it's mandatory that we go over them as well. Plus he's flossing, and we're trying to get him to use fluoride mouthwash. That has been really tough, though, because he can't drink or eat for 30 minutes after using it - and inevitably, he gets desperate to drink right after he uses it. The situation was so bad that he was simply refusing to use the rinse.

But we're pushing ahead on that one. Tonight I had him brush and use the mouthwash right before taking his shower; I figured that he'd be too distracted by the shower to spend much time thinking about how thirsty he was. It worked pretty well, although he got some soap in his mouth and was spitting in the shower. I think he'll get his fillings in July; the though breaks my heart a little, but the dentist told Teri that Sebastian won't even know that he's getting a needle. I just hope he doesn't get too scared. Of course I won't say a word about it to him!

Other than that? He graduated from kindergarten on Friday night. He and his class sang (and danced to) "Celebration". It was very cute. It also made me rather sad, somehow; all those young children who are growing up so quickly. In so many ways they're happier now than they will ever be again. It's rather heartbreaking, when I look at it that way.

One of his classmates had a birthday party on Saturday. Teri was volunteering at the shelter, so I took him on my own. He had a lot of fun. It's sad that he won't see so many of his old friends after the summer is over!

*sigh*

I need to get out of this mood.

Sebastian

Lots of Sebastian news to tell. He has Fifth disease - also called "slapped cheek" disease, I believe. For the last two days his face has been very blotchy and red. The blotchiness is all over his upper body too; it looks as if he's wearing a blotchy red t-shirt. It's odd, because the red cuts off exactly where the short sleeves of his t-shirt end. Nonetheless the doctor is sure that it's Fifth, and not a reaction of any sort. It's viral, there's no treatment, and it will go away in a few days. He's not really suffering, although his energy is a bit low.

He went to the dentist last week, and we got a bit of sad news: he has two cavities. They're in two adjoining baby teeth. There's also another tooth (a baby tooth) that they're watching. Toothbrushing has been a bit of an issue for us; we really haven't been as good about it as we should have been, obviously. That's changing now. We'd been letting him brush his own teeth, but now it's mandatory that we go over them as well. Plus he's flossing, and we're trying to get him to use fluoride mouthwash. That has been really tough, though, because he can't drink or eat for 30 minutes after using it - and inevitably, he gets desperate to drink right after he uses it. The situation was so bad that he was simply refusing to use the rinse.

But we're pushing ahead on that one. Tonight I had him brush and use the mouthwash right before taking his shower; I figured that he'd be too distracted by the shower to spend much time thinking about how thirsty he was. It worked pretty well, although he got some soap in his mouth and was spitting in the shower. I think he'll get his fillings in July; the though breaks my heart a little, but the dentist told Teri that Sebastian won't even know that he's getting a needle. I just hope he doesn't get too scared. Of course I won't say a word about it to him!

Other than that? He graduated from kindergarten on Friday night. He and his class sang (and danced to) "Celebration". It was very cute. It also made me rather sad, somehow; all those young children who are growing up so quickly. In so many ways they're happier now than they will ever be again. It's rather heartbreaking, when I look at it that way.

One of his classmates had a birthday party on Saturday. Teri was volunteering at the shelter, so I took him on my own. He had a lot of fun. It's sad that he won't see so many of his old friends after the summer is over!

*sigh*

I need to get out of this mood.

Fable, Oblivion

Although I bought Oblivion recently, I ended up playing Fable instead. It was somehow simpler and more appealing. The start of Oblivion was rather dark and gloomy, literally so: you begin as a prisoner, and spend a good amount of time knocking around in a dungeon, trying to escape.

Fable is by Peter Molyneaux, the guy who did "Black & White" and (I believe) "Populous". I thought that Black & White was visually stunning, and had some neat concepts, but suffered from a serious flaw: the divine creature. You play a god in the game, and the divine creature is your physical representation in the world - apart from your divine hand and viewpoint, that is.

The problem is that the damned creature learns things, and it often doesn't learn what you want it to. You may want it to be kind and help the villagers, and it will instead for some reason learn to poop on them and eat them. It's really really annoying. Having a key element of the game THAT far out of your control is not a recipe for a satisfactory gaming experience!

There was also some sort of glitch in the game which made it impossible for me to exit the introductory stage.

Teri had bought Fable for me as a Christmas present a couple of years ago. My computer hadn't been able to play it. The new one can, of course, so I installed it and gave it a try.

Visually, it's quite impressive. It's an old game, but it looked pretty cutting-edge to me! The voice acting is rather twee in spots; I'm a bit of an Anglophile, but some of the voice actors were really laying it on thick with the most annoying and cloying kinds of cutesy British accents. Incidentally, I'm rather sure that the voice actors were actually Brits, and not Americans or Canadians doing a lame impression.

The game itself...well, the controls were not as convenient as (for example) Diablo II. And it didn't come with a manual, which was annoying (I later looked it up on the official site and printed out a copy - it wasn't large). There was one annoying thing that I can't call a bug, but it was definitely a problem: blocking. You don't use a shield in Fable, you see. Instead, you sort of hold your weapon up in a blocking position. That doesn't make a lot of sense with bladed weapons, of course, since logically you'd cut your fingers off. And with flaming or electrical swords, blocking looks even sillier. But the problem with blocking is that by default it's mapped to your middle mouse button. And for some reason, that middle mouse button (which is also the mouse wheel) didn't work right in that implementation. Instead, it snapped me back to my desktop.

Eventually I mapped blocking to the Alt key, which worked well enough. But the truth is that movement and control is a bit of a pain in the ass. Not that Fable is particularly lame in that regard, mind you! It's just that after the Wii, anything else seems burdensome.

Once I got comfortable with some of controls, though, I started having some fun. The main point of Fable is that as you make choices in the game world, your character changes to match. If you're good, your hair turns blond, your eyes turn blue, and eventually you develop a halo and aura of dancing butterflies.

I find it hard to be bad, so my character was soon maxed out on goodness. He ended up winning the game after about 30 hours of play, and looked very much like cheesy representations of Jehovah at the end. Here he is standing in front of statues of his parents in the memorial garden of his home town. Looks kind of saccharine, doesn't he?



Eventually I got him a chicken hat, which makes his head look like a giant chicken's. It makes him a bit easier to take. But with his mastery of the Stop Time and Divine Fury spells, he's pretty much invincible.

Later, for the hell of it, I decided to create an evil character - just to see what it would be like. At first, it was hard to be bad. But eventually I was able to get into it. What helped a lot was the decapitation feature. If you can put an arrow at exactly the right spot on a trader or bandit's neck, their head pops off spinning in midair, while a great spurt of blood shoots up from their neck-stump. When the head hits the ground, you can kick it around like a soccer ball. Your total number of decapitations are recorded, which is good because you don't get many experience points for killing helpless traders.

Here's my evil guy. I admit that the Freddy Mercury-style mustache looks very gay. I later picked up a beard for him, so he now looks rather like a cheesy cartoon version of the Devil.



Eventually I got tired of the game. It's not bad - in fact, it's quite good - but I exhausted most of the possibilities after about 30-40 intensive hours of play. That's a little disappointing.

I picked up playing Oblivion again, and managed to get my guy out of the dungeons and out into the open air. The visuals are pretty cool. I'll doubtless have more to say about Oblivion in a while. One thing I can say now, though, is that Fable seems to have been good training for Oblivion - the movement control system is quite similar.

Fable, Oblivion

Although I bought Oblivion recently, I ended up playing Fable instead. It was somehow simpler and more appealing. The start of Oblivion was rather dark and gloomy, literally so: you begin as a prisoner, and spend a good amount of time knocking around in a dungeon, trying to escape.

Fable is by Peter Molyneaux, the guy who did "Black & White" and (I believe) "Populous". I thought that Black & White was visually stunning, and had some neat concepts, but suffered from a serious flaw: the divine creature. You play a god in the game, and the divine creature is your physical representation in the world - apart from your divine hand and viewpoint, that is.

The problem is that the damned creature learns things, and it often doesn't learn what you want it to. You may want it to be kind and help the villagers, and it will instead for some reason learn to poop on them and eat them. It's really really annoying. Having a key element of the game THAT far out of your control is not a recipe for a satisfactory gaming experience!

There was also some sort of glitch in the game which made it impossible for me to exit the introductory stage.

Teri had bought Fable for me as a Christmas present a couple of years ago. My computer hadn't been able to play it. The new one can, of course, so I installed it and gave it a try.

Visually, it's quite impressive. It's an old game, but it looked pretty cutting-edge to me! The voice acting is rather twee in spots; I'm a bit of an Anglophile, but some of the voice actors were really laying it on thick with the most annoying and cloying kinds of cutesy British accents. Incidentally, I'm rather sure that the voice actors were actually Brits, and not Americans or Canadians doing a lame impression.

The game itself...well, the controls were not as convenient as (for example) Diablo II. And it didn't come with a manual, which was annoying (I later looked it up on the official site and printed out a copy - it wasn't large). There was one annoying thing that I can't call a bug, but it was definitely a problem: blocking. You don't use a shield in Fable, you see. Instead, you sort of hold your weapon up in a blocking position. That doesn't make a lot of sense with bladed weapons, of course, since logically you'd cut your fingers off. And with flaming or electrical swords, blocking looks even sillier. But the problem with blocking is that by default it's mapped to your middle mouse button. And for some reason, that middle mouse button (which is also the mouse wheel) didn't work right in that implementation. Instead, it snapped me back to my desktop.

Eventually I mapped blocking to the Alt key, which worked well enough. But the truth is that movement and control is a bit of a pain in the ass. Not that Fable is particularly lame in that regard, mind you! It's just that after the Wii, anything else seems burdensome.

Once I got comfortable with some of controls, though, I started having some fun. The main point of Fable is that as you make choices in the game world, your character changes to match. If you're good, your hair turns blond, your eyes turn blue, and eventually you develop a halo and aura of dancing butterflies.

I find it hard to be bad, so my character was soon maxed out on goodness. He ended up winning the game after about 30 hours of play, and looked very much like cheesy representations of Jehovah at the end. Here he is standing in front of statues of his parents in the memorial garden of his home town. Looks kind of saccharine, doesn't he?



Eventually I got him a chicken hat, which makes his head look like a giant chicken's. It makes him a bit easier to take. But with his mastery of the Stop Time and Divine Fury spells, he's pretty much invincible.

Later, for the hell of it, I decided to create an evil character - just to see what it would be like. At first, it was hard to be bad. But eventually I was able to get into it. What helped a lot was the decapitation feature. If you can put an arrow at exactly the right spot on a trader or bandit's neck, their head pops off spinning in midair, while a great spurt of blood shoots up from their neck-stump. When the head hits the ground, you can kick it around like a soccer ball. Your total number of decapitations are recorded, which is good because you don't get many experience points for killing helpless traders.

Here's my evil guy. I admit that the Freddy Mercury-style mustache looks very gay. I later picked up a beard for him, so he now looks rather like a cheesy cartoon version of the Devil.



Eventually I got tired of the game. It's not bad - in fact, it's quite good - but I exhausted most of the possibilities after about 30-40 intensive hours of play. That's a little disappointing.

I picked up playing Oblivion again, and managed to get my guy out of the dungeons and out into the open air. The visuals are pretty cool. I'll doubtless have more to say about Oblivion in a while. One thing I can say now, though, is that Fable seems to have been good training for Oblivion - the movement control system is quite similar.

AC, lawn

It has been hot as hell here. Teri didn't want me to put in the air conditioning, but last night it was so terribly hot that she relented and let me install one in Sebastian's room. I put a big fan in the window in our room, but it was a hot and uncomfortable night.

Today it was even hotter - around 97°, or over 36° Celsius - so we installed the downstairs AC and the one in our bedroom. I opened up the downstairs one, and the intake was absolutely filthy - simply packed with lint. Teri tried to vacuum it out, but it wouldn't budge. Eventually I got an old toothbrush and used it to scrub loose the lint while Teri vacuumed. It was an effective combination, and when we started up the AC it blew colder than it had in a couple of years. Mind you, the lint wasn't in the filter - it was in the air intake itself.

Of course I cleaned the filters on ALL the air conditioners as well. So tonight we'll sleep in comfort.

Another point: our front lawn. Ever since it was excavated to have the main drain line repaired, the right half of our front yard has been a dead waste of dust, stones, and dirt. We'd put seed on it after it was dug up, but it never sprouted.

A while back we'd put down some fertilizer. We also bought a relatively cheap bag of seed from BJ's. Teri put it down about two weeks ago. Right after she did that, I read the instructions on the bag. It said to rake up the soil about a half-inch or so before spreading the seeds. It was too late for that, but I went all around the yards, both front and back, and used a metal rake to loosen up the soil and mix the seeds in a bit.

The instructions also said to water the seeds twice a day for a month or two. This seemed awfully wasteful, but we'd already put down the seeds so I decided to give it a try. And to my amazement, it seems to have actually worked! The grass has been sprouting nicely and growing with remarkable speed. It's not perfect by any means; there are lots of bare patches still, and the grass is still very young and small. Nonetheless, I was astonished this afternoon when we pulled into the driveway, because from the side it actually looks as if we have a lawn!

AC, lawn

It has been hot as hell here. Teri didn't want me to put in the air conditioning, but last night it was so terribly hot that she relented and let me install one in Sebastian's room. I put a big fan in the window in our room, but it was a hot and uncomfortable night.

Today it was even hotter - around 97°, or over 36° Celsius - so we installed the downstairs AC and the one in our bedroom. I opened up the downstairs one, and the intake was absolutely filthy - simply packed with lint. Teri tried to vacuum it out, but it wouldn't budge. Eventually I got an old toothbrush and used it to scrub loose the lint while Teri vacuumed. It was an effective combination, and when we started up the AC it blew colder than it had in a couple of years. Mind you, the lint wasn't in the filter - it was in the air intake itself.

Of course I cleaned the filters on ALL the air conditioners as well. So tonight we'll sleep in comfort.

Another point: our front lawn. Ever since it was excavated to have the main drain line repaired, the right half of our front yard has been a dead waste of dust, stones, and dirt. We'd put seed on it after it was dug up, but it never sprouted.

A while back we'd put down some fertilizer. We also bought a relatively cheap bag of seed from BJ's. Teri put it down about two weeks ago. Right after she did that, I read the instructions on the bag. It said to rake up the soil about a half-inch or so before spreading the seeds. It was too late for that, but I went all around the yards, both front and back, and used a metal rake to loosen up the soil and mix the seeds in a bit.

The instructions also said to water the seeds twice a day for a month or two. This seemed awfully wasteful, but we'd already put down the seeds so I decided to give it a try. And to my amazement, it seems to have actually worked! The grass has been sprouting nicely and growing with remarkable speed. It's not perfect by any means; there are lots of bare patches still, and the grass is still very young and small. Nonetheless, I was astonished this afternoon when we pulled into the driveway, because from the side it actually looks as if we have a lawn!

Iron Man and Kung Fu Panda

We had a gift card for the movies, so we saw two movies recently.

The first was Iron Man. Teri and I went during the day. It was good, but after all the great reviews I'd heard...well, Robert Downey Jr. is a very good actor, but most of the others in the movie simply didn't stand out - with the exception of Shaun Toub as Yinsen, who was really excellent. It wasn't a bad movie, but it's not like I'd be that interested in picking up the DVD. I don't know. Maybe I'd have liked it better if I hadn't read so much about it beforehand.

Contrariwise, I knew relatively little about Kung Fu Panda before going to see it. In fact, Sebastian knew considerably more about it than I did. But that wasn't the only reason that I found myself liking it quite a lot. The voice acting was outstanding throughout - I was particularly delighted that James Hong, one of my favorite actors, had a characteristically delightful role (you may remember him as Lo Pan in Big Trouble In Little China, among other roles). The movie was well-written, funny, exciting...the one possible complaint might be that it was too short. But all in all an excellent job, and I tend to be very critical of modern animated movies.

Sebastian totally loved it, of course. And Teri agreed with me that it was better than Iron Man. Which was, as I said, a pretty good movie...it just didn't have any really stand-out moments for me.

Iron Man and Kung Fu Panda

We had a gift card for the movies, so we saw two movies recently.

The first was Iron Man. Teri and I went during the day. It was good, but after all the great reviews I'd heard...well, Robert Downey Jr. is a very good actor, but most of the others in the movie simply didn't stand out - with the exception of Shaun Toub as Yinsen, who was really excellent. It wasn't a bad movie, but it's not like I'd be that interested in picking up the DVD. I don't know. Maybe I'd have liked it better if I hadn't read so much about it beforehand.

Contrariwise, I knew relatively little about Kung Fu Panda before going to see it. In fact, Sebastian knew considerably more about it than I did. But that wasn't the only reason that I found myself liking it quite a lot. The voice acting was outstanding throughout - I was particularly delighted that James Hong, one of my favorite actors, had a characteristically delightful role (you may remember him as Lo Pan in Big Trouble In Little China, among other roles). The movie was well-written, funny, exciting...the one possible complaint might be that it was too short. But all in all an excellent job, and I tend to be very critical of modern animated movies.

Sebastian totally loved it, of course. And Teri agreed with me that it was better than Iron Man. Which was, as I said, a pretty good movie...it just didn't have any really stand-out moments for me.