Ender’s Game ON

Friday, 16 September, 2016 at 1:20 am

Okay, I know I made myself not update my blog in all this time because, well, I borked it always trying to clear out revisions and whatnot from the MySQL database (yeah, don’t do that DELETE a,b,c thing, although I don’t know if that’s what caused my comments to stop working on my custom theme), and I was trying to motivate myself to move it over to jeidai.com and clean everything up, but I really had to write this down somewhere. Nostalgia, oh hey, re-meet my blog.

Holy shnikt, holy shnikt, I finally saw Ender’s Game! After all these years! (Okay, the movie is not even three years old, but I first read the book in 2002/2003.) I loved most of it. Just seeing the story on the screen. Like, it just looks so good! Not what I saw in my mind reading the book, but it kept me watching. (Yes I have a bad habit of playing my iPad games while watching tv, missing a lot of nuances of movies and tv shows. But…it keeps away that braindead feeling after sitting for hours just…watching.)

My adrenaline was even going at the final battle scene. Although I recorded the movie on a channel with commercial interruptions, so gah, the impact may have been lessened by me having to focus on forwarding through commercials. (So many commercials.) Ugh.

But I can see how the movie wasn’t that great and how it didn’t do well. I liked it because I read the book and could fill in the whole (or most of the) story. It was a bit rushed, skipped over a lot of stuff (only two Battle Room scenes? *tear*), and they dropped the whole Valentine/Peter and Locke/Demosthenes storyline. (Sorry, I don’t know if I matched the writers’ names up correctly, haven’t read the books in years.)

Probably a lot of my complaints and questions can be answered with, “it wouldn’t have worked in a movie format,” but I will still complain and question.

  • Did they switch around the game storyline? Ender beat the giant the first time he played in the movie. He just…went straight to killing. Did not like. I want more psychology, more with the Formics.
  • Ender’s first Battle Room game under his command, they already had the rope with them. Buh. Not logical!
  • Petra wasn’t as brash and hard and, well, rock-like, as I remembered. She seemed more like… just a face, just a placeholder. And they slimmed down the storyline in Command School where it was so grueling that Petra fell asleep and had to be taken out, and how Ender relied on her too much.
  • I don’t know why, but I really wanted to see the little storyline about Graff becoming a nobody once they got to Command School. It would have served no purpose in the movie, but it kind of hinted at the whole conspiracy of what was going on, the head of Battle School going off with a kid (The Kid) to Command School just to become an old, unimportant man?
  • I liked how they designed the Formics in the movie. In my head they’re really creepy, huge ant-things. But in the movie the queen is almost…pretty? Like she’s not a completely scary alien we have to wipe off the face of the…universe.
  • Mazer Rackam was…Maori? (I can’t remember the book.)
  • Okay, why was there a dying queen there on the asteroid at the end of the movie? Booooring. There’s no way she could have stayed hidden with humans scurrying all over it anyway. I wish they’d focused a bit on Ender’s communication with the Formics too.
  • I saw the little nods to potential future sequels. I’m kind of sad we won’t see them. I’m partial to Bean anyway, having read his story first. ;P And I really like Speaker for the Dead. (Not that I’m saying they should make it into a movie.)
  • Who the heck was Bernard? (Not a complaint about the movie, I just can’t remember this character in the book.) They kept mentioning him…

In the end, I think this just means I need to reread the whole series again. I haven’t read Ender’s Game/Shadow since 2009, and I haven’t read the whole series since 2005. I think this time I’ll read them in chronological order. (Last time was Ender-focused, EG/ES/Ender series/Bean series.) (And whaaaat there’s a new Ender book and a new Shadow book? Must investigate if these are worth paying for…)

(Also, hah, this took me over an hour to write. Oh blogging, never change.)

edit: I wrote this little paragraph while trying to fall asleep after publishing this post. I never added it though because I didn’t think it quite fit. Maybe it goes after my Locke/Demosthenes comment? But… I can’t just erase it. So, here it is, a random paragraph:

I mean, in the book didn’t he mentally give up in the final battle, and his big innovative move was almost a ragequit? But in the movie it seemed as if he was facing the challenge, ready to not be a “failure” as they kept pushing, willing to go on to the next level the adults moved him to. Which kind of weakened the plot twist. “F—— all y’all, I ain’t playing. Destroyed your game. I quit.” “Uhh, Ender…”

so close…

Friday, 15 November, 2013 at 1:16 am

I almost made it tonight. Honest. It was 11:52, nearing midnight, I was preparing to finish up for the day and go to bed… then I decided to post something on a blog. A frustrating hour later, I have two links saved to try and fix one problem (*cough*revisions*cough* yet again) and a note to myself to *gasp* update a little bit of my WordPress knowledge and rip off the Twenty-Thirteen template to update my code.

Anyway. I have decided. I have plans for this blog. And this domain/website. Two similar but separate plans. :] That’ll get completed in another few years…

fall stripes

Monday, 23 September, 2013 at 8:19 pm

I’m one day late for the start of fall, but I am early for the third year anniversary of the date I uploaded the Christmas plaid layout. Meaning it took me less than three years to complete this set, woohoo! It also means I want to tweak that plaid layout and update it (and the spring dots version) so it matches this and the previous layout.

It took me almost three years to come up with the idea of a stripes pattern? I kept thinking of using houndstooth for fall, but I don’t like houndstooth that much. Another plan was switching plaid to fall and coming up with another pattern for winter…? Especially since I thought the plaid layout only worked up to Christmas, and needed another pattern for January and February. But I definitely found it harder to come up with a simple winter pattern. All I could think of were knit sweaters, more winter materials than patterns.

So I am happy with stripes for fall. Well, stripes with a twist, inspired by some fashion design that popped up in Yahoo when I searched for “fall fashion patterns” images. Or something like that, I can’t find the image again.

I also like that each version has somewhat of a different vibe. This one’s kind of retro, ’60s or ’70s, I don’t know which; the Christmas plaid is more traditional; the spring dots is modern and cutesy; while the summer waves lets me use a “Japanese-y” design.

Now if only I could find the time to update my HTML and CSS knowledge, and work on my websites…

update struggles

Wednesday, 29 May, 2013 at 10:11 pm

What is going on? No updates this year, no posts written for almost five months!

I guess I’m growing up (slowly, Oh Viktoria ♫ … *cough*) since all I seem to do is work, or go off to play after work. (Bats Day at Disneyland was fun! ^_^) My websites are sadly near-abandoned.

In fact, I just found out a little while ago about Twitter’s new API thingamabobber, and finally installed a new Twitter feed plugin. (Had to register a Twitter app for that. :x )

It now means that I don’t have an automatic backup of my tweets or favorites. Considering going manual, but I haven’t done it yet. Found a couple Twitter backup/archive plugins (Ozh’ and HL) but Ozh doesn’t work for me and HL creates its own archive which I don’t want to deal with.

Other news… I migrated my websites to a new host! No more sold-to-by-previous-host … host! Kind of sad to leave them (Fluid Hosting), they were really good, kept me informed of server news and other maintenance. They also let me know about the WordPress botnet attack! But I felt guilty using the old host’s package, as if I should have moved over to one of their package offerings, but I couldn’t afford $100 a year, not for hobby sites that don’t even get updated once a season! So I had to move. Messed up a few things in the move, lost a few files without realizing it, because my backup hard drive wasn’t up to date. Ugh.

I also managed to mess up my portfolio website’s WordPress install over the weekend when I installed the Limit Login Attempts plugin! Don’t know how that happened. The only two files I edited were the wp-config file and .htaccess, and somehow that made any WordPress-related pages show up as blank.

When I uploaded other config files to the site, those blogs would show up fine, so I thought it was the config file, but I compared it to a working config file and the only difference was the database name. Ended up deleting/reinstalling WordPress files and deleting/reuploading the database tables. That might not even have been the problem, but my blog came back up. Managed to get the LLA plugin installed on all my blogs.

So… yeah. I have to say, catching up on web development is not fun. I coded a page the other day for work and I struggled, constantly referencing the W3 wiki. Blah. Still don’t know the difference (in usage or implementation) between HTML and XHTML. Still haven’t learned HTML 5 (or even a lot of the eXtensibility of XHTML), just relying on general HTML knowledge.

Not doing much else beyond keeping up with social media sites and watching tv. Oh, I’m trying to pull together a Miwako Sakurada cosplay for Anime Expo in five weeks. Still need to figure out a few bits.

… Okay, maybe things haven’t changed that much. :)

I come bearing tidings…

Thursday, 20 December, 2012 at 11:25 pm

Tidings not of great joy (well, maybe a little), but of great spam! Some spammers are starting to post more relevant comments on my blog. At least relevant enough that I read through the whole comment, was amused, and decided to slap together an entry to preserve them in some manner. :)

First, on an old entry where I consider starting to use XHTML Strict and the W3Schools Validator, I got spam trying to tell me I most likely have a problem with Dreamweaver and my images folder. That’s nice, but I’ve never mentioned Dreamweaver on my blog, nevermind that single post. In fact, the only WYSIWYG I’ve used (for personal, non-school purposes) was Netscape Composer. Oh, I did use the Geocities WYSIWYG, but then I wasn’t serious about my Geocites site. Memories!

Another spam tells me I might have something called “Seborrhoeic dermatitis.” All I mentioned in that silly little post was that I’d started using conditioner in my hair! Did I really have to read, “I get more red patches then most people who had dermatitis, so thats why I also have psoriasis.” OMG, TMI SPAM. (Okay, no, I didn’t have to read it, rhetorical question.)

This spam might suffer from ADD [my commentary in italics]:

Great Journal prompt 22! I’m still icibednrly [WTF? Yes, I understand the use of typos in spam, but still, WTF?] behind BUT THANK GOODNESS I am holidays now [much better than being only one holiday?], and will be catching up on all the prompts I haven’t done yet. They’re all written down in note-point form in pencil on their respective pages, they just don’t look pretty!I’ll hopefully be up to date for Prompt 24!I love sparklers! They are simply stunning and it makes me so happy whenever I see people writing messages with them. That octopus is simply brilliant!I miss the fourth of July so much. Actually, I just miss Oregon in general. The whole town would come down to the main road (just off my street) and we’d have street parties and picnics at the local highschool. I miss picking crab-apples off trees and riding in a wagon with my cousins. And the chalk drawings on our street that lasted until the end of summer every-year…Enjoy every second while you can, you never know when you won’t be able to celebrate your favorite holiday anymore :) [But I thought you were multiple holidays now.] I love you!xxxxxx, Norah

One comment was a standard “I like this site, good article, bookmarking.” (No, this one actually said “very likely I’m planning to bookmark.” Gee, thanks?) But it was on a post titled “stupid spam”!! Spammer doesn’t have very good comprehension skills.

This spam made me laugh and want to know more:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH(it was probably an honest mistake two boxes got smashed to s—t. Right now there is a blender repair shop with a stack of comic books they don’t want.)

So… someone turned in a busted blender stuffed full of comic books? How else could a stack of comic books come to a blender repair shop? Unless the box was packed with the comic books? And what about the two boxes? Did a blender manage to blend its way through two boxes? But the comment notes the boxes were smashed, not blended. Mysteries upon mysteries. XD

As for any real content updates, or managing my sites, well I have time management issues (for the past half year, yes, okay) and my blog isn’t anywhere on my list of priorities. For a possible future entry, I may write about a book I finished recently, Home Again by James Edmiston, a white person’s biography about Japanese Americans and World War II. But who knows, I can’t get my thoughts straight on that subject. I may either scrap it or just post a very disjointed “review.”

In October/November I was considering writing about the Propositions on the ballot, but I found (first, that I didn’t have much time, but also) I didn’t see anyone, including me, getting much out of it, so I didn’t care and I ignored my blog for two months! So, see you again in another two months!

[comments closed to combat spam]