Yes, I realize this is a day late for Small Business Saturday, but I post on Sundays. Anyhow, now that registration is up, I get to inform you of the website my mom and I have created: Curious Critters’ Coadventure!
It’s a whole lot of things plush related. First and foremost, we’re a travel agency for plush, which basically means that you can ship us your stuffed animals and we’ll take them fun places in the Midwest. The group’s adventures (yes, group — that’s the “Coadventure” part of it) will be posted to our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and at the end of the trip a more personalized version will be sent to each furry friend’s home, in either digital or print photo book format.
We also do stories, where we work off a write-up of the critters’ personalities to spin a story with them as the main characters, and graphic adventures, where we write a story and then stage the plush in photo positions for it.
Basically, I love stuffed animals and now I get to work with them! I love my job. Even if you don’t purchase a package with us, take a look at our social media and consider following our local adventures!
Nope, not the Hobbit book. In this case, I’m actually referring to the book that I wrote titled An Unexpected Journey a few years back. I recently realized that I haven’t bothered to talk about it, despite this being an ideal place to do so, so here we are. So… it’s a kids book about an alligator named Cilantro who accidentally ends up going on a quest when he really just means to find a new place to live. Yeah.
You can find out the rest by reading it! It’s really short, 46 pages and it’ll be shorter once I’m done editing out the unnecessary extra line spacing, but, well, it was my first book and I may have made some mistakes. That’s part of the point of this post: to advertise the fact that I am finally going back and fixing spacing, punctuation, I think one or two typos… all the stuff that makes me cringe when I open it up and go, “There should be a comma before that dialogue!” Which means that first edition will be, fingers crossed, going out of print very soon. If you’d like a copy, pick it up before second edition is released! (This may also be a good time to plug the fact that the second book is in the later stages of editing, so you have that to look forward to, too.)
While I’m working on that, I’ll leave you with a snippet of one of the fight scenes. Enjoy!
“What was that?!” Rebecca whispered, “A monster?”
“Shhh! I’m trying to listen!” Allan warned, “I think it’s goblins. Everyone, stand in a circle, back to back.”
Cilantro noticed a couple of sharp, pointy sticks. “Rebecca!” he whispered, “I’ll grab a stick. Use your horn as a spear.”
“What?! Are you kidding?!” she yelped, “I spend hours polishing and cleaning my horn until it sparkles like freshly fallen snow! I’ll take a stick too, thank you very much!”
Allan looked at them. “Do you guys even know how to fight?”
Rebecca looked at him, giggled, and said, “Of course! Beat up the bad guy, and don’t get beat up!”
Suddenly, a goblin pack started dropping from the trees. “Augh!!” Rebecca screamed, while instinctively poking at one with her “spear.”
Meanwhile, Allan had drawn a sword and was busy slicing goblins with, may I add, great skill. Just then, they heard a shout from Cilantro, signaling that he had been captured. Allan took one look toward Cilantro, chopped off a goblin’s head, and charged toward the goblin holding Cilantro.
As Allan’s sword made contact with the goblin’s torso, he heard another scream from behind him. As Allan and Cilantro stared, they realized it was the goblin’s scream, not Rebecca’s. “How dare you mess up my hoof polish!” she scolded the goblin, “It took an hour to put on!” That made them laugh hysterically.
Do give it a bit of slack, I’m not adjusting the actual story or the writing style and I was nine when I wrote it, so there’ll be cliches and tropes and so-so sentences that are probably unnecessary, but I’m trying to stay true to my beginnings.
Occasionally, I go poking through old papers of mine to reminisce, and, just possibly, find something worth sharing. This one is an excellent example: a summary of the Peshtigo Fire that I wrote in fourth grade. Since I don’t think I say it in the report, it should be noted that Peshtigo is a town in Wisconsin. As I explain in the paper, the Peshtigo Fire has been largely forgotten — in fact, up until digging this up, I had forgotten about it, too! Historically, it’s lack of coverage is because it happened in a similar timeframe to the Great Chicago Fire, which was smaller, but in a more known area. Why I forgot about it, I have no idea. As for the rest of the information, I’ll leave that to my nine-year old self.
The Peshtigo Fire was caused by drought and harsh winds. The winds caught onto the fires the lumberjacks set to burn fallen branches. Due to the wind and the many little fires, a firestorm broke out. Firestorms are rare fires that form their own explosive gases. Also, due to the trees in the area, the fire had many flammables to fuel itself with. When the fire stopped, the forest near Peshtigo was a sea of scorched wood and ashes more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Unfortunately, this fire has been nearly forgotten, replaced by the significantly smaller Great Chicago Fire. On the same day the same winds stirred fires at both Port Huron at the tip of Lake Huron, and the cities of Holland and Manistee across Lake Michigan. It is a shame that only the Great Chicago Fire is remembered of all the significant fires that day.
One of the many games that I play online is called Narwhale. Aww! Sounds nice, kind of sweet, right? Haha, nope. Narwhale is a very simple game where you’re all — surprise! — narwhales, and you’re trying to kill each other by impalement, courtesy of tusks. A good example is this image, where I’m less than 1.5 seconds away from getting skewered by someone who’s about to make a sharp turn into my side.
“Why would you want to kill the other narwhales, though?” Well, that’s a good question. For starters, they’re all trying to kill you. You also get bonuses for each level you get (you advance the number of levels that each narwhale you kill has), like stamina (the little dots by your tusk, those are how many dashes you have left at a given time), stamina regeneration, dash speed, general speed, tusk length, turn rate… that sort of thing. You can see each upgrade for a moment as you get it, and then the words fade so that you can actually, you know, see what you’re doing.
Of course, bonuses that make it easier to kill shouldn’t really be the only reward to killing, should they? Of course not! It’s mostly for the rush of exhilaration when you get out of a tight spot, or see your username on the Leaderboard in the top right corner (if you don’t put one in, you’ll come up as “Lazy Narwhale”) or, if you do really well, get a crown for being the top player. Your tusk also turns into a kebab if you hit max tusk length, so that’s fun. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots of my crown/kebab combo, since I was a bit busy trying not to die, but I do have one with just a crown.
It should also be noted that digital narwhales seem to be contortionists, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether they’re missing the back half of their body, therefore dying and no longer a threat, or whether they’re scrunched up, like the little greige-ish dude near the bottom of that last picture. Unfortunately, that’s an unavoidable result of high speed turning, so just know that it’s something to watch out for.
Well, it’s NaNo season again, and as such I’m going to give you all some unsolicited writing advice. I don’t know about all of you, but I have horrible impulse control, and a lot of fun story ideas. For a long time, the result of this was droves upon droves of partially started books. “Ooh, what about this story?” So I started it. “This seems like a neat concept.” And I started it. The result being a lot of “I started this based off of a half-formed concept and don’t know where to go with it, but I have now jumped from the train of thought of my other story and don’t know how to get back” situations.
The solution to this was, surprisingly, really simple. I made a concept document! Now, I just type up notes in my “Write it down!” doc and get back to it when I have the time. This means that I’m not rushing to come up with a full plot for a single piece of dialogue or a vague idea, but I also don’t feel like I’m abandoning them. I can keep expanding on the possibilities, knowing that when I get to them, that work will pay off, but also that I don’t have to have all of the details in my head. For someone who had previously done little writing down the things I needed to remember, preferring to just, well, remember them, it was a bit of a difficult transition to make, but it’s certainly been worth it.
A good example of what I couldn’t have done had I mentally catalogued the ideas instead is actually this year’s NaNo. I was working on another story, see, and it wasn’t until partway through October that I realized we were almost to this time of year again. Not wanting to come up with a new concept with such little time, I turned to my concept doc. If I had been trying to remember all of them and find the most fleshed-out idea to use, I probably still would have ended up choosing the story I did, but I would have misplaced some of its details. I also wouldn’t have been choosing from the full eleven choices that I had written down, because I wouldn’t have remembered what all of them were at any given time. I say this with full confidence, seeing as I just tried to remember all eleven (I cheated; I already have the number from counting them in my doc) and could only recall seven of them.
Anyways, just a friendly suggestion: write down your ideas! That might seem obvious, but for me it wasn’t, so I’m going to assume there are other folks like me who need the nudge.
This is another one of the poems I wrote during my eighth grade poetry unit, though it wasn’t one that I turned in. I may or may not have been under the influence of chocolate when I wrote it.
My heart melts As I read I fold the message How sweet I toy with it In my mind and mouth Both feel good Oh how I love Dove chocolate hearts
This is another poem I wrote for the poetry unit, about a snake “hugging” a mouse. The narrator is a seven year-old boy who doesn’t realize what’s actually happening. It is imperative to the humor of this story that you read it in the voice of a pretentious small child. Warning: dark humor, euphemized death.
"Timmy, go outside!" Mom's hollering across the house. The door slams behind me. She yells something about attitude. I mutter back about her not being the boss of me. I'm seven now, after all. I make sure it's just loud enough for our door cam to pick it up. Really, I want to be out here. It smells nice, like pines, and grass, and wind, and yesterday’s rain.
Not like inside. Inside doesn’t smell nice at all. Something’s broken, I don’t remember what. When it’s nice and cold like today it turns on, and the whole house smells like something is burning. When it isn’t on, it smells old. I’m not sure which I hate more.
But I’m not inside anymore. I’m trekking through my trees, deciding what kind of adventure I’ll be having today. Then I spot them. I freeze. I don’t want to startle them. Either of them. There’s a snake coiled around a pine, and a mouse in front of it. I wonder what they’re doing, and I stay super still so they might let me see. The snake leaps towards the mouse. I flinch. I’ve heard of some really scary snakes that’ll kill you with a bite, but it doesn’t bite the mouse. It hugs it tight, like Aunt Joanna does to me when we see her. I grin in delight. I didn’t know animals hugged each other! The mouse doesn’t look happy. It’s squirming around, like it’s trying to get loose. I guess the snake really is like Aunt Joanna, and that mouse really is like me. I feel a bit bad for it. I know what it’s like to get hugged by someone you really don’t like, but I also know that I’m supposed to be polite and let them hug me, and I think the same goes for mice, right? So I just stand and wait and watch.
The snake squeezes harder. Relatives always do when you try and escape their hugs. Doesn’t the mouse know that? If it would just stop squirming the snake would probably let it go. Eventually, it does. The mouse goes still. I guess it figured out my trick, cuz the snake lets go of it completely. Either that or it said something really nasty. I got in trouble for doing that to Aunt Joanna once. She stopped hugging me faster than my sister runs when she sees a spider, but then I got a talking-to and no dessert. I think it’s easier to just stand still like one of the trees until she lets go. I’m so excited that I sprint back to the house. “Michelle!” I yell for my sister. “You’ll never believe it!” “I just saw a snake hugging a mouse!”
This is one of my favorite poems that I wrote for my eighth grade poetry unit. I present to you, “The Beast.”
The Beast prowls by the gates, impatient to be unleashed. Eager to return to the hunt and sink her teeth into the prize. But she has been banished here by the keepers of her prey.
She cannot escape, yet she scratches at the mass that holds her, the horrible sound carrying down the corridors as the obstacle slowly chips away. She howls in frustration as pieces of her prison fall away, yet in whole it stands strong.
Bored, she turns to her cell. What here can she do? What to climb on? What to destroy? It depends on where she is held- the keepers rotate her containment.
Sometimes she has company. A keeper is kept with her, much to their annoyance. She scrapes at the walls, calling out for freedom, and bothering them in hope of release.
This time, she is alone. The keeper would not stay with her. The other obliged. They needed help with the target anyways. So there is nobody to appeal to; no chance of sympathy.
I am a keeper: the one who keeps her company. Who escaped that fate, this time. As her prey is moved again, the other keeper turns to me. “Unleash the Beast.”
I protest the order. We know what will happen. She will come for it, again. But the other stares me down. “It’s been long enough. Go.” And so I do.
I loiter down the passageway, unenthusiastic about my task. But I have my orders from the head keeper. I undo the latch. Do I really have to? Yes, I do.
I open it hesitantly, slowly. The Beast pushes towards me. As soon as it is open just enough for her to squirrel through she is out. She ignores me, running past.
She is free! She does not know where the target is, where it has been moved to now, but she does know where it often is. She closes in on that place, leaping towards her anticipated prize.
And the cat is on the counter again. Time to lock her back in Mom’s room while we eat our dinner.
Yes, you read that right, and no, it isn’t a typo. Surviv is a third person shooter game, meaning you see your character from an overhead view. I’ve been told that it’s the 2-D version of Fortnight, but I can neither confirm nor deny that, seeing as I haven’t played Fortnight.
You destroy crates to get guns, ammo, grenades, melee weapons, outfits, medical supplies, and gear, which can also be found lying around sometimes. You may also find scopes, which increase your field of view. There are different types of ammo for the different types of guns (they’re color-coded), and different guns within each type. Everyone has their own preferences; I like the yellow-ammo weaponry because they tend to have large clips, and I’m not the most accurate shot.
Medical supplies are split into two groups, which I call “healing” and “adrenaline.” Healing supplies are bandages and med kits, which directly restore health. Adrenaline supplies are consumed, and then gradually give you health back until the adrenaline bar runs out. Gear is split into backpacks, helmets, and armor, each of which has three levels of possibility. Obviously, the higher the level, the better. Outfits are mostly useless, but there are a few that provide excellent camouflage.
The game has a “last one standing” premise to it. As the game progresses, the map gradually gets smaller as the “Red Zone” moves inwards. Standing in the Red Zone is possible, but your health decreases. You can see where the Red Zone will be moving to at any given time in the mini map, which is expandable if you hit “M.” How you survive is up to you – some people like to attack anything that comes near them until they’re the only one left, and some like to hide in bushes until they’re one of the last people left, and then they attack the remaining adversaries. It’s up to you!
You can also play “Squad,” either with random other players or with a group of friends. Let me tell you, it is an excellent experience to try and play this game with a group of teenagers in various, spread-out locations in the same room (*cough* passing period *cough*). It’s insane.
Squads are nice because you can communicate with your team to ask for certain supplies or ask them to go somewhere. You also don’t die immediately. Instead, you go to a slow and helpless crawl until one of your teammates revives you or you bleed out, which sounds awful, but it’s nice to get a second chance, and it rewards team members who stay with the rest of the squad by increasing their chances of revival.
It can take a little while to acclimate to the controls, but if you play enough it becomes automatic. Right click is communication/drop this item, left click is attack, , WASD are movement, 1-4 are selections of weapons (gun, gun, melee, grenade), F is to pick something up or open and close doors, and M is the map.
Now, wait, don’t get too excited, I’m not actually going on tour. Rather, I’m talking about a game called On Tour, in which you’re musicians trying to plan a tour to hit as many states as you can. It’s like 10 Days In The USA, right? Well, no.
For starters, it’s played on an erasable board with dry erase markers, but that’s not all. You see, in On Tour, you can only go to adjacent states in a given move. You’re also not going to only ten states, you’re going to as many as you can. And where you’re going isn’t based off of the color on the board, nor on adjacency alone, it’s also based on numbers. “What have numbers got to do with this,” you ask? Let me explain.
Each round, you flip over three state cards, and roll a pair of dice. You’ll get two numbers from the dice, once with the first die in the tens digit and the second in the ones, and one vice versa. For instance, if you roll a 2 and a 6, one of your numbers will be 26, and one will be 62. You then put each number in a state within at least one of the regions of the flipped cards, or, if you roll doubles, you put a star on one state in the available regions instead, which serves as a wild number. You can circle the number/star if you put it in one of the states you flipped, and not just the region. Eventually, every state will have a number or a star.
When finalizing the tour route, you can only go to a state of equal or greater numerical value to the one before it, so the game is a challenge of lining up the numbers in a manner that allows the most states without spreading them out so far that a stray number blocks the path. You also get bonus points for each circled state you visit, so try to incorporate as many of those as you can!
