Also, for those looking forward to the next installment, I should have it done by September 7th. Or sooner if I decide that what will inevitably be an incredibly long article, especially for just being one part of a series, I decide to trim some of the planned content down or make the series a five part article. Though I'll probably just keep the series as planned, and part two will just be ginormous.
Great, I'm glad you guys got some sort of entertainment from this thing. It was really a whole lot of fun for me to write (though, when I started it, I had absolutely no intention of it being incredibly long). I'm starting work on the second part as we speak; I can't say when I'll be done, but I imagine it'll be at least a two day project. Thanks again for the comments!
Jump to: The Introduction :: RTS101 :: A Brief History :: Trent + RTS = :: Conclusion and Preview Back in the day, when I was a strapping young lad on the brink of finally convincing the parents that the household needed a computer as much as it needed gas and electricity, there were two games that I was introduced to thro
So, some of you may or may not have noticed the positively supertastic absence of rambling entries and gaming editorials that had been written in the recent weeks; all apologies for that. My first move to rectify this content depression was with my review of Titan Quest which was fairly well-received on one of the two locations which I publish material given that I didn't do my normal advertising spree across the realms of the wide, vast, a
So, I've been a bad, bad bloggertorialist the last few weeks while I finished up my summer terms. I can't say that I've been entirely swamped by classes, presentations, exams, and the like, though. You see, once the latest patch for Titan Quest hit the vast intellectual void known as The Intarweb , my problems with constant and consistent crashing with the game ceased. And with this cease of game-ruining problems, I was
Yeah, see, I was able to use naps to get through the sleepless periods last summer... But this summer I'm just completely incapable of taking a nap unless it's some kind of completely late-night, unplanned crash when I just laid down on my bed after working out or something. I'm definitely tired (har har, I so PUNNY!) of the whole situation, but if I had a motto, it would be PERSEVERE! Actually, it would probably be "Meow," but that's neither here nor there. Your ability to nap to help yo
"Does this smell like chloroform to you?" "Do you know how much a polar bear weighs?" "Not really..." "Just enough to break the ice; hey, I'm Trent." I don't usually talk to people completely at random, but I do have quite the repertoire of really horrendous pick-up lines.
Jump to: Personalstuffs :: Child Rearing 101 :: Movie Summaries :: The Gaming Front :: Writing and Conclusion Sorry about the complete lack of posts in the recent past. I could give an honest, heartfelt, sympathetic, sincere, redundantly-described apology for the occurrence but the truth of the matter is that I just needed a break from writing
Well, it's been about three weeks since my last entry that didn't related to games at all. What better day than the Fourth of July (also known as Indepe ndence Day ) to... Write a nice site entry? I finished up my spring term here at this fine establishment a few of weeks ago, thus bringing an end to intensive second-year Spanish and, at the same time, putting
I personally believe that there definitely needs to be a degree of physical attraction for a relationship to work... That said, it's always been that initial attraction to a person that really has mattered to me. If people change a bit while you're together, or even if you're not, it doesn't really matter as much. The initial attraction, though, is the necessary gateway into a relationship. Without that, I think that things go a great deal less smooth, maybe less passionate, and, overall, less i
Jump to: A Prologue (Battlefield 2) :: Battlefield 2142 :: The New Standard? :: A Pessimistic Conclusion Alright this editorial is a sizeable one (Surprise!) which I can easily divide into two halves for the readers who are interested. The first two sections cover Battlefield 2 and its bastard child-spawn Battlefield 2142. These two games serve as a specific platform f
I'm sitting here on the last night of my nice little mid-summer vacation from Ann Arbor, classes, and the like. For spring I was technically only taking a single class, but the class was an intensive second-year Spanish course, designed to take thirty weeks of normal-semester classes and shrink it down into seven weeks. It actually didn't end up being nearly as bad as I went in expecting, but that isn't to say it was easy. For the most part, though, I'm very glad I did it; I made a few fr
Yesterday I ranted on and on about the downside of the new, overhyped concept of games as "episodes" in a larger series rather than self-contained games which receive expansion packs based on both feedback and popularity. Throughout that article I put a blatant focus on Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and SiN: Emergence</
Alright, I've updated the article with perty screenshots and a segment on Battlefield 2. I've also finished the second part , which should be the final part, but I can never really tell when I'm actually done with something like this.
The gaming industry has this thing where it goes through what are commonly referred to as trends . These trends vary year to year, of course, but in the time that can best be described as their own respective hayday they receive some kind of shout out within a game's press release, back cover of a retail box, or an overzealous PR guy that shouts a particular trend from his podium/marketing soapbox. Back in the day , the big trends were all graphical spiffstuffs like the <a href="http
Oh, I can do this! I have a very wide variety of musical tastes. For instance, my current playlist (which has a lot more "favorite songs," as opposed to my normal playlist which just has various CDs queued up) has the following: Something Corporate, Oasis, James Blunt, Finger Eleven, The Verve Pipe, American Hi-Fi, Bowling For Soup, Metallica, Rufus Wainwright, Tool, Elliott Smith, Cursive, Shakira, Dan Bern, Imogen Heap, The Fray, Sufjan Stevens, Anna Nalick, Iron & Wine, Fountains o
It's currently the middle of June and, right on schedule , sleeping problems rear their ugly little heads again. I have no real cause which I can place blame upon for the situation, but hey, it could be worse. At least this year I have an air-conditioned room and a far higher overall energy level. Though I generally prefer the days where I don't get enough sleep at night to be weekdays, simply due to the fact that my easiest way to stay awake and get ener
Well, unlike my last entry , this is not a post fueled by seething emo . I've had a very awesome (if not incredibly exhausting) week filled with spots of concentrated greatness throughout, and for this I am a happykitty. First, let me just start out detailing the almost unending praises that I have for Veronica Mars . Over the course of the last week I have watched t
I'm going to relate a quick tale about the lessons ones learns in the course of writing... Oh, let's say the course of writing a blog. As someone who has been writing some kind of personal stuff on a site of sorts for over four years now, you'd think I would have learned about the dangers of writing about any personal issues. The problem, of course, is that no matter how hard you may try to keep things out of the "standard" viewing area of people you know... There is still that ever-so-re
Well, while your advice is surely solid for the kind of writing you do, it's not something that is ported very well to the kind of project I'm currently working on. My current novel is more of a science-fiction type of novel (it's really not all that sciencey, but that's what people generally call it; it's more like a Lord of the Flies kind of thing meets the TV show Lost ); whenever I finish up a chapter, I spend time thinking about it, and then reviewing it a bit over the course o
I was actually asked a few times about the writing process in general. I make absolutely no claim that anything I do in terms of writing this book is "correct," or even any semblance of "right," but this is just my personal process. I know my friend, who is probably a far more serious writer than myself, has a completely different way of approaching things. For instance, she likes to seclude herself from anything positive and write in the most depressing environment that she can think of. She ca
I originally wrote a ridiculously long reply to this, but since it got asked a couple other places too I figured that I would just turn it into a general entry. So, here's your response: http://mittens.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=119017 . Thanks for the comment!
Well, I actually followed through with my own mandate to myself today and finished up the fourth chapter of my beloved Paradise today. I probably started at about 2:00pm and by 5:30pm I had written a solid seven pages of content and brought the lengthy chapter to a close at about fourteen pages (with 1.5 line spacing). Now, by the time I considered the first full draft of the chapter "finished," I think I honestly felt like my brain was just going to
Funny you mention the short guy thing; I'm generally a big fan of totally making general assumptions about people based on very little information (it's the House side of me coming out), and I think there's actually a case to be made for generalizations about short guys. My mom generally made a reference to some kind of "short man syndrome" that, if I remember correctly, entailed just a less patient, quickly angered, and far more masculine-displayin
I'm beginning to realize that Michigan's seemingly-schizophrenic weather patterns actually do follow some kind of predictable logic. Not in when things occur, of course, but there are definite "seasons" that begin and end, honestly, whenever the Elder Michiganians Up High designate that the season in question starts and terminates. For instance, summer is just now beginning as of May 27. Would you like to know how I know this? Because the weather forecast for the next week is all eighty degrees
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