Shotgun Blog: Five Things
January 26, 2010 You don't pray to a saint, you pray with a saint. You're asking the saint to pray for you. Praying to a saint would make that saint an icon, which isn't what saints are. Saints, having led particularly holy lives, are especially effective in their prayers and have certain specialties, which is why you choose a specific one of them to ask their aid and attention.
A tiny werewolf, which dwelled duplicitously inside the hide of a possum.I saw a dead possum in the road on the way to work. Something about the way its shapeless carcass lay in the road suggested that something else was previously inside it, and had shed its possum costume and gone about its buisness. A very small lycanthrope, perhaps.
Sid Meier said that a good game is a series of interesting choices. When you make certain choices in most games, however, you preclude yourself from making other choices. Is part of a good game, then, deciding which choices you don't want to make, and using that information to inform the choices you do make, in a sort of prognosticative play? And is it possible to play by not playing, say, by choosing to "avoid all games of chance" or "stay out of the Molasses Swamp" by never entering Candyland?
My tepid romance with Dragon Age: Origins seems to be at its end. My interest fell off rapidly when I entered the Brown Kingdom of the Dwarves, whose undermountain kingdom (eight buildings you can enter) had ground to a halt, and only I could save it. Oh, how would these sixty dwarves, none of whom seem to have jobs, survive without my timely diplomacy? To tell the truth, I don't care.
I would love to read A Dance with Dragons.
One of the things that frequently frustrates me about fantasy games (and literature, by extension) is the presence of gods. I mean, the real, incontrovertible, presence of gods. The undeniable possibility that a god might sit next to you at a tavern or smite you about the head with his holy cudgel and restore your lost levels.