Bryce Moore's Blog, page 91
April 15, 2020
Quarantine Movie Review: The Walk
A few nights ago, the kids wanted to switch things up a bit for our evening activities. Tomas was keen on watching a movie in 3D, and the other kids seconded the motion, so I looked through the blurays I’d bought to find something that might work for everyone, including MC. I finally settled on The Walk, a movie I’d heard great things about (especially for 3D) a couple of years ago. I’d bought the film back then, but we had yet to crack it open.
No time like quarantine to correct that, right?
It was a fantastic film, based on the real life effort of a man to tightrope walk between the Twin Towers back in the 70s, before they’d both opened to the public. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and directed by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Contact), it was a total blast, and I can definitely recommend it for a 3D experience. (On a big screen, at least. It was super on my 105″ set up. If you have something smaller, it wouldn’t be as good. This is one where bigger is definitely better. It would have been incredible in theaters.)
Part of that is because a lot of the drive of the movie comes from the tense scenes where he’s preparing for his tightrope walk. Because of course, this wasn’t something he was allowed to do legally. He had to break into the buildings, get his gear to the roof, set it up under the cover of darkness, and then traipse out there before anyone could stop him. That doesn’t sound too incredibly difficult until you think of the details. You can’t just string a rope up between those towers. Not if you want it to bear your weight. You need a hefty steel cable for that, and it needs proper support. So he had to enlist accomplices and make quite the heist plan to get it all done.
Every time the camera would pan down from those towers, and you saw the ground way below, my palms would get sweaty. It wasn’t necessarily a fun movie to sit through, but it was definitely entertaining. (Diminished only somewhat by the constant reminder in the back of my head of the ultimate fate of those two towers . . .)
If you’re looking for something to really get your mind off our current mess, I can definitely recommend this movie. It’s on Amazon Prime to rent for $3. I give it a 9/10.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 14, 2020
Advanced Zoom-Fu: iPad Screen Sharing
The more I use Zoom, the more little bells and whistles I find out about how to get the most out of it. Sure, I’ve done the fun Zoom backgrounds (my favorite is the one from The Office, but I’ve also got The Matrix, The Shining, The Simpsons. Star Trek, Harry Potter, and more . . .), and I’ve been in two Zoom meetings at the same time. But I’m also getting experience using Zoom to teach, since Denisa has been working with it for teaching both seminary and her college classes. She’s turned to some awesome people at the university for help, but when it comes time to actually implementing the plans, I’m often the go-to tech support person for my house.
So we’ve recorded Zoom meetings now and seen the wonders of automatic transcription via Kaltura. We’ve figured out using waiting rooms and passwords to keep meetings safe. And for our next trick, Denisa needed to somehow use a whiteboard on Zoom to illustrate linguistic examples as she lectured.
Zoom has a whiteboard, but it’s a whiteboard controlled by a mouse. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s also not the most user-friendly approach. I kept insisting it would do the trick with some practice, but Denisa pushed for something easier to use.
Enter my iPad and Apple Pencil.
If you click the “Share Screen” button at the bottom of a Zoom meeting, it gives you the option to share your screen, share a whiteboard, OR share an iPhone or iPad screen. If you select the iPad option, then it asks you to download a plugin. Once you’ve got that plugin installed on your computer, you just need to make sure you’re on the same Wi-Fi network as the device you’re using to Zoom. Once that’s taken care of, you can screen mirror to your Zoom session.
If you’ve got an Apple Pencil and a drawing app (I use GoodNotes), then you can have everyone in the meeting see exactly what you’re drawing on your iPad. It’s really slick, with no other apps needed to install. Of course, this assumes you have a higher end iPad with an Apple Pencil to go with it (though I imagine any stylus could work, and in a pinch you could use your finger . . . ) but if you have those things already lying around, then this is a great way to have the whiteboard functionality and have it feel like an actual whiteboard, as opposed to drawing-with-a-mouse.
Necessity is the mother of invention . . .
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 13, 2020
A Much Needed Snow Day
Astute readers will have noticed that I didn’t post anything on Friday. When the quarantine hit and school went online, I assumed my snow days were a thing of the past when it came to this semester. The weather gods had other ideas.
We got 9 inches of wet, heavy snow on Thursday night. (Some places in Maine got 20 inches!) This brought down power lines across the state, with much of my town losing electricity. Because of that, school was canceled for the day. The bad news is that power stayed out for a lot of the state for the entire weekend. Many of my friends didn’t get power back until yesterday, and I still have friends who are without power as I type this. (A situation that won’t be helped by the 50mph winds we’re supposed to be getting later today . . . )
Personally, we just lost power for about three hours, though we did have our internet go down until last night. For almost all of Friday, even the LTE network was down. (No power to the cell tower, perhaps? I don’t know how those operate.) And while it’s been a terrible situation for many, I have to say that personally, there were some definite perks.
Going all of Friday without being able to be online at all was just lovely. I’m already a self-confessed technology addict. That’s not always a good thing. In fact, in many ways this “work from home” thing has made me even more hooked on screens. Before, I could check my work email at all hours and not have to worry too much about coming across anything noteworthy unless it was a real emergency. Now, it seems like I might get “real” email at any time of the day, so checking email at 7pm might lead me to feel like I need to get work done right then.
24 hours without the internet was just what the doctor ordered. I didn’t even have to feel guilty about not checking: there was no way I could check, even if I wanted to. So instead, we played board games as a family and worked on Animal Crossing some when the power came on. In the evening, we watched blu-rays.
Up until then, I was beginning to feel very worn down. Discouraged. Friday was a great opportunity for me to catch my breath and feel more in control of things. (Again, my sincere apologies to the rest of my friends who had to go without power for so long. The only silver lining I can think of for you was that it wasn’t colder than it was, so (hopefully) no one had to worry about freezing pipes . . .)
Anyway. I’m back in the swing of things now, and I hope power comes back to the rest of you in the very near future. Pandemics, volcanoes, earthquakes, power outages, tornadoes. I keep looking out the window expecting it to be raining frogs. Maybe that’ll be later tonight . . .
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 9, 2020
When Alexa Attacks
A couple of weeks ago, Denisa asked our Amazon Echo for the weather forecast. When it had finished giving the forecast, Alexa helpfully offered to alert us whenever there’s a severe weather alert for our area. “Would you like to enable this feature?” she asked.
Sure. Why not? I like a good severe weather alert as much as the next guy. We turned on the feature and then didn’t think anything more of it.
This morning, at 5:30am, Tomas discovered that Alexa takes her job of alerting you about severe weather very seriously. She woke him up on the Echo Dot in his room, boldly proclaiming that the National Weather Forecast had released a severe weather alert for our area. (4-14 inches of snow on our way today into tonight) Then she kept swirling a yellow light to remind him of the impending doom.
His response is perhaps best summed up by the transcript Alexa recorded:
Today at 05:31 AM on Second Floor: Audio could not be understood
Today at 05:31 AM on Second Floor: “alexa”
Today at 05:31 AM on Second Floor: “stop”
Today at 05:33 AM on Second Floor: “alexa”
Today at 05:37 AM on Second Floor: No text stored
Today at 05:37 AM on Second Floor: “alexa”
Today at 05:39 AM on Second Floor: “alexa”
I’ll stop there. Suffice it to say that not only did Alexa not stop alerting him, she also made it incredibly difficult to turn off the alert. (At least, when your mind is muddled at 5:30 in the morning.)
We’ve since added some “do not disturb” times to Alexa on all our devices, which should hopefully deal with this in the future. Actually, I tried to turn off those notifications completely, but Alexa is refusing to obey. Either she thinks we’re in dire peril, or she just doesn’t want to open the pod bay doors.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 8, 2020
How to Zoom in Two Meetings at the Same Time
Three weeks into the Big Quarantine, and my life has become slowly overtaken by Zoom meetings. Each day I have at least two, sometimes as many as six. And sometimes I have two meetings at the same time. Now granted, Zooming into two simultaneous meetings would typically sound like a Bad Idea. If you’ve got two people talking to you at the same time, paying attention to both people is . . . difficult at best.
However, maybe you’re like me. I’m running a Zoom reference desk for a couple of hours each day, and traffic on there is often light. I need to have it open in case anyone comes in to ask a reference question, but if no one’s there, it’s not like I need to be listening to anyone in that Zoom room. If you’re using the Zoom app and there’s a second Zoom presentation you’d like to attend, it looks at first like you’re out of luck. Zoom only lets you into one meeting at a time through its app. (At least that’s what it does on my account. There might be a setting somewhere to make it possible on different accounts, but if there is, I don’t have access to it.)
If there’s one thing I have more of in the Big Quarantine, it’s time in front of a computer screen, with the internet at my fingertips. And so I figured out a workaround for this dilemma. The key is to join the second Zoom meeting not with the app, but through the browser.
Zoom doesn’t like to put this option in an easy to see place. You click a Zoom link, and it automatically wants to load the Zoom app. But if you cancel out of that, you’ll see that on the web page the Zoom link took you to, there’s a second option in tiny writing: “If you cannot download or run the application, start from your browser.”
Click that link, and it bypasses the Zoom app. Voila! You’re in your second meeting, and you still have the other meeting (that you opened first) running in the app.
Make sure to use this power only for good, people. Who knows what nefarious deeds people could get up to if they started wantonly attending Zoom meetings at the same time, left and right? Sounds like the makings of a super villain backstory to me . . .
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 7, 2020
The Banana: Nature’s Perfect Fruit
I’m not going to say I play favorites when it comes to eating my fruits and vegetables. Bring me a nice plate of pineapple or some steamed broccoli any day, and I’ll gladly wolf them down. True, I have been known to turn my nose up at the occasional egg plant or brussels sprouts, but in general, if I come across a vegetable or a fruit that’s ready to eat, I’m not against eating it.
This is something Denisa has marveled at for years. How I’ll eat something if it’s ready, but if it’s not ready, it’s as if it doesn’t exist in the refrigerator. But come on. When I’m moseying over to the fridge, it’s because I want something to eat this second. I want the lowest bar possible. Something I can take out of there and consume right now.
This is where vegetables uniformly break down for me. Steaming something? Cutting it up into pieces? If I wanted to build something, I would have looked for a Lego set. I want something to eat, not a Choose Your Own Adventure. And even when the veggie looks like you should be able to eat it right away, there are still all these steps around it.
Carrots. They should be straightforward. You grab the carrot and eat it. Instead, you typically have to wash the carrot, peel the carrot, and then eat the carrot. I don’t have time to give my vegetable a spa treatment. I’m hungry, and the last thing I want to have to deal with is needy food. I want my relationship with my food to be as brief as possible when I’m looking for a snack. You grab a granola bar, and all you have to do is unwrap the sucker. No need to go looking for cutlery. No need to be near a faucet. At most, all you need is a trash can to throw away the wrapper, and even then, you can just shove the wrapper in your pocket and throw it away later. (Pro tip: do not forget to throw the wrapper away later. Especially if you put your pants into the wash and your wife finds the wrapper . . . )
It’s true that science has discovered (apparently) that if you kill the carrot before it’s fully grown, you can just eat it straight from the bag, ala baby carrots. And baby carrots are about as good as it gets for vegetables. But don’t you feel even the tiniest bit guilty, eating a baby carrot? I mean, you eat veal, and people call you a monster for eating baby cows. But baby carrots are somehow more humane? That’s lifeist, is what that is. As if just because carrots can’t moo they don’t matter. Not that I’m one to talk, as a self-confessed omnivore, but still. Baby carrots? Can’t we call them something else, at least? How about . . . carrot poppers? Carrot tots? Mini carrots? Healthy cheetos?
But nothing in nature quite takes the “I don’t want you to eat me ever” approach to food quite like fruit. Almost any fruit I can think of is rife with danger. Apples have a tendency to get their peels stuck in my teeth, or else they sabotage you with surprise juiciness. (You ever tried to clean a beard up after you’ve dribbled apple juice deep down into the the sub-layers?) Oranges hold onto their peels for dear life. True story: I once sliced off my fingernail when I was trying to peel an orange. (Yes, I was about seven at the time, but still. My fingernail!)
And those are the relatively benign looking fruits. Who in the world looked at a pineapple the first time and decided, “I think I want to put that in my mouth”? Then you’ve got things like mangoes, which are delicious, but I don’t think there’s an actual way to eat one without getting juice over everything. Cherries? Wonderful, but they’ve got those pits inside waiting to surprise you. Blackberries leave little seeds everywhere. Lemons are just pretending to be fruit.
No, when you get right down to it, there’s really only one perfect fruit: the banana.
The banana has no seeds. It doesn’t need to be washed. It comes with its own biodegradable wrapper that’s pretty much the easiest thing to open ever. Better yet, you don’t have to worry about forgetting that wrapper in your pocket, because what sort of a monster would put a banana peel in their pocket?
Bananas taste good at any meal. In cereal or on pancakes. In a peanut butter banana sandwich. Fruit salad. Banana split. They’re the swiss army knives of healthiness. Don’t believe me? Try making a vegetable do any of that. When’s the last peanut butter tomato sandwich you enjoyed? I rest my case.
There’s a reason bananas have become my go-to choice for healthy snacks. Better yet, there are a wide variety of bananas out there. If you get them early in the ripening process, they’re a bit tart. Prime yellow is great. Brown? No problem. You can make it into banana bread. Face it, folks: you just can’t go wrong.
So keep your nasty little seed bombs and fingernail slicers to yourself. I’m going to go with the only really sensible choice. The banana.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 6, 2020
Choosing Hope
There are many reasons to be depressed right now. Many causes to be upset over. And I’ll admit that for the past few weeks, I’ve been pretty down. I’m still not upbeat about a lot of things, to be honest. But I came to the conclusion over the weekend that none of those lines of thought were productive at all. I could sit around feeling like the world was falling down around me, or I could make the conscious choice to be hopeful instead. And after living in the doldrums for the last while, the choice was a fairly easy one to make.
There are many reasons to be hopeful. For one, things have looked grim in life many times before in the past, and the world got through them. World Wars, global pandemics, famines, and more. It’s important to remember that every night has it’s dawn.
One of the things that brought this into focus for me most clearly was a talk I listened to over the weekend. The past two days was General Conference for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 10 hours of speeches focused on religious topics. Let me be clear: 10 hours of talks in two days is . . . a lot of talks. Have I been known to nod off now and then? Yes. Yes, I have. But in a typical year, I look forward to conference weekend as a way to recharge my batteries. Some nice quiet time to think about what’s really important, reevaluate my priorities, and get ready to face the crazy again once it’s over.
This time, there wasn’t much crazy I needed to gear up for, schedule-wise. In many ways, I wasn’t too jazzed about the idea of spending 10 more hours in front of a screen, when that’s what my life has turned into lately. But the talks were on point, and I still had an uplifting time.
One stood out to me especially, however. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk on Hope could and should apply to just about any religious person, or at least any Christian. It’s 17 minutes long, so not a quick watch, but if you’re looking for something spiritually nourishing today, as I was yesterday, I can think of nothing better than watching it, especially the last half. (Sadly, embeds aren’t working yet.)
One quote stood out in particular to me:
When we have conquered it — and we will — may we be equally committed to freeing the world from the virus of hunger and freeing neighborhoods and nations from the virus of poverty. May we hope for schools where students are taught — not terrified they will be shot — and for the gift of personal dignity for every child of God, unmarred by any form of racial, ethnic, or religious prejudice.
For the past few weeks, it’s felt like all of my attention (or at least the bulk of it) has been focused on this pandemic and what I might do to prepare for it and the chaos it seems to be leaving in its wake. This talk was the first real time I’ve collected myself and reminded myself that there will be an “after.” I don’t mean to say I’ve been frantic, waiting for the world to end. Rather, I’ve been wholly distracted, focused on what people are (or aren’t) doing to get through this.
When I was in Utah, I lived in Lindon for a while. Denisa and I moved into the apartment under tentative circumstances. We were in my aunt and uncle’s basement, but we understood we might need to leave it at some point in the future, since it might be needed for other uses. We were grateful to have the place to stay at such a great rate, but we never really put down roots. In some ways, it felt like the Great Pirate Roberts.
We ended up living there for years, and I really feel like one of the bigger mistakes I made during that time was treating that place like a layover as opposed to a home. When you decide to commit to a place and make it yours, you’re able to really dig in and make lasting friendships. You plan for the future, and those plans cement you in the present in a way that you can’t really get through another path.
The past few weeks, I’ve felt tentative again. Living day to day. It felt like so much could change at any moment, so why should I bother trying to make any plans?
I had lost hope.
I’m going to try to correct that now. Yes, the future is still uncertain. We can’t know what track the disease will take, or what it will do to our economy. Things may change at any moment, but that doesn’t mean I need to stop making plans. There will be other things to focus on in the days, months, and years ahead. The problems of yesterday will be back, and I for one would much rather be dealing with simple political conundrums, as opposed to political conundrums AND COVID-19.
Anyway, that’s the shift in mindset I’m trying to make right now. It’s helping me, and I hope it might help some of you. Plan for the future, because there’s definitely going to be one, people. Even if sometimes it feels like we’re fully occupied with our present worries.
April 3, 2020
Goodbye, Aruba
It’s official (if not unexpected). My Aruba trip has bit the dust. That’s actually the third trip of mine to fall victim to the corona virus. I was supposed to have just gotten back from Washington DC yesterday, having attended Computers in Libraries. Later next month, I was to go back to DC for National Library Legislative Day. But both of those trips were for work. This one was supposed to be for fun.
It’s not a disaster, since I had paid for the whole thing with points, and I’ve gotten all those points back now. It’s more just a disappointment. Though of course, the thought of going to an airport and getting on a plane with a bunch of strangers isn’t exactly the most comforting thought. (I wonder how many people are going to develop agoraphobia after all this is said and done . . .)
That said, life seems to be a series of disappointments at the moment, and they all tend to glom on to each other, one after another. I’m trying to stay chipper, and most days I succeed for at least of the day. It’s hard to feel really bad for myself when at least the big things are still going fine. I’m still employed, my family is healthy, and we’re all together and doing okay. That’s important at a time when I know that’s not the case for many others. So I’m grateful for what I’ve got, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sad for the things that are falling by the wayside, one after another.
I see them pop up on my digital calendar. Events that are vestiges from what might have been had everything gone the way the world thought they would. Tomas would be at a robotics event this weekend. Daniela would be at cello lessons right now. There were playdates and parties. Track season was supposed to be ramping up. Each of them come up as reminders, and I have to dismiss them. Part of me wants to just delete all of them, but . . . I can’t bring myself to do that either.
Who knows how long this will last. The next trip that might bite the dust is Disneyworld at the end of June. I have no idea what things will look like by then. On the one hand, I’d like to think that by then we’ve got a handle on things. On the other, I can think of few places I could go that will be more germ-y than Disneyworld . . .
Have a nice weekend, folks. I’ll catch you on Monday.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 2, 2020
Book Review: The Great Divorce
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
When it comes to titles, “The Great Divorce” leaves much to be desired. Before I first read it (which was something like 18 years ago now), I always pictured it as being some long, densely-written tome that discussed . . . I don’t know. Some abstract thought thing that would put me to sleep after about three lines. Yes, it’s by CS Lewis, but come on. “The Great Divorce”? It practically screams “Don’t read me!” right from the cover.
But I was forced to read the book as part of a class I took on CS Lewis back at BYU, and I was so glad I got shoved into the act. And while I’m stuck in-doors, I decided to revisit it, and it was just as good the second time as it was the first. I gave it a 9/10, and I really recommend it to anyone who’d like a good book that will make you think. It’s an excellent companion to his more well-known Screwtape Letters.
Why will you like it? For one thing, it’s anything but long and dry. It clocks in at 146 pages, and much of it breezes along. It tells a first person account of a supposed dream Lewis has, in which he begins in hell and travels from there to heaven. Except hell is anything but the fire pool of torment you would typically imagine. It’s a world very like our own, peopled entirely by individuals who choose to remain there, and the bulk of the book is devoted to examining the different reasons people have for staying in hell rather than going to heaven.
Basically, it’s a series of character studies, as Lewis sees one interaction after another, with each person from hell giving a different reason for why they don’t want to go to heaven. Many of them can be hit quite close to home. There are a few times when Lewis really dives into some dense thoughts, and those are the few times I think he flounders a bit to try to capture what he’s trying to say. At least, those were the time that the book felt weakest to me (though perhaps others would love them). For me, the book (and Lewis in general) is strongest when he’s talking about big thoughts in very easy to understand terms. Here are a couple of highlights from the text that stood out to me:
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.” (p59)
“That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.” (p54)
But there’s a ton more in there that’s really worthy of reading. So if you’re stuck inside for a while, and you’d like to raise your thinking a bit, give The Great Divorce a chance. Just don’t be too stuck on the title.
View all my reviews
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 1, 2020
Video Game Review: Animal Crossing New Horizons
Maine officially closes down tomorrow, with the governor having issued a Stay at Home order that starts at midnight tonight. I saw the writing on the wall well in advance, and so I’ve been looking for ways for my family to not go insane while we’re in quarantine. We’ve got plenty of ways to distract ourselves, but I wanted to get in some different ways where we could do things together. If we came out of this quarantine, and everyone had just spent time doing things on their own, then that would be a failure.
That said, it’s been strange to navigate a new normal in this new environment. I’m at home each day, but I have a bunch of work to do. It’s not like I can put it all aside and just go play games with the kids. In fact, the kids all have homework they’re supposed to be doing as well. So we’re all at the house, but during the day there’s a lot of “all of us working on our own” time, and then we get back together in the late afternoon, almost as if we’re all coming back from work and school.
In any case, I’d heard a lot of good things about the new Animal Crossing game. It’s been so popular over the quarantine time that Nintendo Switches are selling out again, and have once more become hard to obtain. So if you already have a Switch, then this could be a great thing for you to check out for your family. If you don’t . . . it might be hard to play along.
The original Animal Crossing for the Gamecube is one of the few games Denisa ever really played extensively. If you’ve never encountered the game before, it’s pretty straightforward: you play a villager in a town. You do jobs around town to make money and pay for enhancements to your house. You can catch bugs, fish, interact with other villagers, and just generally play at your own speed. There’s no dying. No real competition. It’s just a laid back way to pass the time.
For the Switch version, you have couch co-op, meaning up to four players can play on the screen at the same time, as long as you have enough controllers. That was the detail that really made me decide to try it out. It’s easy to pass the main control from one player to another. (Only one player at a time can talk to villagers and buy and sell things.) It’s already been a smash hit. We’ve had hours of time when two, three, or four players are up playing at the same time. Denisa even came out of retirement last night to have a go at things again.
MC is the biggest fan of the game. She just keeps saying how it’s the “best game ever,” and loves taking as much time as we’ll give her to go around and fish and decorate her house. There’s been a bit of a to do around the game online, since for couch co-op, all progress of the town (making new buildings, for example) rests on the first person to play the game. This means only one person can have “control” over the island, potentially. For our situation, I actually think that works better. I made myself the main player, so there’s no arguing among the kids for what to do and what changes to make. Also, the whole point is to have us all play together, so I’m glad (for now, at least) that we’re not all in different save files in the game. It’s a cooperative thing, and that’s why I bought it.
Anyway. If you have a Switch and are looking for some sustained activities that can bring your family together, I definitely give the game my full endorsement. It sounds bizarre, perhaps, but it really is a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to escape from what’s a pretty grim reality facing us right now.
Give it a shot!
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
