The stupidest conspiracy theory ever: "[W]hat happens when you put a light bulb inside a sealed reflective sphere? Where does the light go? What happens when it is switched off? The answer is all too clear:
it bounces off the inside of the sphere and goes back down the wire!"
Started playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Satyrday. It's fairly cool. My previous Zelda experience is limited to dabbling in the first one, playing about 20% of the second one, and beating the one for GameBoy, so I speak with no great authority when I say that it feels like a Zelda game that's successfully made the transition to 3D. Exceptions to this include the 'overworld,' which is bloody huge and easy to get lost in (as opposed to being basically made up of a grid), the ridiculous and ridiculously short day/night cycle (Link can run for THREE DAYS STRAIGHT without breaking a sweat!), and the difficulties in trying to target one specific enemy out of three or four. Oh, and my sword doesn't shoot magic bullets when my health is full. (To compensate for this I have a slingshot.) I'm enjoying myself, except that the dungeon I'm stuck on (inside a large fish who is also the god of the fish-folk) has tons of creatures that electrocute me when I whack them with the sword and are invulnerable to the slingshot. Having to haul a small girl around with me doesn't help matters either.
I make it sound like the game is more irritating than fun, which isn't the case. I really
do like it. The coolness of gliding long distances because you're holding a chicken over your head cannot be overemphasised. About the only thing it doesn't have is monkeys. But nothing is perfect.
Today I read a collection of short essays on writing, by various famous and semifamous authors (William F. Buckley, Jr., Julia Child, and Danielle Steel, among others). This was made far cooler than it sounds by the fact that the authors were apparently told "Pick your favorite Peanuts cartoon featuring Snoopy trying to write, and give him some advice." Since Peanuts has been my favorite comic strip since just about forever, this was super-cool. The advice given is of varying quality (Elmore Leonard says 'Make sure you name your characters something interesting,' while someone I've forgotten warns against overdescribing the setting) but is fun to read, and the cartoons are of course first-rate.
There's one introduction by Charles Schulz's son Monte, and another by a guy who ran an annual writers' workshop that Schulz spoke at for thirty years. Both are reminiscences on Schulz and his writing. They're very different in the details, of course, but they both paint a picture of a man who dearly loved his work and his books. Add another person to the list of Those I Should Have Met Before They Died, Dammit.
