A is for Anatomy
26 Week Blog Challenge Letter A
A is for Anatomy
I have taken the 26-week blog challenge given by Tonia Brown along with several other authors. I’m not by nature one to blog about a subject, really I’m more of a ranter. Sometimes it manages to be humorous. Honestly, there is a fair chunk of my writing ideas that come from things that piss me off. Game design ideas come from things that could be better or went wrong. For reference see the art for the AD&D dragons around the early 1990’s where they started to all look alike.
Anyway, the challenge is themed with doing the alphabet. I’ve seen this done before by other writers and authors. I’ve seen it done well, in fact. Sadly that makes the bar higher and also makes it feel like an over-used prom theme. Still, it is a writing exercise and those with themes of some kind are usually good. You don’t always get to pick your theme, especially if you try to do the short story market.
Since it is week 1, the letter of the day is “A”. For me, A is for Anatomy. But rather than wax on about actual anatomy and physiology, I wanted to do one on “How to fail anatomy by trusting video games”. (I’m going to do anatomy and botany actually, and maybe a little geology; we’ll see how it goes.)
I love video games, I do, but if you were to trust them for your science foundation, you’d be a mess! Let’s jump in, shall we?
So recently I’ve been all hot on Dragon Age Inquisition. Some day I will look back at this or others might and go, “Wow, that was so long ago!” but one must face such fears and press onward.
Did you know that spiders have rib-cages? Yep. Underneath all that exoskeleton lies an internal one, at least according to this game. In fact, I think all creatures are made up of rib cage and goo according to this game. Mind you, the satisfying squish/splut noise from liquefying monsters doesn’t go out of style. Oh, and I guess they might be part gaseous as sometimes there are no ribs left behind, only a dissipating gas.
People, on the other hand, are made up of neatly folded, tiny backpacks. A friend hypothesized that there are death gnomes that steal the bodies, kind of like the hovercraft in Hunger Games. If you are around they guess at what things you might most want off of the body and leave it in a neat little package. This explains why there is no armor, weapons, etc. sometimes, just some enchanted ring or memento from home from a giant in armor wielding an axe. Don’t steal that idea, btw. The guy who came up with it has a certain set of skills. No, not those ones, worse.
Next up is Dragon’s Dogma. Did you know that carrots grow on vines just like pumpkins? In fact, almost all veggies grow on vines in this game. I will give some credit to Dragon Age Inquisition for having crops in the field that look like the actual plants do, but they get less than Elder Scrolls: Oblivion as you can harvest the veggies growing in said fields.
Weirdly enough, you can collect Morning Glory Root Pulp in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and apparently not utterly destroy the plant in the process. No, it keeps growing happily along.
Dragon’s Dogma does get props for having the potential for your character to get eaten by a hydra and ride around in its gullet for a bit before hitting the stomach. If you get swallowed whole by a large animal, you may well be alive for a time if it didn’t go through the proper effort to dispatch you.
Remember Noah and the Whale? There is a real-life account of a guy from a whaling ship who fell over and got swallowed. (It’s in a book of naval tales somewhere out there. Sadly I don’t have a copy.) The whale was caught 3 days later and when they slit it, the guy was alive in the belly! Mind you, he was not in great shape, seems stomach acid tends to bleach you a bit. Given the internal temperature of whales, I suspect this one got badly injured and wasn’t doing so hot as the guy should have baked in there. Still, it can and actually has happened. Truth is stranger than fiction, eh?
Well, I could go on all day, but I’ll stop here. Mario and turtles you are plenty familiar with. Do take time to check out Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s take on Pac Man.
Ciao for now.
A is for Anatomy
I have taken the 26-week blog challenge given by Tonia Brown along with several other authors. I’m not by nature one to blog about a subject, really I’m more of a ranter. Sometimes it manages to be humorous. Honestly, there is a fair chunk of my writing ideas that come from things that piss me off. Game design ideas come from things that could be better or went wrong. For reference see the art for the AD&D dragons around the early 1990’s where they started to all look alike.
Anyway, the challenge is themed with doing the alphabet. I’ve seen this done before by other writers and authors. I’ve seen it done well, in fact. Sadly that makes the bar higher and also makes it feel like an over-used prom theme. Still, it is a writing exercise and those with themes of some kind are usually good. You don’t always get to pick your theme, especially if you try to do the short story market.
Since it is week 1, the letter of the day is “A”. For me, A is for Anatomy. But rather than wax on about actual anatomy and physiology, I wanted to do one on “How to fail anatomy by trusting video games”. (I’m going to do anatomy and botany actually, and maybe a little geology; we’ll see how it goes.)
I love video games, I do, but if you were to trust them for your science foundation, you’d be a mess! Let’s jump in, shall we?
So recently I’ve been all hot on Dragon Age Inquisition. Some day I will look back at this or others might and go, “Wow, that was so long ago!” but one must face such fears and press onward.
Did you know that spiders have rib-cages? Yep. Underneath all that exoskeleton lies an internal one, at least according to this game. In fact, I think all creatures are made up of rib cage and goo according to this game. Mind you, the satisfying squish/splut noise from liquefying monsters doesn’t go out of style. Oh, and I guess they might be part gaseous as sometimes there are no ribs left behind, only a dissipating gas.
People, on the other hand, are made up of neatly folded, tiny backpacks. A friend hypothesized that there are death gnomes that steal the bodies, kind of like the hovercraft in Hunger Games. If you are around they guess at what things you might most want off of the body and leave it in a neat little package. This explains why there is no armor, weapons, etc. sometimes, just some enchanted ring or memento from home from a giant in armor wielding an axe. Don’t steal that idea, btw. The guy who came up with it has a certain set of skills. No, not those ones, worse.
Next up is Dragon’s Dogma. Did you know that carrots grow on vines just like pumpkins? In fact, almost all veggies grow on vines in this game. I will give some credit to Dragon Age Inquisition for having crops in the field that look like the actual plants do, but they get less than Elder Scrolls: Oblivion as you can harvest the veggies growing in said fields.
Weirdly enough, you can collect Morning Glory Root Pulp in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and apparently not utterly destroy the plant in the process. No, it keeps growing happily along.
Dragon’s Dogma does get props for having the potential for your character to get eaten by a hydra and ride around in its gullet for a bit before hitting the stomach. If you get swallowed whole by a large animal, you may well be alive for a time if it didn’t go through the proper effort to dispatch you.
Remember Noah and the Whale? There is a real-life account of a guy from a whaling ship who fell over and got swallowed. (It’s in a book of naval tales somewhere out there. Sadly I don’t have a copy.) The whale was caught 3 days later and when they slit it, the guy was alive in the belly! Mind you, he was not in great shape, seems stomach acid tends to bleach you a bit. Given the internal temperature of whales, I suspect this one got badly injured and wasn’t doing so hot as the guy should have baked in there. Still, it can and actually has happened. Truth is stranger than fiction, eh?
Well, I could go on all day, but I’ll stop here. Mario and turtles you are plenty familiar with. Do take time to check out Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s take on Pac Man.
Ciao for now.