• I just found out that I won’t be able to watch Nintendo’s E3 presentation via live stream, because I’ll be at work next Tuesday. D: Oh well, I guess I’ll just watch it when I come home.
• Trailer for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 = most awesome thing ever??!! I’m not a Castlevania fan, I’ve never played the first LoS, I’ll probably never get to play LoS2, and I’m still excited.
• I’m trying to prepare myself for the long slog that is editing my dystopian story. Whoo-hoo.

Dunno if I should do one of these playthrough impressions for Xenoblade, since I doubt I have many interesting things to say. But I guess I might as well try! Based on people saying they took over 100 hours to complete this game, I guess this will last my sister and me through the end of summer…

- Reached Satorl Marsh, which is freakin’ gorgeous at night. I just walked around the area with my jaw hanging open. It was lovely, except for the level 80 monsters all over the place. Also, I walked into a poison lake without noticing until I started to lose health. :/

- If I were to describe Xenoblade in one word, it would be: BIG. The areas are HUGE (hello Bionis’ Leg/Gaur Plain!), so huge that you have an insta-warp ability at the start of the game because you really need it, and the game has a ridiculous amount of content, from seemingly endless numbers of sidequests to tons of party customizability.

- The more I progress through the story, the more I don’t understand what’s going on. D:

- I’m used to playing the kinds of action-RPGs like Zelda, where the only customization you have is selecting gear, so Xenoblade’s system still blows me away. I’m sure I’m handling the combat like a n00b…

I need one of those “all the feels” GIFs.

My feelings D:

(This is what I get for listening to “Time” from Inception on loop. While writing about parent-child relationships. AURGH.)

Did they really just skip explaining how Jefferson survived that three-story fall?

:/

“If you cannot tell a story, all those beautiful images and subtleties of dialogue that you spent months and months perfecting waste the paper they’re written on. What we create for the world, what it demands of us, is story.”

- Robert McKee, Story

Rant time! Because I’m totally procrastinating on my final essay :P

I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I was a kid. But my life doesn’t resemble that of a lot of authors I know. By the time I hit high school, English was not only not my forte—next to science, it was my weakest subject. Which, in retrospect, I guess was good for me, because it forced me to grow, to keep on my toes, to never fall into the trap that I knew, definitively, how to write well and there was nothing more I had to learn.

But high school was also the time when I went through a lot of crises of faith. While struggling in English classes made me learn, it also really dented my self-confidence, making me think that all my dreams were just misguided because I was never cut out to be a good writer. More than that, though, I was lost and confused. I liked reading fantasy and YA novels, and those were the kinds of stories I liked to write, but high school taught me that what I liked was childish and not serious.

We had an annual creative writing competition for juniors and seniors, and though I never won (I was too chicken to submit a fantasy piece for the competition, and my realistic fiction frankly sucks), I always read the winning pieces eagerly, trying to see if there was anything I could learn from them.

But whenever I read the winner’s work, and I listened to my classmates praise the living daylights out of the winning piece, I felt hollow. I didn’t like what they had written. And I began to wonder, “Is something wrong with me? Am I a bad reader, too? How can I even think of becoming a writer if I can’t even figure out why this obviously brilliant short story won a contest? Who do I think I am?”

I graduated high school and moved on to college. And I had sort of given up on writing at that point. Instead, I got a new obsession: my first semester of freshman year, I became fixated on learning as many languages as I could.

But when you love to create stories, it’s hard to really let that go. First semester ended, and with it ended my obsession with language learning. Second semester rolled around, and It happened to me: A lightning bolt of inspiration. That itch, once more, to create a world and populate it with characters, and set it down on paper.

That summer, I sat down to read Robert McKee’s Story—and it honestly changed my life.

I learned that I wasn’t wrong and I wasn’t stupid, because what was lacking in those prizewinning pieces I read was an actual story. I realized that what I’ve been driven to do, all my life, was not to write for the sake of writing, but to create stories.

I may be a literary rebel. I may be alone in my beliefs; I may be wrong, and I may just disappear into the faceless ocean of writers who are published and then forgotten. But I’m done with being lost and confused. I’m through questioning myself; I’m ready to act.

At the end of the day, people don’t remember how well you wrote, or how pretty your words sound. Which is not to say that writing isn’t important; of course it is, but the best writing can’t salvage a mess of a plot. At the end of the day, what people remember is a good story.

I am baffled by how inconsistent my writing ability is.

When you agree to meet your lab partner in the library, and she doesn’t show up…

And the lab report is due in two days…

And you would write the whole thing yourself, except you can’t remember half of what you did in lab…

There are no words for my frustration right now. >:|

The danger of working on a piece of writing by yourself for too long is that you’ll always reach the point at which you hate everything you wrote, and you can’t see the good in it.

Let’s see…

My eating habits have gone to hell, I’m tired all the time, I can’t sleep well, I’ve got random aches and pains, my attention span and productivity have dropped to near zero, and my brains have turned into scrambled eggs.

Yep, it’s the end of the semester, all right.

Buh.

Totally burned out from a take-home quiz.

:(

Spoilers below!

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