Author Archives: Ryan Markel

Colossi Cast Really Big Shadows, Or: It’s Time to Clear the Backlog.

Inspired by a thread at 360 Arcadians, I’ve decided that my Xbox 360 going in for repairs was the perfect time to begin attempting to clear out my game backlog (that is, the games I own that I have not yet finished). The entire backlog is listed below.

I began with Shadow of the Colossus, which actually took me about a week of real life to get through, mostly because there were several evenings I didn’t play anything at all. I’m determined to play through only one game at a time, to make sure that I actually finish a few this time around.

Colossus was pretty good in the end. There was a period with a few of the mid-game colossi where I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like the game as a whole, and I believe I stated that I hated the game in those circumstances, but when the 12th colossus and later rolled around, I found I was actually having fun. I still think the controls are a bit iffy and the camera is detestable, but the overall experience was a good one. The game has atmosphere by the bucketful and pushes the PS2 pretty well.

It started strong and ended strong, so I’m willing to forgive some of the sloppiness and poor enemy design in the middle few encounters. 1 through about 5 or 6 (maybe even 7) were great and introduced everything well, and the last four colossi were simply amazing to play.

For the record, the final time to completion according to my savefile (which includes watching the credits) was 9:38:09.

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We’re Thankful That the Answer to Our Question Appears to Be “Nothing.”

I have two other, much more mundane posts in the draft hopper that are going to be posted later today when I get the time to do so, but both video games and my stuff breaking seemed at least a bit trivial in the wake of this afternoon’s slight scare that I’m not too worried about getting to them until after the children are in bed and my wife has returned home for the evening.

Early last week, Amanda began to display very faint signs that she was headed for pre-term labor with Hannah. We didn’t think much of it the first day, but when it happened a couple of days in a row, we were mildly concerned, so I had her call her doctor. She was told that she should report to the women’s evaluation unit at the hospital if she should experience any further symptoms like those she had seen, to at least go through some tests and maybe an examination to make sure she wasn’t going to have the baby anytime soon.

Guess what happened today.

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Where Did Everything Go? And What Happened?

Long story short:

I’m moving the family stuff off Drupal and back to WordPress. There are two side effects to this change:

  • The Drupal-originating posts won’t be here for a little while as I work on exporting/importing them, which shouldn’t take all that long.
  • My entire archive, from the last six years, is now once again available as part of my blog. It’s stuff that’s been missing for some time, and it still suffers from some Unicode problems from an import gone awry from long ago, but it’s all here, including the stupid categories I used to have (which I’ll be cleaning up soon).

This doesn’t change much for most people who are going to visit the blog, but my feed *has* been moved as well, and I’ll be redirecting my FeedBurner feeds in order to compensate.

I Am Ashamed That I Did Not Buy My Wife Something Made of Wood

For those not in the know, Amanda and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary this past Thursday the 18th.

We used up two days to celebrate, wihch is something we try to do with anything that’s a big deal in our lives in order to stretch it out and not make it feel as fleeting.  On Thursday, we had our anniversary proper, with no gifts (not in the budget for this year), but a wonderful meal of stale bread soup, which combines all sorts of things we both like, such as beef stock, northern beans, thick bread, diced ham, garlic, and spinach.  It’s really very good.

Last night, we used up a gift card my parents had sent us for Mothers’ Day and snagged some Applebee’s to go.  Good stuff – I’ll take any excuse I can to have some ribs, she got this seasonal-item steak sandwich that looked really good, and we shared an appetizer of tavern chips, which are little, thinkly sliced pieces of potato that are then fried, covered entirely with bacon pieces, jack, and cheddar cheeses, and packed with a little dipping tray of ranch dressing that’s had a whole bunch of awesome spices added to it.

All told, we are just extremely pleased to look at how far we have come and see the changes and the challenges we have faced together over the past five (and really, more like nine!) years.  It hasn’t been an easy path the whole time, and there have been times where we have disagreed rather strongly on one thing or another.  Sometimes, we wonder how we managed through some of the more upsetting things that have happened.

But at the end of each day, I love my wife and I love her for everything that she is, and I would never trade what we have for anything in the world.

Love you, Mrs.!

It is Now Officially “On,” Even Though It Will Take a While

Amanda just received a phone call from our house builder, and we are meeting the construction manager next week to discuss the home site and go through any questions we might have.

This means they will be doing things like pouring concrete and other cool things like that very, very soon.

Weather permitting, we could be in our home in four months or so.

“Stoked” does not even begin to explain how I feel about this right now.