The Legend of Zelda

My favorite video game will always be The Legend of Zelda.  It even rivals Mario Party and Mario Kart which fall in the second and third slots.  As fun as they may be, they do not even rival the Zelda games.  

When I was in middle school, my brother got me into playing video games, particularly The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  I played this game for an hour everyday after school until I beat it.  You may think that this is antisocial behavior, and perhaps it was, but my little Juli self needed the distraction.  

Life was hard for shy little me during middle school.  This game gave me an outlet that made me feel better about myself.  Whenever I beat a level I felt accomplished and proud.  

The game taught me persistence and patience.  Whenever you died you had to start at the beginning of that level, even if you died near the end.  I would sometimes become annoyed but then I would attack the level with a new determination.  I believe that playing video games, especially the Legend of Zelda games, contributed to my ability to stay on task and persist even when things became difficult and tedious.  

This video game helped me learn.  Many of the levels involved games that used observation and problem solving to get to the next level.  The levels contained long puzzles which involved memorizing and mental exercises.  It taught me to think quickly and strategically.

The story line of Legend of Zelda games usually involve acts of kindness.  The main character, Link, is fighting to rescue a princess and to save the people of Hyrule.  Along the way, Link is often asked to help people with their difficulties.  He puts aside his rescuing quest to assist various people in the land from finding chickens to saving lives. Zelda games are filled with prosocial acts.  The newest Zelda game includes awards for kindness called gratitude crystals.  When Link does something nice for someone, a gratitude crystal appears before them. You collect these as the game goes along.  Once you get a certain amount of crystals, you receive an award.

I love playing this game because of all the wonderful prosocial acts. It might be considered an aggressive prosocial game, but I believe that the acts of violence committed do not negatively influence the player.

If you are going to play any kind of one-player video game. I'd recommend the Legend of Zelda games.

Why do we cry? - Spoiler Alert

If you watch Downton Abbey and haven't seen the second season, be warned; this blog contains a spoiler.  There are no details but I may still give things away.  So if you haven't heard of the series, keep reading.  If you have, proceed with caution.

A few nights ago I watched an episode of Downtown Abbey season 2.  I was comfortably wrapped up in my blankets on my bed watching a TV show that, after a hard few days work, I well-deserved.  I couldn't sleep so I decided to distract myself for awhile.  But poor unsuspecting me did know what was in store in this episode.

One of my favorite characters died in a most sudden and distressing way.  I may have been PMSing or something, but the next thing I know, I was crying--really crying.  Quiet sobs shook my body and tears were actually running down my cheeks.  Mucus started dripping from my nose; I had to run to the bathroom to clean up.

I watched the rest of the episode in tears and then lay down to sleep.  And as you might guess, sleep did not come quickly.  I was too distressed.  Why did they kill one of the sweetest girls on the show!?!?

While I waited for sleep to come, I wondered why I had cried.  I had no connection to this person.  She wasn't even real so why should I feel such emotions at her death. It's not like my mother just died.  I have a few theories, and I'm sure the book for my media class would have some more that might explain my despair.

As I watched the show, I became attached to the characters.  I felt and cared about their pain, their happiness, their anything.  I became virtual friends with these fictional characters. At this girls death, I experienced and saw the pain her family felt as she died.  The circumstances in which she died were heart-wrenching.  She died after childbirth, leaving behind a daughter, a husband, and a family who depended on her for her love.  Suddenly she was stripped away from them. Along with her family, I felt their pain.  I sympathized with them and put myself in their place.  If my sister had just died in childbirth, leaving behind a husband with a newborn daughter to raise, I would have cried just as much.  That small portion of pain I felt while watching this character's death would become full-fledged and real if it were in my own life.  Not only did I feel for the characters but also for my possible future pain.  Some strange, masochistic side of me wanted to live their pain, to pretend as if it had happened to me.  The way people think, the way people imagine, is sometimes perverse.  In my mind I was imagining something horrible;  I was purposefully causing myself pain.

I cried in empathy for the characters. 

I cried in sympathy for myself, for the human race, and our inevitable struggles and pain.

Kindleton

In class last week, someone mentioned e-readers and I figured I put in my two bits about it.  When I first heard of the kindle or the nook, etc., I thought it was a horrible idea.  Who would replace books with an electronic device, right?  Why replace a book with its real paper and crinkling, turning pages with a boring screen and buttons.  What a travesty!

My opinion changed when my mom got a Kindle Touch for her birthday.  I began to see the wonderful advantages of an e-reader.  I mentioned off-handedly to my mother that it might be nice to have a Kindle, and the next thing I know, I got one for Christmas.

Here are the reasons why I love my Kindle:

1) Portability: It's flat. It's small. It's amazing. I can carry it around easily in my purse or backpack and pull it out whenever and where ever I want.  I no longer have to carry around several heavy books.  And best of all, I can have 20 or more books with no additional weight.

2) Scriptures: I downloaded the scriptures onto my Kindle soon after I received it.  Since then my scripture reading has increased dramatically.  I always have my Kindle on me so I always have my scriptures.  During free time I pull it out and read a page or two.  I usually read my scriptures before bed, and ever since I got my Kindle I've been even more excited to turn it on and read.  Plus, the Kindle saves where you left of so I no longer have to wonder where I stopped.

3) Light weight: this is one advantage that I did not entirely appreciation until I experienced it myself.  Holding a Kindle is so much easier than holding a book.  I can lie in bed with my Kindle above my head or to the side and my hand never tires.  Books used to irritate me because I had to prop them open or keep them in my lap because they were too heavy to hold up.  Now I can relax and read a book with no struggle.

4) Highlighting: I can highlight and save my favorite quotes and scriptures on my Kindle.

5) Privacy: How you ever felt embarrassed when reading a book in public?  With a Kindle you don't have to feel embarrassed; no one knows what you are reading but you.  You no longer have to try to discreetly hide the fact that you're reading a sappy romance novel, a kids' book, a gigantic fantasy series, or a popular vampire romance novel.  Those old, embarrassing book covers will plague you no more.

6) Reading in the bathtub:  I got this idea from my aunt.  She puts her Kindle in a zip-lock bag and reads while taking a bath.  It's wonderful and a dream come true.

The only disadvantage is having another electronic device I have to recharge.  Sometimes I forgot, which is very distressing sometimes. 

But other than that, I love having my little Kindleton with me.

A Voice in the Wind

My favorite book now is hard for me to pick.  I love so many.  I like to keep track of the books I’ve read and according to goodreads I’ve read 269 books and I’m sure I’ve forgotten to add more.  But for the sake of this assignment I will pick one that is a top favorite.  It’s call A Voice in the Wind by Francine Rivers.  Rivers is mainly a romance author, and there is a hint of that in her books, but A Voice in the Wind is a historical fiction.  After the destruction of Jerusalem, Hadassah, a Christian girl, is taken as a slave for a Roman aristocrat family under the pretense that she is a Jew.  If anyone found out she was a Christian, she would be sent to the arena to be brutally killed.  This book is about her, her faith, and the Roman family she serves and grows to love.  To make things more difficult she falls in love with the handsome epicurean in the family, who surprisingly falls in love with her.  But because he does not believe in God, she cannot love him as he would like.

I loved this book because it delved into the struggles of a girl around my age who lived my standards but in a wholly different time. Hadassah was so much like me in many ways and her personality and her actions in the book inspired me to be a better person.  She followed her faith no matter the consequences.  Her strength and courage in the book gave me a model to go by.  I loved the historical detail and I thought the author did a marvelous job portraying the beliefs, actions, and environments of the Roman people. The book also gave me much to think about concerning the beliefs of the Romans and the reason for their fall.  It taught me history and gave me an image in my mind of what life must have been like.  After reading this book, I went on to read other historical fiction books to learned and, in a way, experienced history more than I ever could in a classroom.  

Dragonsong

One of my favorite books when I was younger was Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey.  It’s about a girl who finds herself involved the planet Pern’s troubles.  Menolly lives in a hall beside the sea, and her only love and desire is to create music, but her father forbids it because she is a girl. The planet Pern is a dangerous place.  Every two hundred years, gray threads rain from the sky to destroy every living thing they land on.  It is up to the native dragons and their riders to destroy the thread and protect the land.  In addition to the dragons, little fire lizards, miniature dragons, roam the land and are highly valued as pets.  Angry at her father for destroying her dream, Menolly runs away from home, gets caught in Threadfall, befriends nine fire lizards, and lives to tell the tale.  But that’s just the beginning of her story.  Menolly moves on the Harperhall to be trained as a harper, a teller of tales and a musician, but also finds herself submerged into bigger things with her nine singing fire lizards. 

This book is my favorite because it embodies all I wanted in a book when I was a teenager.  I loved fantasy books with dragons and adventure.  The main character Menolly was easy for me to relate to.  She was a musician like me and her personality was similar to mine.  Her struggles suddenly became dear to my heart and I felt for her.  She reminded me so much of myself.  I also loved this book because it reminds me of good times with my sister.  She read this to me out loud as we gave each other back tickles and ate heath bars.  It was a great bonding moment for us and this book will forever remind me of my sister.  The book itself didn’t have a huge impact on my life but it did influence my imagination.  This book and many others inspired me to imagine stories, plot lines and lovable characters.  Dragonsong sparked a huge interest for reading.  After this book I went on to read every other book Anne McCaffrey had about the Dragonriders of Pern.  It sparked inside me a huge desire to read and vicariously have adventures through the characters.  But it also taught me how to create adventures of my own making inside my imagination.