Cool Cherry Cream

Zubatman to the rescue!

Okay, so I missed posting yesterday. I was planning on it and I even had a specific topic in mind, but I… got distracted. And so, today I shall bring you not only one, but TWO posts! Well, actually, only one post, but focusing on two different things.

Yearbook class is slacking class. Nobody does much of anything anymore. Well, no one did much of anything in the first place, but even less so now that school is almost over. Yesterday, Ryan was explaining 1337 speak to our teacher, who then said he was going to write the exam entirely in 1337 speak. Someone remarked that probably 80% of our class would still be able to understand it. Pretty good estimate, if you aren't counting the people who won't bother to show up for the exam (I, sadly, am in the majority here).

Anyway, what I mean to say is, we're a big bunch of nerds. Nerds like to game, and in these days of high technology, gaming is portable, and what better to do in Yearbook class than game? There are usually four or so kids sitting around the table, playing and battling and yelling "zeta slow!". I started to feel left out with all these people around me playing their Nintendo DS's, so I did something about it. I brought my GameBoy Color.

I never did manage to catch 'em all on "Pokemon Crystal", so now I'm determined to do just that (104 and counting! Yesss!). It's become such a part of me that now, not only am I playing during study halls and during lunch and during Yearbook (I never realized how much wasted time there is at school), but I come home and start playing again! It was supposed to just be something to do when there is nothing to do, but now I'm doing it for fun!

And when I'm not playing, I'm on Bulbapedia, trying to figure out which Pokemon I should use as my six and which moves I should teach them and where to find all those items I never picked up.

It's also been surprising educational. I'm terrible with wikis; I've fallen into the trap of Wikipedia and Lostpedia many a time, so obviously I wasn't immune to this one. Turns out MissingNo. was real, and turns out there actually were glitches that would allow you to catch Mew! And it turns out that many of those "go here, talk to this person 99 times, then walk here, then press this…" stories I used to read about actually were true. I always thought those long processes were ridiculous, because why would they make you do all those crazy things to get a Pokemon/item/whatever? I didn't know anything about programming (and apparently still don't know anything about programming glitches), so none of that seemed reasonable.

But now, reading about how the Old Man trick works, I can see the logic in it. Another neat programming thing I read was about how Pokemon retain their "shininess" or alternate colouring when traded back and forth between the old Red/Blue/Yellow version and the newer Gold/Silver/Crystal versions, when RBY didn't have this feature. A Pokemon is shiny if its stats (attack, defense, etc) match a certain number. So basically:

if(speed = 10 && defense == 10 && special == 10 && attack == 10)
     shiny = true;

I thought that was pretty cool. I'd much rather be playing Pokemon right now, but I will finish this post and will work on my Creative Writing poem.

Which brings me to my next topic: Creative Writing. Ahhh. So, remember the old poem analysis assignment on a poem and author that turn up no results in Google? As suspected, I did do the assignment on my own, but that was no big deal.

What was a big deal was the day after that post, I approached the teacher for help. I explained my situation (there's nothing on the poem, there's multiple people who could have written it) and asked if she had any information on the poem or author or knew what I could do. So what did she tell me? "Just look deeper and you'll find it".

Translation: "I don't know either". If you don't know something, just admit it. Seriously!

Luckily, her lack of knowledge on the subject she's teaching came in handy for me. There were two people who may have written the poem, one was a translator, the other a comic book writer. It was probably the translator. But on a whim, I decided it was the comic book writer. That's a much more exciting profession, don't you think? It also makes for a much more interesting analysis.

This poem, like I said, was very short, very non-specific. "Poetry is all about your interpretation", the teacher had said, so I went and took this as far as I possibly could. This poem, which talks about birds and trees and wind and poems, I spun around into an extended metaphor, comparing writing a poem to creating a superhero. "Lighter than air" the poem read. I read this as "faster than a speeding bullet!" (hey, they both use "than"!). There were two lines that were nearly identical, talking about a bird, then a tree, and then the third line changed it up and talked about a poem. I took this to mean "it's a bird, it's a plane… it's Superman!".

All this, I stood in front of the class today and said with a straight face.

And the best part? She accepted it! And possibly even — dare I say? — believed it. When I was done, she asked me a question about the author's background, and I summarized the opening paragraph of his page on Wikipedia, which was all the research I did when I learned there was nothing more to learn. That seemed to be enough. She asked what I learned from the poem and I just restated the bit about it being an extended metaphor in different words. "Well, comic books are seen as like, not very… mature… and poems are more, like… deep and stuff…" I said. Deep… and stuff. Very concise, Jenny.