Ever struggled with your own duality? You are not alone! I let my dichotomies dialogue, and my creative muse appeared on my journey to oneness. May my musings inspire your own unique expression. We all have our own star song.
The word "control" has many implications for video games. On a basic level, without player control, there is no experience. Much of the video game industry focuses on questions of control and ways to improve play to make the gamer feel more connected to the virtual world. The sixteen essays in this collection offer critical examinations of the issue of control in video games, including different ways to theorize and define control within video gaming and how control impacts game design and game play. Close readings of specific games--including Grand Theft Auto IV, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Dragon Age: Origins--consider how each locates elements of control in their structures. As video games increasingly become a major force in the media landscape, this important contribution to the field of game studies provides a valuable framework for understanding their growing impact.
Ye Tian, whose soul had transmigrated to the continent, was originally just a child of a small family. However, because of an accident, he met the princess of the Ling Tian Sect, a great power of the continent.
How often have I overheard alluring snatches of song, only to be baffled by denial when I asked for more. Kindly black faces smile indulgently as at the vagaries of an imaginative child, when I persist in pleading for the rest. "Nawm, honey, I wa and n and t singing nothing — nothing a-tall! " How often have I been tricked into enthusiasm over the promise of folk-songs, only to hear age-worn phonograph records, — but perhaps so changed and worked upon by usage that they could possibly claim to be folk-songs after all! — or Broadway echoes, or conventional songs by white authors! Yet cajolements might be in vain, even though all the time I knew, by the uncanny instinct of folk-lorists, that there were folk-songs there. And even when you get a song started, when you are listening with your heart in your ear and the greed of the folk-lorist in your eye, you may lose out. If you seem too much interested, the song retreats, draws in like a turtle and s head, and no amount of coaxing will make it venture back. And there is something positively fatal about a pencil! Songs seem to be afraid of lead-poisoning. Or perhaps the pencil is secretly attached by a cord (a vocal cord?) to the singer and s tongue. It must be so, for otherwise, why has it so often happened that when I, distrustful of my tricky memory to hold a precious song, have sneaked a pencil out to take notes, the tongue has suddenly jerked back and refused to wag again? Yet that is not always the case, for sometimes the knowledge that his song is being written down inspires a bard with more respect for it and he gives it freely.
In an original and compelling examination of traditional mathematics, this comprehensive study of the anonymous "Manual of Mongolian Astrology and Divination" (published by A. Mostaert in 1969) takes on the fundamental problem of the post-enlightenment categorization of knowledge, in particular the inherently problematic realms of religion and science, as well as their subsets, medicine, ritual, and magic. In the process of elucidating the rhetoric and logic shaping this manual the author reveals not only the intertwined intellectual history of Eurasia from Greece to China but also dismantles many of the discourses that have shaped its modern interpretations.
" In September, 2014, Baltimore and the United States will mark the bicentennial of the event that inspired "The Star-Spangled Banner." But Francis Scott Key's poem, set to a British drinking song, has not always been our anthem, nor even especially popular. Aiming at a broad readership, Ferris examines the history of the song through the generations that followed the War of 1812, the kinds of Americans who rallied behind the song, and the successful lobbying effort that in 1933 convinced Congress to adopt the music and four stanzas as our official national anthem. Since then many citizens have called for its replacement with something less warlike; people quarrel over its apparent militarism and also difficulty level. Politically, Ferris finds, the songhas an interesting and somewhat tortured story. Are we the only nation on earth with a controversial national anthem?"--Provided by publisher.
The essays in this volume, originally published in 1992, examine some of the pervasive implications of Victorian medievalism, and assess its creative manifestations and dual capacities for expression of reformist anger and escapist retreat. Some of the emotional and intllectual reasons for the strong Victorian attraction to ‘medieval’ history and litereature are discussed and emblematic responses to this attraction are examined.
Abandoned as a child to what should have been a short, miserable life on the streets of Dantares, Calee was rescued when it was discovered that she was one of the precious, gifted few — a Dreamer, a psychic capable of guiding star ships through the amorphous darkness of within by following the songs of the stars that only Dreamers can hear. Now Calee lives a safe, cosseted existence within the walls of Dreamworld, alone in a room of her own choosing, drifting on the distant star songs that are more real to her than any of the human pilots she guides. The female pilots she guides, because Calee, her childhood still too raw a memory, wants nothing to do with men, ever. But even Dreamworld’’s high walls cannot protect her when she is assigned to guide a pilot—a male pilot—on a mission so urgent that mankind’’s very survival hangs in the balance. Scout ship pilot Bram Mason has found solace in the dangerous, lonely work of exploring newly discovered planets. But there’s a difference between dangerous missions and suicidal ones, and his latest assignment definitely qualifies as suicidal--an ancient probe has reported the discovery of a planet at the very edge of the galaxy, a planet rich in a rare mineral used by humanity’s mortal enemies, the vicious, alien Gromin, to create an airborne poison capable of wiping out life on every human-inhabited planet known. The risk that the Gromin have intercepted the probe’s message is too great to ignore, and Bram’s is the only ship anywhere close. Even though scout ships are built for speed, not firepower, Bram is assigned the task of locating the planet and defending it against any Gromin incursion, no matter what the cost. Bram is prepared to risk his life if he has to, but he isn’’t prepared for the assault on his heart by a woman half a galaxy away.