Caddo Crunch Saga: Ludum Jam

Well that was a busy weekend.

I just spent the past three days making a video game, and it turned out better than I was expecting. This past weekend was the Ludum Jam (or Ludum Dare if you follow some different rules), a video game making competition. The rules are pretty simple: you have 72 hours to make a video game based around a theme that they supply. You can work on a team, and pretty much anything goes. My roommate and I are both graduating this semester and we have officially finished classes, so we we figured "what the heck, why not?" and just went for it.

The Ender Quartet

So this year I gave up anime for lent, which was actually a lot harder than I expected. I apparently spend quite a bit of time watching anime normally, because I suddenly found that I had time to do some things that had been on my to do list for quite a while. One of these things was to read the books that I had received for Christmas, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, which are the last two books of the Ender Quartet. They had been sitting on my desk for months, and so I decided that it was time to knock that off the list.

For those of you who aren't familiar, the Ender Quartet was written by Orson Scott Card, and it consists of the books Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. I had read Ender's Game for the first time a couple of years ago, and I enjoyed it enough that I gave my friend his copy back and I picked up my own, along with Speaker for the Dead and Ender's Shadow (a parallel version of the story that's not part of the Quartet). I read Speaker for the Dead last year, and it immediately became one of my favourite books (up there with The Silmarillion and The Stand). I had heard that the later books of the Quartet weren't quite as strong as the first ones, but I wanted to finish it anyways, so I got them for Christmas. It was totally worth it.