Author: cookiethecook

Playing, Gaming, Living

Hello once again my fellow kitchen-mates.  I will be your chef today, and now let’s see what kind of cookies we have baking:

Our latest assignment has been to read the chapter “Play” and blog on the chapter and the exercise following:

The chapter explains the importance of happiness and how it affects the world and those who inhabit it. Like the old saying goes, “Laughter is the best medicine,” Daniel Pink believe’s that laughter is just as infectious as any microbes found inside our bodies. I find this to be true as well. It’s extremely difficult to be down around someone who is exuberant.

We should all be playful, at least enough to reduce some of the stresses life has place upon our shoulders. Letting out your inner child from time to time feels good. I do it occasionally by doing some of the stuff I used to do as a kid. It brings back this nostalgic feeling that I can’t get anywhere else.

I didn’t technically perform any of the exercises because none of them pertained to me nor were really available. I focused in on the gaming aspect of the chapter since I love video games and I want to be a game designer when I get older. I did (briefly) visit one of the sites that Dan mentioned in his gaming exercise in an attempt to educated people who have never played what the big deal is about games. I’d like to add on to his take on gaming. It is awesome, and the industry has the capability to teach a lot subliminally. I ,have many examples of this, and I’m going to share two, both took place when I was younger.

1st – I played a bunch of games in the Jak and Daxter series. One of the cities was called Haven City. One day while playing, I became curious as to what ‘haven’ meant and why the city was named that. I went and looked it up on my own and found that it meant a safe place. it was ironic because the place was in rubble, under constant attack, and ruled by a tyrannous baron.

2nd – Our teacher asked us in 2nd grade, I think it was, how to spell ‘cell’. I was the only one. Some of the others came close, but they were spelling words such as – sell, sail, sale, etc. – so the teacher asked me how I knew the correct spelling. It took me less than half  a second to think and answer. My response (all in one breath) – “I watched Dragon Ball Z and there was this guy who went around and got powered up by sticking his tail in other people and stealing their cells and that’s how he spelled his name.” Who says games and cartoons are mind-rotting? They put me at the top of my class.

Well readers, that’s all the cookies we had baking in the oven tonight. Stay tuned.


It Takes More Than One To Game

Hello once again my fellow kitchen-mates.  I will be your chef today, and now let’s see what kind of cookies we have baking:

I just watched the video assignment, TEDTalk: Jane McGonigal, “Gaming Can Make a Better World” (2010), where Jane McGonigal shares her ideas about the gaming world as well as our own world in correlation. As a fellow gamer and future game designer, I have to say that I had already realized most of what she had to say about gaming, I just had no idea that I wasn’t alone.

She explains why people spend so much time and effort gaming. The problems and blights of the actual world chase people away to a world where they make the rules, where they determine the outcome, where they affect their own happiness. People have goals that they can easily overcome. It wouldn’t be profitable or logical to design something that merely frustrates and demotes self confidence. Who wouldn’t want to become a part of some epic adventure and save the world? That’s her next point: Who’s saving our world?

No one is saving our world. The quests aren’t as glamorous, the obstacles are far more difficult, and the fruits of our labors aren’t as personally gratifying as in a virtual world. Jane works as a video game designer and is currently working to try and save the world by using video games as the medium. Sadly, the same reasons people aren’t saving the real world apply to these games that help teach about saving the world.

Our world is falling apart, and it may just be me with this opinion, but now is the perfect moment to design more of these games as a way to escape the ever growing problematic planet. A balance is needed. We need to be two people. One deals with the real world and struggles, gets by, and deals with the problems. The second balances out the first, thriving in the made-up worlds that can solve any problem and refill our self-confidence. The reality of the synthetic reality in video games could even one day inspire new ideas, inventions, and reform. All it takes is the right ingenuity combined with the right faith and data.

Jane makes a reference to the 10,000 hour theory that claims anyone who does anything for 10,000 hours before the age of 21 will  become a master at whatever it is they have been doing. I believe this and want to add my own input to the theory in relation to video games. It helps us become masters of balancing out our hectic existence and allows for our two persons to live as one.

http://flic.kr/p/9eFZtm

Well readers, that’s all the cookies we had baking in the oven tonight. Stay tuned.


Symphony: A Relationship Between Relationships

Hello once again my fellow kitchen-mates.  I will be your chef today, and now let’s see what kind of cookies we have baking:

This assignment was to read the chapter titled ‘Symphony’ in Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind, perform one of the activites listed at the end of the chapter, and then share! But first, a little background-

Dan Pink wrote this book to describe how right-brained thinkers are going to overtake the current left-brained world we live in. In the Symphony chapter, he describes how dyslexics  are the most likely to become self-made millionaires because they have a problem with their left-brain functions, causing the right half to perform more often than it usually does. I have never been tested for dyslexia, but I have always thought that I have it. I show many of the signs and symptoms, except for one very important difference.  I have had trouble with school work with reading word problems and things of that nature, but I never let it stop me. Most people with dyslexia struggle to finish work, but not me. So I either don’t have it and I think I do, or I’m just super awesome (I’m awesome anyways).

After reading this chapter, I became increasingly please with the realization that I have been a right-brained thinker all my life. Examples-

Right-brained thinkers multitask. Well, this isn’t very complicated for most people. My most common multitasking technique I have developed is listening to music while doing school work or reading. Most people say that there is no possible way that I can listen to music and do my work. I’m here to explain my theory of why and how I can (and it’s not just because I’m amazing, although that helps). A frequent problem I had when trying to read or do school work would be my wandering mind losing interest in my homework and thinking about something else. I think I have ADHD. On the same note, it sounds like I’m a hypochondriac as well, but back to the ADHD. I learned that listening to music helped me concentrate better on whatever it is I am doing. But why? My theory is that the quiet music playing in my ears distracts the part of my subconscious that like to wander around. So, while it’s busy listening to the music, the rest of  my mind can remained focused on the school work.

Right-brained thinkers can see relationships and patterns better. His example in the book pertains to drawing, something I have always found enjoyable. He hints that anyone can draw anything as long as the see the actual relationships between all the lines instead of drawing what they think of. F-I-N-A-L-L-Y. I honestly thought I was the only person who saw drawing that way. That is why I chose drawing as my exercise.

What better way to show relationships than to draw a picture of my relationship?

Image Courtesy of Eric Cook

Above is a picture of myself and my beautiful girlfriend, Courtney. (Please ignore the glare as I was taking a picture of a picture.) Now, relationships are complicated, but only if we make them so. If you think everything is going well in a relationship, well, you may just be seeing what you picture in your mind as opposed to stepping back and seeing the relationship for what it really is. The same happens when drawing. You think it looks good until you step back and see the whole picture that usually, honestly, sucks. How do you fix this? Examine each line, each aspect of the picture, and take the time to work at it. It is the little things that make my girlfriend and I happy together, and when you put all the little things together to make up the big picture, you get things like me spending hours on the floor creating this:

Image Courtesy of Eric Cook

It’s not perfect, obviously. It’s hard to capture beauty like that in a drawing, But I think it shows a little something about relationships. Compare it to the actual picture. Most of the lines fit together well, in placement and scale. Even at the bottom it’s hard to tell where her lines end and mine begin, a good characteristic in a relationship. My only regret about this blog is that I didn’t do her enough justice. Oh, and by the way, did I mention? Brownie points.

Well readers, that’s all the cookies we had baking in the oven tonight. Stay tuned.


Invention Mobs Process: Hand-Made Gold


Hello everyone. I have decided that since I now have a blog for class, I shall act like the majority of other pompous people with a blog who think they are famous enough for people to want to read about their lives. On that note, I feel it’s key to come up with a few key phrases and such to spice up this little recipe. I will be your chef today, and now let’s see what kind of cookies we have baking:

We are currently working on invention mobs in our English class. This project entails my group (Kyle, Mark, Tim, and I) to take three handcrafted objects (a pair of doves, a necklace, and a gourd) and present them to people outside the class as very crucial objects they must use in creating a short story. We came up with the idea in class during the group gathering. We all decided to incorporate our friends in the experiment (two or three each). Part of the process is going to be analyzing the stories of each individual to see what pattern they followed. The necklace mirrors beauty, the doves represent peace, and the gourd exemplifies survival. Then we will analyze the stories as a whole to see what the most common theme was that are thinking about these days. The end product will be a slightly longer story that will be pieced together from all the individuals’ stories.

I have the three stories from my sources-

The first tale comes from my wonderfully beautiful (side-note: there is neve

r a wrong time to earn brownie points with the ladies, my fellow fellows) girlfriend Courtney. Her story takes place in the forest where two dove live side by side as neighbors but have never met. The boy dove falls for the girl dove and tries to get her to come to his house (which is a gourd) by painting with berries on the side of it. However, he accidentally falls asleep from painting for so long. When the girl dove comes to admire his painting, she knocks but no one answers. The girl dove goes in to see who lives there, and ends up waking the boy dove. He is so startled that he accidentally knocks the girl dove unconscious. In a panic, he quickly gathers items to make the girl dove an apology present (which is a necklace). Upon waking, the girl dove reveals that she doesn’t remember a thing due to her long-term memory loss. The boy dove uses this to his advantage and fabricates a story of how they have lived together for a very long time and love each other very much.

–Her story focuses on the doves which means she likes to tend towards peace in her story. Think about how there was turmoil between the two doves, and then all was made well and they lived happily ever after.

The second tale comes from my girlfriend’s sister, Sarah. Her story also takes place in the forest. Eric (a commendable and very handsome main character) was walking in the woods and finds a magic fortune telling gourd (somewhat like a Magic 8-Ball). The gourd tells Eric that he will never escape the woods. Well, as it turns out, Eric is cousins with Harry Potter. He pulls out his magic wand and changes the gourd into a giant flying dove. Eric boards the dove and flies in the direction of his house. Halfway through, the dove morphs back into the gourd, and Eric begins hurdling towards the ground. He used that handy-dandy magic wand again and turned the gourd into a giant flying necklace (naturally) and makes it safely home. Once he arrives, his cousin, Harry Potter, comes out and thanks him for finding his lost magic gourd, the one thing he needed to finally defeat Lord Voldemort.

–Her story focuses on the gourd, showing that she clung mostly to survival. Eric used the magic gourd to try and escape the woods, and Harry Potter apparently uses it to defeat Lord Voldemort (who would otherwise undoubtedly kill all you muggles).

The third tale comes from my girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend, Jeff. His story is about the cute pet-monster that my girlfriend owns. In the story, the pet finds a beautiful necklace that she wishes to present to her mother. She passes her crazy aunt worshiping a magic gourd. She became crazy after being mugged by two rabid doves. The aunt sees the necklace and remembers that it was the same necklace that was stolen from her during the mugging. She runs to tell her sister this news but the sister doesn’t believe her and keeps the necklace. The crazy aunt returns to her gourd, only to find that it is missing. She looks over and realizes that the pet now has it. She orders the pet to return the gourd, but the pet refuses. Instead, she eats the gourd.

–His story focuses on the necklace throughout, indicating that he focused on the beauty in his tale. This is clearly shown through the aunts jealousy of her sister’s intangible beauty (brownie points).

Each of the people I chose to write their own stories clung to one of the three themes throughout (unintentionally). I can’t wait to hear the others from my group and come up with the most hilariously random short story ever written. Well readers, that’s all the cookies we had baking in the oven tonight. Stay tuned.

~ Cookie