WTF?! – a free side-scroller development package!?

 There’s a free software package that allows you to create World of Warcraft-seeming side-scroller games.  They’ve released the whole thing for free, but they don’t provide a lot of  info to go along with it.

I’ve been keeping an eye on this, and I haven’t noticed anyone taking advantage of it.  The programming is mostly scripting, although I haven’t figured out how to put it all together yet.

If you know something about Flash- based programming with XML, or if you want to try your hand making games with this thing, let’s put our heads together:  I’ve created a google group for the purpose.  Let’s see if we can’t figure out the procedure for making a game.

–If anyone knows how to get the attention of the WTF?! guys, let me know.  Maybe we can get a demo of how the tools work, or some such.

 

Might Be Going To Korea…

Because there’s not enough work here.  Or, there’s work, but it’s difficult to get many hours, and the pay is pretty bad.

I’ve heard things are better in Phenom Phen, the Cambodian capital, but the basic trouble is just that Cambodia’s starting to feel the pinch, and there’s not a lot of money going around.

Anyway, if you want a good free Korean language course, this is the one I’ve found:

the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) Korean language course, by Unit

the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) Korean language course, by Volume 

BTW, it’s shockingly expensive to fly to Korea from Cambodia — as much as it would cost me to go home!  What’s with that?

English Teaching Geeking

I have previously sung the praises of Inspiration Pad Pro, which is a free, nifty, simple little program that picks items from lists and puts them into blanks in a template you write — like an automated version of Mad Libs.

I’m currently using this tool to create problem-sets for my English students.  This will allow me to tailor daily quizzes to focus on each individual student’s needs — with a little bit of tinkering per student, but not much.

And, once I’ve defined a problem set, I can just aim the computer at that set and tell it how many examples I need.  So, if two weeks from now I want 3 passive voice questions and 2 first conditional questions, I just aim the thing at the problem set I’ve already defined.

And, it’s better than cutting-and-pasting old questions, because there’s variety to the wording.

It’s a nice little program.

Academic Earth and Open Culture

Okay, this is very cool –

You can now get college lecture videos off the web for free.  The primary disadvantage, in comparison to going to college, is that you don’t get to hassle the teachers.

Links here (to Academic Earth) and here (to Open Culture).

The difference seems to be that Open Culture is organized more like a blog, apparently with links to off-site material, while Academic Earth has all their own videos that they put together in-house.

So expect consistency from Academic Earth, and variety from Open Culture.

Free ebook – Emotional Logic, by Aristotle

We’ve been talking about emotions a great deal, but it’s all been about using emotion to write powerful stories.  We haven’t said much about how emotion works.  Let’s remedy that.

I have for you here a classic work on emotion, by Aristotle.  It’s part of a larger work, which you may have heard of, called The Rhetoric.

Aristotle was a greatly practical-minded guy, and human nature hasn’t changed all that much in the past 2,300 years.  Definitely worth a read.

Here’s Aristotle on Emotional Logic.

ps – Also, you’ll notice I’ve conveniently added an item, “resources,” to the sidebar, where you’ll find this and any other ebooks I may add.