Hey guys, it's Adventure Van here with a blog about MarI/O and LuigI/O, an AI that is being taught to play the original Super Mario game, created by SethBling and updated regularly by Akisame. This is a great background video, giving something to look at and listen to in off time, as it has a radio feature in it. MarI/O has already been completed, but LuigI/O still is running, so if you want to take a spin at it, check out here.
Adventure Van, jumping awaay.
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Baldwin, Early Novels & Stories
Hey guys, it's Adventure Van here with a blog about Baldwin, Early Novels & Stories. Written, obviously, by James Baldwin, this book is a collection of short stories called "Go Tell It on the Mountain", "Giovanni's Room", "Another Country", and "Going To Meet the Man". The collection of stories is centered and focused around the lives of black communities. As much as each story has a separate story, they all indirectly and directly focus on the love and hate and discrimination and all the other things blacks have to go thru, whatever or not their age or status is.
The stories are well done in illustrating every detail. It really feels natural enough to make you think and feel like you're actually experiencing the stories. And they're all great stories, each with their own takes and even changing from chapter to chapter while staying the same. However, and this is a somewhat unavoidable problem, the fact that some names are used again during a separate story can easily throw off an unsuspecting reader. But due to fact that these are short stories, unrelated to each other in terms of everything but setting, and aren't meant to be read in short succession of each other, that is not the author's fault in any shape or form.
It's an important author to follow, especially in this day and age.
Adventure Van, reading.
The stories are well done in illustrating every detail. It really feels natural enough to make you think and feel like you're actually experiencing the stories. And they're all great stories, each with their own takes and even changing from chapter to chapter while staying the same. However, and this is a somewhat unavoidable problem, the fact that some names are used again during a separate story can easily throw off an unsuspecting reader. But due to fact that these are short stories, unrelated to each other in terms of everything but setting, and aren't meant to be read in short succession of each other, that is not the author's fault in any shape or form.
It's an important author to follow, especially in this day and age.
Adventure Van, reading.
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
Maus
Hey guys, it's Adventure Van here with a book report on Maus. Maus is a book written by Art Spiegelman, who wrote down and recorded his conversations with his father, who lived thru the Holocaust. This is an interesting book due to it being about the Holocaust, a monstrous experience in which the Germans genocided an entire religious sect due to them being 'vermin', and yet the author decides to portray everyone inside anthropomorphically, drawing the Jews as literal mice, and the Germans as cats, alongside an assortment of other races being portrayed differently.
From what I've learnt about the holocaust, the hands on experiences of someone memorialized inside a deceptively done 'comic' book is quite encompassing of actual events. There's even some one-in-a-kind information, like how exactly the gas chambers worked due to his father being enlisted to take them apart before the Russians took a camp. And due to a lucky portion of his family being kept alive, the author was able to glean information about other camps and 'women's sectors'. And the author's father lived a very varied lifestyle in the camps, granting a lot of information from just one person's view.
The book was extremely well done to the point where it was able to make something very dehumanizing(literally drawing a human as something else) to become something very humanizing. Due to being unable to see the actual faces of the person, you refrain from making a racial stereotype about them yourself as there already is one, and instead you see the personality of the person themselves. But even with this, there's only so much a comic book can do, and despite the possible depths of the form, it still comes off a little too light in some sections.
It is most definitely a read that everyone should read, especially in this day and age.
Adventure Van, reading away.
From what I've learnt about the holocaust, the hands on experiences of someone memorialized inside a deceptively done 'comic' book is quite encompassing of actual events. There's even some one-in-a-kind information, like how exactly the gas chambers worked due to his father being enlisted to take them apart before the Russians took a camp. And due to a lucky portion of his family being kept alive, the author was able to glean information about other camps and 'women's sectors'. And the author's father lived a very varied lifestyle in the camps, granting a lot of information from just one person's view.
The book was extremely well done to the point where it was able to make something very dehumanizing(literally drawing a human as something else) to become something very humanizing. Due to being unable to see the actual faces of the person, you refrain from making a racial stereotype about them yourself as there already is one, and instead you see the personality of the person themselves. But even with this, there's only so much a comic book can do, and despite the possible depths of the form, it still comes off a little too light in some sections.
It is most definitely a read that everyone should read, especially in this day and age.
Adventure Van, reading away.
Monday, August 6, 2018
The Handmaid's Tale
Hey guys, it's Adventure Van here with a report on The Handmaid's Tale. This story, done by Margaret Atwood, suddenly spiked with popularity recently with the Hulu television series, touches on many sensitive topics. It's about an America where a hostile takeover by the military transforms it into Gilead, a place where women are treated little more as objects and animals. It's a horrible vision of the future. It follows the tale of Offred thru the horrible twisted world that has quickly become of America.
It is not a clearcut story. By that, I mean it's not linear. As much as it progresses and ends at the end, flashbacks are quite common. It's a great book and easy to understand, but hard to explain. It's not written like a normal book when it comes to that. Events come in a strange order of both past and future. However, it's not the strangest one when it comes to that, that goes to I am the Cheese. So, it's both in order and not. Is that confusing? Because it surprisingly wasn't confusion to read.
The plot also ends before finalizing, seeing her leave into a world of unknowns. And it makes sense. Although some people have problems with that ending, the fact is that once it reaches that point it is no longer The Handmaid's Tale as she is no longer a Handmaid. But different views are shone on the ending and there is no right one.
Adventure Van, thinking.
It is not a clearcut story. By that, I mean it's not linear. As much as it progresses and ends at the end, flashbacks are quite common. It's a great book and easy to understand, but hard to explain. It's not written like a normal book when it comes to that. Events come in a strange order of both past and future. However, it's not the strangest one when it comes to that, that goes to I am the Cheese. So, it's both in order and not. Is that confusing? Because it surprisingly wasn't confusion to read.
The plot also ends before finalizing, seeing her leave into a world of unknowns. And it makes sense. Although some people have problems with that ending, the fact is that once it reaches that point it is no longer The Handmaid's Tale as she is no longer a Handmaid. But different views are shone on the ending and there is no right one.
Adventure Van, thinking.
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Lord Jim
Hey guys, it's Adventure Van here with a blog about the book Lord Jim. Written by Joseph Conrad, this book is the story of a sailor named Jim in the 1880s. Based off of a real person, Augustine Podmore Williams, the story follows Jim, a first mate, as he does a single cowardly act of abaonding a ship and taking a place on a boat that should have gone to a passenger, when he himself knew that he should go down with the ship and let someone else take the place. The ship survives, along with the people on it. All of the crew, including the captain, run and disappear, not wanting to give testimony and taking place in trial. Only Jim insists on appearing in the court. He is and will be haunted by this act of cowardice for the rest of his life.
After the case, he's taken aside by Charles Manlow, who tells us the story of Jim, as the entire book is written down from his point of view and stories from others. Jim confesses his guilt to Manlow, who takes pity on him and finds him a place to live. However, Jim encounters an engineer who also abandoned the ship there and leaves. Jim then spends time wandering, from going into a job and doing successfully until the name of the ship is mentioned and he immediately leaves, and then getting into a fist fight. Marlow realizes Jim needs to escape the place that knows of what Jim did, so he contacts his old friend Stein, who gives Jim a job on a remote island as a trade representative.
Jim leaves to take this job, and then finds peace in the fact that he is now mysterious and clouded, and no longer known as someone who abandoned his ship, and instead gets a new start. However, just his presence makes enemies, especially from one person who was the former trade representative. His name was Cornelius. His step daughter, who he abused, flees to Jim for protection after Cornelius is ousted from power by his arrival. Cornelius is enraged by this as well.
A pirate known as Gentleman Brown comes with a starving crew to the outpost, but is driven off. The natives and traders there want to land a killing blow on him and his crew, but Jim goes against that and simply send the pirates back thru a guarded riverway to get back to their ship. Cornelius sneaks out and meets with Brown, and then tells him about a better, less guarded way. Brown takes it, and kills some of the sentries as he escapes easily. One of Jim's servants figures out Cornelius' involvement and kills him, and Manlow advises Jim to leave. But Jim doesn't want to abandon his 'ship' again, and takes personal responsibility for the deaths caused by him and goes to the native chief to get himself killed.
It's a sad story about the life of a man, but it's much more heroic then who Jim was based off of. As it's all from the point of Jim's friend, Manlow, you can't tell how much is fully fact and if an attribute or two, or even all of them, is completely made up. The story of how an honorable man would seek penance for a singular crime he committed for the rest of his life is haunting.
After the case, he's taken aside by Charles Manlow, who tells us the story of Jim, as the entire book is written down from his point of view and stories from others. Jim confesses his guilt to Manlow, who takes pity on him and finds him a place to live. However, Jim encounters an engineer who also abandoned the ship there and leaves. Jim then spends time wandering, from going into a job and doing successfully until the name of the ship is mentioned and he immediately leaves, and then getting into a fist fight. Marlow realizes Jim needs to escape the place that knows of what Jim did, so he contacts his old friend Stein, who gives Jim a job on a remote island as a trade representative.
Jim leaves to take this job, and then finds peace in the fact that he is now mysterious and clouded, and no longer known as someone who abandoned his ship, and instead gets a new start. However, just his presence makes enemies, especially from one person who was the former trade representative. His name was Cornelius. His step daughter, who he abused, flees to Jim for protection after Cornelius is ousted from power by his arrival. Cornelius is enraged by this as well.
A pirate known as Gentleman Brown comes with a starving crew to the outpost, but is driven off. The natives and traders there want to land a killing blow on him and his crew, but Jim goes against that and simply send the pirates back thru a guarded riverway to get back to their ship. Cornelius sneaks out and meets with Brown, and then tells him about a better, less guarded way. Brown takes it, and kills some of the sentries as he escapes easily. One of Jim's servants figures out Cornelius' involvement and kills him, and Manlow advises Jim to leave. But Jim doesn't want to abandon his 'ship' again, and takes personal responsibility for the deaths caused by him and goes to the native chief to get himself killed.
It's a sad story about the life of a man, but it's much more heroic then who Jim was based off of. As it's all from the point of Jim's friend, Manlow, you can't tell how much is fully fact and if an attribute or two, or even all of them, is completely made up. The story of how an honorable man would seek penance for a singular crime he committed for the rest of his life is haunting.
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