Floach's New Writeups

absence epilepsy (thing)

2003-04-04T18:52:45Z

I used to have absence seizures when I was young. I'd be playing as usual, and all of a sudden - whoosh. Everything's gone. It wasn't blacking out; it was just leaving. There was some of my conciousness still observing what was happening (usually a gray void with some spinning lights in it); and then, when I finally came out of the seizure, I would be exhausted. And I don't mean "I just went swimming for 6 hours" exhausted; I mean so exhausted, even breathing was an effort. This happened a few times before school in the mornings, and of course my parents thought I was faking. It's pretty annoying to be told to "get off the couch and stop pretending" when you can barely move yourself! Fortunately, I was able to get some medication that controlled them well with no side-effects, once I was diagnosed. (As opposed to ophie's writeup, my eyes did not roll up; instead, they tracked from side to side. And, once I reached roughly 18 years of age, they stopped entirely.)

One of the…

Thief (thing)

2000-11-06T16:45:23Z

(Contraction) A pair of videogames (Thief: the Dark Project and Thief II: the Metal Age) developed by the now-defunct Looking Glass Studios. It created a new sub-genre of the first-person shooter that the gaming media termed the "first-person sneaker". Highly innovative (as were many of LGS's games), it placed the player in the role of a master thief by the name of Garrett - a man of razor wit and quick reflexes. Although the game is not the most graphically-impressive you'll see, it provides endless hours of harrowing gameplay - where else can you crouch in the shadows, holding your breath while chain mail-clad guards tromp past, their boots clicking solidly on the cobblestoned streets? This is the thinking man's first person shooter, and provides a spectacularly different sort of gameplay than you'll find anywhere else.

dragonlance (thing)

2000-11-06T14:16:46Z

A series of books based on AD&D that began life as the trilogy known as the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and eventually mushroomed into a vast series authored by dozens of different writers. The books are usually grouped into trilogies (such as the Dragonlance Chronicles, Legends, Tales, etc.) I tried faithfully to keep up collecting and reading the series, but had to give up when my collection reached about 40 books, and it seemed as if 5 more were coming out each month. :P