Today's open thread is brought to you by a very cute white tiger and a fictional diary about the Oregon Trail.
Regular posting will resume Tuesday, May 1st. I apologize for this disruption in regular posting.
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Open Thread: Cute White Tiger |
11 comments:
Ah! I've been an Oregon Trail nerdette since I played the mac game in elementary school. I definitely had that book. Loved it, too.
Grandma has died of snakebite!
It's definitely one of those awesome generational things. I'm waiting for a modern version to crop up, now that there's so much nostalgia stuff in the periphery of the gaming world.
I'm constantly amazed that pioneering actually worked - when you get down to it, the premise seems extremely unlikely to go well. Not just that part where you tried to cross the U.S. in a wagon with limited supplies, possibly including over the Rocky Mountains before winter, only to have to build some sort of shelter and feed yourselves, but just the day to day grind.
How could they keep things *clean*? How did women manage summers in Utah in all their layers? Wouldn't there be bugs coming in through the sod roofs? And other creatures? That's not even touching the hunger and scurvy and locusts. And inconvenience of everything.
I would not, I suspect, make a very good pioneer. I make an excellent pretend pioneer, in my head, but in real life I suspect I would either die very quickly, or become more of a My Side of the Mountain type.
I don't think I ever played Oregon Trail, but I did play some Canadian knock-off version. The adventure that sticks most clearly in my mind was when I decided that modesty was for people who weren't awesome pioneers, and so sent my team out in a wagon full of nothing but pemmican and rifles.
"Day 1: Everyone has died of exposure."
Really, game? Was it winter and you didn't tell me? Was the UV index somewhere up in the 'might give you superpowers' range that day? Were they simply shamed to death by your prudish standards of dress?
I prefer to believe that, having been set free of the shackles of clothes, my party rejected society and civilisation as a whole and faked their deaths so that they would be free to establish a small egalitarian nudist community somewhere in the wilderness.
Wait, people liked Oregon Trail? I never figured out how to survive even a day. No matter what supplies I took, everybody died. And hunting was impossible.
I'm fairly certain that it did cement early on in my mind that I suck at video games. (And shush, MMOs totally don't count.)
Just for the record, "Your party has faked their deaths and exited the narrative in an act of existential rebellion," or something similar, would be an awesome message to get.
To be fair, exposure can be pretty dangerous, even at "relatively" low temperatures. If they were trying to cross the river before ice melt, it might very well be not far above freezing. Hypothermia is a significant risk, even around 50F, for unprotected folk under constant exposure. If it was wet or windy, and they didn't have help . . . still, it is a little disconcerting to be so promptly punished.
(I don't actually know how water-proof those wagons were - I suppose if everyone huddled together under the tarp, they could have been okay. But that's not terribly heroic pioneer type stuff.)
...dear I'm sorry what now?! I'm an Canuck through and through, so I guess that would be why I've only ever seen (and loved, when I was little) the Dear Canada books. Still, this is scary to me! An abomination against nature!
Still, this is scary to me! An abomination against nature!
I remember being weirded out the first time I saw a Dear Canada book. (I was eight.)
Canada? In books? But nothing ever happened up there, it's too cold to have wars and stuff!
(/joking)
I remember getting bored with Oregon Trail and just hunting a lot, because that was fun. I don't know that I ever got to Oregon in all the times I played it. Also my school's computers had the option to play games or screw around with if/then prompts, and I liked making mini text games and forcing my teachers to play them. The teachers were never as impressed as I though they should be.
And on the subject of cute animals I just watched a show about sloths and oh my holy stars those critters are adorable. They look like very wise aliens with giant claws.
"Day 1: Everyone has died of exposure."
I have been wanting, all day, to say:
At least they told you right out. If it'd been a Roberta Williams* game, they would have let you get halfway through before dying for the mistake you made eight hours before. :)
* I like her games, I really do. But still.
Sounds like Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker game as "user-mendacious". (Whereas Starship Titanic, while soul-crushing and mind-breaking, would not doom you to failure for not feeding a particular dog on the street.)
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