Language Barriers

So, I'm in the process of converting one of my projects from XNA 3.1 to XNA 4.0 for Windows Phone 7. After some difficulty with various things, I get it to a point it's compiling the main code of the game, and get some errors. Apparently, parts of the .NET Framework that I use in Windows and the XBox 360 aren't in the .NET Framework built for Windows Phone 7, and eventually I find out that the core assemblies are built from the Silverlight subset. 

So I'm expecting to have to spend some time today doing some research to find out how to work around the missing functions, expecting this to take some time. I expect and plan for this, because apparently I failed to comprehend both C# and English, because I discovered that, right on the page I was reading yesterday with the class description it tells exactly how to use LINQ to get the equivalent functions that are missing.

Unstudied

Didn't I say last time I was here in Hawaii that I need to work on studying Japanese more so I could get more than just sentence fragments?

Yeah, about that...

Grimoire of ---

He didn't believe her, of course. How could he? She knew that what she was telling him was so outrageous, so fantastic, and nowhere near the realm of believability compared to the plain, empty mountain they were atop now. She knew what she was saying was true, but she had no way to prove it now, no way to show him that she wasn't completely delusional. Sighing, she went to turn away, to wander off in hopelessness, but, as she did, a smirk crept across his wrinkled, bearded face.

She stopped as he began to rummage through a box, pulling from it a leather covered book and a rolled up set of tools. He set the book down, and she watched as he opened the tools to reveal some leather stamps. He quickly pounded out a word and her name in the cover of the book, then began to fill it in with a pen of golden ink. After blowing on it a few times to dry the ink, he handed the book to her.

"A 'grimoire'?" She was puzzled by the words he wrote on th.e cover as she opened the book. Inside it there was nothing, the pages all blank. "But, you don't believe me.."

He held up his hand to stop her from saying anything more. "My believing your story has no bearing on its importance, child," he said with a smile as he rolled up the tools and put them back in the box. "Or its power. Imagination, the power of words and images outside the bounds of what is known. There is magic in words, in pictures, in music, a power of escape that acts directly on the hearts and minds of people." 

"I want you to take that," he said, as he pulled out another item from the box and handed it to her. It was a small box, and she opened it, revealing a feather pen and a mechanical pencil. "That is now your grimoire. Write in it your story. But I want you to write it in third person, outside of yourself. Write about the things that did not only happen to yourself. Write it as a story that people would want to read. When you are done, if you still believe the words you write really did happen to you, then perhaps I will believe you more." He began to turn away, but looked back at her again with a smile. "But even if you don't, it won't change the power of the words that you write." 

She nodded, beginning to understand the old man's enlightenment, and left his small house to find a place on the mountaintop to be alone and to write.

Off Days

Now, that's not to say that I can remember every dream, just a lot more often than normal. Sometimes there just isn't any way to get anything, for one reason or another. Yesterday I didn't post anything, because I didn't sleep very well the night before so didn't have a period where there was real strong dreaming. This last night, for an hour or so before my alarm went off there was a lot of waking up to some noise or something, then falling back to sleep again for a few minutes, then waking up to something else and repeating the process, making things change so rapidly there wasn't anything coherent I could assemble when it was all said and done.

Burnin' Down The House

This one I'm finding harder to remember to put together into words, or at least trying to remember the order. At one point, I was at my parent's house and there was someone in the house next to it assembling an assault rifle with incendiary rounds, then walking around the perimeter of the house through the other yards shooting at some gang members in different places. He then left the rifle and I went to inspect it and accidentally shot one of the rounds, setting one of the neighboring houses on fire, but I was able to get the fire out with just the garden hose before the fire crews arrived. 

Another point I was an off-duty cop, in some city's downtown place and driving my father's car. I had just been talking to some people in a newspaper office in a building there about something (can't remember what anymore), and went back down to leave with the friends with me, but my key had been damaged and so wouldn't open the lock, and while playing with it some trying to get it open managed to remote start the engine through the door keyhole. I went back up to the shop to try to get them to fix my key, because apparently they also had a set of master key codes, but they wouldn't do it.

The last part I don't remember what order it came in in relation to the other two, and might be directly related to having watched Book of Eli last night. I was in some place, with some other people doing something and someone that stood in a guard room with a slit in the wall that would shoot us under some conditions. Something happened to that guard and left us unsupervised, so I tore through the simple drywall wall they had erected and escaped the building, wandering around in this post-apocalyptia. I went into some house to look for supplies, and found in a hidden drawer in this person's house a secret computer rig thing  that ran off an SD card, so put it in my Eee to see what it contained. While waiting for it to boot I noticed I forgot to lock all the doors, and hurried to do that, only to find someone had come through the front door. I shot them without question, and went to look the front door and turned around to find someone came through the side door. I made the mistake of letting them talk, and that man tried smoothing it over that he was a bounty hunter and looking for the man I shot and wanted to examine the body, and as he came forward it became apparent he was only a crazed cannibal as well like most of the rest of the people and I had to shoot him too.