Melody Marks Poop Verified Here

No. She was being literal. And frankly, brilliant.

And some of us leave a little brown smudge on the bathmat.

When Melody said "Melody marks poop," she wasn't being gross. She was taking ownership. She was claiming her territory like a tiny, diaper-wearing wolf. melody marks poop

In our household, a "Melody Mark" has become shorthand for that specific, horrifying moment when your child’s digestive system creates a permanent souvenir.

Have you ever had a "Melody Marks" moment in your house? Tell me your war stories in the comments below. Misery loves company. And some of us leave a little brown smudge on the bathmat

We cleaned the carpet. We lit a candle. Melody is now 17 and applying for colleges. She doesn’t remember saying it, but I had it cross-stitched onto a pillow for her dorm room.

She looked me dead in the eye, pointed to the living room carpet, and said: She was claiming her territory like a tiny,

Because at the end of the day, we all leave our mark on the world. Some of us leave legacies. Some of us leave love.

7 thoughts on “GD Column 14: The Chick Parabola

  1. “The problem is that the game’s designers have made promises on which the AI programmers cannot deliver; the former have envisioned game systems that are simply beyond the capabilities of modern game AI.”

    This is all about Civ 5 and its naval combat AI, right? I think they just didn’t assign enough programmers to the AI, not that this was a necessary consequence of any design choice. I mean, Civ 4 was more complicated and yet had more challenging AI.

  2. Where does the quote from Tom Chick end and your writing begin? I can’t tell in my browser.

    I heard so many people warn me about this parabola in Civ 5 that I actually never made it over the parabola myself. I had amazing amounts of fun every game, losing, struggling, etc, and then I read the forums and just stopped playing right then. I didn’t decide that I wasn’t going to like or play the game any more, but I just wasn’t excited any more. Even though every game I played was super fun.

  3. “At first I don’t like it, so I’m at the bottom of the curve.”

    For me it doesn’t look like a parabola. More like a period. At first I don’t like it, so I don’t waste my time on it and go and play something else. Period. =)

  4. The example of land units temporarily morphing into naval units to save the hassle of building transports is undoubtedly a great ideas; however, there’s still plenty of room for problems. A great example would be Civ5. In the newest installment, once you research the correct technology, you can move land units into water tiles and viola! You got a land unit in a boat. Where they really messed up though was their feature of only allowing one unit per tile and the mechanic of a land unit losing all movement for the rest of its turn once it goes aquatic. So, imagine you are planning a large, amphibious invasion consisting of ten units (in Civ5, that’s a very large force). The logistics of such a large force work in two extreme ways (with shades of gray). You can place all ten units on a very large coast line, and all can enter ten different ocean tiles on the same turn — basically moving the line of land units into a line of naval units. Or, you can enter a single unit onto a single ocean tile for ten turns. Doing all ten at once makes your land units extremely vulnerable to enemy naval units. Doing them one at a time creates a self-imposed choke point.

    Most players would probably do something like move three units at a time, but this is besides the point. My point is that Civ5 implemented a mechanic for the sake of convenience but a different mechanic made it almost as non-fun as building a fleet of transports.

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