Books with author Joan J Harris

Have you ever felt out of place? Like you are not important or special? Have you ever wondered why God made you the way you are? Well, so does Jed, the great, great whale. This story takes us on an underwater adventure with a whale named Jed, who is a very big whale! Jed grows bigger and bigger by the day and becomes twice the size of all the other whales in the sea. In fact, he becomes the biggest creature in the entire ocean! Jed is no monster, however; this big whale has an even bigger heart. Even after being picked on and mistreated, Jed never gives up and believes God made him special for a reason. Jed discovers God has an amazing mission for him and that he was made extra big for this special reason. As you embark on this journey with Jed, he wants you to remember that God never, ever makes a mistake. Just like Jed the whale, God loves you and has made you to do big things for Him.

The age of the NES was transformative for video gaming. The console, and its Japanese predecessor, the Famicom, were extraordinarily popular in that time. When a console is that popular, it attracts a lot of people to make games for it. Many of these games are good. Many of them, to put it bluntly, are not.But it isn’t always easy to decide which are which. Some games present many of the warning signs of a bad game, but there’s something there, waiting, some might say lurking, for a persistent player to come along, to make them say, if just for a moment, “maybe this isn’t so bad after all.” And a few games were popular at the time but their stature has fallen, recently, as they get proclaimed the “black sheep” of their series.Come with us on a journey through the Other Half of the NES library. The games that could have been, if they had a better developer, if they had put in just a bit more effort, if someone had cared about their license a little more, if there had been more marketing money to spare, or even if they had been released a little earlier. To find the grime-covered treasures, ignored or even derided by others. And once we’ve found them, we’ll give you a few tips, just enough to get you started seeing the fun hidden beneath all the mud and gunk.It’s not that they’re all great games. Some of them aren’t even good. But they all have something there, some thing that can be enjoyed, even celebrated. At least you aren’t stuck with only one to play until your next birthday.

Smartphones… GPS… Social media… None of it would exist if it weren’t for one thing: computer technology.So what if the computer hadn’t been invented? Or was invented somewhere… else? BY someone else?Kristen and Brad are visiting the University of Pennsylvania with their cousin Sally. The teens don’t expect their tour to include time travel, and yet when they walk into a campus building they find themselves in another era.They know that the first ‘real’ computer was built at the university. Could that achievement be part of the reason for their trip through time? And what do the Nazis have to do with it?

Years ago, in Xyno City, there was an evil organization that contaminated the city’s water supply, all in the desire to control the people. This, of course, made the families in Xyno City very sick, which forced them to steal and kill in order to trade for medicine. But what the people did not know was that the medicine they desperately needed was being sold to them by the same organization that made them ill. This organization was called the Union. During this time, two scientists from the Union discovered this system and decided to create a serum strong enough to cure the illness with only one dose. But mistakenly, the serum they were secretly giving to the city was also curing any illnesses ever known. When the Union discovered the intentions of this formula, they raided the laboratory in search for the ingredients, killing the two scientists. Luckily, when it was first revealed to the scientists that the Union suspected their dishonor, they hid the formula in one place the organization would not look to find it—their daughter’s locket.

Three months after Joseph Stomper broke the laws of his people to save the Spirit Breather, he pleads with Onaconah, the Nunnehi war chief, to send him back among humans to protect Emily Morrow. But with a centuries-old grudge between them, Onaconah first challenges Joseph to complete a deadly mission without the use of Nunnehi magic or weapons. With Joseph’s immortal life on the line, failure is not an option. But when his own mission jeopardizes Emily’s, he finds himself more tightly bound by Onaconah than ever.The peace chief of the Nunnehi Immortals is the last person Emily Morrow wants to see, especially on her eighteenth birthday. However, when Aiyana shares the dangers of Joseph’s latest mission, Emily knows she has to do whatever it takes to help him succeed. But when she begins hearing her mother’s whispered voice and seeing memories not her own, Emily finds herself torn between a past she never knew and the future she desires.Entangled in a web of secrets, vengeance, and lies, Emily and Joseph must cling to each other as they fight their common enemy and stand against those who would tear them apart.

The Atari Video Computer System, aka VCS, later renamed the Atari 2600 after its model number (CX2600), was the first popular programmable home video game console.The VCS wasn't the first in any area except one: it was the first really popularprogrammable home video game console. Sales of the VCS were gigantic. Atari would ultimately move 30 million units, and the machine remained in production until 1992. It lasted a venerable 15 years, and survived long enough to compete against the SNES. And it did all this with a hardware set that could at best be described as ludicrous. This is generally a book of reviews of interesting Atari VCS games, but there are some important caveats. For inclusion, the most playable version of the game has to be for the VCS. For example, the VCS port of Missile Command is a very good game. But the arcade version is much better: it has three bases instead of one adding a touch more strategy to it, it has missile "matchbooks" that let you use one explosion to touch off others, there are more and more varied types of enemies, and it's generally just a better game overall. You're about as likely to be able to play the VCS or Arcade versions these days, so, why not play the arcade one? This also rules out a host of arcade conversions. In a few cases, the stars of programmer skill and hardware capability combine in such a way that the version on the lowly Atari VCS, a machine with 128 bytes of RAM and ludicrously primitive display capability, is actually a competitive version, and sometimes it is superior in one or more ways. Two games this is true for is Asteroids (whose game variations provide interesting ways to play the arcade doesn't try to match) and Space Invaders (the two-player co-op versions of which make it actually more interesting than the arcade).This is a book of such games. Reasons to scour eBay for tapes, or else drag out an emulator. Gameplay doesn't go obsolete, but some games do become, ah, less accessible over time. Here are 21 that are still fun.

An emergency in the family brings seven cousin together under one roof for the first time ever. Once the children arrive at their Mimi's house in Helena, Montana they embark on a magical adventure as a cat named Winston leads them down a stream and into the forest. Once inside the kingdom they meet a fairy named Pamelina who guides them as they must come together and fight to take control of the kingdom back from the clutches of the evil troll queen and her wicked minions. It is up to the children to awaken the sleeping giant, rally the gnomes of Rimini to their cause, find a beaver who is afraid of water beyond the Gates of the Mountains, and save the kingdom at the battle for the Canyon of the Fairies before they will be able to find their way back home.

This unique hitting manual has a complicated history. Dr. Harris wrote HITTING SECRETS FROM BASEBALL'S GRAVEYARD as a salute to great Deadball Era batsmen like Cobb, Speaker, and Wagner after investing twenty years of off-and-on research in the project. The techniques he unearthed from first-hand accounts, old photos, and much experimental reverse-engineering stunned him to a point that he found himself wanting to recommend their revival. LANDING SAFETIES fulfills that wish. This volume is a straight-up, unapologetic set of techniques for hitting low line drives so as to increase your chances of reaching base. The modern hitting game has become almost the exclusive province of tall body types employing styles that generate "big flies"-so much so that, halfway through the Major League season, you find regular starters still struggling to reach .200 against radical shifts and multiple Big League clubs averaging nine strikeouts per contest. Left-on-base numbers are also soaring as runners-in-scoring-position averages plunge. As the period's name says bluntly, balls didn't travel well in the Deadball Era. Hitters therefore developed techniques to drive the unlively ball through or over the infield: that was the "percentage" move. It still is, especially for shorter players who will never be able to compete at "long ball" with teammates a foot taller than they. Equipped with the techniques laid out in this book, those same players of the shorter (and often more athletic) body type will be forcing the coach to choose between a giant who homers every third game while striking out twice each game, on the one hand, and a more compact fellow who bats around .400. With almost a hundred black-and-white images, this book represents the Old School approach very graphically. Photos of yesteryear's stars are stirred in with Harris's modeling positions himself for which few or no photos exist (usually because they are mid-swing shots that earlier cameras couldn't capture). The results should be very useful to young players-girls as well as boys-who eagerly seek a way to out-perform their larger, more attention-getting rivals.NEW TO THE SECOND EDITION: a step-by-step, fully illustrated breakdown of Tris Speaker's dynamic load into the pitch from a "shuffle-step"; a full chapter on approach, emphasizing the importance of opposite-field and up-the-middle hitting; and two angles featuring frozen-frame analysis of how well front-foot hitting with the Old School downward stroke covers the zone when compared to more recent swing paradigms.