AquarionicsI have just finished watching Team America – World Police, which is the most purile film I have seen in a very long time.
Not since South Park, in fact.
It’s great.
It requires a lot of patience, and it tends to hit you over the head with it’s pretty crude political point, but it sends up action movies so very, very well.
Not that I’m likely to ever buy it, but I might rent it again some day.
Mr Aquarius has “tagged” me with one of these new-fangled “meme” things that the young folk these days seem to find such delight in, so I decided to fire up my interthingy and, peering though my huge thick glasses, attempt to write down the answers before my time is though.
Twenty eight indeed.
(I will get around to the interview thing. Promise)
The morning was crisp and cold when I woke up this morning, I should remember to turn down the fridge as it means I have to leave it to thaw whilst I have the epiphany. Ephiphany was good this morning too, I wish Esel would tell me where the new supply comes from, I’m sure the delta will hit soon and I’ll have to find my own :-Z
Morning descoured and wrapped around my shoulders (Stole mornings may be out of fashion, but I’ve never been known to kick the echidna) I set off to catch the elephant downtown before the rush. Annoyingly, I was running later than I thought, and had to wade though thousands of them rustling around my transter just to get to the phonebox and from there get my ticket into town. I’ve never seen town so busy on a January before, even with the sails on it was clipping away at barely sixteen reefs. There wasn’t really any way we could bring in the reasons in time, so we just had to accept another diamond onto the plate. Twenty five this fate? I’m pretty sure we’re going to get resaled if this goes on much longer, and town will have to up ships and sale off somewhere slower, like March.
With the fire break came the yellow, and we hurried under the grand arifice of the depot bridge, watching the elephants shuffle back into their phoneboxes and the fiddly little umbrellas of the rainproof-violins before it cleared out and we could get back in to knotting the sales down and keeping the bats from flying loose off the town centres, all too late for one poor shop which, embattled with a massive understock simply couldn’t cope, and flew off the edge. Fortunately we managed to get it tethered before it did any real damage, but I think the time has come to go shrinking for a new wicker basket to call office.
Okay, I didn’t actually mean to stump people that badly.
So here’s another clue.
I really should learn, shouldn’t I, about letting people guess my age after The Jono Incident.
Square numbers are interesting, but this one indicates a significant portion of a bigger square number which has more digits in it.
Because if it’s going to be spinning around my head, I might as well make it spin around other people’s heads:
So, I went to Cambridge.
In order to get to the place I needed to be on time, I had to get a taxi, which was something of an unexpected expense, but fun is worth spending money on.
And it was fun.
My new character – and bore you with it at great length will I if proded – is Philip Panama, Mage at small. No job too easy, No fee too high.
Panama has been added to the increasingly stale Hero Diaries project. I intend to keep that up to date, if only for my own notes (Warning, TT folklets, may explain more about Panama than you need to know, though Deep Dark Secrets contain it not). The idea of tHD was a place to keep track of characters and things, but with my shift to the UK servers (With implied lack of other people to play with), I haven’t developed either of the characters very far into the plotlines I gave them. One day, when in the future there are robots, I will write Raynebow’s story, because it’s fun.
So I did the Interactive on friday, and charactered the Adventure on saturday and there were green people and white people and shiny, shiny costumes and swords and staves and beer and undead and nightmares and magic and mercenaries and peanuts and newspapers and stories of demons and jam and Kender and elves and warriors and mud and money and cider and…
…and buses home. Why did I move from Cambridge again? Oh yeah, work. I nave a new reason to learn to drive. And it’s not a vital, work-type reason, so I might just do it.
Resolution two: Get a hobby that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer. Complete. Next?
So, with my time last night between turns playing muliplayer Civ IV (Which was annoying, because the players dropped out as I was about to crush them beneath the sandalled feet of Aquarion Ceaser of the Pythonic Empire from his capital city of Comfy Chair. My secondary city was called “Cheese”, purely so I would get announcements like “The Hanging Gardens have been constructed in Cheese!”, because I have a simple sense of humour, easily satisfied), I reactivated the “Mostly” project.
“Mostly”, or to give it its former name, “This Week I Have Been Mostly…” is a one-box summary of what the hell I’ve been up to recently. What I’m playing, watching, listening to, reading, doing. Most of this can, interestingly, be automated. iTunes submits tracks I’m listening to to Last.fm, which provides RSS streams, and mostly movies I watch come from LoveFilm which I can scrape a feed from, if I can convince it to log in, which I’ve just about managed to do. I’m also going to try to review the stuff I get from Lovefilm and the games I play, because it’d be cool. So:
Why do I torture myself? I didn’t like the book much, the book is the film only with more in-your-face-gosh-isn’t-this-embarrising. I gave up twenty minutes in.
Sam Rockwell in non manic mode, George Clooney directs (pretty well). I like the style, I like the concept, and I like the movie, even when it makes no sense and I can’t see the cultural refs because I’ve never seen anything Chuck Barris produced
I’m glad I played this on the XBox. The game is an adventure-type game, well plotted and with a good story and some beautiful style and direction. The characters are great, the concepts are mostly wonderful. like: You have no health – if you die, you fail. If you fail, you die – but you do have mental health affected by the plot. Taking time out to play your guitar boosts your mental health, making the arcadey bits easier.
And so, we come to the Arcadey bits. There are a few types. First there’s the “Simple Simon”/”Dance Dance Revolvution” versions, where you hit the colours as they appear. These aren’t too taxing after a bit of practice, but are used occasionally annoyingly, like for a major plot-explaining cut-scene where you have to hit the – admittedly very slow, very easy – colours to keep the scene going. The ending effect is not one of immersion (I can see what they’re trying to do, which is simulate some difficulty in paying attention at the time) but of distraction. You get to watch the cut-scenes without the challanges in the menus, but you can’t pay attention in game, which is annoying for a game that is trying to be almost pure plot.
The second are the unforgivable bits where you have to hammer – or occasionally tap – on alternate left or right triggers. It was like playing Track and Field on the C64 again, hammering the keys like mad. Except this makes you keep it up until you’re tired of it, then switches back to Simple Simon for a bit, then back to the hammering… all while stuff’s going on on screen.
The end result is a game that you can only get the entire plot of if you are watching someone play the game. It’s still a good game, though occasionally frustrating, but the conflicting ideals of a pure-plot driven game and not letting you absorb the plot stop it being great.
Tonight: LARP.