| Saturday, May 28, 2005 |
 | Staggering out of Friday last, I noticed that Charing Cross Road Library (small, but excellent selection of Chinese-language exercise videos) was having a book sale, from which I emerged clutching one of these little beauties. If I needed proof that the time for appalling vampire fiction was now, it came in the form of my next charity shop purchase. It's like some sort of... masquerade. I am no less ecstatic to discover this Voltron of shitty, shitty vampire fiction, out there waiting for me.
So far I have managed about a hundred words of the former. Blame Quicksilver, which is an attention sponge. I should be focused on the Quicksilver Trilogy.
Elsewhere, and after the badness of last week, what better cure than Eurovision, seen over at 's gaff? Next year, I must remember to keep track of the number of references to destiny, fires, turning around, forgetting and European Union. Considering the celebratory nature of Eurovision, although what exactly is being celebrated apart from Eurovision remains cloudy, the songs tend to focus on pretty depressing subject matter, barring brave contributions from Moldova (EMF), Norway (KISS) and Lithuania (morris dancing). Having doubled this up with Doctor Who, I feel the United Kingdom's best chance next year is to have a chorus of begasmasked mutants singing "Are You My Mummy?". It can't do materially worse, after all. Ruslana, Ukraine's winning entry last year, should in the same spirit of reform be made some sort of warrior-queen of Eurovision, and be provided with a better flamethrower the better to defend her borders.
Sunday found a home at the Riverside studios, where a double bill of the mid-60s Peter Cushing films Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD was showing. Tremendous fun, if your idea of tremendous fun is Bernard Cribbens in a PVC bodysuit. No, really. The Daleks, by comparison, are severely lacking in menace. In fact, as Dalek the first explains the plot to Dalek the second, the Universe's most relentless killing machines become camp country cousins.
Lessons learned: Daleks are good with impact and explosives, less good with sheer stress - an angled blow will knock them into sections. They can be grabbed and rotated quite easily, and will often forget that their weapons are far more effective against other Daleks than anything you might have to offer - do not, as the last resistance of London does, forget to bring any guns to your attack on the evil spaceship, by the way. They might help. If you get a clear shot on either Roy Castle or Bernard Cribbens, bring them down. If somebody in the audience asks you if you were invited to reprise your role in "Dr Who and the Daleks", try to be polite when explaining that you were busy playing Ursula Brangwen in Women in Love. And if you see a Thal, just kill it.
Really. The Thals are one of the very few powers in this world able to make me root for the Daleks. They have no weapons more powerful than knives, and yet have mastered the milling of plastics and the creation of complex medication. This is perfectly reasonable until you remember that they live in a hostile radioactive wasteland lousy with mutants and one over from a city full of insane cyborg killbastards. Despite having nothing in the way of weapons more impressive than a knife (one, shared between), they have all brought mirrors across the desert, with which to check their glam-rock hair. Doctor Cushing theoretically uses these mirrors to bewilder the Dalek's short-range sensors, but I bet he was just trying to keep morale up. Having said which, sending Roy Castle off to near-certain death in the Swamp of Scary surely must have been enough to create good cheer. Since the Daleks cannot leave the city and their weapons have an effective range of about ten metres, bamboozling aforementioned short-range sensors is pretty much utterly pointless.. All sensors, at any range, serve merely to inform them of how much further the enemy have to travel before the can of whoopass can be opened. It is not really explained how we go from Daleks (unable to leave patio) telling the Doctor (outside patio area) that he was their prisoner and the Doctor actually becoming their prisoner, suggesting that Skaro was in fact devastated by the deployment of Austenian performative speech acts.
Fortunately, no race that responds to "Look out, there's some sort of gigantic monster in the swamp" with "I'm just going to refill the water bottles. You fellows go on ahead" is likely to remain viable for long. It's the circle of life.
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| Tuesday, May 17, 2005 |
| Technology and its abuses; which started, as a thought, from this image. For those not familiar with the vagaries of ragdoll physics or Deus Ex 2, the person in the case has been rendered either dead or unconscious and dropped into her own luggage. It's something that the game presumably did not intend for you to do, but which, thanks to the freedom of action provided, is perfectly possible.
This in turn reminded me of the Cantina Crawl, in which those who have decided that they want to be entertainers in online Star Wars role-playing (and who didn't want to be the elephant playing the keyboards?) get together for beautifully choreographed digital dance sequences. Cantina Crawl XII, although protesting about perhaps the world's tiniest problem, is a remarkable document of how online communities based around dirty dancing on Dantooine can produce works of startling polemic intensity.
Which takes up back to DeLappe, and ultimately maybe to poor deluded Sanford Lewin.
So, what do you use games for? As mentioned before, I primarily use them to meet girls.
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| Wednesday, May 11, 2005 |
| The defining characteristic of Chirk must be the smell. Next to the village is a vast chocolate factory, looking about as un-Wonkaish as you could reasonably expect. As a result of this, what woudl otherwsie be the sort of depopulated former mining town you would expect to see more often in South Wales is transformed into a sensual neverland. Co-Op with bored teenagers hanging around outside - yummy! Pound store - delicious!
Perhaps that constant, battering smell explains the weight and puissance of the food. Day after day of pubs, ham, eggs, chips, chips. My body was screaming in protest, which is hopefully a tribute to the efficacy of my green-tea-and-kale regimen in jolly old London. It feels now as if I have been handed the keys to my body back, although the floor still seems to be rocking gently.
Ny beirw bwyt llwfyr ny rytyghit
The viaduct leading out of Chirk is terrifying. Rather than being set in stone, the iron trough containing the canal is balanced on top of hundred-foot long, spindly legs. The guide book's cheerful comment that keeping the damn thing up is an ever-growing chore hardly helped. In fact, perhaps the only way to make it more terrifying is to walk over it rather than have the comforting bulk of a narrowboat around you.
See what I mean? More generally, it will surprise no regular reader to learn that the Llangollen canal is oddly similar to the river scenes of Half-Life 2. Rusted barges. Scrawled messages in aerosol paint. The use of physics to remove obstacles to forward progress. Even so, I was a bit taken aback to find hostile alien life in Llangollen (the wag asking what other kind of life one finds in Wales will get a slap).
Asking at the tourist information, we were told that the Daleks had all gone, but the sign had not been taken down yet. It was a source of some irritation.
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| via Mildlydiverting:
See these eyes so green? I can model for a thousand years...
Elsewhere, my early experiences of the Internet took place using Lynx, the text-only browser. For an academic environment, Lynx, actually made a lot of sense, insofar as it made surfing for porn largely unrewarding. These days, it might be invalauble for slowing browsing down: information is so quickly presented and removed that having to press a scroll button that switches the whole page over would disrupt the experience of browsing, force you to take time to be sure that hte necessary information has been absorbed before moving on. Links is a lot more sophisticated than Lynx, which reacted to tables like a lunchtime drunk, but it has the same philosophy. Give it a try.
Abandoned art. Didn't somebody do something like this with books? That is, something useful?
Mind your manners - quite a fun, if generally rather easy, game of Victorian manners. Corsetry is not primarily intended for misbehaviour, after all.
Disabled girls are easy. Nice'n'creepy.
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