I love “The Graveyard Book”, I’ve posted about it here before, when I spent a few immensely enjoyable days reading it in various graveyards in my vicinity. So when, over at his blog, the esteemed author Mister Neil Gaiman answered a question a reader had about the precise steps for the Danse Macabre, and mentioned that he would try to link to any video footage of readers dancing the Macabray that found its way to the interweb – well, I knew what had to be done.
A few weeks later and here is the video, thanks to the wonderful efforts of Ben, Erin, Lili, Lizbt, M1K3Y, Melodie, Michael, Omega, Rachel, Sam and Warren – who all took time out on Sunday to come down to my local botanic garden and prance around for a spell. Thank you peoples.
Things didn’t go entirely as I’d hoped, as some thoughtless couple decided to choose the exact same time to get married in precisely the bit of the gardens that I had plotted out the shoot in the day before – but the ‘best laid plans of the living and the dead’ as they say…
Above is a cast photo for the Plants vs. Zombies video I shot with some good friends recently. Stay tuned to this blog to see the fan-created homage go up in all its videographic splendour.
Shooting it was lots of fun. And it ties nicely in with what I threatened to talk about in more detail a few weeks ago, the brilliant Typing of the Dead. Now I was going to crack my writing knuckles and really get stuck into some praising the bizzare Mavis-Beacon-meets-Resident-Evil game, but I happened across this article a in the meantime over at Offworld. The article stopped me in my tracks beacuse I think Margaret Robinson has really said all I wanted to say about the game, and probably more succinctly than I would have managed.
Bottom line, it is fun AND extremely educational. So track it down. Play it. Master touch typing and revel in the horrors of the polygonical living dead all at the same time. (The system requirements are extremely meagre so maybe you could run it the old laptop that won’t manage anything else, get some use out if it!)
I’ve also been playing another of my game loot titles, “Titan Quest,” so I may talk about that a bit more about that click-fest in a subsequent post. For the moment I have to get to editing and uploading some video!
Not sure how vocabulary building is going to help me increase my earnings, but hey…
On my recent visit to the family homestead I plucked from the shelf an old book of mine, pictured above.
“Word Power Made Easy” by Norman Lewis. (You can see the scan of the back of the book over at Project Life, where I am guest posting this week!)
The book has been in my possesion for years and years (not sure how it came to me) but I’d never really given it more than a cursory flick through until now.
I must say I’ve been enjoying it immensely. As well as being very, American the author proves himself opinionated, fond of digression, and not at all shy in using the book to make sweepingly hilarious statements about any number of subjects in the guise of improving the reader’s lexicon.
To provide you with a taste here is an excerpt from Chapter 6 – “How to Talk About Science and Scientists.” -
“The root astron, star, is also found, combined with our old friend ology, study of, in astrology, the pseudo-science which claims it can foretell the future by the study of the stars. The practitioner of this theory is called an astrologer, a man generally pictured with a pointed dunce cap adorned with stars, planets, and various portions of the moon; a flowing robe that looks like an old fashioned flannel nightgown; and unkept gray; and a wise expression, as if he knows everything there is to know. All he knows is that he’s going to separate you from some of your money if you’re gullible enough to believe his baseless predictions.”
Hey, don’t hold back, Norm, tell us what you really think.
Here’s another gem from a little earlier in the book when he is discussing the latin root gamos -
“…and polygamy is the delightful if somewhat chaotic custom, practiced at one time by the Mormons of Utah and before them by King Solomon, of having as many wives as a man can afford financially and put up with emotionally.”
I love this book. I am going to keep working my way through it – learning a word here and there no doubt - but more importantly soaking up the wisdom of Mister Lewis, and enjoying the absolute conviction and bloody minded certainty with which he sounds forth on any and all subjects he comes across.
I salute you sir! May you never be at a loss for words or opinions at that great dinner party conversation in the sky. (The author, so the internet tells me, died on September the 8th 2006, aged 93.)
P.S. In a related note, my recent gaming hours have been divided between World of Warcraft and the supremely awesome TYPING OF THE DEAD. More needs to be said on this game, and it will, so stay tuned dear reader….
Most bad-ass zombie killers ever. And doing it all with TYPING my friends!
“Okay, just keep flying and hope no-one notices we broke the citadel.”
Gaming update.
Well I finally got a World of Warcraft character to level 60. Which was the orginal level-cap for those who are interested in such things. (It goes up to 80 right now, and as Blizzard have announced a THIRD expansion “Cataclysm” is on its way then there will be level 90’s running around soon enough.) Anyway, just because I am 5 or so years behind the curve, doesn’t lesson my personal sense of achievement. (See one of my favourite comic artists deal with this very topic at http://www.xkcd.com/606/)
Must say I didn’t spend a great deal of time with Rollercoaster Tycoon. For one thing the graphics were… not good. Did things really look that bad in 1999? I guess they did. I started off with the easiest scenario, running a themepark in Sherwood Forest during the Dark Ages, which is a nice idea and had me raising an eybrow at least. But unfortunately the gameplay was just not my cup of tea. I’ve never really been a simulation gamer. My father could (and has) happily spent hours building up infrastructure and micro-managing all manner of stuff in games like these - I just can’t get in to them. I played the original Civilisation a bit, and SimCity too, but my heart was never really in it. (In SimCity’s case I would usually have only played for an hour or so before I got bored, eventually a message would pop up telling me that there was traffic congestion some-where-another and I would call down a couple of hurricanes and earthquakes as vengeance for my city’s population whining about traffic.)
I was just as bored with Rollercoaster Tycoon. I’m not saying the game doesn’t have an amazing amount of detail and depth, but frankly for me its detail I could do without. I don’t want to click on a punter and examine his hunger, nausea or need-to-go-the-toilet stats. I don’t want to make decisions about the lift-hill chain speed or the lateral g’s of one of my rides. Essentially playing Rollercoaster Tycoon well means balancing the books – earning enough money from a smoothly running theme-park – and I find that about as enjoyable as an excel spreadsheet.
End verdict – All the fun of a theme park with way more responsibility and no actual fun!
So on to another game from my game-loot for me then. I’ve started playing “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare”, I’ll report back when done. Or bored. Or horrified with 1st person shooting actual people in realistic real-world looking situations…
Oh I almost forgot, here’s what guest contributor Lizbt had to say on her Horsez experience -
“Picking up a horse simulation game that pluralises with a ‘z’, I expected silliness, coat-brushing and a fair bit of canter. What I did not expect was for it to be hard. This game was hard. Well, not hard. Difficult by design, in that I had no idea how to complete many of the set tasks. The very first mission, your introduction to the game, involved you (as the horse) saving a young girl clinging to a cliff face. Realistic, I hear you say. Also, nearly impossible. The poor girl plunged to her death 3 times before I googled the damn thing. Ah, yes, press spacebar when you pass her incredibly camouflaged hand reaching up the side of the path. Of course. My hoofy rescue complete, I settled in for some good brushing. That was the ticket. I even got to use that hook thing to clean the pebbles out of the horse’s shoes. This increased my horse’s moral, which had presumedly taken a dip after the glow of the daring cliffside rescue had worn off. Then followed some sort of dressage / DDR combo, where I pressed the arrow keys in time to complete awesome galloping moves. I could dig it, I’d played my fair share of Shrek Super Party. But then, once again, it was fail-city time, as my horse just would not jump it’s little jumping gate, not matter how many times I clicked the button as it turned green. This all culminated in a cross-country race in which I had to collect a statue from inside a country church with an hours time or a pawn-shop owner would not sell me a pack of cards. I really needed those cards. I’d thrown the last deck in the fire in a fit of teenage hormanal rage over not winning an undisclosed card game (plot!). But the “map”, it no show me where I was. Or where I was going. Or how long I had left to complete the mission. So, I did the only possible thing I could. I rage-quit out of that mother, and played some Fairway Solitaire. Birdie!”
I have, Dear Reader, been somewhat lacking in the updates. Don’t think for a moment that it is because I am Not Doing Anything. No I am doing plenty, but mostly things that don’t really seem all that exciting to report on. Catching up with friends and family at the moment in my place of birth. That is to say I am away from my beloved computer so no updates on the gaming side of things anyway. I will get to Horsez and Railway Tycoon eventually though, fear not.
In the meantime though, and in the spirit of the slightly family-centric turn this blog has taken lately, I thought I might share with you my recent Re- initiation into the wondrous alchemical mysteries of my mother’s lasagna recipe. It was, I can only assume, the product of some ancient arcane rite. Souls were perhaps put on the line, bargains were struck – the details are not clear but the end product is several layers of tasty. I present to you the copy presently in my mothers keeping that will presumably one day be passed on to me.
Needless to say this is not a complete version, just an excerpt. Any persons attempting to use information from this particular portion of the grimoire to summon their own cheesy, meaty, slab of heaven-type dish will invariably fail to capture its true essence.
Today’s theme over at A Step Ahead of the Competition is ‘Old’, for which I posted a photograph of my 91 year old grandfather, holding a photograph of his younger self in front of his face. I really had trouble deciding between that photograph and another from the same set, the one above featuring both my grandparents holding their wedding picture. So in a completely personal and un-gaming/pop-culture/urban adventure related move – I thought I’d put it up here.
Hi Nanna and Pa! You are famous on the internet now.
I finally finished the main quest in Fallout 3. The ending was okay, in a not-entirely-thrown together-montage-of-still-images-with-voiceover kind of way. I mean to say, it didn’t feel like enough of a payoff for all the hours and effort, but the endings of RPG’s rarely feel satifyingly epic . It was no KOTOR 2 a least. (For the uninitiated KOTOR 2 “Knights of the Old Republic 2″, was an otherwise brilliant Star Wars action/rpg that due to a rushed development deadline, – ie we are releasing this sucker come Christmas time and We Don’t Give a Stuff If It Is Finished or Not – had a whole bunch of brilliant plot twists and character development and player choice that all ended in a 8 second clip of a starship flying away from a planet as it fell apart. I was so outraged I actually stood up, I remember it well. )
So that’s one game off my unfeasably large ‘To Play list’. I also *finally* finished Bioshock. I mean I only started playing it 1 year ago, what do you expect? Bioshock was always gloriously pretty in design and pleasingly dark in concept with its Ayn Rand-inspired philisophising, but I became bored with the kill Big Daddy then harvest/rescue a little girl gameplay about halfway through. I am easily bored. Also, I got lost a few times, so I punished the game for this design flaw by not playing it for 10 months. (I really, really, dislike mazes. I had enough 1st person maze navigating for one lifetime in 1990 with the brilliant Eye of the Beholder.) Anyway, I have finished finally, the story was actually very good, even if the end boss fight was comically easy.
So I’m going to tear the shrinkwrap off another of my competition-booty-games and take it for a spin. I’m going to venture into the world of another neglected game genre (for me at least) ; the simulation. Time to try my hand at “Rollercoaster Tycoon 2: Triple Thrill Pack”. Wish me luck.
N.B. Lizbt of the Project Life-ness has unwrapped and loaded up “Horsez” on her computer. This was one of the games I won that languish in the “sell give away or otherwise destroy” pile. Along with “Hell’s Kitchen: The Game.” *shudder*
Lizbt is presently stuck on the first mission, rescuing some girl from a gully. The girl keeps dying because she isn’t fast enough and Lizbt can’t find the gully. Teach those kids life lessons Mr Developer! This is actually a re-start for her as the first time Lizbt began the game she didn’t get the name quite right. Which meant she spent a few minutes bashing the escape key and trying to stop the baffling ‘death of a girl’s father, save the Horse Academy’ cutscene so she could rename her horse. I quote -
“I want to be Sparklez with a zed!”
We’ll get back to you with the verdicts. I’m sure you’ll be dying to know if the poor girl ever gets saved from the gully and if I end up being virtually sued for neglicence leading to the death of several people on a poorly constructed and maintained theme park ride…
A merry crew on a fine spring day.
Another shot of the cast, looking much more glamorous now that they are famous on the internet…
Not sure how vocabulary building is going to help me increase my earnings, but hey…
Most bad-ass zombie killers ever. And doing it all with TYPING my friends!
“Okay, just keep flying and hope no-one notices we broke the citadel.”
“Aww…”
Today’s theme over at 
