To Be A Gamer

My iMac just did the weirdest thing. I brought it out of sleep mode and all of a sudden it started making this huge racket. It normally makes a few noises (hard drive, DVD drive, etc. starting up) when I activate it but this was... louder. Like a hoover would sound from a few metres away kind of volume. Same sort of sound as well. It must have been a fan or something but I swear I've never heard anything like it before, at least not from my computer. It took a couple of minutes to die down and now it's stopped.

Really weird.


You know what I've noticed lately? Now is an awesome time to be a gamer.

Think about what's been out in the last couple of months and what's going to be out soon. We've had new entries in the Halo, Half Life, Zelda and Metroid series with a new Mario game, Smash Bros Brawl and Metal Gear Solid 4 all on the horizon (well, some nearer than others but you know what I mean). Then you've got new IPs like Zack and Wiki, Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed all gearing up to make their mark.

And that's just off the top of my head; I'm sure it's far from an exhaustive list but you get the idea. There's no real point to any of this, though maybe I could find one if I had more time and patience, but it's an interesting thought. It's also quite annoying since you can be almost certain that you're missing out on something great if you don't have a solid gold wallet.

I have a whole lot of games that I need to play and a whole lot to say about them but that'll have to wait since, once again, I've left this far too late.

On the bright side this is hilarious, particularly if, like me, you can't stand CSI: Miami. I also came across Flame Warriors, a comprehensive guide to the various types of asshole that you are likely to meet on the interwebz. See how many you can recognise. See how many you are.

That's it for today. Actually, here's another Weebl and Bob cartoon. I'd forgotten how much I loved these things. While I'm at it, this is funny as well, particularly if you are or know people who are afflicted with a Halo 3 addiction.

Miniposts aren't half as cool as miniguns

Ever have one of those days when you get to the end of it and you're brushing your teeth thinking “As soon as I'm done, I'm just going to slap something together for tonight's post, pack my bag and go to bed” when you suddenly realise that you haven't printed out several things that you really ought to, that you left your Maths homework undone when you got bored with that question on sigma notation (and you were off on the day you learned how to do it) and that you need to learn how to use a new program so that you can teach little kids how to use it during your lunch break tomorrow?

I'm having one of those days.

And I've just wasted even more time just browsing around the internet, closing some open tabs and bookmarking things that I'll never look at again. So I need to go and do this work, meaning that you're stuck with a mini-post for today.

It's been a while since I did a truly tiny mini-post and I don't want to make this too short so.... go look at these pumpkins on Joystiq.

I need to go do stuff. Very quickly. Have a nice day.

Overanalyze This!

It's a little after two o'clock right now and I'm home from school, having got out for a doctor's appointment and then not gone back in because all I have is a couple of free periods anyway. It's been bucketing with rain on and off all day, which is kind of miserable, but it does get me out of having to hoover up leaves outside.


It's later now and my thoughts, after a bit of a day off, must now return to getting this post written. I've got a backlog of things that I want to discuss and do but I keep leaving this too late to complete them to my own satisfaction so I'm just going to discuss whatever comes into my head.

As you may well know, I'm a big fan of and occasional contributor to the TV Tropes Wiki, where logically minded individuals come together to point out the similarities in various plots and story telling devices in order to document and (usually) mock them. Of course, the site isn't limited to that and also deals with various fan ideas, meta concepts, Wild Mass Guessing, etc.

One of my favourite pages on the site is the trope called “Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory”, which deals with fans (and professional critics) who feel compelled to attach significance to every little thing in a fictional creation. It doesn't matter if the author disagrees or if they say it has no meaning or if it's a book written for five year olds – there's someone out there who will argue that it's a metaphor for the Cold War.

A lot of the examples are from songs, shows and pieces of literature that has been professionally critiqued and examined, often producing ideas and themes that the author, when questioned later, will say simply aren't there, or were never intended. The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland often have far too much significance attached to them for the children's books that they are. People have viewed The Lord of the Rings as a tale about World War II, despite Tolkien saying that he had much of it planned and written before his supposed “inspiration” had even started. Douglas Adams said repeatedly that 42 was a random number and, yet, it's been tied to everything “from base thirteen to Tibetan monks”. Of course, that last one might say more about Hitchhiker's fans than anything else.

But some of the funniest stories are ones provided by the tropers from their real life experiences. Things that have happened to them in English classes and discussions of art. Encounters with people for whom common sense, at least when it comes to their chosen “art”, is unheard of and likely blasphemous. You should really read that page.

This is really a pet peeve of mine albeit one that I have to deal with far less often since I dropped English at school. No less a man than Isaac Asimov has commented on it, writing a short story entitled “The Immortal Bard” in which Shakespeare, brought forward in time, fails a class on his own plays. In more serious writing, Asimov apparently concluded that the meaning of a story should be left entirely up to the reader. He himself said that he viewed The Lord of the Rings as a warning against industrialisation and didn't mind in the slightest that Tolkien had denied it.


I really need to get my hands on some more Asimov fiction. Ironically, I did my personal study, a big long essay for Higher English, on The Robots of Dawn. I didn't like doing it though, so it's not a problem.

That's it for tonight. I might do some Physics homework now, if I can be bothered. Other than that, I'm off to bed. Have a nice day.

Krazy Klocks

Have you ever just sat still and listened to the air whistling through your left nostril? I'd recommend against it; it really is very, very boring.


You know my whole strategy of not having any homework and taking the weekend off to play video games? Kind of backfired at around 6pm today when a couple of unrelated IM convos reminded me that I had Physics homework to do and that I hadn't filled in some form for my university application that I said I would fill in.

So, I'm mildly screwed.

On the bright side, I get time off school tomorrow since I've got a doctor's appointment before lunch and there's no point in going back because I just have free periods after that. Unfortunately, I would actually quite like to be in school because it means that I can just sit around and kick ass at Street Fighter.

You know, I think that's all I have for today? It's not even 11 o'clock yet and normally I'd just put this off, adding little bits here and there until I had about 400 semi-coherent words but, since today is clock changin' day, it feels like it ought to be midnight. It was a nice surprise when I turned on the iMac after looking at my clock and thought that time had wound back by an hour, but it turned out that I hadn't installed Leopard in my sleep and now it's catching up to me.

So I'll leave you with one last link. I recommend not watching this before you go to bed because it will haunt your nightmares, especially if you liked any of the Gundam animes. In fact, even if you don't like them, or have never even heard of them, it'll still make you die a little on the inside. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Doozy Bots. It doesn't even deserve my usual bold formatting for titles. Check Wikipedia (I refuse to link to the article) if, for some reason, you want to know more about its origins and its ultimate fate. I suspect that both begin with “H” and rhyme with “bell”.

Also, I've just remembered that I have a Computing test tomorrow morning. Crud.

I need to play games more often

Woah. It got to be quarter past eleven somehow. When did that happen?

Anyway, just a short post tonight, due to time constraints and a lack of much interesting to say. I don't need to get to bed earlier than normal, but I'll probably get yelled at if I don't because my eyes “look red and sore”. I personally don't notice anything about them even when I look in the mirror and you'd think I would feel something, what with them being connected to my central nervous system and stuff. Apparently, that doesn't matter.


I've had another nice relaxing day. No huge pressure to do homework or anything, so I've been able to kind of take the day off from doing nothing and play some games I've been meaning to get round to.

I've managed to get further in Phantom Hourglass. I'm still not too far in but I've been “encouraged” by the fact that Sam told me today that he had beaten it. It's a great little game and, while it takes a little while to get used to the differences to previous (particularly console-style) Zeldas, it's a very solid entry into one of the best franchises in video game history.

I've also been playing Metroid Prime 3 and I've finally got around to cracking open The Orange Box and continuing the Half Life saga. I've got a lot more to say about both of those games, and Phantom Hourglass, but it seems that it'll have to wait until tomorrow, owing to time constraints and the amount that I want to say.

I've just realised that I've failed to do a woodle again, despite my relaxed day. Instead, I offer you a link to a mildly amusing video in the style of a fake movie trailer. It has Donkey Kong in it.

Every time I see one of these things, I keep remembering the big long list of parodies and short films that I keep tucked away in my head, waiting for a word processor and a camera. I really need to write some more of that stuff...


One final note. After a long hiatus, Skippy has started posting at the MacTake again. We'll see if he can keep it up this time. I've already had to correct his spelling once.

Nothing completes a good day quite like Metroid Prime

I've had quite a good day today. I pretty much put my personal statement behind me. Sam Potter's peer evaluation for his Darthmouth application is all done and checked, I just need to type it up for the final form. That Physics homework I was worried about wasn't mentioned at all. I managed to get out of doing Maths. Mentoring was fun, as usual, and the rest of the day was spent playing (by which I mean “winning at”) Street Fighter.

How I got out of Maths is actually kind of weird. Myself and another guy, Andrew Mackie, miss the main class on Fridays due to separate scheduling conflicts so we go second last lesson, joining in with a Higher class. We're kind of lucky since, rather than being stuck with a roomful of S5s or whatever, it's a small class consisting of people from our year who chose to do Higher Maths over two years.

The homework for today had been to complete the first couple of questions from an exercise consisting of six. We learned by asking around that nobody else had done this except for Andrew who had, in what must have been a gargantuan bout of boredom, elected to do the entire exercise. That morning, all everyone else had done was get a little further on, most barely completing the questions that had been set for homework.

So I decided, I've got nothing better to do, I may as well get on with this exercise and maybe I can get out of class later. So, over two free periods and a bit of lunch, I leisurely worked my way through the exercise in between bouts of Street Fighter EX II Plus, finding the whole thing rather enjoyable. When it came time for class, we went along, copied down a note everyone else had got that showed us who to do the work we had gone ahead and done anyway and then left.

Okay, so it's not a hugely weird story, but the strange thing is that I actually quite enjoyed doing the Maths work. Everyone else seemed to struggle with it a bit but I actually found it quite relaxing, seeing everything slot logically into place as I worked through page after jotter page of powers and derivatives. I wouldn't call it fun exactly, but there was a certain amount of exhilaration every time I peeked at the answers and saw that my ten minutes work hadn't been in vain.

And, of course, there was that great feeling of superiority that comes from doing in three seconds flat the mental sums that an S2 Maths class was struggling over. It's not quite so impressive but it does remind me of just how far I've come in my knowledge and abilities in just a few years.


Well, my finger's bleeding and I want to watch an episode of Heroes before bed, so I'll be off now. As a last note, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is awesome. I intend to play a lot more of it over the weekend, in between catching up on Phantom Hourglass.

Wait, I still need to do some other homework...

If I ever have a child, I'm giving them the middle name of “That”. That way, whenever anybody they want to impress says something, they can say “That's my middle name!” without lying or exaggerating.


One thing I have to say about this peer evaluation thing – I think it's a little bit unfair to have it handwritten in a certain amount of space. At least with a word limit, or character limit as UCAS has for personal statements, you can be sure that everyone is getting an equal amount of text in which to sell themselves. This system seems to favour people who have friends with small handwriting.

I've almost got it done and it's not half bad, even if I say so myself. Like I've said before, pressure seems to make me work better and, since it's for tomorrow, I've managed to produce something that makes Jesus pale in comparison to Samuel Burns Potter. I worried a bit that it would come off sounding a little forced though I think the only problem area is the bit about the first words that come to mind when I think about him.

I truly hate those kinds of questions, because any truly honest answer is not going to be suitable (“World of Warcraft”, “freckles”, “Halo”, etc.) and anything you try to make up sounds fake. I had the same problem with my personal statement and any other writing of this sort, where you have to talk something or someone up. Maybe I'm being a little perfectionist since this could well affect a good friend's whole life. As he pointed out today, with the necessary exams and his SATs out of the way, whether or not he gets accepted is now completely beyond his control and this evaluation is the last little piece of the puzzle. Perhaps not the most important, but nevertheless...

Anyway, like I said, I don't much like doing this stuff but, when push comes to shove, I can doctor spin fairly well. All this reminds me of when I had to do personal writing for English, doubtless the thing that I hated the most about the subject. I used to rage and fume for days at the absurdity of it all, the pointlessness of it and the assumptions that had been made. Several times, when I'd reached the point where I just didn't care any more, I'd write something humorous, something making fun of the whole concept.

I've just looked at some old essays like that. There's the one that's meant to be about “the real me”, where I just compare myself to a Linux distribution and spout some clear nonsense. My favourite is the one where I had to write about a situation from which there was no escape. I ended up writing about my inability to escape from doing the essay itself. Both were handed in, though I suspect neither did all that well.

Not that it matters much. I grabbed a B in English many months ago and now I'm done with it. And I'm also very nearly done with this peer evaluation too, so goodness only knows what I'll be complaining about having to do next week. For now, I need to go and copy my draft on to the practice form, just to check it fits, and then watch the latest episode of Heroes.

Have a nice day.

Why don't any spell checkers think that "combust" is a word?

Well, the trip to St Andrews was very interesting and informative. I got to know the town a bit better and learned a lot about the university itself. I also got to see the computer science building and meet some of the staff there – everything seems to be well-equipped and the staff are very friendly. They had a room full of iMacs that would have made Skippy spontaneously combust with joy.

I'll probably discuss that more at some other point. Or maybe I won't. My track record indicates the latter, but I certainly haven't got the time now. I had to get up at 6:30 this morning and I've been either stuck in a car or walking around St Andrews for most of the day, so I'm pretty damned tired. And I've got a headache too, probably related to the lack of sleep.

The journey there and back did end up taking about 3 hours each way. Of course, on the way back, we had to drop Sam off somewhere in Glasgow to see a play as part of his AH English. And, also of course, he had no idea where or when he was meant to be dropped off. This resulted in an awful lot of phone calls being made as Sam tried to contact somebody who might be able to give him the phone number of one of the people he actually needs to talk to.

It eventually all worked out but I didn't get home till after six o'clock, by which time my headache had already set in, so I've done none of the homework that I really need to do... Screw it. I'm going to bed.

Have a nice day. More tomorrow. Etcetera.

Another short post undeserving of a capitalised title

So that discussion of the TV Links debacle (yes, NeoOffice, it is a word) that I mentioned yesterday and was planning to do today? Seems like it's not gonna happen.

My excuse is thus: a visit to St Andrews University decided to creep up on me. This involves getting up ridiculously early and then having a nice, long (approx. 3 hours), boredom-filled drive up the road to St Andrews. There's then a tour around the halls of residence, etc., and then a big long gap until Sam and I attend a Computer Science lecture for half an hour. Then we leave.

So I've got to get to bed and I have little else to say. I'm also in a bad mood, for some fairly obvious reasons, and some other, less obvious ones.

But you know what always cheer me up? Star Trek parodies of inspirational posters! Go on. Have a look, they're funny.

And that's it from me. I should have more to say tomorrow but there's no way of knowing how tired/annoyed I'll be when I get back from St Andrews.


Oh, and here's a trailer for a rather weird looking animated movie based on the Turok games. I remember the original Turok. Never owned it, but I played it at a friend's. I recall there being more fog.

Silly Faces and Sillier Legal Propositions

So, they've taken down TV Links. That's certainly a shame, it was a very useful site. I admit that maybe, once or twice (give or take), I used it to catch up on shows or to see some stuff that's never been shown over here. I'll have more to say tomorrow, I think, since I can feel a righteously indignant rant swelling up inside me. And I do love my righteuous indignation, not to mention my ranting.

All I'll say for now is read the articles (the link above is to Google News, there should be at least 5 or 6 stories on it) and leave any comments you want. There seems to be some dispute as to what the legal grounds are – has the arrested man (as yet unnamed but presumably the guy in charge of the site) committed any crimes simply by linking to illegal videos? Would such a ruling have greater repercussions on sites such as search engines? Was any warning issued to him first?

That's partly why I'm holding off judgement. I want to get all the facts, though I have no doubt I'll end up on the side of TV Links. That, and it brings up some other interesting points about the progression of technology and distribution (I'm particularly thinking of music piracy and download systems).


In other news, I finally got round to reading some of Star Trek: The Manga. As I imagined, it was unanimously declared geeky. Fortunately, that doesn't bother me and it didn't much seem to bother anybody whose opinion I actually give a toss about. As for what's actually contained between the covers... well, there are the some funny sound effects (helpfully translated from Japanese by Sam), some bizarre facial expressions and the standard Star Trek plot “twists”.

The twists, as indicated by the speech marks, are fairly predictable, at least thus far. The second story had a decent enough one; it could have done with a bit more build-up but it wasn't given much space and it had some cool concepts, so I'll let it get away with it. The first story (I'm only partway through the third of five, by the way) gave away its twist to any Trekkie fairly early on. And let's face it, if you're reading Star Trek: The Manga, chances are good that you're a Trekkie. Or a Trekker. I forget the difference, but I know that one group doesn't like to be called the other.

And the facial expressions. Sulu smirking as he tells the captain that they're exit route has been cut off by a hull breach made me laugh. I even posed a hypothetical scenario to some friends of mine: “Your ship is under attack, one of your crew is dying and you've just learned that the only way to save yourselves is by destroying an evil cyborg. Of course, you need a blood sample from said cyborg to cure your dying crewman and you can't destroy the space station it's on, because then there would be nothing stopping you from falling into a black hole.”

Now, a question. “Would you have this look on your face?”


Hilarious. But it's not a bad little compilation. The second volume came out recently and I can get it for under a fiver on Amazon so I may buy that.


Further news, still sci-fi related. Peter Davidson is, as rumoured, making a comeback as the Fifth Doctor in the Doctor Who Children in Need special. While it may well be played for comedy and obviously couldn't fit in between the cliffhanger-ish ending of last series and the resolution coming in the Christmas special, previous specials have been in canon. This one's penned by Steven Moffat, a veteran Who writer, and I'm really, really hoping that it's being used as a test for the possibility of more multi-Doctor episodes in the future. I'd certainly kill to see Christopher Eccleston back in the role, and some interplay between the post-Time War Ninth and Tenth Doctors and the unaware Eighth (or even, dare I say it, Seventh) Doctor could make for some very nice drama.

But that's maybe just wishful thinking. Either way, watch out for the scene on Friday 16th November, during Children in Need night.


I think that's it for today. Still need to play more Phantom Hourglass but that'll have to wait. I need to get some Physics homework done tomorrow, which I probably should have done over the holiday and was planning on doing tonight, except I don't know what questions it was. I'd check my prep diary, but Sam (currently going by the name Thomas, after another discussion with Sam Potter, henceforth known as Burns, over who should get to use their name resulted in each going by their middle names) managed to lose it while searching my bag for a sheet of paper. So it's lying in the common room. I'd use his, but it long ago disappeared into the ether.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, wrapping things up. Before I go, I'll just say that this headline put a rather amusing image in my head. Go figure. Now, I'm gonna go lie in bed and find out how the latest woman to flirt with Captain James Tiberius Kirk is going to kick the bucket. Looks to be alien brain-screwing signals.

Not one of my best

You know what I want? A pencil sharpner. One of those ones that clamps to the side of the desk and you stick the pencil in and then turn a handle and it sharpens it. Maybe an electric one. I don't know why, I just vaguely remembered having one at some point, or maybe just using it a lot in school or something, and wanted one.

Well, Christmas is coming.


As is school. School is coming tomorrow, in fact. Unfortunately... well, I've not done a lot of the work I set out to do. I haven't updated The Grey Line (I really should stop linking to that), I haven't written much more fiction... I've barely even played any of the games I set out to play. I've even fallen way behind Sam on Phantom Hourglass.

And then there was my homework... yeah. I'm further along with Sam Potter's peer evaluation, the most important thing I had to do, but I'm going to make some notes and talk it over with him tomorrow. That's probably allowed. Maybe.

Also, I didn't do a woodle yesterday. I'd do a Stick Guys one now, but I kind of need to get some stuff ready for school. Well, I need to pack various games consoles since I'm the one who handles half of that stuff. At least I can do something useful.

So, I'm gonna call this a “crappy post”, my term for hurriedly made posts that I don't really like that you may have heard of if you read the topic tags at the bottom of such posts, and then go do that stuff then go to bed.

I may be a terrible blogger sometimes, but at least I acknowledge it.

Wires Made Of Straw

I had a good day today. Guess why.

Wrong.

It was because someone gave me a box full of useful looking cables.

For complicated reasons (mostly involving it being a total mess), we were tidying out the garage and my dad and brother came across some old cables that had apparently got stashed there at some point when no one could think of anywhere else to put them. Among them was a SCART lead, two AV component cables (I'd been looking for some like them; wish I could remember why), four RF leads (which are always handy for various old consoles or possibly for selling with the NESi), an aerial for some old portable TV which I guess I could use... somehow and an adaptor for running multiple SCART devices into one TV.

There was also a rather useful tray thing to hold them all, which'll come in handy because I can use it to store the various tools and bits of gadgetry that I randomly find myself needing and using.

That, ladies and gents, is how sad my life is. Well, how sad I suppose it must seem. Works for me though so, as I and others have often observed, I really don't care about what people think. They can stand around and talk about sport and parties all they want; I'll be laughing at them from my little corner where I sit, surrounded by miscellaneous unidentified cables, reading my Star Trek manga. And then I'll conquer the world.


Anyhoo, in other news, I was thinking about the phrase “the straw that broke the camel's back” today. I'm sure you're all familiar with the meaning. If not, get out more. It makes you wonder where exactly such a phrase came from – why a camel, why a load of straw, why does anyone care? Interestingly, it also seems to be where the phrase “the last straw” comes from, which is another odd one without its original context.

I've now looked it up and have some understanding about it either coming from an old Arab proverb or from a line in Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son (same difference, really) but at the time, I started to ponder its origins.

I reckon it must have come from a story somewhere, since so many things do. A hypothetical book called 101 Ways to Kill a Camel. Probably brought up in Chapter 4, “If Life Gives You Straw...”, though it probably got famous cause it was the first one mentioned on the blurb, which was all most people read when someone gave it to them for Christmas. Probably the same person who gave them Does Anything Eat Wasps? the year before.


Well, I have to go and read an article on a new Fire Emblem game and then chew up a roll for a few minutes before taking some antibiotics. It's kind of a weird system that my brother recommended to me because my ability to swallow pills is, to put it bluntly, near non-existent. Comes and goes. It's weird. I plan on using it as a metaphor for super powers at some point. Not that the characters in The Grey Line are going to get super powers. That wasn't foreshadowing or a slip of the tongue or anything. Just forget I said that.

Incidentally, if I ever write my autobiography (I suppose it's not really my autobiography if someone else writes it but you know what I mean), I'm calling it “101 Ways to Kill a Camel”. No explanations or anything. Only people who have followed my writing from the early days will get it. And this URL will have expired years ago, so you'll have no way to cite your information for the Wikipedia page! Bwahahahahaha!

Lot of Stuff to Bold Here

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe I've discovered the nerdiest item in all of space and time:


I saw it in a book shop this morning and had to get it, if only to find out what the hell it was all about. I also picked up volume 2 of Bleach and volume 4 of Dragon Ball while I saw them, since I don't think I'll be getting near another Forbidden Planet for a while, which is where I like to get manga. Well, apparently. I've only really bought manga there once, when I went there with Sam, Skippy and Jimerson while we were meant to be at an Edinburgh University open day. But it was an enjoyable experience.

I actually need to read more of Dragon Ball. I got the first volume... last Christmas, I think. Read a bit of it and eventually handed it to Erin, who seems to like them. I think I'll probably end up taking a couple of volumes, either the first two of DB or Bleach and Star Trek, into school on Monday to give me something to do when I get bored of beating people at Street Fighter.

Actually, holy crap. School starts again on Monday. Damn and blast. I need to get a peer review for a friend's university application written. It shouldn't be hard, I've known him for most of my life and he has all the right qualities for his course, I just suck at doing that kind of thing. Well, pressure generally helps me in these situations so I'll probably leave it to Sunday evening or so.

Saturday, as with much of this afternoon, will likely be spent playing The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. I'm about 3-4 hours in and it kicks some serious ass. The controls, once you get used to them (which only takes about 5 minutes), are excellent and while it deviates a little from the standard Zelda formula here and there, it still retains that essential feel of the series perfectly. I'll probably write more tomorrow once I'm further into it.

Also to do tomorrow, is play The Orange Box, which I also picked up this morning along with Zelda and my manga. My brother and I may end up taking a trip to PC world to upgrade the sound card on the gaming PC since it's been in trouble for a while and I don't want to miss any good stuff from Episode 2. It's kind of odd - the sound always had trouble during pre-rendered cutscenes where it cut in and out repeatedly but it never had trouble with Half Life 2 because that was all done in-engine.

Meh. I'll figure something out or just end up putting up with it. And then I can play me some Portal as well. I've read a lot of good things about it. In fact, the only bad thing I've read about it is that it's too short, which seems to imply that it's a damn good gaming experience. May discuss that more tomorrow as well. In the meantime, here's a video of Half Life 2 modded to use the Portal gun.

And since it's now almost 20 to midnight, I'll end tonight's post here. I'll try to get a woodle up for tomorrow, since I just remembered it. I also remembered that I meant to get a podcast done this week with Sam. And I also remembered that I've got to watch the latest episode of Heroes. Busy, busy, busy.

I got a new chair!

I got a new chair. It's blue, like my old one, but this one has a significant advantage: the cover on it is intact and it doesn't leave chunks of yellow foam all over my floor. I still have the other chair in my room though, so the foam problem hasn't really been eliminated. But the new chair is nice and comfortable. I thought you ought to know that. No real reason. Just to rub in the fact that I have a new (well, second-hand but in very good condition except for a small tear in the fabric on the back, you can hardly notice it, really) chair and you, probably, don't.


I think I kind of consciously took the day off from doing anything very much today. The whole family got dragged out for a walk around Culzean country park, which is a nice enough place, I just don't like being dragged anywhere. I was planning on discussing it at greater length, but I'm tight for time again and I didn't manage to get a copy of some photos that I wanted from my brother. Meh. I may discuss it again.

Probably not tomorrow though, since that's a day for working and for playing Phantom Hourglass.

It's weird. Normally, I'd be really hyped up about a new Zelda game but for some reason, I'm not. I'm sure it's a great game and I'm going to play it three times through and love it to bits, I'm just not excited about it right now. There's been no real hype for it. I've seen it advertised on TV a couple of times, only really paying attention to it because I noticed that Zelda music was coming from somewhere in the kitchen.

I know it's been out in the US for a while now (Sam's doing the next Nintendo Report and has made it quite clear that no spoilers will be tolerated from his co-hosts across the Atlantic) and I've heard some good things about it. Very high score in my latest NGamer, though I haven't read the full review. I did the same thing with Twilight Princess, since I didn't want any of the plot spoiled.

One thing I will say that I already like about Phantom Hourglass – the graphics. It follows the same style as Wind Waker and I can't get enough of it. Partly because it allows for such a range of expression and characterisation as well as hugely impressive environments but also partly because it isn't brown.

No, really. So many modern games go for that “realistic” style where everything is dim and some shade of brown. Gears of War is the perfect example here. Twilight Princess sometimes suffered from this as well, though Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, the previous “realistic” Zelda games managed to avoid it. I remember seeing an image a while ago, after an E3, maybe '05 or '06, with a load of new game screenshots shrunk down and put side by side. When pixelated, it was mostly browns and greys.

Ah, found it here.

As a few people point out, it's not exactly scientific but it does point out the problem that some games have.

For an even better example, compare the original Halo with Halo 3. The series wasn't exactly comedy to begin with, but as it established itself as a serious franchise, the art direction changed slightly, becoming that much darker and less vibrant. It seems to stem from some idea that too many colours makes the game look “kiddy”, an instant nail in the coffin of any game trying to appeal to “hardcore” gamers. Ah, hardcore gamers. If only your skulls weren't as solid as your cores.

Anyway, to come back to my original point, the diversity in colour and animation is why I like the Wind Waker/Phantom Hourglass look. And that's all I have to say for today. Tomorrow, who knows. But today is almost over and I'm going to get some sleep.

Another Day, Another Headache

I've got a splitting headache and I've just discovered that Blogger's due to go down any minute for more maintenance... I can't be bothered rushing, so I'm just going to go at my own pace and hope that everything works when I get there. Which is a good philosophy in a lot of situations, actually. Unless you've been called to repair something.

Today was reasonably busy and productive, which is probably what gave me the headache. I can scratch a couple of things off my huge to do list – tidying a couple of rooms and sorting some of my junk. Still a lot left to do and very little time in which to do it. Well, plenty of time, but not with the amount of effort I can muster. I'm only an incredibly lazy human, after all.

So, yeah. Nothing much to say for today. Still haven't updated The Grey Line (which I can't be bothered linking too). Been reading a lot of a great webcomic called Gunnerkrigg Court. That link is to the first comic in the archives, by the way. I hate it when I get linked to the home page and accidentally see some spoilers or something. Doesn't happen very often, but it's annoying when it does.

I figure Sam and I will get the podcast going on... Friday maybe. No wait, that's when Phantom Hourglass comes out. Nothing getting done that day. And the day after will be more PH with a little Orange Box to shake things up a bit. But I'm determined to get it done before the end of these holidays.

Just like I'm determined to get Corbett's Fiction going properly and write more sketches and read a dozen books... and that's not counting the stuff that I have to do for school.


Okay, you know what? This post is way too whiny. Well, it seems that way to me. And I'm the one in charge here, so that's a convenient excuse to end things. I'll be back tomorrow, hopefully having had time to write something more substantial.

Have a nice day.

Same Symbolism, Different Day

I am overcome with a sudden urge to point a Brute Shot at someone's feet and say “Dance, Spartan! Dance!”. I think this means I've been playing too much Halo 3 (or reading too much on Halopedia).


So, I managed to do that thing again where I come up with a topic, write about it for a while, look at the clock, realise I'm not going to do it justice and then decide to do something else instead.

And I just did that thing again where I massively and unnecessarily extend a list of my actions.

Anyway, it's a good topic and one that covers video games and my love of them, so you can imagine that it'll be pretty long. Fortunately, I predicted its length early and have plenty of time to come up with something else, like the backup topic I was going to use. Which I'll just get to.... now.


I mentioned I was reading Halopedia before. Almost every page there (maybe I'm exaggerating, but it is very common) points out what relevance the page's topic has to the number 7. For those who don't know, and I suspect that will be many, Bungie, Halo's developer, loves the number 7. It crops up in all kinds of places in their games, often in very sly little hints and neat little maths tricks.

For example, the monitors of the two Halo installations encountered in the game are 343 Gulity Spark and 2401 Penitent Tangent. 343 and 2401 are, respectively, 7^3 and 7^4. That much makes sense.

Then you come across stuff like there being (at the time of Halo 2) seven Covenant vehicles. And some of those vehicles having names with seven letters. And the game being released in September, the 7th month of the Roman calendar. And this glorious little nugget “UNSC Frigate Forward Unto Dawn is FFG-201. 20+1=21, 2+0+1=3, 21÷3=7”.

Fans, once they get started, will see symbolism in more or less anything. And it's funny how often symbolism will unintentionally turn up. Take my own piece of fiction, The Grey Line. Which I am contractually obliged to link to in every blog post. I struggled for ages to come up with a name for it, once it had grown beyond what I had originally planned. I settled on the “The Grey Line” for a few plot related and reasons and then decided to check to make sure that it wasn't taken by anything else.

Turns out it's also a term for the terminator, the line that divides night and day on a planet. Which is some awesome symbolism about something or other. And then Sam, ever the student of English, pointed out the contrast between “grey”, generally implying some middle ground or a blurred area, and “line”, implying a clear and stark division.

There's no real reason for me to be thinking about this. I just wonder sometimes if we read too much into things. I know I certainly do. I practically make a hobby out of it.


In other news, this is a really interesting article about the fall of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. I'll probably write more about it some other time.

I'll try to get some stuff up at Corbett's Fiction for tomorrow. I think I've recovered from the whole “crashing at the start of the holidays” thing, so I should be able to do something.

Of course, I still have other stuff to deal with, such as getting all my homework out of the way before Phantom Hourglass and Half Life 2: Episode 2 come in on Friday. Man, have I ever got my priorities straight.

This post never really had a chance

I'm making an effort to get this post done earlier than usual (around 7pm) for several reasons: I feel I can put more effort into them if I'm not under time constraints, I need to get to bed earlier (woke up at 11am again today) and Blogger's having an outage around the time when I normally post.

That last one's probably the biggest factor.

I've actually been a little distracted now, what with having to go and eat and then read some funny stuff on the internet. It's still kind of early though.

You know, it's kind of hard to concentrate on writing something coherent when someone's playing Halo 3 in the background.

It gets even harder when you're the one playing Halo 3, which is what I've been doing for the past half hour or so now. Ah, well. If you can't beat 'em...


So, preamble aside, what have I got for today?

First, another video of Will Wright demo-ing Spore. The more I see of this game, the more I want it. The more I want to build my own gaming rig just so I can play it in my bedroom. Then I realise that by the time it comes out, I may well be heading off to university, at which point I reconsider and start wanting to buy a nicely spec'd laptop that can handle it.


Okay, you remember how I said I was doing this early and that it was about 7 o'clock then? Course you do, as far as you're concerned, it was just a few paragraphs ago. Well, for me, that was over 3 hours ago. So I need to get this wrapped up and posted and then go back to reading a rather fascinating article on the development of Donkey Kong Country in Retro Gamer writing some more important stuff.

Stuff that doesn't have a time limit on it. Like the 20 minute time limit I have on this, because Blogger is about to go down for maintenance. Sure, it is just meant to be 10 minutes of downtime. But it may well be that Blogger and I have different definitions of “10”, as has been shown before, in similar planned outages.

So I'm calling it quits for tonight and heading off to bed. No, seriously. I mean it this time. I've wasted too much of today so I'm just going to get some sleep and make a fresh start tomorrow. Why would I lie about that?

Oh, yeah. The lazy unreliable jerk thing. Nuts to that. I'm tired.

And would someone, probably someone with no life whatsoever, mind counting up how many times I've mentioned that I'm tired or rounded off blog posts by saying that I'm going to bed since I started this endeavour? I'm just curious.

Thanks, much appreciated. You weirdo.

SWAT Kats

So, it's half past 10 at night, I haven't written any of The Grey Line all day, I'm bored out of my skull, I really ought to be doing something interesting for tonight's blog post and my thumbs hurt again. And what am I doing? That's right, downloading old episodes of SWAT Kats.

Damn, I vaguely recall maybe having liked that show as a SWAT Kid (a term I just coined and will likely never use again). It's one of those shows that you don't ever really think of when considering your childhood but as soon as something reminds you of it (or you see it referenced on TV Tropes), little memories and images start coming back. You can't recall the plot but you remember the big cat and the little cat and that they had a jet. When you watch the intro, you recognise the logo and the theme tune rings a bell.

But, though I haven't watched the first episode yet, I doubt anything else will come back to me and sooner or later, I'll forget what's a childhood memory and what I read about on Wikipedia. The first episode is fully downloaded now, so I'm going to go watch that for a little while. I be right back.


Okay. On the one hand, the plot makes no sense whatsoever. On the other hand, they're fighting a dinosaur in a jet plane, in the middle of a city. And that dinosaur is called a Megasaurus Rex. And all this occurs before they get sent back in time, their plane runs out of fuel and they have to eject in order to avoid getting eaten. They then get attacked by flying dinosaurs, while up in the air, in their seats. Fortunately, the chairs are also jet planes and they can simply put on their gas masks and skim over the surface of an active volcano in order to get rid of them. Of course, that's just a last resort. For when the chairs run out of missiles.

By the gods, I love this show.

And, just so you know, they escape from the past by refuelling their jet with gas from the volcano. When this initially doesn't work, T-Bone utters a line that, by all rights, should go down in television history.

“Maybe we should have tried the unleaded volcano.”

I'd write more but... I have to go and watch the next episode. I just have to. I don't care about doing a woodle. And neither should you. Go download the episodes.

Not the Title I Wanted

(Note: this was actually my second choice for yesterday's post topic and was partially written last night. I like it and I'm lazy so I've just changed the odd “today” to “yesterday” and gone with it. Also, I wanted to title this post “Yesterday's Enterprise Blog Post” but I can't do formatting on the titles. Truly, a great loss to the world.)


Yesterday was the last day before the school's half-term break. This also means that it was inter-house activities day, a day on which house captains wander around the school, pleading with you to make up the numbers for senior rugby and show pride in the house you were randomly assigned to when you first came to the school. At some point, sports of various different kinds are played.

This is not something that I enjoy. Fortunately, I've worked long and hard at cultivating a reputation as an unsociable and lazy jerk who hates sports in all its forms, so I'm never asked to do anything anymore. All I had to do yesterday, activities-wise, was the inter-house quiz. Which we won and which I provided numerous answers for. While trying to convince various S3-4 brats to shut up so we could here the damn questions.

First period was Computing. Registration in the morning finished a good few minutes early, so I just went up to the common room and played a friend at some variant of Street Fighter II. Managed to KO her right as the bell rang, too.

After that, I had second free and then the quiz. The real fun started after lunch, when the debating was held.

Debating at school is often fairly unbalanced. I always feel sorry for the poor bastard who has to stand up there and champion the right of the government to kick down your door and shoot your dog because you gave a civil servant a funny look. And, of course, we all have to sit on the floor for what is often the better part of two hours.

For some bizarre reason, Sam Potter, a friend of mine, had volunteered to be the questioner for our house and so, when he spilled something on his shirt, he obviously needed a replacement. Since this happened at lunch, right before debating, he needed it fast. He ended up taking mine and I ended up wearing an old t-shirt of his that he happened to have handy.

While I did have a perfectly reasonable and legitimate excuse for wearing it, I didn't particularly want to go out into the school and have to keep explaining it to everybody, so I began to consider simply staying in the common room rather than going to the debating. Skippy (I always say this, but you do remember that Skippy is technically the co-writer of this blog, right?) hadn't wanted to go either and wanted to go into town. I didn't really want to go into town and was a bit apprehensive about dodging the debating but when the time came, we just stayed upstairs when everyone else went to register.

When no one came to get us after ten minutes or so, we realized that no one was really going to and started to relax slightly. And by “relax slightly”, I mean “remember that another friend had brought in his Xbox 360 in anticipation of taking it to a LAN at somebody else's house”. Naturally, we located this fellow's bag, took out the 360, hooked it up to the good TV and played Halo 3 co-op for an hour.

A few people came in during that time but it was only a few members of our class who had done their bit at the debating and decided to take a break to get something to eat. Once it was over and everyone started to filter back in, a few people were surprised that we hadn't gone and most were fairly amused. One person in particular was more annoyed than surprised but, then, we had stolen his Xbox.

Technically, we were supposed to go to our class for last period but no one had there stuff because the debating was supposed to take longer and nobody wanted to go anyway, because we're Sixth Years and it was a class. So we stayed in the common room and had a generally pretty good time, playing Mario Kart and making jokes. One line of mine I feel I must relate, because I'm extremely egotistical. Sam Potter, who was a member of a team and so got a chair at the debating, mockingly asked everyone what it was like sitting on the floor. I replied that I didn't know, since I had been sitting on a sofa.


And that was my day yesterday. I have no idea why I felt the need to write about that. It might have made marginally more sense if I'd actually finished it yesterday, but even then it would have been pretty useless. I guess the point is that I really like days like that, right before the holidays when everyone is relaxed and I can get out of sports, sitting on a wooden floor for an hour and Physics last lesson on a Friday.

A few other notes, before I post this and go to bed at a sensible time so that I don't end up getting out of bed at noon again.

I haven't managed to post a woodle so far today. I may resort to a Stick Guys later or tomorrow, if I can't find the images I need to do a little edited thing.

Another day goes by without an update to Corbett's Fiction. I definitely intend to build up a buffer tomorrow and try to have regular updates starting from Monday. I know, I know, I said that last week. But this is a holiday, at least, so I should have the time.

I finally got round to playing MySims today, having been meaning to since last Saturday when Erin got it. It takes you a little while to get used to the building and design controls, but once you do, you realise just how powerful they can be. I also like how the character creation stuff has been greatly simplified. There's still room for variation, you just don't have to worry about the exact angle at which your Sim's chin meets their neck. I may even post a review of it on here.

Or do a review of it on the VersusCOM podcast, which shall rise from the grave at some point during these holidays. I have declared it, so it must be so.


That's all folks. I'm off to bed. Right after I read some more of the Agony Booth recap of Hudson Hawk.

Third Time Lucky

Damn it! Third try. I keep running out of time. So I'm making this short and summarising in a few sentences what I would have put in the larger posts. I still intend to do them, so think of it as a preview or a teaser blog.

I think professional footballers should be punished.

I hate inter-house debating.

Halo 3 is awesome.

Sports are not.

I haven't had time to write any of The Grey Line tonight. Apologies.

I will have more time to write it because it is now the half-term holidays.

I'll also try to restart the VersusCOM podcast during that time, particularly if my parents head off to Edinburgh for a few nights, giving me some free time.


That's about it. I'm going to post this now. More tomorrow, when I'll talk about the interesting things that happened today. And maybe a woodle. Who knows.

Have a nice day, sorry to have robbed you of the 3 seconds you spent reading this when you could have been enjoying yourself.

Another in a run of short posts

Another quick post, since my thumbs are hurting for some bizarre reason and I need to trim and couple of hundred characters of a document before saving it to print in the morning.

So, it's a mini-post. Here's some stuff.

This video is amusing and nicely parodies the whole video game violence debate.

You know how Sonic the Hedgehog is now officially in Smash Bros. Brawl? I just got the newest issue of Ngamer today and there opinion poll for the month was... do you think Sonic will be in Brawl? They couldn't have avoided it, given the timing, but someone's gonna be kicking themselves.

Finally got round to watching the third episode of series 2 of Heroes. Am I the only one who finds West really kind of creepy?

I've just remembered that I still need to clean a Super Mario Bros. cartridge at some point before I go to bed.


So, yeah. I need to go shave off some of my personal statement then pack some stuff, clean that cartridge and go to bed. No fiction for tonight, unfortunately. I'll see what I can do tomorrow and Saturday, trying to keep a three a week schedule. Kind of depends on if my thumbs stop hurting because that may be to do with repetitive motion or something. But, then again, my thumbs have always been kinda screwy. Long story. Short post.

Busy day, not yet over

Another quick post. Today has been a busy day owing to Maths revision, a Maths test, more Maths revision cause the Maths test was near impossible, more of the Maths test, Computing club, computing homework and then actual Computing needing to be done while I was at school. Then I got home and had a doctor's appointment.

Once that was over, I had to send some form off to apply for a St Andrew's open day. This took forever because Mum was constantly arguing with me about what to put on the form and how it should be the same as Sam's. Since Sam kept ducking off Adium to play DBZ: Budokai Tenkaichi, the information I needed took some time to extract. Then I had to scan it in and try emailing it. Gmail didn't like it for some reason, possibly file size and upload speed (I was downloading an episode of Heroes at the time; still haven't watched it) and I can't use my other email account on this computer with Thunderbird because it needs some password that no one knows.

I eventually got it sent using a different computer entirely but I still hadn't done the Physics homework that I had been planning to do during the day. I'm still working on that now and it's about halfway done.

To summarise, I'm very tired and very, very angry and I need to go do some very important Physics homework that I probably should have done days ago, if not weeks. And I haven't updated Corbett's Fiction either.

On the bright side, there's been some good news coming off the interwebs that I can't be bothered linking too. Sonic is going to be in Smash Bros. Brawl, which is also going to have an online co-op mode. There's information about a new Fire Emblem for the DS and I do love my Fire Emblem. WiiWare seems to be proceeding very well and the Wii now has USB keyboard support, which is always good. Mario Kart Wii is apparently going to have motorbikes of some description.

That's about all I have time to write for now. I'm still angry, I'm even more tired than when I started and I still haven't done my Physics. Cause this whole thing was written in under five minutes.

Have a nice day; I know I haven't. Well, I kind of have, since I like a bit of pressure to work hard but that's complicated and not for discussion now. Now is the time for angular... something something. I'm writing an investigation report and I can't even remember what I was investigating. I really should have done this before now. But don't tell anybody I said that, internet. I know you can keep a secret.

Too hurried to think of a decent title

There's something deeply satisfying about going into my Blogger Dashboard and seeing Corbett's Fiction, a little tag saying “4 posts” underneath it, at the top of the list, the latest of my blogs to be updated. The MacTake has been on the bottom for a while now. I'll get round to that sometime soon.

But not tonight. I said I'd be online to play some friends at Halo 3 but didn't manage it, partly because I left some homework too late (some of which I still have to do) and partly because I was watching the fourth season première of Stargate Atlantis. It was a good episode and it's fun to have something to watch once a week again. I can do this with the 'Gate series because they start showing in the UK just a few weeks after the US and that means we catch up and surpass the Americans while they're hanging around at that mid-season hiatus thing.

I remember when SG-1 ended and various geek sites on the internet were hyping it and lamenting it. During all the buzz about the final episode, I was just thinking that I really should get round to watching it. It had been saved on the DVR for weeks.

Anyway, I've just been reminded of some other homework that I need to go and do, so I'm cutting this short. I'll probably still end up having to do half of it at school tomorrow, which will be difficult for various reasons. One, someone is bringing in a 360 for a Halo 3 marathon (technically, just to play Halo 3, but you know it'll never even be switched off) and two, the table I usually work at in the study room has been stolen.

We really don't know where it's gone. Someone took it for some school function and it never showed up again. Since one table is covered with games console stuff, that really limits the working space in the study room. And I don't have time tomorrow to lead a crusade to recover it because I'll be too busy stealing a little patch of table and scribbling down answers for Computing homework.

I really need to stop being so damned lazy about schoolwork. And I really need to get that fracking table back.

It's been scientifically proven that Mondays pass more slowly than any other day

Another slow Monday. I did get some of The Grey Line written and I'll probably cut this post short so that I can write more and get it posted. I also handed in the second draft of my personal statement, which is a weight off my mind for another couple of days. Still need to fill out some forms to go to the St Andrews University open day on the 24th. Not that I particularly want to go to the open day, I just have to. The Edinburgh one was fun, but only because it was me, Sam, Jimerson and Skippy and we spent more time in Forbidden Planet than we did in the lecture.

Anyway, I've just wasted fifteen minutes watching Weird Al music videos on YouTube and now I'm watching Bill Bailey, so I'm a little distracted. Did you notice I actually managed to get a woodle up last night? I'm practically on a roll. Well, a wobble that could, with appropriate wind conditions, carry on to one side or the other and turn into a roll.

I've been watching Black Books on DVD again recently. Really funny Channel 4 sitcom, considered a bit of a sister series to Spaced, which you should also watch.

I've just realised that it's a little over a week until Half Life 2: Episode 2 comes out (in shops and in the UK; it's out on Wednesday on Steam and in the US). I'll have to remember to preorder that at some point. And add it to the huge list of games that I keep meaning to play and finish. I'll do them all one day. You'll see.


Okay, got distracted by Weird Al songs again. And this news story about the woman fighting that case against the RIAA over downloading songs. Good on her, I say. Kick their asses.

Unfortunately, that made me want to watch Don't Download This Song a couple of times. Curse you and your musical talent, Yankovic.

More tomorrow, as their shall be for some time to come yet. I'm off to write some fiction stuff, I hope.

Stick Guys VII: Not as good as the equivalent Final Fantasy

We apologise for the delay.

Just a Little One

Comic Life is loading as I type this. The woodle will be up before midnight.


Anyway, another fairly quiet day. It should have been more productive but wasn't. I got my personal statement for my uni applications redrafted, but it's a few hundred characters over the 4000 limit. I'm going to hand it in anyway and just ask my teacher what she thinks I could cut out.

I did mean to get some of The Grey Line written today but I've hit something of a snag. It's something I run into when I try to do a lot of projects, actually. I know how I want it to go, I know where I want it to end up, I just can't for the life of me figure out how I want to start it. I guess I'll try to get some written while in school tomorrow. May or may not work out, depending on how busy the common room is and whether I can be bothered doing any Maths revision.

That's about it, I'm afraid. Like I said, didn't get much done. Had a few ideas for comedy sketches that I might flesh out.

Oh, actually, before I put this up, I'd like to mention that the new series of Top Gear started tonight. Love that show. So do a lot of other people, it seems, enough to keep it on the air despite the vast numbers who hate it. Which includes, according to Jeremy Clarkson, a vicar whose tree they smashed something into, Birmingham, the USA and the coastguard, for ruining the English Channel, no less. So if you don't watch it, start.

More tomorrow. There could hardly be less.

What Happened Today

I hurt my mousin' hand today. I whacked it against the corner of some shelf or something. It's slightly better now, it just twinges slightly when I type.


It was my sister Erin's birthday today so she got her presents in the morning then had some friends round in the afternoon. I just kind of put up with the proceedings until I could get some cake and play the new games she got. As she always does, she got another Sims 2 expansion pack, not that she'd played the last one. She doesn't really play those so much as she collects them, it seems. She also reads this, so I'll stop saying bad things about her. Because I value my life.

Other than that, I got round to making my big to do list today. I think it covers almost everything... except, I've just realised, writing more comedy sketches. On the bright side, it inspired me to write a small sketch about someone trying to make a to do list. It also reminds me to do regular woodles. Which I totally forgot about until just a few moments ago. I'll get on that after this is done.

I'm sure something else interesting happened today. Oh, yes, now I remember. Really. My mind blanked for a moment there and then got it together again by the time I'd finished that sentence.

The Corbett family, it seems, has a curse. Whenever we let other people use projectiles outside, said projectiles will get stuck somewhere highly inconvenient. This is probably why my brother doesn't let people borrow his bow. A few months back (probably late January or early February), I had some friends for my birthday and one of them got his hands on a bow and arrow of mine that shoots foam arrows.

I've just remembered that I bought that so I could use it in a Zelda parody film. Huh.

Anyway, he found out just how far this thing could shoot and took it outside to launch arrows over the roof of the house. In accordance with the curse, it got stuck on the roof. This led to about half an hour of throwing footballs, basketballs, whatever we could find, really, at it in the hopes it would fall down. We eventually got it. Then got another one stuck.

A while after that, Sam or Erin (can't remember which) managed to get this spinning disc thing lodged in a tree. It's one of those little toys where you pull out a string really quickly and it sets a helicopter blade-style thing going, shooting up into the air. After determining that we couldn't get it down by any sensible or simple means, we constructed Citizen Cane. For those of you who don't want to follow that link (or this one to the video version), CC is a giant monstrosity of a thing, made entirely from garden canes held together with various forms of adhesive tape.

It took us three hours but we finally managed to get the thing out of the tree, just in time to get inside and pretend we knew nothing about it when my parents and brother got home.

Citizen Cane is not something you ever expect to have to use once, let alone twice.

But, alas, one of Erin's friends found the spinning disc doohickey today and lodged the disc on the roof. Owing to them being little girls and me throwing like one, getting it down with the balls again wasn't an option. We tried Citizen Cane but it proved too difficult to control (several months of storage on the shed roofs up the back have not been kind to the tape holding it together) and probably wouldn't have worked anyway. It was successful on the tree mostly because it could shake the branches around the disc and let it work its own way down.

So we tried to cobble together something else. James tied a roll to sticky tape (as Erin pointed out, all our crazy schemes seem to involve that most magical of materials) to one end of some rope, providing enough weight for it to be thrown on to the roof. It also proved fairly hard to aim. His first attempt put the tape into the gutter on the other side of the house.

His second attempt was even more ironic. He threw it up. It came down. It snagged itself on an outside light halfway up the wall, got caught and wouldn't come out without pulling off the whole light.

So we used Citizen Cane. After a few minutes of poking and prodding, it came out. Then it started to rain and we went inside.

So, to summarise, the disc went up on the roof. The disc is still up on the roof.

Still, it was an excuse to use a 30ft long garden cane-based construction for something other than... whatever the hell else you could possibly use a 30ft long garden cane-based construction for. There may be pictures tomorrow, taken with Erin's new digital camera.

There will also be a woodle tomorrow. But not tonight. I'm too tired and I have... stuff to do tomorrow. Have a nice day.

Things that Bug Alasdair #345896

I really like having non-uniform days at school. Everything becomes so much more relaxed somehow and people seem more natural than when they're in uniform. That, and it takes me about 5 seconds to kick off my shoes and that's me changed when I get home.


Anyway, on to what bugs me. There are a number of people amongst my group of peers and close acquaintances who are into, not just sports, but “exercise”. This includes weight-lifting, running, whatever the hell bench pressing is, etc. And, as people do when they share a common hobby, they like to discuss these activities at length.

And I can't understand a word they're saying.

Seriously. Not a clue.

It's not really that the individual words don't make sense, it's just that I have no idea of the scales these people are using. If they've run xkm or lifted ykg, is that good? Bad? Average? If they tell me that their "BMI" is "something point something", should I call them fat or claim they're a reincarnation of Hercules? I have no idea.

I have, however, learned to live with this. The basic method is, as with my treatment of sports and other things that disinterest me, to smile, nod and make non-committal, monosyllabic grunts until the conversation moves on. Additionally, you can learn to interpret certain adjectives and tones of voice. If someone sounds proud of their achievement, you say well done. If someone else says it's not so good, you can always claim you were just humouring them.

If they use the word “only”, I tend to avoid saying anything very much. They may not be too impressed with what they've done, but it's still almost certainly twice what I could manage.

So, yeah. People talking about sports and so on annoys me. I know I don't really have a right to be annoyed, since I can get a lot of blank looks when I start going on about computers and video games, but at least I tend to shut up quickly. Curse those socially confident, sporty people. But it still bugs me that they expect me to understand what they're talking about half the time. Sometimes I just have to say, “Come on, this is me you're talking to. I don't know what you're talking about and I probably wouldn't care if I did. Get out of the way of the TV.”

Tact is for suckers.

And that is my new motto.


Wow. Motto looks weird when I write it down. And it's even weirder since I was having a conversation earlier today about that exact phenomena of words just randomly looking weird or like they're spelled incorrectly if you repeat them or suddenly become aware of how often you use them or something like that. I love "study" lessons.


A final note. Bungie and Microsoft parting ways? Who saw that coming? Aside from the internet rumourmongers.

Things I should be doing instead of this post:

1. Finishing redrafting my personal statement
2. Fiddling around with an old NES that I plan to take into school
3. Studying for the Computing test I have first lesson tomorrow
4. Sleeping

And yet, here I am, clearly not doing any of those things. I figure I'll probably get the NES repaired before I go to bed, or maybe I'll just take it in as is and deal with it in a study period. After my Computing test.

I really have very little else to say today. I know, I know, I need to do these things earlier and with a clearer goal in mind. That could be said about most things in life, but I've been saying it about TWToday posts since... well, pretty much since I started doing this thing. I'll get back on track eventually.

Actually, I've not really left the track. I'm just going along it kind of slowly, swerving from side to side and not really paying attention to the road because I'm too busy over-thinking metaphors.

But that's beside the point. A few other things before I go:

I know Skippy will be reading this. So I'm telling him to go and either come up with a post here or at the MacTake. If he does it here, he should try for a New Word Thursday.

Speaking of semi-dead, semi-regular features, I need to come up with a woodle for Saturday. Don't let me forget.

I've just discovered that the new series of Stargate Atlantis is due to start soon. I still need to watch the end of the last series. I'll probably just end up watching it the whole way through again. Similar situation with House.


And that's about it. As always, have a nice day; I'm going to bed. Also, I'll take any excuse to use a semi-colon.

Heroes Takes Priority

This will be a quick post, I think. But I have a really good excuse. Even as I type this, the second episode of series 2 of Heroes is downloading... and I really want to watch it. Yeah, it's not a great reason, but it's good enough for me.

I'm watching it through Veoh, the actual application, whatever it's called. The website and confirmation email call it the VeohTV Beta whereas the program itself is just called the Veoh Player when running. Maybe the Player is the software and VeohTV is the service it accesses. Who knows. Anyway, I've been happy to watch such videos in a little browser window so far, but Skippy recommended the software, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Fairly impressive, so far, going on download speed alone.


I really need to do more reading. I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fan but I've got the latest Discworld book, Making Money, and it's just been sitting on my desk for the past couple of days. I guess I'll try just sitting down at the weekend and reading through what I keep meaning to read through for a few hours.

When I really push myself, I've learned, I can read a surprising amount in a short space of time. Admittedly, pushing myself generally means “suddenly realising on the last day of the holidays that my English teacher wanted me to read a novel over the holidays and then madly scrambling to read it all before giving up sometime around 4 o'clock”.

Actually, besides reading, there's a lot of non-work-related stuff I want to get done. And by “work-related”, I'm including all the Corbett's Fiction and MacTake stuff that, while technically a hobby and usually enjoyable, still takes a lot of effort. Complete Super Paper Mario is fairly near the top of the list. I still haven't even played Dragon Quest, despite picking it up weeks ago. I've fallen out of the habit of using my DS a lot, though I imagine I'll be carrying it everywhere when Phantom Hourglass comes out. Won't help me get back on track with Final Fantasy III, though.

Then there's that PC I keep meaning to build, the stuff I want to sell on eBay, the big video game design books that I got from Amazon and that I'm slowly working my way through. Some day soon, I'm going to make a big to-do list, prioritise everything on it and then create some kind of elaborate scoring system. I will then use the scoring system to work out the total “to-do value” of the list and then try to ensure that I get tasks corresponding to at least half of that value done before the end of the October holiday.

Maybe I'll do that tomorrow in a study period, instead of studying for my next Maths test. Or maybe I'll just play Crash Team Racing, if Sam Stafford remembers to bring along his semi-mythical copy of the game. Someone brought in an original PlayStation today along with some classics like Spyro. I never had a PlayStation back in the day, so I feel a little left out while everyone reminisces about it. Still, they can keep their Crash Team Racing and their multitaps. I had Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie... Although I still maintain that my entire future is a direct result of hours spent playing Super Mario Bros on the NES.


Anyway, Heroes finished downloading some minutes ago, so I'm going to go watch that for a while then go to bed. I apologise if you didn't follow any of today's post but I'll be damned if I'm linking to the Wikipedia page of every game I mention here. You don't like it, Google it.

Halo 3 DS

So, the rumours and now videos of Halo DS (I'd suggest reading through that before continuing on here). What do I make of them, you don't ask? Well, I answer anyway, they're certainly interesting.

The cynic in me wants to decry it and the fanboy in me wants to embrace it. But let's stick to the facts. I haven't followed a lot of his stuff, but Matt Casamassina is a respected and generally reliable video games journalist and it's not impossible that he would pick up on a Halo DS, if it exists. In fact, IGN being such a major organisation and Matt being the big Nintendo guy there, if anything at all existed of it, it would almost certainly leak to him.

Of course, that's a lot of “ifs” and doesn't necessarily prove the game's existence. It's possible that it is an elaborate hoax of some kind, probably played by Casamassina, if anyone. I say that simply because he reiterates time and again that this was an official product, something no one would do without irrefutable proof of authenticity. Unless they were a master trickster of the highest calibre.

As for the videos they seem to clearly depict a Halo-style FPS being played in wireless multiplayer on two DS consoles. Many commentators have pointed out that something like that could be a simple reskin or mod of an existing DS FPS (the two most common targets being Goldeneye: Rogue Agent and Metroid Prime Hunters). Of course, I (and, I highly suspect, they) have no idea if such a thing would be “simple” or not and how you could possibly tell.

And if creating such a game from existing technology is easy, then why must it have been done by amateurs or pranksters? Is it inconceivable that a game developer or publisher might make it, just to test the water and see what could be done?

Another point of contention is whether Microsoft would allow their ultimate cash cow to appear on a Nintendo system. When you think about it, this doesn't seem so impossible. Despite die-hard fanboys tapping their heels together and wishing really hard, no portable Xbox seems likely and it would arguably be to Microsoft's benefit if the PSP suffered.

Despite now owning a big stake in the company, Microsoft has still let Rare develop for the DS, even spreading the Viva Piñata franchise, and no one has completely ruled out Rare games on the Virtual Console (though Goldeneye seems unlikely, due to the obvious licensing nightmare). Even if Bungie isn't focusing on Halo right now, other developers may prove just as capable of handling the franchise. Ensemble Studios is dealing with Halo Wars, though it is admittedly a Microsoft subsidiary dealing with a 360 game.

So it's quite possible that it did exist, even if it got no further than a tech demo. It's also fairly easy to see why it got cancelled or, more accurately, why it never really got off the ground. The Halo series has pretty tight continuity and another game would be difficult to fit into the series timeline. Bungie and Microsoft are clearly aware of the dangers of milking the franchise, since they have decided to lay the main series aside for now.

So, are the videos real? There's no real reason for them not to be. Sure it could be a hoax, but would Matt Casamassina really risk his own, and IGN's, reputation if he knew it wasn't real or even just had doubts about it? No, probably not. So, in absence of any other evidence, I'm sticking with the word of a trustworthy journalist.

And so we lay Halo DS on that big old pile of semi-mythical games, alongside Metroid Dread and all that Kid Icarus nonsense from years back. Though that doesn't seem so impossible now, given Pit's appearance in Smash Bros. Brawl (remember when Fire Emblem characters cropped up in Melee?) and certain comments made by Shigeru Miyamoto.


Anyway, feels good to get some gaming news done and some speculation out of my system. That'll have to hold me over until Sam and I kick off the VersusCOM podcast again.

...

I've just remembered that I have a Maths test tomorrow. Probably ought to revise for that.

Mondays and More

I love Mondays. I have one lesson in the entire day and the rest of the time I just spend hanging around the common room, playing games, reading books and chatting with friends. It's like a three day weekend with some Physics tacked on. The lesson I do have is even second lesson, meaning it's early enough that I have most of the day continuously off but I can still do any homework during first period.

Speaking of homework, I still have some Computing to do... just some documentation for a simple program I had to put together. And speaking of Physics, I need to do some further revision for a test I'm in the middle of. It's nothing hugely difficult, I should be able to handle it if I just check over the notes and make a few good guesses.

I got the first draft of my personal statement handed in today. Hopefully it won't require much editing and I can quickly get rid of that little pain in the neck.

I picked up Volume 1 of Bleach while I was in Edinburgh on Saturday and finished reading it in school this morning. It's really pretty good so far. I'll have to pick up the next few volumes from somewhere.

I feel I should offer some explanation as to the current state of Corbett's Fiction. I am still working on it, fleshing out the extra characters and sub-plots. I'm hoping to have it updating again by Friday or next Monday at the latest and from then on on a fairly regular three-a-week schedule. Damn it, I just realised that I missed the opportunity to say “thrice weekly”. Ah, well. Editing is for suckers.

So that's pretty much it for today. I'm off to finish this Computing homework and listen to Weird Al Yankovic songs. Have a nice day.