Le weekend

Friday evening was spent Laser Questing, with cairmen, werejud and two other people that don't have LJs as far as I know. One of them was a visitor from Norway, who apparently hadn't ever played laser quest before, and proceeded to annhialate all of us, and the 13 other people who were also playing our sessions, by an impressive margin. Very good fun, and an hour is about as much as I wanted to play, so we timed it just right. We then retreated to the pub, and more people joined us for alcohol and conversation, which was very nice indeed.

Saturday was fairly quiet - largely consisting on playing Settlers with Julie and doing a few things around the flat before heading out in the evening to lizzieandari's flat, because Ari now has indefinite leave to remain in the UK. Handy, as she's married to Lizzie, who live here. I was exhausted for some reason, and kept yawning at people, despite their interestingness, and so took myself off home unreasonably early (althogh a little later than Julie, who was coming down with a cold and having real problems following people's conversations when there were three of them happening in the same room at once).

Sunday was spent playing Civ 4, which I have finally gotten into. I still feel completely lost most of the time, and I can't work out if this is because the game is more confusing, or simpler, than it appears to be. I'm also not sure if I'm actually enjoying it. But it sure was addictive, taking up about 4 hours of the day. And then Julie and I went to the end of festival fireworks. Which are perfectly viewable from the nearby hillsides, but even better from within Princes Street Gardens, as they pipe the music from the live orchestra to you. Sadly I can't find any fantastic photos on Flickr of them, but you can get an impression by clicking through on these images:





This morning I am waiting for the damp people who theoretically fixed my damp problem in February to arrive and tell me why it's still damp. Huzzah!

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-6-2010

• Orange and T-Mobile splice customers - allow roaming between their networks
  (tags: orange t-mobile mobile_phones uk)
• How News International (Murdoch) and the London Metropolis Police Force are working together to cover things up
  (tags: police london news murdoch)
• Craigslist’s Forced Censorship of Erotic Ads Saves Journalism Industry
  (tags: advertising craigslist porn prostitution usa)
• Top Ten Myths of Popular Psychology
  (tags: psychology brain memory skepticism science)
• Grasping the nettle: an empirical enquiry. Does it actually work?
  (tags: science)
• Famous directors in haiku form
  (tags: movies haiku)
• An employee of a web analytics company talks about the data they have on where people go.
  (tags: SomethingAwful web statistics)

Shiny!

The festival fireworks with orchestral accompaniment have a brief excerpt on the BBC here. Sadly, they don't have any of the piece from Bernstein's Taras Bulba which closed out the show, but it's still quite pretty.

Fear of The Dark

It takes balls to do a horror game right. There's a reason that out of all the recent high-profile horror games of late, Dead Space and F.E.A.R. 2 gave you enough weaponry to level whole buildings, Resident Evil 5 and Siren: Blood Curse traded some of their series' spookiness for more gung-ho action, Alone In The Dark featured ludicrously overblown stunt sequences and Alan Wake gave its monsters enough of a weakness that they'd probably qualify for disabled parking stickers. Scaring players is about more than inserting jumpy moments and a quivering string soundtrack into a level lit like a seedy club. It's about a lack of empowerment and control, which is enough of an acquired taste that none of the big publishers will fund it.

Amnesia isn't just a game where you can't fight the monsters. It's a game where you can't look at the monsters. Doing so drains your sanity and increases the chance they'll spot you. Sometimes this not-looking isn't a problem because the monsters are invisible, but in places it's the most horrible thing in the world. Imagine it. You're hiding from a monster in the sole pocket of shadow in a room, and all you can do is stare at the floor.

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via johnbobshaun

Why LJ sucks, #626

I just told AdBlock to block scorecardresearch.com, outboundlink.net, scnt.rambler.ru, top3list.ru and tns-counter.ru.

Suddenly, LJ loads in half the time.

How to tell your girlfriend is ill

When you arrive home to find her asleep on the sofa at 5:30 in the evening, curled underneath the curtains she's been working on, using them as a blanket?

Then she's ill.

(Although two hours sleep, dinner and an episode of Dexter seem to have helped somewhat)