Pointless Nostalgia
Last night I was in a pub to play a gig with the band wot I am in. Like many establishments that like to position themselves as a cozy Sunday afternoon hangout as much as a place to get blind drunk, they had a selection of board games lying around for patrons to use. Other pubs choose the likes of Scrabble. This one has Mouse Trap and Buckaroo, surely the two games most likely to suffer from fatal piece-loss. But spurred by nostalgia we got Mouse Trap down and found it pretty complete and in good condition. We didn't actually play it, of course. Has anyone actually played a round of Mouse Trap? I suspect not. I had it as a kid, but all I ever did was put together the elaborate Heath Robinson contraption and set it off. It was a constant joy to turn that little plastic crank and watch the chain of causes-and-effect that it kicked off. I hardly noticed that there was an actual game attached to it.
Sadly, however, it seems that Mouse Trap has recently been modified beyond all recognition. There is still a complex contraption to put together, and it's probably about the same size in terms of individual components, but in an effort to introduce some exciting randomness, the makers have chosen to split it into three sections, each about a third of the size of the original trap. Dropping a ball-bearing down the toilet in the middle of the board causes it to rattle around for a moment before being spat out to trigger one of the three traps. It might make for a more entertaining board game, but as a ridiculous device it's a bit disappointing. It doesn't have the little diver on the end of the see-saw who gets flipped into a bucket when a heavy weight gets dropped on the other end. Tsk.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Classic Games In Stop Motion
I love the home-made feel of this. Reminds me of Morph.
(Nicked from Gordon)
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Frustration
It is said, by those who know, that use of the <TABLE> tag to control layout in HTML is A Bad Thing, and that we should all be using CSS nowadays. Silly old me actually listens to people who claim to know about things like that, but is getting increasingly frustrated at a layout which would take me ten seconds to get working as a table, but as CSS is steadfastly refusing to display correctly in either Firefox or IE. (But never both at once.) What century are we living in? It's like the nineties all over again.
I have settled for a compromise that looks moderately crap in both browsers until I can be bothered turning it into one big table.
Kitson and Films
His show was more of a one-man comic play, but otherwise met and exceeded my expectations by being both very very funny, and very bearded. Titled "C90", it was a warm, witty thng about a man whose job it was to index and file discarded mix tapes, though never to listen to them. Once faced with huge piles of the things every morning, the obsolescence of the humble compact cassette had left him with less and less work to do, until he was finally forced into early retirement, and on his last day someone sent him a mix tape of his own...
Kitson is an engaging and eloquent speaker who can be both poignent and laugh-out-loud funny in a single breath, and has a voice which remains in your head the next day and is welcome, and after "C90", I'd really like to hear more by him.
That I didn't realise that the show was in play form could be marked down to laziness, but I rather like not having expectations. As I said before, I remember reading positive things, possibly related to this particular show and possibly not, but I came to it rather short on details. One of life's rarest but greatest pleasures is seeing, for example, a really good film that you know nothing about. Usually it's on late at night and has subtitles, because if it was on general release in this country you would no doubt have seen a trailer for it that condensed the entire film into one super-dense thirty-second plot gulp. Even reviews, written with the best of intentions, usually feed you the setup of the story, so that the only surprise is in the resolution. Sight and Sound is particularly bad for this. It's editorial stance seems to be that its analysis of a film is of greater importance than the reader's enjoyment of it. Or, at least, enjoyment of its narrative. It will gleefully give away every little detail because, to its reviewers, plot is of negligable worth. It's fine to enjoy both the craft and artistic intent of a film, but Site and Sound appears to look down its nose at anyone who dares to take pleasure from something as vulgar as storytelling.
If I had my way all trailers would be banned, and reviews limited to a single sentence - "if you liked these films you'll like this." - and a star rating.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Ginger
While we're on the topic of the local listings-mag imaginatively titled "The List", there was in interview in the last issue with Simply Red singer Mick Hucknell.
Now, given the choice, I would have every single recording by that band rounded up by my elite squad of musical stormtroopers, loaded onto a great big rocket, and fired into the sun, but I'm willing to give someone the benefit of a doubt. "Maybe," I thought, "his terrible crimes against popular music are merely the result of tastes that run contrary to my own, and he's actually an okay guy."
How wrong I was. Now, it was just one of those back-page quickie interviews that consist of a set of stock questions that are presumably emailed to the interviewee for them to rattle out answers to at their leisure. No big deal, just a light, fluffy filler article. Except the ginger twat decided to use it as a platform to bang on about his "gift" and to complain about what a drag it is doing interviews. (Well don't do them, then. Who needs publicity when you're as all-round wonderful as you are?)
Then this morning, Terry Wogan played one his records, and I found myself wishing that Mick Hucknell really would fall from the stars. Hopefully burning up on re-entry.
Labels: music
link | 2 comment(s)Festival
Tonight we're going through to Edinburgh to see a stand-up comedian called Daniel Kitson. I don't know a whole lot about him, to be honest. I know he gets mentioned in The List quite a lot, and it's usually positive. And I know he has a beard. Other than that, I'm at a loss. R is a bit of a fan of his, though, so the choice of show is really hers, but that we're going at all is a symptom of an annual sense of guilt that usually sets in around mid-August for myself, and probably quite a few other Glaswegians. That sense that there's a lot going on over there and, inter-city rivalry aside, you should probably go and see some of it before it's done. Naturally, we've left it a bit late, and most of Kitson's shows are long sold-out, but I guess Tuesday night is as quiet a night as the center of the 'burgh gets this time of year, so we managed to get a pair of tickets.
I'm quite looking forward to having a the night-out. (On a school night too! What rebels!) And the bustle of Festival-period Edinburgh can be quite fun. When you can go home afterwards.
The Height Of Laziness
Not testing your website on the world's most popular browser, that is, since I've just noticed that this site is quite broken for Internet Explorer users.
Still, who cares about them, eh? I'm sure all (two) of my readers use fair-trade, dolphin-friendly alterna-browsers woven from organically-grown hemp.
Anyway, should be fixed now.
Labels: site
link | 0 comment(s)Wednesday, August 09, 2006
So... yeah...
My blog is now, as you can most likely see, unless you are colour blind, or partially-sighted, or using a text-based browser, or apply your own style-sheet to all web pages in order to minimize the chance of your boss spotting that you're surfing, mostly green. Substantially uglier than the old template, yes, but also a fair bit less default, in the hope that symbolically taking more active ownership of it will encourage me to post more. We'll see. I do wish I had some iota of design skill, however. I am generally useless as far as the visual arts are concerned. I can't draw for toffee, and you wouldn't want me choosing the decor for your house unless you like white, white and more white since I know that any attempt to apply a more adventurous colour scheme will be of a similar standard to my old flat's eye-watering bright-yellow-and-green combination.
No noisecast this week, since my free time is being absorbed by my new G6 Flash. This is a nifty little gadget that allows the execution of "homebrew" applications (and... er... "backups" of commercial software) to run on the Nintendo DS. I primarily bought it for the emulation possibilities - the prospect of playing 20-year-old NES games on the train fills me with geeky joy - but being able to have a bunch of NDS and GBA games on a single cartridge is also mighty convenient. I'm hoping to try my hand at some DS development soon, and I'll post the results here as soon as there's anything to see other than dramatic crashes.
The next consumer electronic item I buy will most likely be a massive memory card for my camera since, as previously mentioned, we're taking a long weekend in Iceland at the beginning of September. I am stupidly excited, and rapidly becoming an Iceland bore, though I won't inflict tedious reams of Icelandic trivia on you just yet. Needless to say, a great many pictures will be taken and Flickred.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Hello... ?
I don't seem to have anything to say any more. I should probably just stick to noises, then.
We're going to Iceland next month, though. I'm looking forward to that.
I've just ordered a DS Flash Cart that will allow me to run emulators and homebrew apps on my favourite console ever. I've even been browsing some tutorials on developing for the thing, and it looks slightly less impossible than I had imagined.
Labels: diary, games, iceland, travel
link | 1 comment(s)