Dec 4, 2022 · 1 minute
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Blood On The Clocktower
It’s been three years, but we finally played Blood On The Clocktower again! But, instead of a convention floor, in our own home and run by Tammy (who has retired from active play after her career-high performance of being hissed at on the SHUX convention floor). A good night was had by all, even if Evil carried the night both times!
Packing continues — this time next week, I’ll be back in the UK for a couple of weeks (mostly Bicester as normal, but with a side-jaunt to London, providing I can use the Oxford Tube to sidestep the rail strikes that week). It’ll be the first Christmas there for three years! Expect a few fun things here in the lead up to Christmas (and yes, you can safely assume that they’ll be Stable Diffusion-related).
And a very good Thanksgiving was had by all. Next year’s will almost certainly have a smaller focus, but we also made progress on that this weekend too. The back bedroom’s transformation is definitely underway.
Next weekend, Blood On The Clocktower, and the last update on here from the US until 2023!
Nov 20, 2022 · 2 minute
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the good anniversary and the really bad one the food may have just been a really big jersey mike's sandwich
(that’s @carsondial@mastodon.social, btw)
This upcoming week will be a double anniversary! Not only is it five years since buying this house in Cincinnati (but not actually living in it - that’s next year), but it is also twenty years since my first-ever Thanksgiving in America! Which was vaguely documented on the blog at the time.
What my somewhat annoyingly terse entries of the time lack, mind you, is just how horrible that weekend was. It was probably the final straw that saw me wanting to throw in the towel on the course just a week later. Because my dorm was shut for the holiday, those of us that had nowhere to go were transferred to another dorm, where we were sleeping six to a room. I don’t have a complete recollection of that time, but what I remember is that I slept there on Wednesday night, and then spent the rest of the weekend sleeping in my TA office at Sitterson Hall, watching My So-Called Life on DVD and struggling to get a handle on some assignments that were due the week after. God knows what I actually ate, and thankfully the building had showers so I wasn’t a disgusting mess by Sunday, but it was such a wretched few days, and perhaps the loneliest part of my time at UNC.
On the bright side, every Thanksgiving since has been a lot better! And hopefully that continues next week - seven of us, enough roast potatoes to sink a battleship, and a healthy-just-over-double-figures number of desserts. Totally sane.
Finally for the week, the art for my third comic story (of four!) has come in and it looks fantastic. Now if I could just come up with a good title for it, that would be grand…
It has been, in the main, a rather rotten week, as the two embeds above attest. Slightly offset by the midterms being not quite as terrible as I thought they were going to be when I went to bed on Tuesday night, and the ongoing spectacle of a billionaire stepping on every rake in the car park while setting money on fire at a rate that would astound the KLF. But mostly, I’d rather just forget the last seven days altogether.
Nov 6, 2022 · 2 minute
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twitter blink and you'll miss the year
This is my current position on staying with Twitter for the moment:
i was on tumblr when yahoo had to sell it for $3 million after buying it for $1.1 billion. we were all a little bit responsible for losing yahoo a billion dollars. and with that type of collective effort, i believe we here on twitter can lose elon musk even more
(I have reactivated @carsondial@mastodon.social from a four-year slumber in case it’s needed, but in the meantime, I’m going down with the ship with the band playing on as the water rushes on-board)
We have solar panels! 18 of them! Which means, for the next week, I am going to be that unbearable person that messages to say “oh, the panels have generated 50% of my power needs today!” as I keep logging into the metrics panel to see how the stats are going. I promise the novelty should subside by around Wednesday or thereabouts. At least until I figure out the API access to generate all sorts of graphs from the raw data!
It really feels like the year has already run out of steam. Two weeks until Thanksgiving, after which I have two more weeks and then I’m back home in the UK for most of December. There’s not a lot of time to do all the things we need to do…
Oct 23, 2022 · 1 minute
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pastries old television
A few things for the week.
I would really like to have more than four hours of sleep a night again. Maybe this week…
Sebastian Bakehouse is not messing around and was totally worth the 25 minute trip across town first thing on Sunday morning. CUBIC CROISSANTS!!
Watching all of The Blackstuff, The Muscle Market, and Boys From The Blackstuff in one go is…a rather intensely bleak way to spend your time.
The Next Stop Is Lewknor Turn is probably delayed until January or February, but I have finally got the last two scripts to the artist, so work will be progressing there in the next couple of months!
Apparently, when British and Swedish people have to find a Hallowe’en costume at the last minute, we fall back hard on stereotypes.
On a completely unrelated note, after 15 years or so, it seems like the batteries have died in my 10th Doctor sonic screwdriver…
Let’s talk about something different this week - two transcendental moments in computer games. One a long time ago, one as late as this week.
Games based around pop bands were not exactly filling the shelves in the 80s, but they were more common than you’d might expect in the heyday of the UK computer game market. And given that most licensed titles chase the cash before the fad dies down, you’d be forgiven if you thought Frankie Goes To Hollywood1 would be something like “DJ Mike Read has stolen the master tapes to Relax! Find the tapes in five levels of platforming action! Absolutely brilliant!”
Instead, you play as a Nobody in Mundanesville, a suburb of Liverpool, determined to become a Real Person and enter the Pleasuredome. But of course you do. But while the open world you are exploring seems to be a never-ending set of identical terraced houses on similar streets, a different world is hidden in full view - by interacting with the objects within houses (lamps, TVs, etc), you trigger portals sending you into abstract mini games, where you will bounce symbols into energy barriers, take part in a shooting range of world leaders, try to rebuild the ZTT logo, defend Liverpool from air attacks in WW2, or race along an infuriating set of pot holes that transport you to another part of the screen. And every time you succeed in one of your tasks, Frankie will award pleasure points. You need 99,000 of them to enter the Pleasuredome.
It is, in short, completely bewildering and mesmerizing. An open world computer game in 1985, where the mundanity of the real world can give way to the fantastic in a matter of seconds. The developers, Denton Designs, were formed from the core of Imagine after that company went bust with their grandiose Bandersnatch designs, and the game actually has a lineage of code stemming back to that original failed effort via their first game for Ocean, Gift From The Gods. One thing that I have been curious about over the past few decades is: just how much input did Paul Morley have on this? Because if you sat down and thought about what sort of obtuse game the Morley of 1985 would come up with, this is exactly what he’d do2.
About half-way through the game and you’ve got a handle on things. You’re playing these mini games, picking up useful objects, increasing your stats. And then you enter a house, just like all the other houses. Twenty-seven churches and silver birches. But there’s a dead body in the sitting room. And suddenly the game becomes a whodunnit. The game doesn’t really change that much - only that when you enter houses or rooms, you might now get clues on all the possible suspects, but it absolutely electrified me as a seven-year-old, building up a web of suspects while trying my hardest to become a Real Person3 on my Spectrum4.
This week, No Man’s Sky. I’m still very much in the early game on the Switch, trying to scrape together credits and building a small, respectable base (we won’t talk about my first attempt, which was a wooden structure built on a hill that you had to use a jetpack to even get to the door). Anyway, I was at a trading post on a new planet I’d discovered, trying to convince an alien to help me with co-ordinates I had been given to locate somebody else deeper in the galaxy. But they wouldn’t talk to me because I didn’t have enough standing with their faction. Which was rather annoying. The game suggested I fly up to the space station in the solar system to take on a few missions to increase my standing and come back when I had enough clout.
I started trudging towards my ship when sirens sounded. Two ships appeared in the sky, raking the outpost’s metal panels with plasma fire. I ran to my ship, took off, and defended the facility against the two raiders in a dogfight that went from trading shots in tight canyons on the planet’s surface to circling each other in the upper atmosphere. Eventually, I shot them both down, landed back at the station…and my standing had increased to the point that the alien was now more than willing to talk to me about those co-ordinated. In that moment it was like all the promises that games such as Elite had been making had come true after all these years. Not just a pretty 3D interface pasted over a spreadsheet (hello, Eve Online!), but a living world where the pirates don’t just attack you, and where you’re feel to help or not depending on how you feel.
Computer games! They can be quite good sometimes!
I think Americans don’t really understand how massive Frankie was in the UK during 1985. Probably not helped by the band’s total collapse in the wake of their second album, I guess. ↩︎
According to this Eurogamer retrospective, Denton Designs did talk to Morley, so my feeling may not be entirely crazy. ↩︎
I never did become a Real Person, sadly, but I came close. Around 95% and the full BANG maxed-out stats. Also, I know the murder is telegraphed in the manual, but like every other child in the UK during that time, I had an extensive collection of C90 tapes. ↩︎
Sadly, the C64 version is probably the definitive version, as Denton used the extra memory for back gardens and a couple of additional mini-games. It’s a shame that FGTH imploded so quickly - a 128K Speccy remix version that included those extra bits and some AY versions of Relax / Two Tribes would have made the Spectrum version stand out far above the breadbin, and besides, a remix would fit in so well with ZTT’s attitude of ‘let’s just release a remix every other week, lads!'↩︎
Oct 16, 2022 · 1 minute
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bleak so bleak spot the reuse of footage from earlier Curtis docs
Yes, so it turns out that watching most of Traumazone in one sitting is not a good idea. You’ll reach 11pm on a Friday night basically ready for bed and full of despair. I know how to kick off a weekend, that’s for sure.
Also, the LENINGRAD CAKE FACTORY will haunt your dreams.
I am in two minds as to whether to update But This Was A Fantasy? to include the new series. It is 420 minutes of footage after all, and would give me a good excuse to fix a few awkward bits in the UI and maybe move from FAISS to a different vector database in the backend. But I feel I’d also have to edit out a few bits of the documentary. There’s hardcore amateur porn, photos of beheaded people and video footage of mutilated bodies. None of which you want to have popping up on a random vector search. Of course, if I do move to a different backend, I could run a classifier over the footage and give people a ‘safe search’ option by default. Which would have its own problems, but might be something to try.
Anyway, next week, we’ll begin the Autumn Archival Drama Period in earnest. It’s time to go full Potter.
Oct 9, 2022 · 1 minute
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no man's sky all the chocolate molds
This week I made two mistakes:
I resolved to organize my chocolate molds
I bought No Man’s Sky on Switch
Two results:
“Do I really have 4 copies of that mold? And am I glad I am not running a count…”
“Oh, it’s 1am? I should probably go to bed”
On the bright side, my re-organization of the molds reveals that I still have plenty of room in Mold Box #9 before I need to buy more storage!
(As of writing this post, I still don’t exactly know why the website I normally order my pastry/chocolate things from has sent me a 4lb package that doesn’t seem to line up with any order I’ve made with them for over a year. Maybe I’ve graduated to their secret elite tier where they just send me things that they think are fun?)
Oct 3, 2022 · 4 minute
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shux vancouver canadian airports suuuucccccckkkkk but so many mini eggs
A mini-SHUX-trip roundup!
Vancouver remains incredibly pretty in the Autumn, with red and orange trees lining the streets, the sea down at the port, and the forests visible in the distance. And the weather was so nice!
The centre is so damn walkable. Unlike any of the other1 visits to cities I’ve made in the last couple of years - no Lyft/Uber trips required, and a pleasant mix of your usual (and Canadian) chains plus local shops. Just really lovely sitting out in a pedestrianized area on a sunny Autumn morning eating an almond croissant next to a city bike stand. Plus, knowing that getting to and from the airport is just nipping around the corner from the hotel and getting on a regularly-scheduled train takes away so much stress.
Yes, I was indeed the whitest and tallest person in Jollibee.
And now to the actual convention itself! I think we did fewer panels this year, but the two game design ones we went to were both really good, with one being the view from big names, and the other from a more indie perspective, which made them both feel quite different but complementary.
Though the common theme in both panels was “learn InDesign’s data merge facility”, which makes me think there’s probably a bit of a gap in the market for something like the equivalent of Clip Studio Paint, but for boardgames. Or knocking something up in Python…
The complete insanity of “Quinns’ Courtroom” panel, which went off the rails from the first few minutes, included an amazing indictment of Tom on the subject of dinosaur-based drafting games, an actual lawyer on stage, Quinns forgetting everybody’s name, and Pip channelling Phoenix Wright with some wonderfully impassioned speeches. Which sometimes even worked!
I thought the team also got through the awkward questions on the Late Night panel pretty well…though I think they probably regretted all the call-and-response systems they set up as we would not stop doing them. I think we missed this panel last time around, so it was great to see everybody in tired loopiness.
One again, we met up with mippy and liquidindian! The precious ginger cake is now safe and sound in a biscuit tin in the kitchen…until I devour it over the next few days. And it was good fun to play Irish Gauge with them, as well as a round of Quacks of Quedlinburg!
I did feel a little disconnected from the main SHUX event this year. Not entirely sure why. Maybe because we missed the opening ceremony, skipped the signing bit, and had to dash off first thing on Sunday morning. And Tammy sadly didn’t get to reprise her astonishing betrayal in Blood on the Clocktower due to us not getting there early enough for signing up to the sessions. I don’t think we missed out on anything, though - we had good reasons to skip what we did, and I don’t think it would have changed that feeling if, say, we’d got something signed.
Wrong city, but I had Stars in my head all weekend.
It seems like Cadbury Canada sells Mini Eggs all year round, which would make it the promised land, except for…
Canada’s weird attitude towards Diet Coke. At almost every restaurant, when we asked for Diet Coke, they only had Coke Zero, or they just silently gave us Coke Zero. This is heresy.
Somehow, despite donating four boardgames to the SHUX library, I still came home with two more? Plus, I had a good enough time with Fantastic Factories that I might want a copy of my own at some point…and there’s an expansion…ooooh.
After all that positivity, wow, Canadian airports, man. Somehow we managed to have such a bad time yesterday. When we got to Vancouver on Sunday morning, we ended up scouring not just the gate, but the general post-security area in order to try and find something to eat. With very limited success. At Toronto, we had to run a gauntlet of security checks, seemingly walking the length of the terminal twice, and being taken aback at the rudeness of employees towards one woman that was concerned that she’d miss her flight, only to be told that “you still have 20 minutes until the door closes” when she was in the middle of a slow-moving customs line, and from experience afterwards, still had a five minute walk at least to get to her gate. As for us, we got to the gate, starving, only to be confronted by gate area having one sit-down restaurant, and us with 20 minutes until boarding was supposed to occur. We remained starving (I did manage to find a terrible sandwich, but it was basically the only real food I had yesterday).
