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| Friday |
the Twenty-Fifth of October, 2002 |
| And the catalyst that triggered all this musing, mentioned by an entity
I only know as "SpasmodicMonk" - Giant Monster Rampage,
a tabletop game of arbitrary toy monsters demolishing Lego cities,
or whatever you feel like building for them to demolish. Design your own
monster, including its tonnage and the option of such powers as Invincibility
and Signature Roar. Looks entertaining.
(Must try playing Rumble
with giant monsters instead of superheroes...)
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There's also Steve Jackson's Lego Pirate
Game, of course, if you've got the fleet for it, which I can't
imagine anyone has. But it all seems a bit too generic-naval-battle -
atmospheric, but there's no real need for it to be using Lego, specifically.
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| There's always a slight feeling of tinkering with the pieces of a game I
have no rules for, a reality I have no physics for, when playing around
with Lego in adulthood. The uniform plastic studs of the floor tiles,
the precise one-brick quanta of another universe's building blocks. I
construct forms and towers in frozen time, obeying a few local laws of
gravity and friction, but don't know how to start it into its own
particular life.
BrikWars may well be the shining Platonic ideal I'm
grasping for, a snappy but convoluted Lego-figure wargame with tiny
plastic people running around with hands full of weaponry and gadgetry,
demolishing scenery to build their own cathedrals and defences. Three
floor studs are approximately an inch. I may have to buy Jack some more
Lego people.
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| Thursday |
the Twenty-Fourth |
| Odd to see the BBC reporting the Russian theatre situation
as a "hijacking" for a fair while, presumably through some ropey translation
which nobody was actually bothering to parse. Did the Chechen rebels threaten
to open fire unless the performance was immediately redirected to a fairer
and more socially-responsible ending?
And - I've been suspicious of this for years - why does the jump-cut
logo of the increasingly-absurd BBC Breakfast linger on "EAKF" in
such a diagonal way that it can be read as "FAKE"? More vague, facetious
news commentary as it breaks.
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|
| Wondering absent-mindedly why Alphabet Street
didn't seem to stock any Murakami, and
were only offering me - wait a minute - a CD, it turns out that they
actually closed down their book wing a while back. But you can buy your
boring old dead media at BOL.com
for sane postage rates, these days. Mediocre range of books, but they
actually discount some of them quite heavily. Life of Pi and
Dorian for nine quid each...
[Update: Wait a minute, bol.com looks like some sort of book-club
must-promise-to-buy more scam. Pah.]
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| Tuesday |
the Twenty-Second |
Horribly, even predictably appropriate that the zombie-viral
thing should see my server beseiged by hordes and hordes of
blindly-clicking online-forum monkeys, pounding the glass
doors into submission. In lieu of shotguns, and assuming that
all significant people have already had their brains safely eaten,
I resort to breaking out pop-up adverts. May CAMRAD have mercy on
my soul.
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| Monday |
the Twenty-First |
"I first saw Dawn Of The Dead in my early teens. I remember what affected me most about it then, and still affects me today, is that the post-apocalyptic setting did not operate as a cautionary tale but as a kind of ideal. When I saw the empty shopping mall in which the bulk of the film takes place, I wanted to be there - holed up against impossible odds, fighting an enemy that seeks victory through numbers rather than cunning, in a fortress of consumerism."
I feel like this all the time, of course. Where the Zombies Come From; Alex Garland discusses the inspirations behind 28 Days Later - George Romero, John Wyndham, J G Ballard... Can't remember the last time I looked forward to anything in a cinema. It's out next Friday. There is no cure.
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|
| More trailers for 28 Days Later, and a
silly viral thing to help spread the URL. Appalling
that they've overlooked the obvious idea of doing a zombie-style
viral - a page informing the reader that their brain has been
eaten by [name given in URL], and that they should wreak
grey-skinned revenge by luring people to [same URL but with
their own name on the end].
Like this!
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![Tragically I Was Only a Twin
by [author not found]
Am on page 62; "Tragically I Was *An Only Twin*! Feh. Collected works of Peter Cook, if you're wondering. Scripts and transcripts and odds and ends. Some fantastic obscurities in there."](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0712623981.01.THUMBZZZ.jpg){kind=small}
