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| Friday |
the Twenty-Third of May, 2003 |
"?transmit ping to energizer
Energizer #208 :: Mover #005 | [Energizer-class machine * Serial 09-208 * Power: 4335 * GOOD MACHINE]"
I'm getting big kicks out of the text adventure Bad Machine, at the moment - the story of a Mover Robot with a
malfunctioning CPU, avoiding corrective disassembly and reprogramming in
the depths of a bustling, automated factory. Enjoyably, maliciously confusing,
with most of the game text being semi-corrupt error messages.
Very reminiscent of Shaft of Light, very reminiscent of a bad
day's debugging.
[ Comments? ]
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| Thursday |
the Twenty-Second |
"I will block with Taskmaster (6/6 gold evil character
"All Old Testament Heroes in play decrease 2/2 until end of turn.").
Abel is from Genesis (the card has a Genesis reference), so he is an Old
Testament hero. That means Taskmaster reduces Abel to 4/3."
I'm oddly fascinated by Redemption, the
Biblical collectable card game. I can't decide whether it's been
designed to coax heathens away from their evil, secular CCGs, or subversively
constructed to lead otherwise innocent Christians towards them, but I'm
sure it serves its purpose as an educative tool - all comprehension is
analogy, and translating information into decision-based gaming (even something
as simple as military playing
cards) can fix it in people's heads in a way that simple story-telling can't.
Elsewhere, two Christian games which would work equally well as
spoofs: Settlers
of Canaan and - wait for it - Amen,
the Christianised version of Uno.
[ Comments? ]
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| Tuesday |
the Twentieth |
What Fools These Mortals - play NetHack from the
perspective of a tunnel-visionary god, responding to whiny prayers and
mediocre sacrifices from a computer-controlled adventurer. What we really
need is a NetHack equivalent of the Virtual
Air Traffic Simulation Network, a player's prayers being routed to
an assigned god in a basement somewhere. Go bravely with Leonard.
[ Comments? ]
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"Norwegian Shipping Giant Under US Suspicion.
Canadian Giant Acquires New Zealand's Kim Crawford Wines.
Villagers vs Oil Giant: Ashcroft to the Rescue.
Steel Giant Corus Swings Axe Again."
Pick your own parallel-universe dungeons-and-dragons newspaper headlines with
a Google News search for
the word "giant"; lumbering, genderless entities with silly names and
tremendous influence. "The building giant says it has no choice but to hitch its local future to vertical towers and retreat."
[ Comments? ]
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| Monday |
the Nineteenth |
"AngryBat. Restoring high-impact satisfaction."
The New Media Company
Generator from Adactio. I'm a terrible sucker for random text
generators - I think it must be a Library
of Babel thing, the suspicion that the next reload could give something
significantly meaningful or inspirational, something that nobody else will ever find. It unnerves me greatly that the
Prior-Art-O-Matic still contains n viable, original products that nobody's chanced across yet.
[ Comments? ]
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"I have my own mysterious space in myself. It's a dark
space. It's a basement and I enter it when I'm writing. It's a very
special door for me. The things in that space might be the things I lost
along the way. I don't know. It must be a kind of sorrow."
The Murakami
piece in Saturday's Guardian seems to be a partial transcript of his recent
London appearance, the writer being very careful to avoid the word 'interview'.
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