Having learned multiple lessons from turning the Gulf of Mexico several shades blacker in the middle of the year, news has just come in that they blew up another one. This one doesn't appear to be as disastrous as the last time so far, and all thirteen people have been accounted for, but though the platform wasn't producing at the time, there's no word so far on whether this means another leak.

What's especially inconvenient from a work point of view is that when I read that the name of the oil rig is was "Vermilion 380", it seemed awfully familiar as one of the vaguely sensible location names that I had to examine in the latest iteration of the hierarchy for one of our clients at work, in between all the pig launchers, large rack holders and ballcock suck units. But when I checked back, I saw that they listed a large number of Vermilion units, but fortunately for them, not rig 380.

So I'm relieved, but also a little disappointed, that I won't be able to open a new issue about the location hierarchy saying "Well, you won't be needing this one any more".

Marking about the fifth game that I've released since starting my alleged current project, I battered this puzzle/observation thing out in MMF over the last week after taking the concept from a game that I was doing for another site. Buying the Commodore 64 book had got me in something of an 80s mood - I came up with the entire "storyline" for it on Tuesday morning and it was done by Friday. I wanted it to be a bit... crazier and take itself less seriously than some of my other games, striving for a mood that was something like the random shareware games that I was fed on while growing up.


Special Agent Bunnet versus Doctor Dishwater

The aim is simple, as described in the story - deactivate the bombs by finding the buttons that don't have duplicates anywhere else - but the field you have to search through gets gradually larger throughout the game. About ten people have reached the end so far - one of them in four minutes, which surprised me as my own record's closer to five. Hopefully it's the kind of thing that you can use to distract yourself for lunch - then to forget that lunchtime ended an hour ago.

What I'm interested in is whether this sort of anti-pairs game is something that anybody's done before - it's such a simple idea that I feel that they must have, but I can't name anything myself (though perhaps you could argue that it's just a variant on the hidden-object click-em-up genre).

I'm also aware that this game's title starts with "Special Agent", further cementing the theory that I only have three game titles that I'm going to be using for the rest of time.

Er, I might be buying a car this week. It's something that Whitney and I have sort of talked about one day getting around to considering for a while, and I've been encouraged to finally get a licence instead of continually relying on the way that Zipcar inexplicably allow me to just drive in the knowledge that I held one in a country that drove on the other side of the road, but I always thought it would be something that would get pushed off indefinitely. This afternoon, though, our neighbour came round to tell us about the plans she had for moving out, and casually offered us her car for "$500 or less".

So... I'm not sure what we should do, now. The decision would have to be made fairly quickly because she moves on Friday, though once bought, the car can freely just sit in our off-road parking space until such time as we're ready to use it. I don't know how the whole process really works in America, but I've sent an email off to the man who does our home insurance to ask what the monthly payment might be likely to be, and he should be able to give me some idea of what I'll need. I hope that I'll get time this week to test drive it and get it looked at - it's a roughly-1985 Pontiac 6000 LE (whatever that is), she says it's been good to her and she's taken it to be checked every six months, and it seems to have worked all right during the two months we've been living next to her, at least.

At the moment, hiring a Zipcar for a full day costs us about $100. So the way I see it, if it goes about five round-trip journeys of decent length before the engine jumps out and all four wheels fall off, then it's already paid for itself - and getting an incentive to finally get a licence will be welcome, as would the ability to go beyond ten minutes' walk away without a ton of planning. It might even replace the bus and train to work if I can get unterrified of driving among people from Boston. And if it doesn't work out, we can sell it on to a junkheap and probably break about even.

Is this a remotely good idea?

Edit: She's actually decided not to sell it after all, so all of this turned out to be a bit pointless - however, thanks for everyone's thoughts, and it was clear that this made us consider it, so that tells us a lot...

After Whitney also sighted the mouse, who sauntered into the living room like he owned the place while the television was on (destroying my theory about him not having been seen before because he would only come out when the house was perfectly quiet) we ordered a trap from Amazon. The one that we got is a long clear-green plastic thing designed to look like a house, with two ends - one is a door that's removable from the top only by human hands, and the other is the trap. When pressure is put on a platform near the other end, a door springs up from inside to catch whatever took the bait inside until the other door is removed manually.

This is a humane mouse trap - as an example of the kind of slush that only the Americans are really capable of, the front of the box honestly reads "Do we have to kill the mouse, Mommy? - No, honey, the earth is big enough for all of us". Welcome to Bleurgh City. And inside, after thanking you for being a kindhearted person, the instruction booklet is also irritatingly hippy (and full of typos):

This allows the mouse to escape without panic, so its survival in the outdoors is more assured. It si [sic] a joy to see a mouse escape, and to realize its life has been spared. This lesson in compassion is best shared with a child!

Before it's devoured by a fox twenty minutes later. Anyway, I set this up when it arrived, baiting it with a pinch of oats and some Honey Nut Cheerios, and left it on the kitchen floor underneath a cupboard that I'd seen it run towards on Monday.

After spending far too long on the Internet as usual, I went to bed at about midnight, and lay awake for a bit trying to forget about listening for the trap, telling my over-aware brain that the noises I heard were just doors being opened and closed next door and that I would be able to check it in the morning. Then, after about ten minutes, I heard an unmistakable plasticy snapping noise, and sat up, waking up Whitney as I said I thought I'd heard it.

When I dragged the trap out from under the cupboard, inside was the little brown mouse - I was surprised at how clean, sleek and quite adorable it looked compared to the bedraggled look I had expected from a wild scavenging animal. It was running from one end of the enclosure to the other searching for an exit, had already scoffed the entirety of the bait that I had left out, and I had read that they can easily die of panic if you leave them too long, so I resolved to go out and set it free immediately in the only non-built-up space within walking distance.

So I shambled down to the graveyard at half past midnight, feeling a bit like I was going out to dig up some body parts for Dr. Stein, with a torch in one hand and the trap in the other - the mouse banged about from one end to the other at first, but had calmed down by the time I got there. I walked some way into the darkness before setting the trap down near a tree and opening it up, but the mouse stayed inside. I turned the torch off for a moment and then on again to see if it would go in the darkness, but it was still there - but as I leaned a little closer it honestly launched out of the box, going about six feet before landing, and ran off into the night on a Cheerios-induced sugar high that I hope didn't end with it killing every other creature in the cemetery.

I set the trap up again when I returned, and wasn't really any less restless listening for it throughout the rest of the night - but when I woke up, it was still baited and open, so hopefully he was the only one.

This week I received a rectangular anachronism through the post. I had suddenly remembered about the very first programming book that I had ever seen, the catchily-titled The Times Book of Computer Puzzles and Games, and had gone on a search online for it a couple of weeks ago. I was surprised to find the 26 year old book still available, and now that it's arrived, equally surprised that it's in such good-as-new condition. It's a collection of program listings for little Commodore 64 games that were sent in to the Times, aimed at computer hobbyists who might want to try them and pull them around - an open source X-Box Live Arcade of the 80s. Of course, it arrived with the notable lack of the accompanying tape (though now that I come to think of it, I'm not sure what I expected to be able to do with that these days) so I was going to have to put some effort in myself to bring these things back to the world.

After looking at the first few fragments of Commodore BASIC, my initial overwhelming feelings of nostalgia were quickly replaced with wondering how on earth people used to seriously program with this. The C++ family, so incomprehensible to people who look at it for the first time, seems beginner-oriented compared to having to POKE seemingly random collections of numbers into memory, keeping track of variables with names like ZC$ with no concept of scope. And when a program begins (as one does) with "GOTO 10051" followed by "GOTO 204", you know it's not going to be easy to follow the program flow.

To avoid all this, I had hoped to take advantage of some modern inventions that would save me from the traditional method of clunking through thousands of lines on the Commodore's tank-like keyboard, but the first attempts at OCR on the book's tiny 80s typeface came up with this masterpiece:

1 OTH OHUNTING 10iO RESTORE
? RIH OOPYRIGHT J. R. JOOKSOO
5 OOTO IGOS1: REM GETOP 1OEO E$=“
K9? GOTO QO4 ” l
BOO X3=G(ZP+481 1025 LET H$=“ ABCOEFGHIJK ”: LET IS
?O1 X4¤INT£X3{25b1: X3=X3·256*X4: PO =" OBOOEFGHTJK “
EO4 REO EMO OF NOTE SOBROOTINE 3
1GGG RER SHOOTING
1005 REM ? J. R. JOEKSON
100? OIR X${501: DIM PANTS OF 112O DATO 255,56,36.255,255,255,0,0

So I took that as a message that I was going to be typing these in by hand. Fortunately, some wonderful person has developed an actual Windows IDE for the Commodore 64, so that you don't have to use the actual machine's more... eccentric layout, and (for example) have to remember that "Inverted heart, inverted pi, four inverted Qs" means "Clear the screen and get ready to type somewhere". After about forty lines even in that, I was beginning to appreciate how little I actually missed the program distribution method of typing in twelve columns of code character by character, knowing that you don't have a debugging method if a single character is wrong, and armed this time with the author's name, successfully found tape images of some of the individual programs, including the one I was attempting (but I'll have to provide most of them myself).

SHUNTING, then (and neither OHUNTING nor SHOOTING - or to give it its full imaginative title, "Train Shunting Puzzle"), is a Laytonesque little conundrum set by the Reverend J. R. Jackson. In it, you start with a train in the siding, some carriages in the depot and some trucks in the station, and because British Rail only has one train capable of movement at any one time, it's up to you to trundle around connecting and disconnecting the carriages with the aim of swapping the trucks and carriages round and leaving the train back where it started. Just to top it all off, the right side of the screen is taken up by a tunnel which only the train can enter, for reasons that are left unexplained.

And I'm proud to say that - after setting the emulator speed up to five times normal to prevent being driven mad by the little animation every time a move was made - I successfully did it, in only about double the moves he expected me to. I'm not entirely sure how I did it, either, I just seemed to rely on luck - but solving it at all is good enough for me by this point, seeing as if we measure from the first time I ever saw it, it took me roughly twenty-one years.

Well, apparently the new Sepultura album's been released early:



I'm really not sure what to make of Kamelot, now. When I discovered them they were a power metal band that had the unusual property of being American but was fairly accessible by the usual standards. After Karma, they started off experimenting with more involved concepts (starting off as they meant to go on with a two-album interpretation of Faust) and incorporating more and more non-traditional instruments. Now, nobody can really agree on what they even are any more - their albums are called symphonic/progressive/power in various different combinations and quantities, and as their music has been getting gloomier and more pretentious, so has their album artwork. I'm pretty sure your radio will start bursting static when you take this out of its shrinkwrap.

The new tracklist gives away some of the mood, as well:

1. The Great Pandemonium
2. If Tomorrow Came
3. Dear Editor
4. The Zodiac
5. Hunter's Season
6. House on a Hill
7. Necropolis
8. My Train of Thoughts
9. Seal of Woven Years
10. Poetry for the Poisoned, Pt. I: Incubus
11. Poetry for the Poisoned, Pt. II: So Long
12. Poetry for the Poisoned, Pt. III: All is Over
13. Poetry for the Poisoned, Pt. IV: Dissection
14. Once Upon a Time
15. Where the Wild Roses Grow
16. Thespian Drama

Cheerful, isn't it? "Dear Editor" is a bit of a curious standout, though. But keeping with their "accessible" theme from the early 2000s, another thing about the tracklist is that there's hardly anything above four minutes long - it's especially odd that they split up the title track into four separate sections, because the nine-minute song they comprise is positively manageable in comparison to what some people in the genre get away with.

One last thing you can do to assess the mood of a release is to look at the latest band shot - I promise that like I said above, they used to seem fairly normal. This time, with his beard having evolved into a full Blackadder II, Khan has a look of sheer unadulterated fury unmatched since the Sim City 2000 transport minister.

I'm glad that people appreciated my non-story of what dinner was like last night - I had been planning to set up a post like that for some time, ever since I was sitting on the sofa with my awful dinner and shortened finger two weeks ago and thinking about how days alone would be better planned so that they were survivable. Unfortunately, it was a lie - or at least it didn't tell the whole truth, and the answer to ravenworks' question of whether I ever have normal dinners is probably a resounding "no".

You see, there is a moose, and furthermore, it seems to be loose aboot this hoose. I first noticed it when I saw a dark cloud zoom across the kitchen floor and back out of the corner of my eye when I was working at the dining table. At first I thought it might be an earwig because we'd had a couple of those when we first moved in, but it was far too big and too fast unless it was the King of the Land of Earwigs himself. I decided that it was probably my imagination.

Then I looked again when messaging lupineangel, and there it was - a small dark brown thing, not nearly as nice-looking as you might have been led to believe, staring back at me from the wooden floor. As we made eye contact it took off again under a cupboard, leaving me to incoherently type "MOUSE" for a few lines before calming down and trying to decide what to do about it.

He suggested peanut butter in a very Elmer Fudd style trap of a shoebox, pencil and bit of string, but we don't have any of that, and I decided it probably wasn't worth it to spend my evening that way - besides, those cartoons always involved him shooting himself in the face with a hunting rifle, and that's even worse than anything I've done to myself in the kitchen. I couldn't find it by shining a torch under the counters, and when the pizza arrived, I resolved to just forget about it and plan another day (though I have a big tub ready to throw over it if I get the chance).

So we'll have to try mousetraps or something (this also solves a mystery that we had earlier on when a bait station we hadn't bought suddenly appeared in the middle of the kitchen floor one day - it must have been kicked out from under a cupboard by him.) And Whitney's been wanting a cat for ages - perhaps this is a reason to finally get one, so that he can try to catch it while we're out with some sort of elaborate arrangement involving the ironing board, a cheese grater, and an anvil suspended from the ceiling.

Well, Whitney was out again tonight and it was up to me to work out dinner for myself.

I ordered in a pizza. It was quite nice.

Whitney's birthday was yesterday, and we've already had an unusually exhausting weekend that was spent mostly out in Boston, visiting the aquarium and then eating most of its inhabitants at a seafood restaurant in Cambridge. Among other things, I gave her a miniature Professor Layton to keep her company if I go away again, and all of our parents got together with me to contribute to an iPad - last Wednesday, I received the most disappointing delivery ever when a courier came to the door with a two inch box that contained a stand for it, as it had been shipped ahead of the main article.

The race for most appalling e-card this year was as hotly contested as ever, with my parents offering up this truly hideous video of computer-generated chipmunks badly synchronized to a grating slightly sped up rendition of the birthday song. However, her grandmother probably beat this with the simple device of sending her exactly the same one that she got last time, a make-up themed monstrosity that declares something like "No amount of make-up can improve a girl like you", with the probably unintentional lyrical subtext of "Because it would be like putting it on a steam boiler". To top things off, it was through a site that appears to be something that you can sign up for and it'll just automatically send emails to people on their birthdays for you. When you go there, there's even a pre-filled out form that you can just click on to instantly send a generic thank you note.

My own effort was something that called out to me from a shelf in the supermarket - it first caught my eye because of the rabbit, and the implication that the second line could be "Because I'd probably lose a finger if I tried"...





And it turned out that he was in fact the perviest little rabbit ever.

Of course I still got it.

1. Go to the supermarket and buy a box of cake mix. Realize halfway back that said box doesn't include icing.
2. Go back to the supermarket and buy icing. Go back home.
3. Go back out to the supermarket and retrieve the icing from where you left it on the counter after buying it. Trudge back home.

I think I'll just stay in bed for the rest of the week.

If you'll allow me to redeem myself for a moment, I also made these last weekend, with the use of just seven fingers. And Whitney.



I will call them... "albino gingers". They came from a recipe I found while looking up ginger biscuits, and it didn't really work the first time - it needed a significant amount more flour than it said for them to stay biscuit-like instead of pancake-like, so this is the modified one - resulting in much lighter biscuits - that we came up with.

~ Albino Gingers ~

Loads of stuff
3 cups of plain flour
0.75 cup of margarine
1 cup of sugar
2.5 tsp ground ginger
1.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
0.5 tsp ground cloves
0.25 tsp salt
1 egg
1 tblsp orange juice
0.25 cup of treacle/molasses/golden syrup (the first you can get your hands on)
2 more tablespoons of sugar (just to be safe)

(Makes about 36)

But what you do with it's easy
1. Put the flour, ginger, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon, cloves and salt together, therefore getting most of the ingredients out the way early on.

2. Cream the margarine and the cup of sugar together (taking care not to eat it all at this stage), beat in the egg, then stir in the juice and whatever treacle-like substance you chose.

3. Combine the two amalgamations above together by stirring the dry ingredients into the wet ones.

4. Put the remaining sugar into a tray, roll the resultant doughy mixture in it in balls about the size of walnuts, then press them into disc shapes on ungreased baking trays.

5. Bake them at 350F for about ten minutes, and let them cool slightly before attempting to move them.

I think that their lighter-than-normal colour comes from us having used half golden syrup in place of the original molasses, and because of the expansion of flour compared to other ingredients to get them to stay in biscuit form. They have a light ginger taste, but are heavier than you would expect from looking at them!

I also realize that by this point, my measurement confusion is at a point where absolutely nobody will get through this recipe without a conversion table.

Three days... three days after my kitchen skills were so casually mocked. Whitney was away this evening and I was on my own for dinner, so I went to the kitchen at seven o'clock with the plan of cooking one of the burgers from the freezer, chopping it up and guddling it together with pasta and cheese in a preparation not unlike a flat lasagne. It's not healthy or sophisticated, but it's simple and a nice comfort food - when you make it right.

My greatest mistake took place before I'd even started, in the separation of the burgers. I press my own out from packaged ground beef, because they're a lot cheaper that way, but even though we started putting wax paper between them before putting them in the freezer, it's really a matter of luck whether they separate readily when they come out. This wasn't one of those times, and after trying to dunt two of them apart on the edge of the chopping block, I resorted to my standard backup method - I took the breadknife out and wiggled it between them. After a couple of centimetres it shot through it, didn't stop at all and I rammed the point of the knife a significant distance into the tip of my left index finger.

For the next few minutes, dinner progress was forgotten as I ran my finger under the tap, pressing the top of it and hoping that it would stay on, trying not to think about how deep the cut was and wondering if the bleeding was ever going to stop. After a while I retrieved a tissue from the living room, formed my left hand into a rigid OK symbol with the tissue in between to keep pressure on it, and looked for the antiseptic. It wasn't in the bathroom, so I phoned Whitney to ask, but about twenty calls later I was beginning to get the feeling that she was never going to pick it up. So I gave up and looked down in the basement, where I found it in a box that had never been unpacked. I poured it over my finger, it stung a lot, and then I wrapped a plaster tightly around it - I haven't looked underneath it since and I'm hoping it'll just be healing away without intervention.

With one hand Elastoplasted into a permanent Phoenix Wright pointing action, though, making dinner would prove difficult - I did what I could with one and a half hands, as not a lot of it required a whole lot of interaction - a frying pan, a pot of water, and that was all that was really needed. After about fifteen minutes I did my best to pour the pasta into a sieve, the process being made very awkward with only the use of one hand, and I left the burger on for rather longer than I'd intended as a result. Eventually I got the pasta back into the pan minus the water, and turned around to find the cheese. I was thinking that at least America had introduced me to the concept of bagged grated mozzerella because I was in no position to prepare any myself, then I opened the fridge and found that we'd run out.

I therefore had for my dinner: One burger, overdone in black Scotch outdoor barbecue style, about a cubic inch of the only available cheese that I found, a misjudged amount of completely plain pasta, and about half my own finger. I believe an appropriate phrase might be "FMC".

UPDATE lcmr.content_relationship SET content_entity=
(
	SELECT TOP 1 ce_id
	FROM lcmr.content_w_xms_name newContent
	WHERE newContent.content_type=130
	AND newContent.xms_name='Badger Mushrooms'
	
)
WHERE id IN
	(
	SELECT lcmr.content_relationship.id
	FROM lcmr.content_w_xms_name newContent, lcmr.content_relationship
	INNER JOIN lcmr.property_value
	ON (lcmr.content_relationship.id=lcmr.property_value.id)
	WHERE property=13
	AND lcmr.property_value.content_instance NOT IN
		(
		SELECT pvForExisting.content_instance
		FROM lcmr.property_value pvForExisting,
		     lcmr.content_relationship crForExisting
		WHERE pvForExisting.id = crForExisting.id
		AND pvForExisting.property = 13
		AND crForExisting.content_entity IN
			(
			SELECT TOP 1 ce_id
			FROM lcmr.content_w_xms_name newContent
			WHERE newContent.content_type=130
			AND newContent.xms_name='Badger Mushrooms'
			)
		)
	AND (newContent.content_type=130
	AND newContent.xms_name='Badger Mushrooms')
	AND content_entity IN
		(
		SELECT TOP 1 ce_id
		FROM lcmr.content_w_xms_name oldContent
		WHERE (oldContent.content_type=130)
		AND oldContent.xms_name='Cow Exploding'
		)
	)
;
DELETE FROM lcmr.property_value
WHERE id IN
	(
	SELECT pv.id
	FROM lcmr.property_value pv, lcmr.content_relationship cr
	WHERE pv.id = cr.id
	AND property=13
	AND content_entity IN
		(
		SELECT TOP 1 ce_id
		FROM lcmr.content_w_xms_name oldContent
		WHERE (oldContent.content_type=130)
		AND oldContent.xms_name='Cow Exploding'
		)
	)
;

A masterpiece. (This is just one of them - it has to do all this about 32 times for different locations.)

Note the fair amounts of repetition - SQL is not my strong point, and this probably does things 100 times slower than they could be. It might be possible in about four lines, I don't know.

As I was in a Commodore 64 mood thanks to yesterday, I was remembering some of the other things that I used to play about with on it. I really have no idea where any of the diverse tapes that we had for this thing came from, but one of them that I remember loading up quite a lot was a sort of graphics program called The Designer's Pencil.

I say "sort of" because while its focus was on producing graphics and music, this was done through programming a routine to draw and play them, like some sort of unlikely prototype of a cross between Mario Paint and ZZT. An analogy that falls down immediately, because the interface was nothing like either of them - as far as I can tell, on the right you have a list of commands that you can select from to add them to the list on the left, and you can then edit some of their parameters. Different variations on the commands let you draw in a direction for [variable] number of pixels, so you can set up things like loops, and the whole thing can get surprisingly complex.

The language is quite understandable and LOGO-like on the surface, but thanks to the limited space, all the commands are named things like JSUB and it looks like Assembler - and it wasn't helped by the way that the designers had declined to use the arrow keys and instead put up/left/right/down on F1, F3, F5, F7, which doesn't really make any more sense on a Commodore keyboard. Naturally, through this extraordinarily cumbersome interface I failed to create anything worthwhile of my own at all, but it came with a library of example files. Some of these were algorithms like a spiral, and some were very impressive complete little programs, drawing things like helicopters and cars. But while scrolling innocently through these titles when I was four - CUBES, MUSIC, SAILING, COPTER - I eventually stumbled across one called FAROUT. It... was terrifying.

This horrific spectacle looked like this:


Yes, I know, I can feel the disappointment radiating off you already. There's no way that I can make this look as frightening as it seemed, even when I mention that that background flashed rapidly in random colours in an apparent attempt to induce a seizure. But perhaps listening to the sound coming from the Commodore while this was running might change your mind:

The sound of FAROUT (and/or hell)

Well, I ran straight out of the living room, didn't I? I had to get away from the unholy sound of a Commodore 64 being instructed to go berserk, as the random kaleidoscope pattern on the screen gradually spread, showing the growth of insane cells in the computer as the screen epileptically flashed behind it. After that, I knew that FAROUT was evil and must never be allowed to escape its electronic jail again - every time I played about with The Designer's Pencil, I got a bit of a chill when I saw its name in the list, and always made sure to skip over it, never even allowing this program listing from hell to be displayed.

I had to load it up again to record its sound, of course, and though the attempt to get over the fear worked rather better than my earlier attempt at Ecco the Dolphin, I could still see why I had been scared of it at first - there's something very uncomfortable about the randomness and insanity of it, especially that crawling-up-and-down sound. However, just as I was about to turn it off, it crashed the computer - and not just the emulator it was running on, the whole thing just ground to a semi-window-drawing halt. After twenty years away, FAROUT had made the most of its opportunity for revenge.

It's gone now, never again to be opened, sealed in a vault somewhere at the bottom of the SCP Foundation.

I'm just writing about this to highlight how exciting my life has been recently - I just ordered a book of program listings for the Commodore 64 from Amazon, the immensely-titled The Times Book of Computer Puzzles and Games. It originally came with a tape, which was one of the first things that I remember having for any computer, and also probably the very first step in finding myself where I am today. I was surprised that it still existed anywhere, but it was going for $4 from a bookshop selling through the site.

I'll have to see if I can get any of the games working via an emulator again when it arrives - I'm counting on the way that I can probably now just scan some of the pages and character-recognize them into something coherent, instead of - as was more traditional in the 80s - having to type in 10,000 lines of BASIC by copying it out of the book and going off to do something more entertaining well before you were finished.

Amazon seem to have introduced the concept of pay-phrases since I last ordered from them - I imagine these speed you through the checkout process by... being a password that isn't your password, I don't know. I promise you that when I was on the checkout page today, my suggested one was:

David's Reassuring Innocence

I'm just glad that it only has my email address to go by.

As if everything else wasn't enough, there are even infuriating stealth sections.

Some of the best games are those that are not only enjoyable at a gameplay level, but that are thought-provoking as well - and the mathematically-titled Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days (pronounced, though it sounds somewhat unlikely, "Kingdom Hearts, Three Five Eight Days Over Two") kept on bringing up one thought throughout. It was "Why am I still playing this?".

I've mentioned before that I always found it a huge mystery why I didn't hate Kingdom Hearts, but this game did the best job yet of solving the paradox by just making me hate it after all. The series started off as a Disney-nostalgia-laden action RPG, but has now fully embraced the oncoming tidal wave of Hot Topic-ness that's been threatening to overtake it since around the time that the concept of Nobodies was introduced (sort of half-there poor photocopies of people that are created when they're turned into a Heartless or something).

This time around, you star as Roxas, one of these Nobodies with a side career of being a clueless dipstick. He has recently been indoctrinated into Organization XIII, which is a society of Square Enix characters and David Bowie, dressed in black cloaks and sporting increasingly unlikely haircuts. During the game, these people organize missions into the various Disney realities from a sort of Tron-like coffee-room of darkness, where they spout things like "RTC authorized" and talk about "recon missions", which is meant to be all mysterious but really sounds like ten year olds running a society of secret agents from their treehouse.

Why does Riku wear that if he's not blind? Because he's a wanker.

Your objective in these missions is usually to clear out the Heartless so that you can steal their hearts (which I must say confuses the hell out of me for a start), with the eventual goal of completing Kingdom Hearts and... getting hearts themselves, or something, I didn't quite get the explanation. Apparently Nobodies don't have hearts but Heartless do, I don't know. Still, most of these missions involve going through and whacking enemies with a big key in the best of the series' traditions, but the crown of this exercise in banality is the investigation missions. In those, your objective is to clomp around every space and along every wall in the level until a question mark icon pops up over your character, then look more closely at the immediate area, whereupon they'll say something like "Cor, a pile of sand" before you're allowed to move on. It takes them about eight "discoveries" before having the "breakthrough" that the Beast is the master of the Beast's Castle - they might as well be the Society for the Investigation of Really Boring Things.

After each menial job you're tasked with, the timeline and storyline advance a little further (usually by one day but sometimes more, so thankfully you don't have to do 358 of them), and you're often treated to a cutscene of the central characters getting together on the clock tower after work and talking about their feelings and inability to understand life like in some terrible Australian soap opera. And as if that wasn't enough punishment, you also get the unenviable opportunity to read his bleeding Livejournal - throughout the game, you'll get updates to Roxas' Diary, which contains such enthralling private thoughts as the following:

"Axel and I went to Twilight Town today. He taught me a lot. Before we RTC'd (Returned to the Castle) we swung by the clock tower and had some sea-salt ice cream. Axel called it the 'icing on the cake' after a successful mission. Well, except there was no cake - just the ice cream. I don't know what to write in this thing!"

Needless to say, you'll be looking for a Defriend button pretty soon after starting.

Now that I've got all that out the way, I'm going to have to explain why I played this to the end, and to be honest I'm not really sure myself... but I've got to say that the last sections of it suddenly got interesting after a ton of repetitive missions, so I feel like I got some reward out of it. Ignoring the storyline, it's a reasonable action RPG, even if fighting usually consists of hammering one button (you have the option of using physical attacks or magic, but the first tends to be far more useful, easier to aim and non-depletable). If you can stand the main characters for long enough, you get a sense of achievement in advancing the timeline and seeing where you're sent next - there are only a few actual environments, but different areas of them are open on each mission, meaning that the actual playfield is different each time. And occasionally, it throws the odd genuinely clever bit at you - to symbolize Roxas' vague memories coming to the surface, occasionally the bottom screen will turn off and be replaced with a grainy image of Kingdom Hearts 1 being played simultaneously with you. It feels oddly nostalgic, even though said memory was from all of about three years ago.

This reminds me that I never found another backpack icon to go into that blank slot, either

After the system of the similarly lengthily-titled Kingdom Hearts RE:Chain of Memories, in which I either missed something absolutely fundamental or the game was all but completely unplayable, it's interesting to note that this one's progression system is actually one of my favourites from Square Enix in a long time. The entire process of levelling up and gathering abilities is represented like an inventory - every ability and enhancement you're given is represented by a "panel" (even the level-ups), and you can swap things in and out and try to Tetris the various pieces into a space that expands gradually over the course of the game - it's quite satisfying to finally get something together that has all the abilities you want and fits into the space. And finally, I'm frankly quite impressed with it on a technical level - 90 missions, countless different enemies and about half an hour of FMV totalling about 30 hours of gameplay time are squashed into a cartridge the size of a stamp.

I suppose I should close this with an example of the level of conversation that you page through in this game, though. Inevitably, I have the impression that the main audience for the series is made up of slash-writing fangirls, and this surely must be pandering to them, because I don't think there's any way that I could possibly make this conversation any more hilarious.

Roxas: Whoa! Xion, I didn't know you could use the Keyblade.

Xion: Yeah...neither did I.

Roxas: You did great. In fact, you deserve a little something extra.

Xion: Something extra?

Roxas: Yeah, the icing on the cake. C'mon. There's this place...

---

[On the clock tower]

Xion: How'd you find such a great place?

Roxas: Heeere ya go.

Roxas: Sea-salt ice cream.

Roxas: Well? Go on, try it.

Xion: Okay...

Xion: It's sweet. But kinda salty, too.

Roxas: It's really good, right? Me and Axel always meet up here for ice cream after work.

Roxas: Sea-salt is Axel's favorite.

Xion (giggling): Sounds like it's yours, too!

Roxas: Heh, yeah. I don't remember it too well, but Axel said he took me here my very first day with the Organization. And then he bought me some ice cream again after my first mission. Said it was the "icing on the cake."

Xion: A little something extra?

Roxas: Exactly.

Xion: You guys must be close.

Roxas: Axel's my first friend.

Xion: Your... friend?

Xion: Roxas, do you think I could be a friend?

Roxas: When Axel gets back, let's ask him. Then all three of us can have ice cream together!

Xion: Okay!

At this point you can't help regretting that there's no option to just boot them off the clock tower at this point and end the game that way. If you've got that mmmmmmmmemorized.

As of today, Whitney and I have been married for four years, equalling the amount of time that I was in university. I tend to still use that as the metre-stick of life, because I'm still a little unused to the fact that I'm no longer there, but now that I've had more life out of it afterwards than I ever had in it, it might be time to let it go. I suppose I should also express the annual surprise that it's been this long already, and that even four years in America have not diminished the constant stream of "What's that?" and "I don't understand" and "What's your word for _____?" that I find myself saying daily.

This has been the year with the biggest life changes since the first after getting married, having moved to a different suburb of Boston and into a house that we're paying a mortgage on instead of paying a higher power to come and stick the ceiling back up every now and then - we've made two payments out of 360, and now indisputably own a space equivalent to the bit at the bottom of the stairs just inside the front door. This time next year, we might own a whole room. And at work, we moved offices again, and even though it was only down one floor this time, it has the advantage of privacy and a window to the outside world, from which I have just watched a lorry doing a particularly awkward reverse turn across two streets thirteen floors down.

I notice that on our first anniversary, I mentioned us going back home in the evening to play Final Fantasy XII. This evening, after going out to a fondue restaurant, we'll be on Final Fantasy XIII. How times change.

...you're in a Flash game. In space.

quadralien linked to this a couple of hours ago - it seems that Iron Maiden are now joining Limozeen in outer space self-parody. (At least, I hope both of these are self-parody.) This several-year-late hop in to the whole interactive Flash Internet browser multimedia game thing involves Eddie - who by now is a horrific mostly-skeletal visage with teeth growing out of its teeth - having to recover the band's equipment by floating around shooting things. It's not the first time the band have gone into science fiction territory, but it still feels a bit like a gimmick from a bygone era.

The fifteenth album's called The Final Frontier, by the way, as you've no doubt heard by now. A preview song, El Dorado, is up here, so you can assess the sound for yourself. From the tracklist, it looks like they've returned to the philosophy that they introduced to me of a song not really being complete unless it's over seven minutes long, and are skirting with the maximum capacity of CDs in just ten tracks. On the positive side, its chorus doesn't just consist of the title sung sixteen times as has been their habit recently, but it's still a lot more... understated than their earlier material. Give us another Run to the Hills, Steve Harris!

I've stopped really following them over the last while, but it's at least impressive that a band of their age has had a stable line-up for ten years. Especially when compared to ones like Stratovarius, who split up seemingly irreparably after releasing every single album and then just crawl back together again like the T1000, absorbing a different bassist each time.