Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Eye Contact

The Last Thing The Field Mouse Sees

Ritting
Rattling along underground in a vicious humour, all around me are temporarily like me; none can see the blue of the sky. The tube disgorges beneath Kings-Cross and we all barrel out, the stick-wavers, the 20-20s and me. There's probably some of my kin around too, but we never make eye contact, head for the city. There's a city in all of our eyes, great towers of rhodopsin raising up, the rods and the cones, an empty city that collapses at the touch of light. In my city the architect's plans went awry, or he lacked imagination and my city looks all samey, not enough variety in those towering discs. As in the eye, so in the world and my world, outside the vitreous humour (if it's really there) also has lost something from that failure; colour.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Champers

My cat champers has been dead for at least seven years now. I still miss him.

Monday, July 21, 2008

According to my timesheet at work, last week I worked sixty five hours, not including freelance. If I'd been at Future, I would have begrudged every moment of that stolen time, in my penury and misery, but here in the glossy, happy world of PR it's varied, exciting, and interesting; my only irritation is that I can't spend every hour of every day with Maria - oh, how low this onetime bachelor hath sunk... Anyway, that week of schlepping was tolerably pleasant because it included a day trip to Paris to see the really interesting city-building MMO Cities XL and 2 1/2 days on the Hop Farm at the War & Peace show (large numbers of scary men in military/Nazi uniforms or 1940s civvies walking around buying cheap machetes and "decommissioned" machine guns, mortars. And one very brave Vietnam war protestor) demoing Men of War, a very cute and clever realtime tactics / roleplaying game that reminds me of nothing so much as a non-pausable Hidden & Dangerous II. Now, back to the working week...

Friday, July 11, 2008

The Warslow Beef Restival 2008

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

How StarCraft Beat Chess


Eurogamer Front Page 02/07/08, originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

Look, I just wanted to use a Wired-style complete hyperbollicks title, okay? God, I hate forumites. Anyway, my big interview with the creators of StarCraft is online over at Eurogamer, finally. Childhood ambition complete (tick!)

Eurogamer Front Page 02/07/08