Torrefaction

Hooray! Amazon just emailed me that Witchblade is coming out on DVD in July.  I've been waiting for this for a while.  The second season didn't work for me - they were doing annoying stuff with the plot, Yancey Butler was apparently drunk a lot - I gave up on it after a couple of episodes.  But the first season was a perfect confection of mumbo-jumbo, female badassitude, intricate plotting, and hot, HOT men.

Amazon page here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00170LCWC/

Posted by alchemist at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

HOW have these panthers survived all this time, sealed in these little chambers all over the place?  Every time I move a frelling block or pull a switch in this ancient ruin, a panther pounces on me.  Why haven't they all starved by now?  It's been a ruin for 2000 years or something, right?

I mean. Seriously. 

Posted by alchemist at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reflexive Arcade has a zillion really good, addictive little games.  I've been playing Big Kahuna Reef 2 for a year or so, so I decided to get a couple more and have been wasting loads of time with them.

 

In Tasty Planet, you are a bacterium designed to eat bathroom germs (the grey dude in the pic, above).  You can only eat things smaller than yourself; each thing you eat makes you bigger, meaning as you chow down you can eat more and more stuff, including enemies that hurt you when you're smaller.  You don't even have to click--just push the mouse.  Oh and your color changes to reflect whatever you've been eating. It's very cute.

I'm still in the Lab levels, but you eventually get too big, escape, start eating cars & stuff, and end up consuming the planet, apparently.  What's not to love about that?  Particuarly if you're dieting.  Speaking of which, did you know that 4 Burger King "cini-mini's" have 500 calories?  Five-effing-hundred.  For 4 miniature cinnamon rolls.  So, not having those today.  Oh, for comparison, a Cinnabon has...[looking up on google]...670!  HOLY CRAP!

Jeez. Ok, back on topic:  you can download and play each game for a total of an hour; then you have to buy if you want to keep on playing.  All the games I've tried are $20.  I like this scheme, because if a game is going to bore me, I'll know it within an hour; if it's not, I'll play it for at least 20 hours by the time I'm done with it.  Since the big quest games tend to cost $50 and provide about 50 hours of single-player play time, I figure a buck an hour is about the going rate for games...cheaper than a movie or a hardcover book.

EDITED to add:  Now I am in the lab dude's blood stream, eating his red blood cells...

 

...and then his white blood cells.  AWESOME!

 

Posted by alchemist at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I'm playing Titan Quest, and it's fun and Diablo-like, which is great.  But playing it right after playing Oblivion for a long time (and getting bored & bogged down in Neverwinter Nights II) has got me questioning some standard RPG stuff.

1. Why does a tomb containing 4 sarcophogi have 6 skeletons and 2 zombies?  Are the extra ones visiting the 4 who belong there?

2. Why would a giant spider be carrying bag of gold?  (Actually, I've heard a good explanation for that - based on the giant crabs in Pirates/Black Kat:  That's all that's left of the last adventurer they ate) 

3. Why do zombies carry health potions?

 

I'm sure there are more, but that's what I've been noticing the most.  

Posted by alchemist at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the only thing that's kept me sane for the past month. Between the adoption paperwork snafu, a family medical crisis, and a promotion at work (yay, but yikes too!), I've just got way, way, way too much stress in my life. So throwing myself into a realm filled with clear objectives and solvable problems is very appealing.  (Particularly a realm with an available "add gold" cheat!)

Oblivion is a totally bitchin' RPG that isn't massively multiplayer and isn't played online, so it's good for antisocial gamers like me. (I'm perfectly sociable about everything else, but game time is me time). You can customize your character a lot, the leveling and skills system makes sense, the world is HUGE, and there are a bazillion small quests in addition to the main one. The main quest involves saving the kingdom, like basically any RPG worth its salt.

The quests are pretty good, and combat is fun. The different cities are actually pretty different from each other, and you can buy houses in them once you save or steal enough money (or, um, cheat). The pacing is mostly slow and meandery at first, so you have to stick with it long enough to discover the main places in the realm and collect some quests, but once you do, it gets to be pretty cool. The quests and story aren't quite up to the level of Neverwinter Nights (best RPG ever!) but they're not bad, and the character development is better than NN. For instance, you can buy potions at a shop, or you can wander around collecting odd ingredients in the wilderness and mix your own potions, developing alchemy as a skill over time....whatever you feel like. You can join several different guilds including one for murderers.  When I'm done playing my current character, who's mainly a blade fighting hero, I'm going to play the whole thing again with an evil magician character. But unlike most RPG's, you're not restricted to narrow character classes - if you want to specialize in alchemy AND blunt weapons, you can.  Same goes for good/evil - there's no alignment.  You collect fame and/or infamy points as you go, which determines how people react to you and affects some elements of your game experience.

Anyway, it's good. I've logged 63 hours of play time so far, with no end in sight.  I love a good timesink!

Posted by alchemist at 04:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My favorite PC game of all time was The Longest Journey.  It came out several years ago, and I was completely immersed in it until it eventually ended.  It was one of the only games I'd played that really had "girl appeal" -- it followed the adventures of art student April Ryan as she travelled between two worlds, trying to save them both.  Complex plot, deep characterization, gorgeous visuals, not-too-challenging puzzles--loved it, loved it, loved it. 

After playing The Longest Journey, I kept hoping that there would be another game like it.  I hoped in vain. There are other adventure games out there, but nothing that hooked me the same way.  So imagine my delight years later when the very week I get my new PC, the sequel arrives!  I've been playing it while I recover from the icky cold I caught last week and it's fabulous.  This time you start off in the life of another young gal, but April Ryan's in this game as well.  If you've played the first game, the second one is that much cooler--right now I'm playing the part where Zoe, the heroine, is wandering around April's old stomping grounds in Newport, but everything's changed in the intervening 10 years.  At the moment, I'm trying to get into a locked room in a derelict hotel.  The first room I went into had a girl lying on the bed with a mechanical flower thingy attached to her face.  Now she's following me around in a daze, scaring the crap out of me, while I try to hide from the guard who's coming up the stairs.

Mere words cannot express how cool this game is!  Head over to www.dreamfall.com to check it out.

 

Posted by alchemist at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My friend's receiving her M.S. in Clinical Psych tomorrow - I'm going to see her walk for it.  This will be my first-ever commencement.  When I got my B.A. my folks were in Europe, and I'm not a big ceremony person anyway (I got married at court, thank you very much), so I skipped it.  And my M.A....well, I didn't get my M.A.  I left grad school after 2 year's worth of M.A. work and an additional year toward an M.F.A. in poetry (yup, that's right, poetry).  If I had finished the paper I was writing on "Dissolution of the Narrative Self in Edgar Allen Poe" and passed a French test, I would have my M.A., but by the time I was leaving school in 1993 academics had become pretty meaningless to me.  And I sucked at French.

I wasn't cut out for grad school...I like hard work, and to study in order to further my work.  And I enjoy abstract knowledge - I read history, psychology, and science for fun.  But when the work IS the getting of abstract knowledge...well, then it's just a drag.  When I moved to Chicago I figured I'd make a living as an editor or proofreader, but after a couple of weeks in the city I discovered that people would pay me just to type on a computer.  Like, $15 an hour to put addresses into a spreadsheet.  How crazy is that?  I've loved computers since I was a kid playing "adventure" on the campus mainframe...I never imagined that I could get paid for my hobby.

So, my original life plan was to get my PhD and become a lit professor.  I didn't really expect I'd find anyone to marry, since I have a quirk or two and had generally been unlucky in love.  But I was determined to have a baby eventually...I figured I'd get some friendly fellow to knock me up if I reached 35 without a steady boyfriend.   The way it's really worked out, I've been with my husband 10 years this month (married for 6.5 of those years), but I don't have an advanced degree, I've become a monster of corporate coggery, and I'm infertile.  So it's all backwards.  I'm happier this way, I think, and certainly wealthier than expected, but confused.

Moving along to the shrunken heads...my friend is going to be a therapist.  Already is, actually, because part of her program involves a practicum, where you do the job with supervision from older wiser types.  I figure she should have something whimsical to take the edge off when she's had a bad day at the office.  I couldn't find any good shrunken heads on the internet (nothing affordable and not gross/made of goat skin, that is) so I decided to make her some.  These are about 3" across and they're made of crayola model magic clay, plus beads and yarn.  There's a largeish wood bead in the center of the head with beading wire strung through it and out the top of the head so they can hang from a hook. The "hair" is just knotted around the wire after the head is dry and then the knot is glued down to the head with glue-all. Model magic dries in 24 hours, no baking or any of that crap...nifty!  Kiddie art supplies are always more fun than the grown up equivalents.

 

I'm gonna have to make some more of these so I can keep 'em for myself. 

 

Posted by alchemist at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)