Associate L Glenny asked me for some podcast recommendations, though I’m not sure he realised what he was asking for at the time. After it passed the 1000 word mark, I thought I probably ought to make it into a post. Has been slightly edited from its original form. If I say things like ‘you probably won’t be interested in this’, I’m talking about Lucian.
Shockingly, that episode wasn’t particularly good or interesting. Continue reading
Come with me.
First, let’s address the title.
We now turn to number two on your song sheets. Don’t strain your eyes trying to read them, though, because I shall be telling you exactly what comes next; in any case, these rather fanciful titles that we print on the programmes bear no relation to what we’re going to sing. It’s a dead waste of a shilling, is what I say.
- Michael Flanders
Now that’s out of the way…
At the moment, I’m trying to keep up with some of the titles being published by Marvel under the Marvel NOW! line. Marvel NOW! (and yes, that is the way it’s being capitalised and punctuated) is… well, I’m not quite sure what it is, and neither, from the looks of things, is Wikipedia. Near as can be told, it’s an attempt to draw in some new readers after yet another catastrophic world-shaking things-will-never-be-the-same summer event (this one called Avengers Vs X-Men*) by shaking up the creative teams and relaunching a bunch of books**. Sounds good to me. Here are lots of words about my favourite Marvel NOW! books so far.
[by the way, if you're reading this at or shortly after publication, Marvel are offering a load of issue #1s (including ALL the Marvel NOW! stuff) for free download, so if you're interested at all in the slightest, check it out]
Tap tap tap taaaaap tap taptaptaptaptaptap tap tap taaaaaaaaaaap taptaptaptaptaaaap tap tap taptapta-
Super Hexagon, from Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV fame, a successor to his slightly more rough-around-the-edges Hexagon (a flash game made for Pirate Kart, a game jam sort of thing) is a game that’s both very simple and very difficult. You control a small triangle, moving either clockwise or counter-clockwise around a central hexagon (or sometimes a pentagon or a square), and you have to avoid the line patterns moving from the outer edges of the screen toward the centre. It seems somewhat reductive to describe it in those terms, but watch the video, and you should get some idea of how it works, how difficult it can get, and how excellent the music (by Chipzel) is.
More podcast talk! I have a feeling this is an expression of my sublimated guilt for not having edited the podcast I recorded with comrades S Wilson and J Lambert last week. Anyway, today’s podcast recommendation is different to yesterday’s – different to most – in fact, it’s not really a podcast at all, more of a serialised audiobook. Turns out.
Tomorrow, I go back to work*, so I felt like I should talk about the podcast Back to Work, from the 5by5 network (at the rate they’ve been disappearing , it’ll soon be the only podcast on the 5by5 network) presented by The 5by5 Guy, Dan Benjamin, and well-known productivity person Merlin Mann,
Illness isn’t fun, turns out. I don’t get ill very often, so when I do, it’s always a deeply unpleasant experience rediscovering how terrible it is. This week, I’ve been suffering from a new! exciting! kind of illness, one that goes on all week and changes symptoms day to day. This is the longest I can remember any illness lasting for, and it’s starting to get really annoying. The current symptoms are sore throat/cough, runny nose, and the titular ear infection, the only symptom I don’t think I’ve ever suffered before, and the most off-putting, because it’s started interfering with my hearing in that ear, which is getting more that a little irksome. It’s miserable, and the disease’s irritating reluctance to stop caused me to delay my triumphant return to Brighton, because while ill I didn’t really feel like leaving place with all the tea made for me and free food, but a) my brother was really starting to get on my nerves and b) I’ve got Stuff To Do here. But I am back, now, and Brighton has greeted me with typical affection: by having the washing machine leak. If I hadn’t had my eyes open, it probably would have flooded the kitchen. The other problem with illness of this kind is that it saps your will to write. I was only able to summon the effort for one measly paragraph, and I wasted that on bitching about how unpleasant it was feeling a bit ill. Never mind. Tomorrow, I’m hosting a fighting game tournament, and will hopefully be feeling a little less malaised. I’ll write about videogames or something similarly uplifting.
I’ve got some posts about my favourite smaller and bigger games of last year in the hopper, but they still need a bit of polishing, and I wanted to talk about Spaceteam quickly before the relentless march of time dulled my enthusiasm for it. When I heard about it on Polygon’s excellent podcast The Besties, I thought it sounded a bit like a more light-hearted version of Artemis Bridge Simulator (which I still haven’t got around to playing, but need to). I didn’t want a light-hearted version of Artemis, because space is serious business, yo. Nevertheless, when visiting compatriots S Wilson and J Lambert, I found myself reminded of it, and realised that we had three iOS devices in the room, so I thought we should try it. I’m very glad we did – it’s scrappy, silly, and tremendously fun.
I bet you thought I’d exhausted all my words about Doctor Who with that 3000-word monstrosity yesterday, didn’t you? Sorry to disappoint, but no. Well, almost. I’ve run out of pictures of Matt Smith pulling stupid faces, or at least ones I thought funny enough to use, so I’ll try and keep this short(er).
