Regurgitator aren't as mental as they used to be, but they still have a Crazy Noise Box on stage with them. 

Slipknot earn their bachelors degree from Crazy Go Nuts University. 

More climbing on top of the drum kit. The guy who's supposed to be playing it is lurking around in the background. Notice also the rubbish tin stuck to the side of the kit. That's for beating with a baseball bat, or alternatively, one's head. 

This would have been a really good picture if all those arms weren't in the way. 

This guy spent more time sitting on top of his drums than actually playing them, but then again, with nine people in the band you can't expect them all to have something to do in every song. 

YEAH! ROADIE!!!! 

Gee, Scribe looks popular! 

Kid Koala. Scratchy decks guy. Also pretty good. 

The line to see Slipknot at the signing tent was bigger than the audience for The Have. 

Gee, who could all these people in black clothes be lining up to see at the signing tent? 

But they were pretty good. 

Not many people showed up for The Have either. 

With only a half hour set, Pluto only had time to play their good songs. 

Not many people showed up for Pluto, but they were fucking good. 

The audience for the Donnas was pretty tepid. 

"Is anyone here on P?" 

"This is a really scary song, and even though it's the middle of the afternoon, I reckon you guys are going to shit yourselves when you hear it." 

We are Deja Voodoo! And this is 'We Are Deja Voodoo!' 

Hey look, some people actually like Steriogram! Who knew? 

People are already using condoms as balloons. 

I'd say something about how I found this gig a bit disappointing, but I hear that the guy in the middle gets his mates together to beat people up who dis the bleeders on the internet. 

My first act of the day: The Bleeders. 

Behold, a mighty throng of munters! 

Punks, Metallers, Goths and general wierdos near the end of their annual pilgrimage to Ericsson Stadium.

Thousands of sweaty munters enjoy an early morning dose of 8 Foot Sativa 

Goddamn Piece of Shit Motherfucker

Get up in the morning. Think very carefully about what I need to bring. Pack bags. Feel like I've forgotten something. Think some more about what I need to bring. Can't think of anything. Fuck around for a few hours. Still feel like I've forgotten something. Think really really hard. Can't think of anything. Get ready and leave. On the way to the airport, still feel like I've forgotten something. Check wallet for big day out ticket. Dismiss feeling as routine paranoia.

Get to airport. Surrounded by screaming kids for four hours. Forget about nagging feeling. Get to mum's place, talk to family, old friends etc. Sit down for dinner.

Goddamn piece of shit motherfucker.

I forgot my motherfucking camera attachment for my phone.

FUCK!!!!

What a goddamn fucking retard. There'll be no moblogging tomorrow. Maybe next year. Hopefully I'll write up something during the weekend, but there'll be no pictures.

This really fucks me off. I was looking forward to doing this moblogging thing.

[...]

OK, just went and borrowed mum's digital camera. We will have pictures, but not tomorrow.

OK Just One More

This guy seems to be a pretty decent writer. And he's used his talents to write gory 'choose your own adventure' stories about zombies. Entertaining but cheesy.

Temporary Cessation of Posting

Tomorrow I'm flying up north to the big day out, so I probably won't post much until next week.

With the exception of course, of my planned BDO moblogging. My phone camera is one of the earlier models, so I don't know how good the pictures will be, but we'll see how it turns out...

Special 'Lonely Depressing Heartbreak Day' Bonus Post

The Top Ten Worst Album Covers Of All Time

Jon Tells It Like It Is

Over at Grumpy Gamer they're talking about why there are no adventure games being made anymore.

Now this is the topic of almost all comment threads over there, the Grumpy Gamer being Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion fame, but as I read it I realised that I have a somewhat unique opinion about this issue.

I think the two reasons that no adventure games are made anymore are that 1) The classic adventure game interface is archaic, and 2) 'Adventure games don't sell' is a deeply held belief of the industry.

Lets start with the second point – adventure's like Kings Quest and Monkey Island were once the best selling franchises in the business, but as PC hardware improved they were eventually surpassed by more fast paced and acronym-mungus genres like FPS and RTS. This followed the trend of the gamer demographic moving from old geeks to 14 year olds who wanted blood and boobies. So it was understandable that the adventure genre declined. Nowadays the mainstream companies view it as a dead medium. But when was the last time one of them ever put out a real adventure game? The last one I can think of was Gabriel Knight 3, and that was over 5 years ago. While it wasn't a huge seller like Halo or Grand Theft Auto, it didn't exactly flop either. Look at The Longest Journey, one of the only attempts in recent times to make a classic adventure game. It was published by a small developer, in an unpopular genre, but still managed to get copies on store shelves even in New Zealand.(On top of all that it was a shit game too).

With the demographics of gamers broadening so much in recent years, you'd think that there would be a large potential audience for a more cerebral, less action-oriented style of gaming. But no, conventional wisdom says 'Halo and GTA made lots of money, lets do that!'. The end of Gabriel Knight 3 involved a series of jumping/timing action puzzles, in contrast to the logic and reasoning based puzzles throughout the rest of the game. Jane Jenson, the writer, said after releasing it that she felt like she had to put those last bits in, because any gameplay element that wasn't immediately obvious to understand made the company execs nod off during their demonstrations, they knew that only Action! and Danger! sold games.

My first point is just that one of the things that turns the modern gamer off recent attempts at the adventure genre is the antiquated interface. In the olden days an adventure game would let you indicate what to do by having a huge list of verbs at the bottom of the screen, (and you'd usually end up trying each of them in order on every object you could find when you were stuck). In later days these were combined into a single mouse pointer which could be changed into a variety of different modes in order to represent different ways of interacting with something. While it kind of made sense at the time, compared to other games out there at the moment, it's very non-intuitive, fiddly, and obstructive to gameplay. No one likes it when you realise 'Oh, I should have used 'turn' on the door handle instead of 'open'. Even Gabriel Knight 3 and The Longest Journey used the same kind of UI, despite their ambitions to break out of the adventure ghetto.

So, if I were given lots of money and told to make an adventure game, here's what I'd do:

1. License the Doom3 engine (or maybe Source). We need lots of nifty graphics to impress the unwashed masses of the gaming press and the coke snorting suits who're paying us to make a game.

2. Get someone with an established reputation like Ron Gilbert or Jane Jenson on board as a writer, to make sure we do end up with a game worth playing!

3. Make sure the damn interface is good! My suggestion would be something along the lines of Splinter Cell. You walk up to something, and a list of potential actions appears. Get rid of the inventory too! No one likes having to try every object on every other one, because there's some obscure combination that will reward you with the solution to the puzzle. If you've got the right object in your position, it just brings up another option in the list when you get wherever you're supposed to use it.
   

It might not outsell The Sims, but I reckon there's no reason a game made along those lines wouldn't make money.

BDO Moblogging

Well, other than Vodafone conspiring to publicly display my cellphone number on the web, it looks like my moblogging test is a success. (That's Mt. Ruapehu by the way, there's really good tramping around there.)

So, this Friday I'll be at the Big Day Out, and all going well I should be doing some live moblogging! I'm not sure if I should feel like a real geek for doing it or not, but it should be fun anyway.

Moblog Test

There should be a picture here.

Update: Changed the title of the post, since Vodafone automatically changes it to 'You have a PXT from XXXXXX'. Wasn't too happy about having my cellphone number posted on the web.

Update2: As Joel points out, the alt text of the photo still had my number in it too....

Bridge of Birds

By Barry Hughart

Yet another book that has been sitting in the 'to read' pile for well over a year. I'm very glad that I finally got around to this one. It's a fantasy novel, but a far from conventional one. While most books in the genre come with several pages worth of maps before the story starts, detailing some weird and unfamiliar landmass (usually with the good guys starting the in the top left corner, and the bad guys living down the bottom right), Bridge of Birds skips all that, and is just set 'in China'.

Most westerners are unfamiliar enough with Asian history and culture that Chinese myths and ancient history make a good substitute for fantasy anyway. I have no idea how much Hughart has borrowed from real Chinese mythology, or how much historical detail is accurate (I'm guessing 'not a lot'), but reading this book made me want to find out. (As if I need anything else on my list of things to read about).

Bridge of Birds is the story of a young man named Number Ten Ox, and his quest to cure the children of his village of a mysterious illness. He is guided along his travels by Master Li Kao, a scholar with a slight flaw in his character (he's an alcoholic). It's a pretty standard beginning to a fantasy story, but the exotic flavour of the setting and characters make it a unique read right from the start. The story is told from the point of view of Number Ten Ox, and Hughart does a great job of evoking a truly exotic culture, a welcome relief from the faux-oriental europe-with-curvy-swords-and-pointy-hats that lesser fantasy authors invariably stick somewhere on their big map.

The book is divided into three parts, and each part is somewhat different in style. The first part starts out fairly dry and formal, but by the third chapter, when they arrive in the Worst Wine Shop in China, it becomes riotously funny. Master Li's elaborate schemes to cheat the wealthy and arrogant are reminiscent of trickster myths from all kinds of cultures, and it's tremendous fun to read about a bunch of clever, good-hearted heroes handily defeating the mighty and powerful with only their wits.

The second part is more of an adventure story, with the character's visiting all manner of strange and wonderful locations in their quest. It's a little weaker than the other two parts, but still very enjoyable.

In the final third, the story becomes more and more mythic, before reaching a poetic and moving conclusion. All the disparate threads in the story are brought together in clever elegant ways. It feels contrived, but this is easily forgivable because it's easy to tell early on that something like this is going to happen, and the book's inescapable charm more than makes up for it.

Heartily recommended. I'm buying the sequel as soon as I can.

Friday Drunken Link Blogging

The Corpuscle is a very literate erudite blog. It has impressed me with the quality of it's writing, and has hence been added to the blog roll. Behold the Miscellaneous Blogs category, as it begins to swell and grow like some unholy cancer!

Real Climate, a blog about the science behind global warming, and why dumbasses like Michael Crichton don't know what they're talking about.

Perry Bible Fellowship. Another funny webcomic.

Chomsky and Zinn deconstruct The Fellowship of the Ring.

Chomsky: [...] Now, again, surely, among these Moria Orcs were some Orc radicals — aggressive, angry, militant radicals. We shouldn't understate that.

Zinn: Well, look how the Orcs grow up. What do you expect?

Chomsky: I mean, what other options have they?

Zinn: I dare say that, were I an Orc, I might possibly be one of those terrorist Orcs, shooting arrows at the Fellowship myself.

Chomsky: Here comes the Balrog. Notice Gandalf's unilateral action. "Quick, get away, I have to fight this thing alone!"

Under Construction

In the absence of having anything of substance to write about, I have updated my profile and fiddled around with my links. If you've got nothing to do, Jeremy's started posting again, so go read what he has to say instead.

Network TV Can Eat Me

So they've started showing Joss Whedon's show Firefly on TV3 at 11pm on Tuesdays. Firefly is the show he started just before Buffy and Angel finished, and it got canned after half a season. I managed to miss the first few episodes, because I was expecting it to show on a wednesday, but quite frankly, tv3 have fucked me off a bit here. I found it pretty annoying having to record Angel when they showed it at the same ungodly hour, and since Firefly will probably be out on DVD within a year, I feel little need to make an effort to watch it on TV.

It really annoys me that tv3 runs these shows so late. I figure they just say "These geeks will keep bugging us until we run this show, but we can get away with showing it in the middle of the night / on sunday afternoon / on friday night because none of them have lives and they'll be happy no matter what time it screens". And yet they have room for half a dozen home renovation shows every week at prime time...

First Day Back At Work

I would like to express my displeasure at the following things:

Getting up at 7am and not being able to have a drink.
Idiots in huge SUVs that almost run you off the road because they can't see you over the side of their big fucking doors.
Rainy weekday mornings.
Sunny weekday afternoons.
Having to go to the gym.
Final Fantasy X minigames.
Early bedtime.
Inscrutable girlfriends.

However at the same time I guess I'm glad the following things are around to mitigate the crap things:

Strongbad emails.
Tool.
Sunny evenings.
Flatmates who can cook.
Inscrutable girlfriends.