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Samorost and other reviews
Mar. 7th, 2004 03:25 amI'm trying to think of something dessertish to bake. Any suggestions? I am limited, in that I have no fruit in the apartment, but I do have a fair amount of semisweet chocolate, plus eggs, sugar, butter, flour, etc.
Samorost is yet another Flash-based game, courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elysdir. Help a friendly fellow save his wordlet by solving a series of puzzles involving the fauna of a neighboring worldlet. It's apparently Hungarian (?), and it bears out my feeling that Flash is an excellent new medium for animators to create art with. The game itself is charming rather than challenging, but the visuals are wonderful—something like "young Terry Gilliam does Le Petit Prince." Elysdir points out that it's difficult sometimes to find the action points, but if you click on things that look clickable you should make progress.
I finished Stephen Baxter's The Timeships this morning. The cover is vastly misleading—it's actually an unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. Baxter gets the narrative voice exactly right, but takes Wells's basic concept outward in ever-expanding conceptual circles. Wells's idea of time travel was like wandering through a mansion, stopping in various rooms to see what they hold; Baxter picks up where Wells left off to show us feedback loops, paradoxes, changing futures, parallel universes, quantum mechanics. And his very human protagonist makes the ride more comfortable than it often is with Baxter: even as he ramps up to universe-spanning high-concept SF, the pseudo-Victorian prose keeps him grounded. This is my favorite of his books, I think, though it is a bit bloated, and fails to make sense in a couple of places.
Prior to that, I read Inferno by Niven and Pournelle. That is an unauthorized sequel to Dante's Inferno, a trip through hell with a rationalist science fiction author. It was actually rather nifty, and rewrites theology in interesting ways; not terrifically deep, but fun. And it ends, literally, with ( this nifty allusion ).
I'm currently watching Panic Room, which, so far, is interesting chiefly because of Jodie Foster's surprisingly abundant cleavage. It's not bad, but I think if you're going to keep your protagonists in a single room for most of a movie you need some piping-hot dialogue to keep the audience interested. Too many CGI "camera tricks," too. Hmm...but I am getting sucked in a bit.
Little else to report tonight. It was lovely to work a Saturday night without having to stay for a midnight show, though a surprising number of people turned up expecting one. (People cannot read schedules.) I learned what happened to that missing $120, too; my boss forgot to tell me that he'd paid the plumber yesterday, in cash, to fail to fix our urinals. Apart from that, I spent too much time at work playing Bubbles, trying to top my ~200,000 high score.
Best news of the day: it appears that Kendra's father's term tenure review went well. Hooray!
Samorost is yet another Flash-based game, courtesy of
elysdir. Help a friendly fellow save his wordlet by solving a series of puzzles involving the fauna of a neighboring worldlet. It's apparently Hungarian (?), and it bears out my feeling that Flash is an excellent new medium for animators to create art with. The game itself is charming rather than challenging, but the visuals are wonderful—something like "young Terry Gilliam does Le Petit Prince." Elysdir points out that it's difficult sometimes to find the action points, but if you click on things that look clickable you should make progress.I finished Stephen Baxter's The Timeships this morning. The cover is vastly misleading—it's actually an unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. Baxter gets the narrative voice exactly right, but takes Wells's basic concept outward in ever-expanding conceptual circles. Wells's idea of time travel was like wandering through a mansion, stopping in various rooms to see what they hold; Baxter picks up where Wells left off to show us feedback loops, paradoxes, changing futures, parallel universes, quantum mechanics. And his very human protagonist makes the ride more comfortable than it often is with Baxter: even as he ramps up to universe-spanning high-concept SF, the pseudo-Victorian prose keeps him grounded. This is my favorite of his books, I think, though it is a bit bloated, and fails to make sense in a couple of places.
Prior to that, I read Inferno by Niven and Pournelle. That is an unauthorized sequel to Dante's Inferno, a trip through hell with a rationalist science fiction author. It was actually rather nifty, and rewrites theology in interesting ways; not terrifically deep, but fun. And it ends, literally, with ( this nifty allusion ).
I'm currently watching Panic Room, which, so far, is interesting chiefly because of Jodie Foster's surprisingly abundant cleavage. It's not bad, but I think if you're going to keep your protagonists in a single room for most of a movie you need some piping-hot dialogue to keep the audience interested. Too many CGI "camera tricks," too. Hmm...but I am getting sucked in a bit.
Little else to report tonight. It was lovely to work a Saturday night without having to stay for a midnight show, though a surprising number of people turned up expecting one. (People cannot read schedules.) I learned what happened to that missing $120, too; my boss forgot to tell me that he'd paid the plumber yesterday, in cash, to fail to fix our urinals. Apart from that, I spent too much time at work playing Bubbles, trying to top my ~200,000 high score.
Best news of the day: it appears that Kendra's father's term tenure review went well. Hooray!
