Pac-Man

Happy 30th birthday, Pac-Man!

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Recent Acquisitions

Apart from some music, I ordered a few books on Monday as well. Here’s the list in no particular order other than the one I remember them in:

1. The Elegance Of The Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
2. To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
3. Hatfield’s Herbal, Gabrielle Hatfield
4. Five Modern No Plays, Yukio Mishima
5. Little, Big, John Crowley
6. Rimbaud Complete, Arthur Rimbaud
7. The Museum Of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), Macedonio Fernandez

I can’t believe Rimbaud has not been sitting on my shelf all of this time. Same goes for To The Lighthouse. And I’m quite surprised that it took me so long to get to Little, Big.

I had to stop there because I am a poor kid.

I also have to make a donation soon. Which reminds me to post this link up here: http://www.wolfire.com/humble. Donate in the name of gaming!

Besides, World of Goo is awesome. Or so they tell me. It’s great to be charitable and to get a game I’ve wanted for a bit of time now simultaneously.

So, spread the word!

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Exam Survival Kit

Music

1. Narrow Stairs, Death Cab For Cutie
2. Good Evening New York City, Paul McCartney
3. 桑田さんのお仕事 07/08 ～魅惑のAVマリアージュ～ The Works Of Mr. K. Kuwata 07/08, 桑田佳祐 Keisuke Kuwata
4. The Velvet Underground And Nico, The Velvet Underground and Nico
5. All The Plans, Starsailor

Most of the time, music just keeps me awake so I don’t fall asleep halfway through my revision, but let me just say that I know the songs of 2 and 3 so well that it is often tempting to sing along.

Games

Well, I have to entertain myself every now and then. I was in the process of completing a Mass Effect 2 game, but I think I’ll suspend that. I started a new Metal Gear Solid 4 game yesterday under the influence of my friend who just got a PS3. (Congrats!)

I just have to play. Even for an hour a day or so. I would feel very unbalanced if I didn’t, and that definitely isn’t what I want going into the exams.

Idle Thinking

Any moment I can spare on “hobbies” is spent on thinking about how to implement my forthcoming book club experiment. I’m supposed to get that running in the holidays, and if it succeeds, that will bode well for the prospects of an actual book club in the future. Here’s hoping.

Rewards

To have something to look forward to after my exams, I’m going to buy a few books at the end of this. I might buy a couple of other things too. Call it retail therapy.

Specific to books, however, I’ve been going through my list, adding and subtracting, trying to work out a nice list to go all guns a-blazing on by the time I’m done with these pesky exams.

Miscellany

I’ve been trying to sleep earlier because it’s an early paper tomorrow and I need to get used to sleeping early. I hope it works. Most of my papers are in the afternoon, so it probably won’t be too bad, but let’s just hope tomorrow works out fine.

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Entertainment Value

Recent Purchases

When I first got back on Steam, I bought the Freedom Force double pack for two bucks, as you know. Ever since then, Steam has been gradually swallowing my lunch money, which is fine because it’s just my lunch money and I don’t actually eat lunch very often.

Since those early days, I’ve bought Far Cry 2, which I’m sure is not a bad game, but I’m really not in the mood for a shooter now. I played about an hour of it, though this is one I swear I’ll be back on in due course.

I’ve bought the Total War pack. I’ve always been interested in the series, but this is one where I wonder if I’ll ever get to. I know that strategy games are a component of my diet, but I wonder if this is the series for me.

I bought Serious Sam HD, because I thought I should have something to exercise my trigger finger with. In what brief time I could afford it, I realised very quickly that it’s actually not an easy game. (Silly me.)

I bought Trine. This has actually so far been my favourite purchase. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Hammerfight. Hmm, I like interesting indie games, and this certainly fits the bill. The fighting feels awfully random to me. I’m sure I’m just not skilled enough and my laptop mouse is just too tiny, but there is definitely the element that I don’t really have very much control over the outcome of the battle, so this has been a little suspect for me. I don’t exactly regret it, and in fact I think I might end up liking it in the future when I take the time to explore it.

I bought the Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! pair because I like such games, I’ve just come off a good experience with Machinarium, and I wanted to support them, but I’ve placed them in reserve (I don’t imagine that they’re too long) and am currently enjoying Toki Tori and Bob Came In Pieces. I like the chicken game better than the spaceship one so far, but they’re both charming in their own ways.

And I’m supposed to get back to Mass Effect 2 someday.

Awful

The days continue to be awful, which is why my growing game library is a welcome sight. (It fits nicely into that hour or so that I reserve for such entertainment every day or two.) It’s not school work. It’s so many other things, in a fairly complex issue. Yesterday I spoke to someone and I used the word ‘cost’, and then I realised that I knew inside of me that the fact that I’d used such a word implied that there are things that are going to be irreversible. I’m not sure what they are, and there is a slight sense of dread that I will have to find out.

But otherwise, everything has been pretty much normal.

Editor

Lorin Stein has been named successor to Philip Gourevitch as editor of The Paris Review. [via The Paris Review]

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Quietly we watch the gloaming.

TV

I was watching a bit of the Channel 5 lawyer show, The Pupil. I found it fairly interesting. Most curiously, it reminded me of Channel 8 dramas. That is, it’s like a strange blend of the very well-established local Chinese drama form and the seemingly new and teeming local English drama. The script flowed well, for the most part. At least in my view. Of course, it gets away with it mostly because it’s a bunch of lawyers. Nothing wrong with that. I use that trick too. That said, sometimes someone pops in and says something completely unnatural, and it irks you a little bit.

Extremely dramatic though. Like The Practice or something. I’m sure all my lawyer friends will tell me that it’s nothing like that. The only thing that seems remotely realistic is the fact that there’s a lot of photocopying to be done. Of course, I’m just guessing. Maybe it really is all that exciting in real life. Then, damn, I should’ve been a lawyer.

Although, I think, I should say that the realism bit isn’t actually a problem for me. I’m just pointing it out. Almost no television (except documentaries, of course) would work without throwing realism out of the window. Even reality TV, as you will no doubt tell me.

I’ll keep my eye on this. I’ve been mildly impressed by the recent English shows in some respects. Fighting Spiders, I think, caught my attention for a while (though it was really long with plot threads that I didn’t really enjoy). Red Thread too (until I realised it was really a soap marketed as a gripping drama). The water polo one was completely not to my tastes. The Pupil seems okay, if there’s something about its stock characters that disturbs me.

Trine

Trine is fun. It somehow reminds me of LittleBigPlanet. Except it’s single-player. And you get to smack things. For a 5-dollar game, it’s certainly turning out to be quite excellent.

Tekkonkinkreet

I hope to get to watch Tekkonkinkreet. I’m looking for it. In the meantime, can anyone tell me if it’s any good?

Three Percent

A review of the latest Kenzaburo Oe book to be translated by Grove Press, The Changeling. [via Three Percent]

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Busy Weekend

And yet it didn’t feel as if I did too much.

I wrote. I wrote a lot. Or at, I wrote a lot more than I thought I would.

I did tutorials. They were not friendly. I spent a bit of time worrying about the upcoming weeks. I’ve got essays, a project, and two or three tests. (Three, I should think. Maybe four. Maybe… Oh never mind.)

I read. Readings. Not for leisure.

I did research. This was for a variety of things, including said project and also for my writing.

I drafted emails. That took a long time. And I had to ask for some assistance. (Thank you!) These included an email to follow up on my submission, and one for the project. I have to draft two others but those are not quite so urgent and I have no idea what to reply.

I bought a game. I bought Far Cry 2 from Steam because it was on offer and I was surprised to find that I could run it on my laptop. That said, I’m still on Mass Effect 2 and whatever time I can afford it is well worth it. Unless it’s planet scanning. I think I scan too much.

Ahead of me, the week looks busy too. I’ve got classes, of course, tutorials to attend (odd week!), and a project to discuss. Lab too. I’m supposed to have my reunion dinner before the New Year, so that’ll be on the cards too. I think I’m having dinner with some friends just before that. And that might involved doing the craziest thing I’ve ever done in a long time. I hope I survive that.

Meanwhile, I know I have to keep up with the writing, and I’ll have to start work on those essays and papers soon. And then there’ll be the lab report. And I’ll also have to make sure that the past few weeks of lessons haven’t been completely lost on me.

Brr. That’s a lot of things to do.

My block is green.

Yes, green.

For some reason they decided to spruce up my HDB block a little. Cleaning, refurbishing some concrete and painting. Hey, no complaints from me. We always needed a new coat of paint. But for some reason they decided to paint over the bricks, so all the pretty bricks that used to punctuate the flat yellow walls are now painted over rather unkindly.

And it’s green. A shade of green that I don’t really like. Kind of pale, like the sort of colour you get when you mix milk with some peppermint oil. And while it’s not my least favourite colour, they could have at minimum have spared the bricks.

Studies

I’ve been studying (yay!) but it’s not been getting into my head (not so yay). There’s a lot to deal with and I’m not so sure things will look any better closer to the end of the week, but hey, at least I’m managing something.

The bad feeling that you get before each exam or test period hasn’t quite sunk in yet, but I’m confident it will soon. A punctual fellow, that.

Chatty

I am enormously chatty these days for some reason. I can just talk and talk about this thing or that, jump from one topic to the other, with this person or that. If only I could have the same output volume with writing.

Hazardous

I was just thinking, a month before the release of the Decemberists’ The Hazards Of Love, that I ought to do something I’ve always thought I’d for this album or that. I’m going to take photos, one for each track, related by theme or lyrics or title (I suppose the last being the rare case). There are seventeen tracks that don’t look to welcome this, but I’ll see what I can do when I get the album.

Gaming Note

Recent break times have been invested in improving my PixelJunk Monsters proficiency and also a side dish of Noby Noby Boy.

And that’s all, I think. Sorry for the disjointedness of this post. Back to work.

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