The Dutch Are Weeping

As a long term drinker of “anything new”, not a week goes by without me delighting in a new beer label – even from established big breweries like Little Creatures. Today’s purchase was this little ripper, showing just how far beer label design has come. Simple pastoral scenes make me want to sit outside and drink – perhaps not in July though.

Did you notice how I positioned myself to showoff my new veggie garden corrugated tank? We’re only weeks away from filling those (got 2) with good soil and hopefully tomatoes will flourish.

When a book is described as “a novel of stupefying ambition” and “the electrifying literary event of the year” and “the first great book of the 21st century”, I take notice. Add to the mix the fact that author died before it was completed, and that it is 898 pages in length, and I am curious.

So, I finished 2666 by Roberto Bolano this week, and I really don’t know what all the fuss was about. It reminded me of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas because of the 5 different sub-stories, but unlike that book, there were linkages between all stories – though with not enough continuity or closure to satisfy me. His writing is very direct and readable – I was rarely bored, but there were moments when I wondered what the point of it all was. It felt like he was throwing historical and literary references in over the top of a disjointed jalopy of a tome in the hope it would bring magic, but to me it just didn’t jell so well. It felt unfinished, or at least in need of some serious editing.

The first section was completely unexpected, but fascinating, the second intriguing, the third seemed a real mess – unfinished, the fourth – detailing nearly 300 pages of killings, a mile too long, and the last a reasonable attempt at bringing it all together.

I enjoyed it, but I probably shouldn’t recommend it really – or else I’ll get I’ll get a repeat dose of the ire I copped from a workmate of Kim’s for recommending Peter Carey’s Illywhacker to her. At least I’ll get 2 month’s head start this time though.  4 stars.

There are Dockers fans in Preston?

Water restrictions are just a fact of life around these parts. We talk about it all the time; we even have websites and Iphone apps dedicated to it. Three years ago we had to abandon most of our vegie garden because we couldn’t keep the asian greens, carrots, tomatoes, rocket or basil alive in spring/summer. We ended up putting in tough stuff like oregano, rosemary and (my favourite) sage, which have thrived, but there’s nothing like salad ingredients in the hot months. Hence our new rainwater tank.

Glorious water

It is surprising how expensive a setup like this is. We were warned that it would cost around $1000 per 1000 litres once we  factored in the tank, pump, concrete pad, copper piping, installing electricity into the garden, and the various attachments. Four tradesmen and 4000 litres worth later, we have a 2m x 2m x 1.1m work of art in our sideway – completely hidden from the street.

Crappy plastic fittings on brass taps - must fix that

The best thing about it so far is that I only have to turn the tap for the pump to automatically kick in and it is exactly like mains pressure. I can water anytime I like now (instead of the impossible 6am Sat till 8am Sat., which after a late Friday evening of WoW raiding was like torture, or the 6am Tuesday before work, which I always forgot).

Worst thing? After they jackhammered up my bricks and 4 inches of concrete footings to dig the trench for the power and piping, I now have to re-level and re-mortar about 40 bricks back in myself. Several of which are going to need precise cutting. Oh joy. Luckily a friendly African guy nearby sold me 50 red used ones today for 60 cents each, so at least I have the materials now. Just not the inclination.

You may ask yourself what brings a person in their 40s without children to expose themself to possible public ridicule by confessing to playing a kids game. Part of it is attention seeking, but another bit is wanting to break a stereotype. Which is weird because I don’t feel the need to do the same with books. Or maybe I’m just afraid that if I do, I will end up raving about Harry Potter or the Twilight series or something.

On the otherwise mature RPG-focused podcast Active Time Babble a few months back, one of the female panel hosts confessed to previously wanting to be a hard-core semi-professional Pokemon fighter/trainer. My mouth fell open at this point, as I had no idea you could do that. Nor did I realise that it could be an enormously complex game, where breeding Pokemon could pretty occupy people’s thoughts for months on end. I always got Pokemon and Tamagotchi‘s mixed up in my head somehow.

Since yesterday, thanks to THE ZOCH, I have a loan Nintendo DS Lite running the Pokemon Diamond game. First impressions are that compared to an Ipod Touch, the screen is much lower definition. Those Pokemons and the people you talk to are tiny. We’re talking a quarter the size of your pinkie fingernail. so straight away, any appreciation for the characters is muted, and confined to their hair colour or shape.

Nintendo do quite a good job of introducing you to what you have to do, and starting you on a journey. At no stage did I feel abandoned or at a loss. This is good. 

A typical battle - level 23 vs. level 30 = not fair!

Next, there’s the stylus / pen. Half the time your right finger is on the buttons A or B because there’s a ton of text and speech to get through, and all of a sudden you’re in a fight between your Pokemon and another monster. This requires you to click with the pen on your preferred attack. The monster then has an attack, and you alternate slowishly till the monster dies. I am sure that the difficulty will ramp up shortly, as I’m mowing them down right now. Mwahaha.

Turns out, the whole point of the game is to “discover things about yourself” if you listen to Nintendo, and “to collect all 493 Pokemon” if you are like everyone else. So far I have been given 1 Pokemon, and my task is capture the other 492 “in the wild”, which seems to comprise of finding them, injuring them, and then throwing a Pokeball at them to contain them. They then get added into your Pokedex, and you can use any one of yours to fight harder and trickier wild ones in future.

It’s going well. I’m 1 hour in.

It’s been a few weeks, but boy it was nice to get back to killing bosses again tonight.  We decimated Festergut in a single attempt (where I broke my record for single target dps, even taking into account the 15% zone buff) and then went on to try a brand new boss.

Valithria Dreamwalker is a green dragon who needs to be healed from 50% health to 100% health to win the encounter. So, it’s exactly the opposite of a normal WoW fight. This time, the heroes of the encounter are the healers, who have to go into tiny portals and gather clouds of “goop” which magnify their heals, so that by the end of the encounter, they need to have healed the dragon around 10 million health in about 7 minutes max. In the meanwhile, the other 22 people in the raid stand around and try and fend off all sorts of waves of nasties who spawn more quickly as the fight progresses. If you don’t do them in the right order, or you forget which ones explode upon death, your group of players will die very quickly.

I’m very pleased to be able to link a Youtube video from tonight’s first ever kill of this boss by our guild. It was done on our 9th (and last) attempt. Our first try, we got the boss to 59% before dying, then 66%, then we had 3-4 mid 70%s attempts.

I am happy to have broken out of a reading funk on my hols, finishing some mags, the daily paper and the good, but throw-away “Love Machine” by Clinton Caward (yes I was captivated by the front cover like every other male) and maybe foolishly beginning a monster of a work that is described as “a novel of stupefying ambition” which I will not name here for fear of looking silly if I don’t make it to page 898.

I also finished the awesome Plants vs. Zombies game on my Ipod Touch, which let me say is a lot better and faster than the PC version (if you are considering it – and you darn well should). The game trailer (below) has been whizzing around my head for days now. I liken it to the Napoleon Dynamite dance-scene, or the (spoiler) unexpected song at the end of Portal. I had a big grin on my face throughout.

As per all holidays where lounging is the main activity, I found myself making mental lists of things to either do, or plan for when I got home. And it has become a little overwhelming.

Games: Finish Pixeljunk Shooter, Bayonetta , and play the Batman Archam Asylum and MLB 2010 demos. Try and borrow a Nintendo DS to play some Pokemon or buy one on Ebay.

WoW: Try and get to 8000 achievement points on Grenache. Start thinking about which Alt I would like to play in Cataclysm, when 10/25 mans raids are considered a single raid lockout, meaning I would need 2 characters if I wanted to do both 10 and 25 man.

House: We need some water tanks for the garden and it’s about time I got things started. More pruning to be done. Kick my sister up the arse for not watering and causing plant torture whilst we were away for 11 days.

More books:  The pile of shame is getting bigger. It’s not in my wife’s league just yet, but I’m into double digits now.

Many fun happy hours of storyboarding to follow!

3 hours in to our trip and the car needs a scrub.

Fresh update 6 hours driving later. It took me 9 minutes of high pressure spray to get this mostly all off. And that was after I removed a dead bird by hand from the grill.

The last game I finished would have to be Diablo 2 or maybe even Fallout 2  - so I’m hardly an expert on the subject. I didn’t even finish Portal or Plants vs. Zombies last year, such is my attention span. But last night around midnight (and a little drunk) I finished Heavy Rain on the Playstation 3.

I’ve been unable to think of much else all morning, humming the magnificent soundtrack, and trying to console myself after surely the most depressing gaming ending possible. What makes it worse was that after listening to a few podcasts this morning,  many/most other players had amazingly different endings and it appears that I missed several “classic” or “pivotal” scenes somehow. Even though the 7 hour game is replayable, the cut scenes are not able to be skipped, so I have not a lot of interest in seeing all 22 endings, and I’ve just taken 30 mins to watch Youtube vids of the good bits I missed.

Regardless of the outcome, I thought it was a very clumsy and crude game for the most part – no different to a bad version of a crime show on TV, and I’m amazed that so many gamers see it as a real evolution in gameplay. Is this how little gaming has progressed since I stopped around 2000? The graphics are fabulous, the women are realistically rendered to the point of being sexy, and some of the early exploration and family interaction – although slow, built genuine empathy and feeling.  Worst of all, when the killer was revealed, I (and many others) had a classic Agatha Christie moment of “Wha?” and in hindsight it is a ludicrous choice that is not at all justifiable based on the evidence and thoughts I’d witnessed. A confusing and perplexing game.

Feel free to borrow it from me. There’s still quite a lot to like, and there’s a huge amount of internet discussion still going on about it. I felt a bit cheated. I still don’t know how much of it was my lack of controller skill, or just some bad decisions, and I guess I’ll never know.