Obdormio.com

It’s been two weeks, so I guess it’s time to face it: Uru is gone, for now at least (hope springs eternal…). I don’t really have time for extended mourning due to imminent exams, but I finally took the time to hang up the Journey Cloth I bought before Christmas. If I can’t have the real thing, at least I can have a reminder. Courtesy of my seldom used camera, here are a couple of shots of how it turned out:

My desk, with the Journey Cloth hanging over it. It was actually good to get something on that wall, it’s been a bit bare.

Here’s a close-up of the cloth. It’s very cool, just the way you’d imagine they would look if the game were real. The hand print even glows in the dark, but it can sadly not be activated by touching it.

For those wanting their own Journey Cloths, look here.

Obdormio says:
“such matters” are all about image quality

Good Sir! - wistfully flying - “My fish is a hooker. Fan-tastic.” says:
and the image quality of my existing pig-image is still better than your nonexisting pig-image

Good Sir! - wistfully flying - “My fish is a hooker. Fan-tastic.” says:
much like 1>0 even though it’s clearly inferior to all other numbers

Obdormio says:
my exisiting pig image is why you even have a pig image!

Good Sir! - wistfully flying - “My fish is a hooker. Fan-tastic.” says:
finder’s keepers, Abooboo.

Life, lately, has devolved into getting up in the middle of the day, going to work, coming home, and then not moving for several hours until I fall asleep. Writing it out, that seems far from healthy, but I find it satisfies my innate laziness.

Since my last post (in MAY? Good grief! Loki is right to complain!) I don’t feel like I have really done much worth talking about. School’s obviously been out for the summer (and is actually soon to start up again, but let’s gloss over that little tidbit), and I’m back at my parent’s house, not being very useful. Despite swearing that I would never touch a lawn mower again, I am once more mowing graveyards. The equipment and lack of communication with management is just as bad as last year, and just to make it all perfect, I seem to have developed allergies to grass. Definitely not applying for this job next year.

I am also making a bit of money by cleaning the doctor’s and dentist’s offices on weekdays. Basically I have the job of the Janitor from Scrubs. (Well, except for all the fixing and handyman duties, I just clean, so it’s not really like that job at all, but any analogy that compares me with Neil Flynn is worth including.)

I spent a week in Fredrikstad, on the Oase festival, but a writeup of that wouldn’t be very interesting. There are only so many ways to say “sang and prayed a lot” before it gets boring.

I have bought a new computer, one running this fancy-pants Vista stuff. Help Desk speaks truth, and they’ve sucked all the fun out of Solitaire and Minesweeper (I liked them because they were simple, now they’re a chore!), but other than that, all is well. Mainly because it can run URU!

I’ve been aching to play Uru again for some time now, and now I finally can! I never want to leave my room ever again! And yet I keep having to anyway! Curses! Exclamation points!

This is the main reason for my slack updating, to be honest. Uru Live is very definitely pretty much at the top of my list of Most Awesome Games Ever, narrowly beaten by Riven, possibly sharing second place with The Longest Journey. Explanations can’t do it justice, go get one of the free visitor’s accounts and have a look around it for yourself. It helps to have played the rest of the Myst games, but it isn’t necessary. Or even better, get a paid account, so you can actually see the game, not just the visitor approved areas. August is right around the corner, sign up on the first. It’s 99 cents for the first month, so that gives you plenty of time to get hooked decide if you like it or not.

Another thing I’ve been doing a little bit of is reading, so I’ll do a quick little mini-review-list:

Swamp Thing - I bought all the volumes containing Alan Moore’s run (and when he left it ended! LALALALA THERE IS NO MORE AFTER THAT!). This was very good, I can definitely see why it became so popular. I’ve read them twice since buying them, and will probably end up reading them again before going back to school.

Hellblazer - I bought Original Sins and Dangerous Habits, which the lie-list at the store said were the two containing the earliest stories. Wikipedia tells me there are two volumes in between, though, so I guess I know where next month’s comic budget is going. Original Sins was ok, but nothing spectacular, but I really loved Dangerous Habits, which seems to be where the movie pilfered all it’s best bits. I really didn’t need to get hooked on an expense like this now, but I’m much to weak to resist, so I guess I’ll be buying new shelves soon.

The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas under Red Skies - Oh man! I bought Lies some time ago, on sale, and it’s just been sitting in my shelf ever since waiting for me to find the time to read it. Luckily for me, that time arrived at the same time as the sequel, so I didn’t have to grind my teeth and wring my hands waiting for more. At least not until I finished Seas. These books were good. These books were very good. Who doesn’t love con men and capers? And pirates? And it’s in a good fantasy setting to boot. Locke Lamora is hereby officially one of my favorite fictional characters.

Renegade’s Magic - the end of Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy, and what an end! Seriously, the end took be completely by surprise, especially considering her other work. Like all her books, this was a fantastic story, well worth the read.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - I’m not even going to bother. Either you’ve read it, or you intend to read it, or you hate it without having read it, or you just don’t care. I thought it was good, and I’ll leave it at that.

I think that’s it. I make no guarantees for continued activity, not with Uru installed, but I somehow suspect that I’ll be more tempted to blog once school starts again and I have other things to do.

Remember this? Well, it’s time to wish him luck again! (He’s gonna need it, too. The man hasn’t studied for a fig’s worth in the past week!)

Good luck, old sock!

He has an exam tomorrow! :O

Now, all join in and wish him good luck with those tricksy vowels and verbs!

Good luck, Obdormio! :D 

Not too long ago, I bought myself a poster.

I’m not really a poster person, with this purchase my total number of posters reached two. I don’t know what the average is, I can only compare myself to my brother, and I don’t think anybody remembers what colour the walls of his room are. But until recently, I had only one, which I bought under peer pressure when my brother visited before Christmas. I’m just not bothered by bare walls, I guess.

But then I saw this V for Vendetta-poster, and I bought it. I really liked it, it wasn’t too showy, had a bit of a retro-look, clear colours, stuff like that. So I bought it, and put it on the wall.

And then I spot the problem.

Underneath the V for Vendetta-title, in smaller letters I had completely missed on the miniature preview in the store, over two lines, it says “An uncompromising vision of the future from the creators of the Matrix trilogy”.

I hate those two lines. They take away all the class I thought the poster had, pollutes it with an attempt to sell the movie. I have no idea why, it doesn’t look like a movie poster. There is no info about who’s in it and when or where it can be seen. It might as well have been a poster based on the comic (which is part of the reason why I bought it), if not for those two lines of text.

It just spoils the thing completely. Now, whenever I look at it, my eyes are invariably drawn to that blight. It seems to grow bigger and more vivid every time I look. Why, oh why, would somebody ruin a great poster with that crappy line?

I’ve contemplated trying to paint over it, but I suspect the blot of paint would stand horribly out from the rest of the poster, and look just as bad.

I like the movie. I like the comic. I’m growing to hate that poster.

- 3rd Rock From the Sun is several times better than I remember, and I remembered it as being pretty good. I should perhaps spend less time watching it and more time studying, but that doesn’t seem right somehow.
- The Order of the Stick is even better in book form, what with the bonus comics and commentary.
- Robert Llewellyn has a YouTube channel. In a perfect world this would be cause for public celebrations and national holidays, but I guess we can all celebrate by watching his videos instead.
- The Checkerboard Nightmare book is even better the second time around.
- I should write more. I’m far to lazy for my own good.
- I really need to find a new Red Dwarf RPG group.
- Prim is tasty. I should buy some.

You know, for a city famous for its rain, and pretty much naught else, Bergen has surprisingly few safeguards in place too keep the sidewalks from becoming rivers. My soaked socks are prepared to testify to this.

I have lost weight. I know this, because my belt no longer properly holds my trousers up. This means I have to stop and pull them up every thirty seconds or so, and that I still end up with thoroughly wet cuffs.

What really cinched the morning though, was the bus driver, who was standing at the bus stop, only a meter or so ahead of the shed, waiting for a light which had just turned red, and still refused to open the door and let me in.

Oh what a glorious day.