CRRRRS 523 Shaggy Game Story

By Roy Mathur, on 2024-02-12, at 23:37:37--00:18:57 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show

A Welcome Distraction

It's been a terrible few days. That's all I'm going to say. Believe me, doing this show tonight is a welcome distraction.

This week's title refers to an upcoming shaggy game story.

Domino Day

Beautiful young barista and powerful witch by night, drains the energy of dating app rat, drawing the unwelcome attention of a dangerous coven in this new BBC horror drama.

All the men are scum. I don't even like the love interest; a cheeky chirpy barman. Drama depends on conflict, it becomes stale if you root for only one side.

There isn't enough mystery or horror and, despite explicit dialogue and adult content, with minor tweaks this could have been a CBBC series.

I don't like how organised the underworld of witches is. Blame Buffy, Harry Potter, The Vampire Diaries, and the more recent Mayfair Witches, etc. for the trend, as well as for the soapy pace. This would be better as a snappier, one-off TV drama, like an episode of Hammer House of Horror.

The energy vampire theme was reminiscent of Lifeforce, rather than the better novel, The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson, the film is based upon, as was the absurdly beautiful star who sleeps in fetish wear, and the very BBC budget FX and some of the acting. I could have lived with either trashy or clever, but it tried have its cake and eat it by being both and failed.

In it's favour are very pretty spell casters and, as someone who's enjoys the esoteric, I appreciated, even portrayed so superficially, the inclusion of the African diaspora's Obeah religion with it's rituals and spells.

Mr Stink

David Walliams' 2012 BBC comedy drama about the friendship between a homeless man (Hugh Bonneville) and a school girl (Nell Tiger Free; The Servant).

Entertaining, light, moving, with the usual fantastical Roald-Dahl-like elements common to Walliams' writing.

After the Flood

Run-of-the-mill 2024 BBC cop triller in which a body is found after a flood, but did they drown?

Mr Bates vs The Post Office

2024 ITVX riveting ting miniseries chronicling the unfair prosecution of subpostmasters by the Post Office due their cover-up of faulty Fujitsu's Horizon software.

the public outcry after the broadcast has affected government action and the police are investigating the Post Office for fraud and wrongful arrest, but decades later the subpostmasters' fight is ongoing.

Dominoes, Solitaire, Tarot, The Great Dalmuti

When was the last time we talked about games? Reminded by Domino Day, I've been thinking about old school Mauritian dominoes. This is just dominoes, played at high speed as pieces are slammed down hard enough to dent wood, and often accompanied with rum. Sometimes we play at home.

Thinking about dominoes, led me to thinking about games, particularly card games, as I've been after a Top Trumps Fantasy deck for years. After a being habitual Microsoft Solitaire player, I re-learned how to play Solitaire with physical cards months ago and it's great. It's space consuming, but satisfyingly tactile and inspired me to enjoy my tarot cards once again. That, in turn, brought me to back to DnD's gothy arty rendering of The Great Dalmuti deck, a game I bought a few years ago, but never played. I opened the box, looked at the instructions, and then put everything back as it requires a minimum of four to play. (Let me know if you know of solo rules).

London Trundle

After illness stylmied me, Saturday's monthly traipse to London began again this last weekend.

In brief: wake, train, walk, tube, pub, tube, train, walk, home, sleep.

In detail: Avanti's delays and lack trains on a match day meant overcrowding and standing room only, and I arrived late enough that I didn't have time for my usual pre-club flaneuring about London.

I'm getting an earlier train next time.

The Life, Death, and Life of My Journal

I've been keeping some form of diary since I was about seven. I stopped in 2013 because it morphed into a digital To Do list. Actual journal content had become part of my blog and podcast.

So why did I decide to reintroduce it in 2022? My hatred of social media and microblogging and my love for plain simple ASCII text files. In fact, much of my old shownotes were in text file format and I'm still in the process of converting them into browseable blog posts.

Today, even even the previous digital To Do list is just a temporary page in my Filofax. Appointments go in Google Calender. So there you are, no need for an online text journal anymore. For posterity, its contents follows.

The Midnight Journal

2024-02-08 23:43:49 I edited and uploaded The Five Doctors revisit mere moments ago. Again, hurrah!

2024-02-07 xx:xx:xx (written 2024-02-08 00:10:03) Caffeination blasted me through The Five Doctors revisit. Hurrah!

2024-02-06 19:46:15 I was stuffy, didn't sleep until c. 03:00, then couldn't function later. I began my day at 18:15, but only managed a couple of tasks.

2024-02-05 23:02:41 I'm very tired trying to catch up today and I'm still lagging behind, but Google Fit says I walked 9.08 km (13471 steps, 77 heart points). That's something, right?

2024-02-04 18:11:12 I wasted the day wallowing and listening to podcasts instead of making my own. As they say, tomorrow's another day, but I can't wait until then as I've a million things to do, so as they also say, better late than never. Who are "they", that's what I want to know.

2024-02-03 18:34:41 We negotiated rubbish and noisy traffic in a stroll taking in two petrol stations. At the first I bought energy drinks and at the latter my mother bought milk, while I enthusiastically avoided a man enjoying spewing his lurgies. NB I'm abandoning the microblog format, instead I'll write a single daily entry before midnight.

2024-02-02 15:58:50 I didn't sleep, then dozed into a nightmare about trying to return a PC case with a waterlogged PSU. Skillz? Years after setting it up I suddenly remembered Alt+A brings up ASuite and later (2024-02-02 20:42:58) couldn't fix an .htaccess file. Does anyone understand Apache?

2024-02-01 xx:xx:xx (written 2024-02-02 00:45:01) I recovered from my recent trip, I looked at my old QBasic date/time stamp code and felt the old skillz returning, started The Five Doctors shownotes, finished another rewatch of Mr. Robot, sulked around midnight, then typed this.

2024-01-31 xx:xx:xx (written 2024-02-01 15:28:24) I'm apparently the very definition of a flaneur. True to form, during our 7 km walk into and around the city, I observed litter, fly-tipping, and, adding insult to injury, police horse excrement lining much of the route. We snacked, shopped, then taxi'd home exhausted.

2024-01-30 16:11:08 Big gap! What did you miss? I podcasted a lot, started learning to ride a noisy motorcycle, canoed badly, my social life remains almost zero, we're between cars since scrapping our big blue Millennium Falcon, and I've mostly recovered from a long chest infection.

2022-09-28 19:42:01 A belated happy birthday to myself two days late. I had an upset stomach today and rode my bicycle, Sir Clanky, a battered red cruiser.

2022-09-27 10:30:47 Hello, World! This journal is a continuation of diaries kept since my age was a single digit to about a decade ago. Let me surmise what came before. I was born in Saaf London to Mum (nursery teacher, company buyer, civil servant) and Dad (Royal Corps of Signals corporal, factory worker, Royal Mail postie), schooled/university'd in London, the West, and Up North, worked in IT, heritage, and media.

Vignette

If you want a vignette of UK geek life, betwixt a smattering of brief reviews and other talk, listen to these multi-topic rambling episodes, which is how the podcast started in 2012.

If that's not for you, then listen to my single topic shows.

Which is which? For a while now, the multi-topic episodes have weird mishmash titles or an obscure reference or are totally random, while the single topic episodes are titled with what what I am reviewing. Older episodes are just a mess of stuff, with no way to tell what you're getting without downloading them.