angharad_gam | Entries tagged with games

I've been meaning to update for a while, but haven't managed it for various reasons. I've been fairly busy since I got back from Canberra. And we're coming into forward work planning season at work, followed in fairly short order by performance review season, so it's not going to get much quieter.

Also my enter key is not working again. It is just this box for posting entries - it's fine in other applications, or even commenting in other people's entries. WTF LJ? I might have to start posting solely from LiveWriter (or my phone!).

Since I got back from Canberra I have been struggling with side effects from the 'flu shot, mostly in the way of pain in my arm and shoulder. I suspect that having a sore arm, and favouring said arm, whilst having a bad neck/shoulders generally, with a side order of carrying luggage and a body full of inflammatory factors (thanks, wacky immune system!), led to some actual injury of my AC (acromio-clavicular - bet you didn't know you had one of those - I didn't until I googled 'shoulder pain' and thought 'that's exactly the thing I am feeling') joint. One of the things with AC joint damage is it hurts worse to lie on the injured side, and of course, this is the side I sleep on, so it led to not a lot of sleep as well.

We had a fairly quiet Easter, which nevertheless seemed to involve quite a lot of doing stuff on my part, partly because Andy has been sick with a bad cold, and partly because we got up on Good Friday morning to discover that a bottle of milk had been leaking inside the fridge, which led to me deciding the fridge needed to be cleaned out (there is something about our fridge and beetroot - I swear I could put an unopened tin of beetroot in our fridge and somehow the juice would still leak out all over the place). I also did an awful lot of cooking (we decide we weren't going to do a big Easter dinner, but just an afternoon tea, and still I made two cakes). I would post recipes/pictures, but they would not work well without a functional enter key. Maybe next time.

I have been playing a nifty little game called From Dust which is (okay so now I can't get the Italics to go off - apologies if the rest of this looks wierd). The game is a puzzle/god game with an unusual premise. However the PC version has a bug which basically makes a certain level about 2/3rds of the way through all but impossible to solve. This has been known for a while (to judge from the age of the forum complaints about it) but the makers have not seen fit to fix it. Thanks guys.

Edited to add: Ha! the enter key works in the html editor!

I was playing Skyrim last night (much too late), and I discovered there is a certain amulet your character can wear and people will start expressing a romantic interest in him/her. To cut a long story short my character basically asked her long time, favourite companion at arms to marry her. But due to a misunderstanding on my part (yeah, yeah that's everyone's excuse I'm sure) I was late to the temple for the wedding, and thus failed the 'attend your wedding ceremony' quest. Now not only is my character not married, but her friend has disappeared and I don't know if she is coming back! And, of course, I don't have an appropriate save point to go back and try again.

I am far more annoyed with this than I ought to be.

Let's see...stuff to catch up on...

The kids finished school last week. Their reports were all fairly good, which was pleasing. I mentioned their end of year concert in my last post. Ashwyn's performance was quite memorable. The concert was outside on the oval, with the kids singing/dancing along to amplified music. Ashwyn's teacher told us that she'd put him in the front near the microphone because he was so loud. He was so loud that we could hear him from the back of the crowd, in the open air, over all the other kids and the music. He's got quite a talent for voice projection. He had a good time though.

Like all my children, he has his strange little moments. The other night he was complaining because he couldn't bite his own willie. "I'm trying," he said. "But I can't reach." There's not much you can say to that really.

On Sunday we put Erin on a plane and sent her up to Queensland to stay with my parents for a week. I can tell you, there are a lot of hoops to jump through when you send a child alone on a plane. I suppose this is only to be expected. It certainly is very quiet around here without her, but it's strange, not knowing precisely where she is or what she is doing. I mean, it should be no different from when she's gone to sleepovers or school camps, but somehow it is.

I have been playing a lot of Skyrim lately. We got the new Solstheim DLC and it is pretty cool.

We will be doing Christmas at Andy's parents place this year, which means I only have to worry about desserts. I am going to make a summer pudding and a frozen honey and praline cheesecake. I will do the shopping for this at the Central Markets on Friday. Apart from this, and waiting for various deliveries, we are pretty much organised.

Also whilst doing my Christmas shopping I noticed that a new shop has opened in Rundle Mall. It's called 'Forever New' and it has opened right next door to Copycat Fashions.

If you too are interested in getting sucked into Guild Wars I have one free 3 day trial code I can pass on to someone. First come, first served.

So I've been playing Guild Wars 2 a fairish bit lately. I was a bit uncertain about it to start off with, as I'd never played a MMORPG (just old-fashioned MUSHes and MUDs) before, and the controls and gameplay took a bit of getting used to. But I got hooked fairly quickly. It's a pretty good game, for what it is. I haven't been playing it often, because when I get in, I tend to want to play for a while, which pretty much means I shouldn't play except on weekends. Also I'm playing it at pretty much the lowest graphic settings on my laptop and still the fan runs like it's trying to achieve escape velocity. This worries me a little, as my last laptop died due to overheating.

But then Andy and Erin started playing Skyrim again. And I think I'm getting sucked back in. I know I complained a bit about it before, but this is so much the game I want to play - flexible, immersive, pretty. It does't hurt that I can play it on the XBox with the full benefits of a HD TV. There's also been an update since last I played, with some interesting additions, including the ability to build your own house. It's still a bit buggy in places though. Andy tried to go into a part of his half-built house and ended up in a wierd limbo lakeshore environment with random pieces of furniture floating up into the sky.

At the moment I am reading The Two Pearls of Wisdom by Alison Goodman, which is a fantasy set in a universe inspired by Chinese mythology. Which is not a bad thing (in fact it's kind of cool), but the author seems to have randomly selected whether characters should have western or Asian style names, which is a bit discordant. And also she has renamed what is essentially (pun intended) chi as 'hua', which sits wrongly too.

On the other hand, I have nothing bad to say about Sarah Monette. You should go read her books now.

Also someone has been eating a lollipop here and now my keyboard is sticky.

Liam was still ill on the weekend, and got worse, so we took him back to the doctor and got a diagnosis of pharyngitis. Then Erin got it. And I have had a stuffy head since the weekend too. Which was unfortunate because on Tuesday I had a short sharp and shiny visit to Melbourne for a big meeting. As a result of which I've spent the last two days with my left ear blocked up. It seems to be going at least, which is good. I once had my ears clogged up for more than two weeks after flying with a cold. It was not fun.

And the hayfever on top of that, of course.

Despite the lurgy I came home from yoga feeling pretty good this evening, only to find my first rejection slip in my inbox. Which has put a surprising dent on my good mood. I keep telling myself I will take these sorts of things in my stride and it totally never works. Although I think the cowardice that kept me from having this experience earlier in my life has possibly done me good service here. I might once have found this discouraging. Now the overwhelming feeling is 'dammit, more work!'

So I suppose this becomes a kind of confession - yes, I write. Some of you probably know this. I've been writing for, well, pretty much since I could. There seem to be two kinds of writers - those who keep it to their chests and those who rush about showing their work off at every opportunity. I morphed from the latter to the former some time during the massive crisis in self-confidence that was partly why I dropped out of university, perhaps understandably. So I don't talk about it much. I also came as close as I ever have to stopping writing for a while around the time I got pregnant with Erin (losing 50k words of the book I'd been writing in a hard drive meltdown probably didn't help).

But then when Liam was a baby and I was having somewhat of another mental health crisis I picked up the pen again, and I haven't really put it down since. Things progress slowly. Very slowly. I don't have a lot of time, and I don't devote as much energy to it as I should. But somehow I seem to have written a book.

Also I just got a copy of Guild Wars 2. I've avoided MMORPGs so far because I just can't afford the time to get sucked in. But this one looked so good on Good Game. If I'm not back in a week someone may have to come in and get me.

Current Mood: surprised

No, actually five. A meme, actually, from

irreparable. If you want me to give you five topics/questions then say so in the comments.

My five:

1. What's your favourite board game?
It's probably a game called Arkham Asylum, which is a cooperative game in which the players travel around the town of Arkham trying to stop one of the Great Old Ones from arising (and destroying the world usually). Some people don't like it because the odds are stacked heavily against the players to win, but I don't mind that - it justs adds to the atmosphere. I'm also quite fond of Fury of Dracula and Cleopatra and the Society of Architects (but the latter may be because I usually win when playing this).

2. Which dance was the hardest to learn?
There's a 16th century Italian dance called Leggiadria d'Amore which I really struggled to get the hang of because it has an asymmetrical chorus (you do something on one foot that you don't do on the other). It's really screwy.

3. SCA
The most fun you can have with someone else's clothes on? There are some legitimate criticisms of the SCA as far as re-enactment goes, but for me it's still the main game because a) I like the flexibility to be 16th century one day and 12th century the next if the mood takes me, and b) it's the biggest game in town (especially in this town) and so you're more likely to find an event to your liking with people to your liking (or have the opportunity to cook for 150 people if that's your thing, and it happens to be mine).

4. What's your favourite thing to cook?
Ohhhh...this is a tricky one. It's difficult to tease out what I like to cook from what I like to eat. And there are so many excellent things to both cook and eat. Some days what I most want to cook is the thing I really want to eat. And sometimes my favourite thing to cook is something simple but done just right. And sometimes it's something amazing and virtuosic. So, picking some things at random ... hand-made pasta, tiramisu, pancakes, calisciones (fried marzipan pastries), falafel.

5. Statistics
A deeply misunderstood topic. I am constantly surprised by the range of uses for statistics and statistical methods, and constantly frustrated by their misunderstanding and misuse.

Current Mood: sleepy

I used to pride myself on not being allergic to anything except myself.
But in the last year or so I have come to accept that 'I don't normally get hayfever but...' is actually now 'yes I get hayfever, bring on the anti-histamines please'.

And now...

Andy bought a bottle of moscato on Monday. I suspect it was a cheap one. It was also a very sweet one. This is relevant because cheap wines and sweet wines tend to have higher levels of sulphites, which are otherwise less often added to Australian wines than to European ones. So I had a glass on Monday night and my throat swelled up. Not a lot, just enough to notice. I wasn't sure whether it was the wine, or some side effect of the endless cold I seem to have had since Canada. But then on Tuesday night I had another glass of the wine and same deal.

I think I may have become allergic to sulphites. Yay!

No more cheap wine for me.

Also I recently acquired a mediaeval city building and trading game called Anno 1404, which is a bit addictive. It's very hard to imagine in a week and a bit I shall be cooking for Midwinter. This is probably not a good thing.

Current Mood: sleepy

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angharad_gam

September 2021

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Page Summary

Catching up...
Why you should not be late to your wedding...
It's been a while
Guild Wars Free Pass
Games and books...
The lurgy juggernaut rolls on...
Now answer me these questions five....three sir
Cheap wine

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