Author: Martin

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Chilli Peanuts

Chilli…yum. Chilli con carne, chilli chicken, deep fried shredded beef with chilli sauce. I can’t get enough of the stuff.

Peanuts…yum. Salted peanuts, shelled peanuts, peanut butter, saté sauce. I can’t get enough of the stuff.

Put them together, and you get chilli peanuts!

Which are unspeakably vile.

In terms of badness, they’re right up there with the salt and vinegar peanuts I encountered a few years ago. A mouthful of peanuts with some salt and vinegar crisps, that works just fine. But cut out the crisps, and the flavour is too much for the poor peanuts to bear on their own. Peanuts should taste of, well, peanuts. Maybe with a little salt. But dusted with mildly spicy chilli powder? No. Don’t go there.

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Everquest

I bought a copy of Everquest the other day. (It’s the time of year. The next instalment of “The Lord of the Rings” hits the cinema, and Martin’s thoughts turn to fantasy gaming.) First impressions: it reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon from a few months ago, the one where a doctor tells Alice: “You’ve got interface poisoning. You’ll be dead in a week.” Ick.

Sure, it’s a complex game with lots of interactions, but does all of this complexity have to be passed on to the newbie user as soon as they log in? Whatever happened to progressive disclosure? And do I really need five different mouse actions (left-click, right-click, double-left-click, alt-left-click, left-click and hold) to simply activate different features or objects? You can skin the interface (kudos to the programmers for good use of XML; nuts to the designers for making the basic UI in need of skinning), but it doesn’t make the fundamental problems go away.

Also, the game is basically four years old, and it shows. First-person games on the PC have come a long way since then. Console games, with their smooth, cartoon-like animation are almost fully mainstream now, and so the bar on prettiness is raised. I know they’re apples and oranges, but after playing the gorgeous Ratchet and Clank for a week or two, the stilted and angular first-person Everquest feels bony and cold.

But hey, that doesn’t mean that I don’t like EQ, though. Over time the interface will become transparent, and the graphics will take second place to the gameplay, which seems pretty cool so far. That’s the advantage of it being four years old: it has had time to mature, and the developers have fine-tuned it extensively.

The community seems pretty friendly, too, although I haven’t done much social interaction yet. I’ve just barely figured out how to chat to people without attacking them and being cut down instantly by their reflexes. I’ll give it time.

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His Dark Materials–on the radio!

Starting this Saturday, and running for the next three weeks, the BBC is broadcasting their adaptation for radio of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The first episode, on Radio 4 from 14:30 until 17:00 covers the first book, Northern Lights, and features the excellent Terence Stamp as Lord Asriel. Definitely one to tape!

(Note for those of you not in the UK, or otherwise unable to receive Radio 4 over the traditional ether: you can get Radio 4 streamed over the Internet. Just go to their home page.)

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New keyboard

About six months ago, Alex poured cola over my precious computer keyboard. It was an old NCR model, so old that it didn’t even have the now ubiquitous “Windows” key sitting between Ctrl and Alt. But that didn’t bother me because it had such sweet action. However, cola and keyboards don’t mix, and even after drying and cleaning it was still dead.

I got a new, cheap one to replace it in the short term, but it was horrible. In particular, the block of six keys from “Insert” to “Page Down” was moved down one line so that there was no gap between it and the arrow cursor keys. This meant that whenever I wanted to hit the “Delete” key, I ended up pressing “Insert” instead, and overtyping a bunch of text. Extremely annoying.

On Saturday I finally gave in and went out to buy myself a proper new keyboard. The one I’ve ended up with is a Microsoft Internet Keyboard, and it’s very nice. The keystroke action is soft, but with good resistance and a satisfying click point. It’s also fairly quiet, which is also a bonus.

I didn’t end up with it purely because of its feel, though: I also didn’t want to be lumbered with the vast amounts of junk all the other keyboards were saddled with. It’s almost impossible to buy just a plain keyboard these days. They all have multimedia buttons, application shortcut buttons, rearranged function keys with funny icons, and all sorts of other things to make it supposedly more “useful”.

I just want a keyboard, dammit! With qwerty keys so I can type words. I don’t want it to take up half of my desk with widgets that start up my mailer, fast-forward music, and just about everything short of making a tasty cheese sandwich.

There was one ultra-plain model on sale, but it was the cheap and nasty one I was trying to replace. As soon as you want to pay a little bit more for better quality, you also have to accept more features and less desk space. I’d be more annoyed if I didn’t like the Microsoft keyboard so much. The satisfying feel of the keys beneath my fingers make up for its larger-than-necessary form factor. Grr.

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Tolkien bits

There’s a lot of discussion going on right now about The Two Towers, its relevance to current world politics, and its use as an allegory or just an interesting point of comparison. Patrick Nielsen Hayden links to some of the essays in his blog.

At Paul Bibire’s (Near) New Year’s party yesterday evening, James Harvey made the observation that Peter Jackon is re-telling a tale from mythology–a practice that stretches back as far as language itself. The fact that some elements are differently emphasised in this version, and that others are added or dropped, is perfectly natural, and in keeping with the nature of the work itself.

This makes me a bit more comfortable with the film’s treatment of Faramir, and makes me even more keen to see it again. (Maybe tomorrow?) After watching all the extras over the weekend, today we’re watching the extended version of the film itself. Wow. It’s much more than just the original film with deleted scenes re-inserted: it’s a complete re-edit. It’s almost a completely different film. Wow.