by ·Comments Off on 10 Different Ways to Play the World of Warcraft
world-of-warcraft_1401366c

As a point of argument to suggest that this game is probably considered mainstream by now, I picked up this image from the website of the Daily Telegraph.

I’m writing this post for three different reasons.

1)  I want to put another post up.

2)  I love Warcraft unconditionally despite the abuse it puts me through.

3)  I hear lists are fun.

It is no surprise to anyone who has played any game of any type, be it on a computer, with a deck of cards, or on a board, that everyone has different ways of playing games.  Just as Monopoly can range from a light hearted exercise in casual sparring using passive business acumen to a three-day friendship breaker ending in somebody having to call an ambulance, any Massively Multiplayer Online Game can be played in many different ways.

I’m going to look a little closer at some of the ways I’ve witnessed my own particular online poison of choice being played.

If you have absolutely no interest in online games, or in Warcraft in particular, feel free to skip this post.

Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on First Episodes and Pilots

Writing is harder than it looks.

I’m almost tempted to just leave this post there to prove a point.

I’m fairly easy to please when it comes to television and film and I actually struggle to identify bad writing.  I know this because of those awkward moments where everyone around me will be laying into the film crying foul at its poor structure, heavy handed exposition and forced dialogue when all I can really think is “…but it was great…right?” and so I know that I’m not a critic.  However, sometimes I’ll see something on television that I’ll think was awful and that I just can’t watch, and I’ll make my mind up that it’s due to bad writing and that I could do better.

Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on Being Creative with Job Applications

I’m constantly fascinated by the paradox that sits at the heart of job hunting. We are encouraged to make our CV and covering letter stand out from the crowd and display unique qualities, but in the process make sure it looks the same as all the others and follows a certain convention. Maybe it’s not as dramatic as I’m alluding to, but regardless, there is a certain procedure that one follows for applying for new jobs.

Sometimes however, it appears that you just need to forget about everything you’ve been told and wing it a little.Image borrowed from Doublefine's website

Tim Schafer, the absolute hero of a game developer for many ordinary geeks such as myself has posted his application to the Lucasfilm games division on his website to celebrate his twenty years in the games development industry and it’s really worth a read, if only for the realisation that this actually worked.

Tim Schafer, for those who would know the work but not the name, was the mastermind behind Grim Fandango, an adventure game taking the afterlife equivalent of a travel agent on a sprawling journey through the land of the dead, Psychonauts, a platform game where you controlled a boy who ran away from the circus to attend a summer camp for psychics, and the upcoming Brutal Legend starring a roadie trapped in a heavy metal themed fantasy world. He is nothing short of an inspirational genius. Had he not taken an oddball approach to applying to Lucasfilm, the gaming world would have been a somewhat duller place.

What I find interesting is that he considers himself to have been massively under qualified for the job that he was offered.  This strikes a chord with me as I am constantly driven to a state of melancholy when job descriptions for things that I would love to do seem incredibly far away from my actual abilities.

I should really have learnt this lesson long ago when I applied for my current job and was informed by the job listing that I needed to be “fully literate in Microsoft Excel”. What that actually translated to was to know what the icon looked like.

by ·Comments Off on But Wait, Where’s My Update?

Considering I’ve spent a fair amount of time tinkering again today, I’m a little perplexed as to where the actual post is for this evening.  It’s at this point that I realise I didn’t write anything today and have instead just messed around with code (as well as de-grease an oven and launch a polar expedition into the freezer) and make some very small, yet significant to me, changes to this site.

I still need to alter a few things.  A bit more space between lines of text would be quite nice, and maybe a slightly larger font wouldn’t go amiss either.  Details, details.

by ·Comments Off on Learning New Things

I remember reading somewhere that you never really finish fiddling with WordPress, you just sometimes need to eat drink and sleep, thus necessitating a departure from messing around with themes, widgets and settings.  Whilst you’re away from your computer, I can understand how some people might consider that you’re happy with how it looks and have therefore finished, but this is far from the case.  I can certainly see why this is.  I’ve just poured another morning into trying to get Comicpress, a webcomic-based theme for WordPress, up and running for my comics website.  I’m not ready to share the link for it, but with some creative guesswork you could probably find it.  Sometimes the phrase “Under Construction” just doesn’t quite convey how much of a building site the whole thing is.

I think that I’ve been feeling a little sorry for myself lately because it has come around to September once again and I’m not embarking on a new academic year, as I have long ago flown the fluffy comfy nest of university and I’m not taking the next course required for the legal training that I started two years ago due to feet encased in ice-blocks concerning my future in the legal profession.  As a result, I don’t have a new exciting course to throw my efforts in to and I’m starting to think that September causes some sort of Pavlovian conditioned reaction in me to start working on something.

I’m sure I’m not the only one, but every year that I started at university, I’d say to myself that I’d get all my work done as soon as possible, that I’d do all my forty hours of recommended reading each week and that this time I would scrutinise my Latin vocabulary from day one.  This all lasted for about a week, two if I was lucky, but for those first weeks in September and October, I was an astonishingly conscientious worker.

Finally getting around to sorting out this webspace and domain name has happened at the perfect time, because it has given me a real outlet for this weird conditioned response I have at this time of the year.  Besides, it feels great to scribble something out and find that you’ve left a mostly coherent lasting digital impression of some kind on the internet.  If you’re in the mood for learning something new, I can highly recommend this as a course of action.