The Blind Assassin is the 5th Atwood book I’ve read thus far, and I’m falling in love with Atwood more and more with each book of hers that I read. She writes with a detached, flippant sensitivity that I haven’t really experienced in anyone else’s writing. It’s also uncanny how she picks certain very specific issues or situations that I have in the past thought about, and wondered if other people thought about as well; and then she takes the exploration of these issues so much farther than I am capable of that I’m left sitting there with the book in my hands, staring at the ceiling and wondering where on Earth this woman acquired her faculties of reason and observation.
« Archives in January, 2007
Geeking out: An admission of a guilty pleasure
It’s been a long time since I played video games. There are so many other interesting and more creative endeavours that I could engage myself in that I find it hard to justify sitting in front of a machine that I already spend the better part of my life on to push little men around on the screen.
However, when crunch time hits, I often need a mindless outlet to distract me from all the reading, writing, and doing. This happened to me in the fall, when I was busy cranking out three projects and some other rather tedious things. So, I immersed myself in one of the first and greatest bastions of computery nerdiness that there is: Nethack.
Quoth wikipedia:
NetHack is a single-player roguelike computer game originally released in 1987… [it] is one of the oldest computer games still being actively developed… NetHack is traditionally played using text mode graphics where the dungeon’s features, inhabitants, and items are all represented by single ASCII characters.
Nethack is also reputed to be one of the most difficult games ever made. I’d disagree with that, but it is pretty tough. I played a bit locally, but then started gaming online at nethack.alt.org so that the folks on #nethack could help me out a bit.
By some insane fluke, I ascended (i.e. won) the first game I played on n.a.o. (It was my 11th game overall. It’s not uncommon for people to play hundreds of games before ascending their first character. Ahem.) I was a minor celebrity for about two minutes, which was edifying. Feeling like some sort of superstar, I tried to ascend another character… and died umpteen times in quick succession. Whee.
For posterity (and because I’ve come close to deleting the file about 5 times now), I’ve included the record of my win here. Check it out, it’s good for a laugh. Brownie points to the folks who can identify the inspiration for my character’s name without leaning on Google.
I’ve resumed my videogameless conduct, and after a full four months of ignoring books I’ve started reading once more, so I should have something to say about that relatively soon. At least now I have motivation to put a few more posts up here, so as to knock this one down far enough that most people won’t notice it 
Contact
Yes, I’m still alive. I assume that no one visits anymore because it’s been a few months since my last update. In short, things are rolling along in BC, and I’ve been keeping myself pleasantly occupied: But that’s a story for another post.
The purpose of this post is to call your attention to the new projects section of my site, where I’ll be posting various things of minor importance that I’ve worked on in the past. Many of these will be software related, but not all of them.
I’ll be back with a real update sometime in the future. I hesitate to say soon, because I think we all know that’s a lie .