1666: You're Never Finished

Occasionally, my mind gets into an almost comatose loop, and I find myself going round and round the same websites, over and over again. I hate the loop — and I'm growing to hate the websites and all that they stand for in 2014 — but still I do it compulsively, habitually, regularly.

First I'll check Twitter. Then I'll check Facebook. Then I'll check Google+. Occasionally I'll poke my head in the sites for my Final Fantasy XIV guild or the Squadron of Shame, but more often than not, it's just those three sites. And there's rarely anything interesting to see on any of them — but still I feel compelled to do it, particularly if there's a little red number at the top of the page.

The same is true on my phone. I'll check it every few minutes, looking for little icons across the status bar and hoping that something interesting might have happened. But it rarely does, and still I do it.

I'm talking about "notifications", one of my least favourite developments in modern technology. Turns out I have the sort of brain that gets extremely uncomfortable if something is left "unfinished"; if a little red number is there, suggesting that there's something that requires your attention.

Trouble is, most notifications these days aren't necessary. On Google+, since the Squadron of Shame moved its base of operations to its own site, the only notifications I get are from people who gave a comment I left on a YouTube video six months ago a "+1", saying that they "liked" what I said without actually having to interact directly with me. On Facebook, where I rarely post any more, my only notifications come from replies to a comment thread I long since lost interest in. And Twitter's 2014 incarnation sees fit to notify you not only when someone replies to you, but also when they "favourite" or retweet something you posted — or, in comedically ridiculous levels of Inception-style madness, when someone retweets something you retweeted.

The provocation of this sort of compulsive behaviour is entirely deliberate, of course; these sites' use of notifications — and mobile app developers' use of notifications, too, for that matter — is designed to get you doing exactly what I'm doing, which is visiting the sites or booting up the apps several times a day just to see if the notifications are anything useful. They inevitably aren't, but there's always the hope.

Provoking this sort of behaviour can't be healthy. It doubtless plays havoc with people who already have more obsessive compulsive tendencies than I do, but just from a user experience perspective it's frustrating to never feel like you're "free" — there's always something out there demanding your attention. Look at me, that little red number says. I'm important.

It's because of all this that I find myself considering daily whether or not I should nuke my social media presence altogether and simply interact with people through more private channels — email, blog comments, chat messages, the Squad forum. Every day it gets more and more tempting to do so, so one of these days soon I might just do it — and this time for good. This isn't what I signed up for at the dawn of the social media revolution.

1665: Shock Value

I'm pretty open-minded, as longtime readers will already be aware. But last night I, for pretty much the first time I can remember, found myself genuinely shocked by something that had been not only allowed on TV in the first place, but deemed worthy of repeating on one of those "nothing but repeats" digital channels — in this case, quiz show specialist channel Challenge.

There were two shows broadcast last night, neither of which I'd ever heard of prior to seeing them. And, having seen them for the first time last night, I'm now in no hurry to do so again.

I lump them both together like this because they both approached the same subject matter from a slightly different angle — the concept of humiliating contestants, causing them physical and mental discomfort and even inflicting pain in some cases. The shows in question? Distraction and Killer Karaoke. Both parts of the episode of Distraction in question are embedded in this post; watch at your own risk!

Distraction first. This was a Channel 4 show hosted by Jimmy Carr, who I've always interpreted as "cheeky" and occasionally a little bit risque, but never outright mean. Distraction turned that perception on its head — but more on that in a moment.

Distraction was first broadcast in 2003 and continued until 2004, so it had a relatively short life compared to some other gameshows. The concept of the game was twofold: in the initial elimination stage of the game, four contestants would compete against one another to answer insultingly easy question (in the episode I saw last night, all of the questions were from Key Stage 1 junior school material) while being distracted through various means. In the second stage of the game, the last remaining player would be presented with their prize, which would be damaged in some way if they answered any of their final questions incorrectly. The grand prize would either be a car — which would have parts of it smashed or defaced for an incorrect answer — or a pile of money, which would be destroyed piece by piece somehow with every incorrect answer.

The twist was the distractions themselves: these weren't simple things like someone buzzing in your ear. In the episode I saw last night, the very first game saw all four contestants sitting in toilet cubicles, with the only means of them "buzzing in" to answer a question being to do a piss, which would cause a light to go on above their stall. Later stages saw the contestants being thrown around and pummelled by professional wrestlers while answering questions, and in the final pre-prize stage, getting piercings with every correct answer, causing them to suffer more and more pain and discomfort the more questions they got right.

Killer Karaoke, meanwhile, operated on a similar premise. Hosted by Steve-O, of Jackass fame — which should probably tell you something about what to expect — the show challenged contestants to sing their way through popular songs while being, there's no two ways about this, abused in various painful ways. One contestant was on a swing and was unpredictably "dipped" into a tank full of snakes over the course of her song. Another was forced to wear vision-impairing goggles and walk barefoot through a cactus-strewn obstacle course while singing. Another still was strapped into a suit with a dancer "puppetmaster", who pushed her around as she sang, smashed a bottle over her head, rubbed a raw eel over her face and finished the song by slamming her face into a cake.

I had exactly the same reaction to both shows: initial surprise and laughter at the seemingly slapstick nature of it, gradually giving way to feelings of unease, horror and even disgust at the fact that people were genuinely being hurt — both physically and psychologically — in the name of entertainment. Slapstick comedy is nothing new, but both of these shows felt like they crossed a line somewhat: that not everyone was "in on the joke" as a willing participant. In Distraction in particular, Carr's appallingly written material — at least I hope it was written and not delivered ad lib — didn't come across as the usual cheeky, light-hearted jabs you hear him making on shows like 8 Out of 10 Cats and its ilk: it came across as just plain mean.

It was pretty telling that we didn't see or hear most of the participants' reactions to his spiteful comments; one contestant — a woman named Gabriela Blandy, whom it just so happens that I was at university with, and who decided to chronicle her experience in this beautifully written blog post — just looked plain miserable; the very picture of despair. ("I finally realise how shameful all this is," writes Blandy, reliving the experience, "and why I was never able to tell them I wanted to be an actress. I would have been admitting I was prepared to do anything to make it. There’s no Steven Spielberg, sitting in the audience, thinking: wow, that girl has talent! Besides, the talented ones are at home, learning monologues, putting genuine work in.")

Both shows were certainly effective in their shock tactics and I don't doubt that I'll be remembering them both for some time to come — likely when I least want to. But, on reflection, even admitting the fact that both made me genuinely laugh several times, I don't think I ever want to see them — or anything like them — ever again. And it's not very often I say that.

1663: Freewriting

Buggered if I can think of anything to write today, so I'm going to fall back on my old "emergency stopgap" measure, which is to indulge in a spot of "freewriting". For the uninitiated, this creative writing exercise, which I learned at university, involves setting a timer for a short period of time of your choice — I've gone for ten minutes — and then you just start writing and don't stop until the time is up. In this case, I'm hoping that continuously writing for ten minutes will cause something vaguely interesting to pop out of my head. If not, then you'll get a glimpse of how my thought processes work, because one of the key things about freewriting is that you don't stop to edit or tweak your writing as you go along. This means you can sometimes end up with very long paragraphs like this one, so let's nip that in the bud before it becomes too much of a problem, shall we?

Freewriting has, for me, led to a number of interesting compositions over the years. I don't know if I still have the pieces I composed as part of my Creative Writing module at university, but they were intriguing. Some were purely fantastic. Some were reflective. Some were very literal. All of them came out of my head relatively unprompted, just by sitting down in front of a page — handwritten in this case — and writing. What I'm doing with today's entry — and have done a couple of times in the past — is exactly the same. (Six minutes and fifty seconds to go.)

Tomorrow, I'm picking up my new car. I haven't owned a car for a while, so it will be nice to have one again, albeit a "nice thing" that comes with a lot of expenses attached. It was pleasant to be able to go through life without worrying about the cost of car insurance and the like, so I'm not relishing the prospect of a return to that world, but I am particularly looking forward to the ability to get out and about a bit more easily when Andie isn't here (and, by extension, has the car that we currently share between us.) I'm hoping that having easy transport — and by "easy" I mean "not the bus" — I will be more inclined to do things that involve getting out of the house, like going to the gym, going for a swim or, hell, just going to town for a wander around or something. As I've mentioned in previous entries, spending all day every day at home can cause you to go a bit "stir crazy" after a while — I'm sure anyone who has spent any length of time either un- or self-employed will be able to empathise with this.

Four minutes thirty seconds to go and my brain is telling me I need something new to talk about. So what should it be? Umm… maybe the music I downloaded and printed recently? Regular readers will know that I'm a big fan of Square Enix's MMO Final Fantasy XIV, and I was delighted to discover that a nice chap on YouTube had done some piano arrangements of selected pieces from the soundtrack. I have a good collection of other Final Fantasy piano collection albums that I very much enjoy playing, but as far as I'm aware there's no "official" one for XIV, so I was interested to come across this chap's work. Turns out it's very high quality, so I was more than happy to fling him $40 (about £25) for his hard work in arranging and transcribing 36 tracks over 140 pages of music. I shall look forward to getting stuck into learning and playing some of those in the next few days and weeks — perhaps I'll even record some for the enjoyment of you, readers. Yes, you. That'd be nice, wouldn't it? (That wasn't meant to sound sarcastic, but as I was typing it I realised that it probably does. Oh well. No turning back now.)

I've also set up the keyboard amp that my parents dumped on me last time they came. This hulking piece of extremely heavy audio equipment is something I've been trying to avoid coming back into possession of for a while, mostly because I didn't really need it, but also because audio equipment scares me a bit when it makes loud popping and buzzing noises, which this amp has something of a tendency to do. However, now I've let it "warm up" and used it a little over the last couple of days, it seems to have calmed down a little bit, and it actually produces a somewhat more satisfying sound than my previous keyboard solution, which involved a MIDI connection to my Mac and using Logic Studio to produce the instrument sounds. Logic's instrument sounds are high-quality, for sure, but the Mac's speakers are a bit weedy and subsequently it wasn't quite as impressive as it could be. (In our new house, there's also the minor issue that the MIDI cable doesn't reach from the keyboard to the Mac, but that doesn't really matter now.)

Anyway. My ten minutes are up, so that's that. Sorry for the abrupt ending. Apparently I tried to cram too much into such a short space of time, but them's the breaks. Technically I'm breaking the rules here by going past the time limit, but whatever. Anyway. Now I'm finishing. Good night.

1662: Moving Pictures

Call me a traditionalist, out of date, out of touch, whatever you like, but I'm really not a fan of the current obsession with video as the be-all and end-all of publishing things online.

I have numerous feelings about this, not least of which is the fact that as a former member of the gaming press, it smarts to see my particular skillset — writing compelling words about my specialist subjects — being sidelined in favour of video, but as a consumer of online content, it also frustrates me immensely, too.

Put simply, I like to read. I prefer to read. If I see an interesting-sounding link on social media, I'll read it if it's text, but if it's video I will, nine times out of ten, not watch it. And this is true whether I'm sitting at my computer or browsing on phone or tablet — though it's particularly true when I'm browsing on a mobile device, since due to patchy network reception and exorbitant data charges, watching video on the go is often, to say the least, a somewhat subpar experience. Text is much more desirable in these circumstances. (This is to say nothing of live broadcasts, which are even less desirable than video on demand to me.)

There are types of content where it's simply easier to refer to text, too. Take game guides or tutorials in general, for example; while video can show you the things the creator is trying to teach you in context, it's difficult to refer back to specific points or cross-reference things, whereas this is a snap to do with text. Again, if I'm using a mobile device to browse this information, I much prefer having the information open in front of me to keep referring back to, rather than watching a video and having to take as much in as possible, perhaps over the course of several viewings. It just doesn't seem like a very efficient means of delivering information — particularly when that information is complicated.

This isn't to say video can't work, of course. Video is a great means of delivering educational content that you passively absorb rather than actively refer to while working on something. Crash Course on YouTube, which my friends Mark and Lynette introduced me to recently, is a good example of this.

And video is great for comedy, when said comedy has been written to be performed in the form of video. Glove and Boots is my current favourite example of this:

I just get a bit annoyed when people make sweeping declarations about video being "the future" of online content, as if those of us who still like to read words on a page rather than watch and listen are somehow irrelevant. Like so many other things, there are plenty of different tastes out there, and lots of different ways of doing things. Rather than only pursuing one to the exclusion of all others, let's accept that fact: continue to provide relevant, interesting content to all people and all tastes, not just the fashionable, young market who, at this point, are obsessed with video. My individual opinion may not matter all that much, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person out there who will close a tab without checking out an "awesome" link if the link turns out to be just another video.

1659: Time Off

There's still nearly a month before I start my new job. With the job search over, this means that I am now being left largely to my own devices on a daily basis, which sounds like a dream come true, doesn't it?

It isn't.

Much like working from home isn't the wonderfully liberating experience you might think it would be, having a protracted amount of time to yourself with not a lot that you really "need" to do is not everything you might think it is, either. Days are long, boring and filled with vast tracts of nothingness, unless, of course, you find yourself something to occupy them with.

Most days, I'm pretty good at occupying myself. In the simplest cases, I'll simply play some games, watch some TV or read some stuff. Others, I might go out — maybe into town, or down to the gym, or just for a wander around outside. Others still, I might do things that "need" doing, like mowing the lawn or cleaning or tidying.

But there are days — today was one of them — where nothing feels like it's quite "right"; nothing feels like it will satisfy you. It's days like today that often see me sitting on the sofa staring into space for surprisingly lengthy periods of time, caught between desires, wants and needs, and never quite being able to muster up the energy or motivation to pursue any of them. Doing something I know I'll enjoy feels like a waste of time; doing something "productive" feels like it's an insurmountable challenge.

All this, of course, is a side-effect of depressive tendencies; it's not that I actually don't want to do anything, it's simply that, for whatever reason, my brain decides that it wants to be sad today, and the jumbled impulses the depressed brain fires out have a tendency to override everything else and prioritise that feeling of sadness. It's not sadness about anything in particular, it just is; it's just a frustratingly dark feeling from which it's difficult to escape, particularly if you're home alone, like I have been.

It's for this reason that I'm genuinely looking forward to starting work again — and genuinely looking forward to the fact that, for the first time in four years, I'll be working in a place where there are actual other living, breathing people with whom I might be able to interact on a daily basis. (Said interactions will, of course, be prone to my other big issue — that of social anxiety — but that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it.) I'm looking forward to having the change of scenery each day — the chance to drive my new car and spend some time listening to the radio, music or podcasts; the opportunity to spend several hours away from the house; the pleasant feeling of "coming home" after a hard day's work — and of just, you know, doing something.

Tell that to my twentysomething self and he'd probably laugh in your face. But, frankly, life without work is not as fun as you might think it would be. (Well, it probably would be if you had more money than you'd ever know what to do with — though I imagine even that would get boring after a while.) Consequently, I find myself counting down the days until I become just another cog in the great machines of business — and genuinely looking forward to that day, rather than dreading it.

1658: Automobile

I bought a new car today. Like, an actually new one, not a "new for me" car. I didn't go out with the intention of purchasing a pretty much brand new (16 miles on the clock) car, but that's the way things went after being presented with a good deal by our local Toyota garage.

Yes, I am (hopefully) about to be the proud owner of a new Toyota Yaris. Not the most exciting car in the world, for sure, but out of the several cars I took for a test-drive today, it was by far the most comfortable, spacious and pleasant to drive. Also it has a magic computer thing in the centre console that includes a rear-view camera with overlays to assist with reverse-parking. Fortunate, since 1) I am bad at reverse-parking and 2) my new job, which starts at the end of the month, requires me to reverse-park in the staff car park.

To be honest, I've been kind of mildly blown away by how much cars have advanced since I last had one of my own. I've been driving Andie's car (I can call it that now, rather than "our car") off and on and have found it thoroughly pleasant to drive, and thus had some familiarity with what was now "standard" in cars, but looking around today really drove the point home: I used to drive some shit vehicles.

Actually, that's not altogether true; most of the cars I've driven over the years were perfectly acceptable at the time, but various bits of automotive technology and engineering have moved on considerably since then. To put this in context, the cars I've driven to date have included a G-reg Rover Metro that belonged to my mother; an L-reg no-frills Fiesta which blew up on the way to work one morning; a slightly-but-not-by-much-younger Escort that was actually pretty awesome due to the fact it had a fairly powerful engine, a "sports" exhaust and a spoiler, but which I knocked one of the mirrors off by dropping a bookshelf on it (don't ask); and a 2001 Peugeot 106 that used to belong to my mother and which was subsequently donated to me, shortly before it decided that the Right Thing to Do would be to occasionally, inexplicably, fill up one or both of the front seat footwells with water, despite there being no visible place from which a leak had sprung.

None of these cars were awful per se (aside from when they broke) but, compared to the stuff I looked at today, all were pretty primitive. All of them had simple tape decks, for example — though I replaced the stereos in both the Fiesta and the Escort with something a bit more badass — and none of them had anything that could reasonably be described as a "computer". Contrast with the Yaris, then, which has a touchscreen console from which you can access the radio, frighteningly detailed trip data (with graphs and everything), a Bluetooth connection to my phone for hands-free phone calls (not that I ever make or answer any) and music playing (much more "useful") and some other bits and pieces besides. Plus the aforementioned camera, which is pretty awesome.

The car itself isn't a particularly speedy little number, but it's economical — important, since I'll be commuting a reasonable distance to work each day — plus comfortable and pleasant to drive. There's a nice view through the windscreen from the driver's seat, and the brief test drive suggested that it would be a pleasure to drive, although I will have to adjust to the bizarreness that is having six gears. Six! What am I supposed to do with all those? At least it has a handy "shift up" indicator to remind me!

Anyway, assuming all the credit and whatnot goes through, I should have it by next weekend. Expect further enthusing then.

1656: Notepad

For all the wonderful conveniences of the digital age, some things just can't be replaced. The exact trappings of the past that people cling to even as technology advances around them vary from person to person, but I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who prefers scribbling notes on a piece of paper to tapping them into a phone or tablet.

It's silly, really. I can be doing something that requires me to make a note of something — solving a puzzle in a video game, say — and my phone can be right there next to me but I'll still get up and go hunting for a pen (inevitably a black biro — a trait I have inherited from my father) and a piece of paper on which to write. There's something far more satisfying about the scratch of pen on paper than there is for the far less tactile tapping on a touchscreen or finger-painting on a tablet.

And, sorry to say, a piece of paper is infinitely more flexible than any phone or tablet with all the apps in the world installed on it. A piece of paper can be the gateway to your imagination, limited only by its own boundaries — a limitation that can be easily circumvented with additional pieces of paper. A pen or pencil, too, is a far better writing or drawing implement than a fingertip; even tablet styluses are yet to capture the true feel of actually writing or sketching something by hand.

Sure, electronic notes have their benefits. Services like Evernote allow you to categorise and tag your notes for later retrieval, rather than having to rummage through endless reams of paper, some of which have useful notes on while others have nothing more than an array of crudely drawn penises doodled while on the phone to someone boring like a customer service drone for a utility company or anyone involved in government. But sometimes you don't need that level of permanence. Sometimes you just need to scribble something down quickly to aid in short-term memorising, then to discard it when you're done with it. For that, it's tough to beat the old faithful pen and paper combo.

Plus have you ever tried actually handwriting stuff on a palmtop device or tablet? However hard you try, it's impossible not to make even your neatest handwriting come out like that of a head trauma victim in rehabilitation given crayons for the first time. Sure, you could type it out, but doing that is, in a lot of cases, slower than just picking up a pen and writing it down — plus it doesn't allow for the flexibility of pen-and-paper notetaking such as being able to integrate both writing and drawing into a single note quickly and easily.

I guess what I'm trying to say in a roundabout way is that however far technology advances, I never want to be too far away from a pad of paper and a pot of pens and pencils. You may call be a traditionalist, bound by the conventions of the past rather than embracing the future, but I don't care; there are some things that technology simply doesn't improve, and I feel this is one of them.

1653: Impromptu Vacation

Whew.

Now that our international visitors have departed, it is time to collapse into a heap and fall asleep — and indeed, that is what I did for much of this afternoon, and that is what I'm probably going to do shortly after I hit the "Publish" button on this post.

It's been a great few days, though, and Mark and Lynette appeared to have an enjoyable time. We didn't have nearly enough time to do all the things we might have wanted to do — such is inevitably the way when you have just a few days to spend with people you don't get to see in person very often — but we got a decent amount of things in, including a wander around Southampton (including the waterfront and the "old bits" at the far end of town), a visit to the stately home and grounds at Mottisfont, and a trip to Oxford for two room escape games, a wander around two of the colleges and finally an evening of gaming at the UK's first (only?) board game café Thirsty Meeples.

Doing so much in such a short space of time has reminded me that our lifestyle on "normal" days is rather more sedate. I feel genuinely exhausted right now, though not at all sorry that we got to do as many things as we did. Whenever I host visitors — even if it's just for a couple of hours — I often find myself worrying that I'm not entertaining them enough, or not being a good enough host or whatever. This time around, I feel like we did a decent job: a bit of downtime to relax and play things like ZombiU and Towerfall, trips out to see interesting things near and far, and a few "quintessentially British" things just to make them feel like they've had an experience that they can't have anywhere else — even if that experience is just, I don't know, eating a Jaffa Cake or something.

But anyway. Now they have departed and I am about to collapse, it's time for a sort-of holiday before my new job starts at the end of August. I'm not quite sure what to expect from the job as yet, but I'm quite looking forward to it, for a number of reasons: chiefly, the fact that I'll have reliable money coming in every month, but also the fact that it's something I'll be able to show up to, do, clock out at the end of the day and not have to worry about in the evenings. (Hopefully, anyway.) This will allow me to kick back of an evening and enjoy myself with some games or some TV or some anime without feeling like I "should" be doing something specific — a common issue that will be familiar to anyone who has ever written about games for a living. While I still fully intend to write about a variety of subjects for my own site MoeGamer, I'm not planning on putting any undue pressure on myself to romp through games as quickly as possible; I'm not working to a review schedule, nor do I have to worry about the "glut" of games coming later in the year. I can simply write about games as and when I feel like it, as often as I feel like it, and in as much detail as I feel like. It's refreshing, and I can't help thinking it will be a fine way to dispel some of the cynicism I've built up over the last few years. (Shitty free-to-play mobile games can still eat a dick, though, as can pretty much anything from EA.)

Anyway. I can feel my writing descending into rambling stream-of-consciousness, so rather than inflicting that on you, I will simply say good night for now, and hopefully be a little more alert tomorrow!

1652: A Grand Day Out

We took our visitors up to Oxford today, for several reasons — to have a look at some genuinely Old Stuff, to play a couple of Zero Escape-style "room escape" games, and to visit Oxford's answer to Toronto's board game cafe Snakes and Lattes, Thirsty Meeples.

It was a great day out, though the amount of walking reminded me that I don't do nearly enough just walking around these days.

The early part of the day consisted of the aforementioned "room escape" games courtesy of Ex(c)iting Game, a modest operation that offers two different interactive experiences in which you're given an hour to solve a particular task. In the first room, we were challenged to break into a computer to recover a piece of information about someone who was going to be assassinated; in the second, we were tasked with locating a USB stick containing sensitive information before it was auctioned off.

In both cases, the games were fairly low-rent, consisting of straightforward and simple props with a few fun gadgets. The two games were markedly distinct from one another, too; the Stop the Assassin game was much more gadget-heavy, seeing us cracking a safe, using a blacklight and eventually cracking the code that led us to the computer password; conversely, second game The Auction was much more focused on deducing the answers to various riddles in order to solve combination locks and get them open.

Both games also featured a number of red herrings that had little to do with the games themselves, and both were reasonably challenging, taking our group of four a decent amount of time to crack in both cases. We completed the first game with just six minutes to spare; the second game we solved a little more quickly, with around twenty minutes left on the clock.

The setup, although simple, was effective. The staffer — whom I felt rather sorry for, since she clearly spent an awful lot of time twiddling her thumbs between appointments — observed our efforts to solve each room via webcam, and subsequently offered real-time hints through the monitor that otherwise displayed our time limit. Rather than these hints being predefined, she was able to highlight particular things in the room or type messages to us to ensure we could normally be nudged back onto the right track. In the case of both games, we would have probably found the answers ourselves eventually, but the hints were timed nicely so it didn't feel like our intelligence was being insulted.

All in all, the game experience was fun. It would be neat to see the idea implemented with a somewhat bigger budget — perhaps some more special effects, more high-quality props and a little more effort to make the games more strongly thematic — but for today, it made an enjoyable and memorable day out.

We then took a bus into the city centre of Oxford, where we had a wander around a couple of the colleges, which was a fairly humbling experience when I think back on the places I stayed and studied when I was at university in Southampton. The dining hall in one of the colleges in particular was a real Hogwarts-style affair that impressed me and Andie almost as much as it did our visitors.

Following some wandering around — and a break for a drink in an incredibly old pub — we made it to Thirsty Meeples, where we had coffee, snacks and some gaming. We played the cooperative game Robinson Crusoe, which I've been curious to try for a while, and Boss Monster, which I've likewise heard of previously and have been keen to give a shot.

Robinson Crusoe is a very cool and strongly thematic cooperative game, though for those who enjoy the more Euro end of the spectrum, there's plenty of worker placement and resource management involving shifting little wooden discs and cubes around the place. There's also a number of different scenarios that I can see would likely change the way you play significantly — it'd be a game you could get a decent amount of replay value out of, due to the randomised elements. It was initially a little difficult to grasp, but after a turn or two all becomes clear and highly enjoyable — likely a game I'll try and score a copy of for myself in the near future.

Boss Monster, meanwhile, is a short and simple card game in which you play a 16-bit era video game boss and have to build a dungeon to fend off the never-ending hordes of incoming heroes. It's a simple, easy-to-understand game that I think will be a lot of fun with various groups — I ended up picking up a copy of it along with Avalon before we left.

We also gave Concept a go, which is, along the lines of Dixit, more of a fun group activity than a "game" per se. Like Dixit, it involves a certain amount of creativity — meaning Andie wasn't a huge fan of it, but she soldiered on regardless — but handles things very differently. Rather than attempting to describe pictures on cards, Concept challenges you to get, well, concepts across by placing markers on various icons. It's kind of Charades-ish, only you don't do any actions — you place markers to describe the main concept of the word, phrase, title, whatever it is, and its "subconcepts". You can then use smaller markers to elaborate on these a bit, but the only thing you can say during this whole process — which is surprisingly frustrating if your tablemates just won't grasp something that seems obvious to you — is "yes" if they get something along the right lines.

So all in all, then, we had a great day. I'm pretty tired now, though, so I have a feeling I'll sleep rather well this evening!

1651: British Things

When British people have visitors from overseas — such as we have at the moment — it is seemingly obligatory to do at least a few things that are as British as possible, just to clarify the fact that yes, it is the United Kingdom of etc. etc. that they are visiting and not just, say, the next town over to where they normally live. And in doing so, it can often be quite eye-opening to contemplate the quirks of one's own culture when seen through the eyes of those from elsewhere — even those with some cultural crossover with Britain, such as our present visitors, whose cultural background includes both Ontario, Canada and Texas, USA.

For part of today, we took a trip out to a local National Trust site that I've forgotten the name of. It was about eight miles away from where Andie and I live, and featured a modestly sized stately home — "modest" being a relative term here, obviously — as well as some nice grounds and gardens. It's the sort of place that Andie and I would probably never go to by ourselves, but since Mark and Lynette wanted to activate the National Trust passes they had for the remainder of their visit and this site was the nearest place that would allow them to do so, we figured we may as well pay it a visit.

It was enjoyable and impressive to see the house, which had been kept in very good condition and had an interesting history. The grounds, too were pleasant to look at, with a nice walled garden area and part of the River Test running through the grounds. There wasn't too much to take in there, either; no feeling that you needed to spend the whole day there to get your money's worth.

We followed the visit up with a trip to the Forte Tearooms in Winchester, one of the most British eating and drinking establishments I could think of that wasn't a chip shop (that's on the agenda for tomorrow) or a pub. Unfortunately we weren't quite in time to enjoy a cream tea as well as our rather late lunch, but the food we did have time to enjoy was tasty enough.

After that we grabbed some food from Sainsbury's — meat pie, chips, Mr Kipling fruit pies — and came home to eat, accompanied by the deliciously British sounds of classic Radio 4 show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.

All in all it's been a thoroughly British day, and surprisingly enjoyable. Tomorrow we're going a little further afield to Oxford for a few different activities — two different "room escape" games a la Zero Escape, some authentic fish and chips and a visit to Oxford's board game cafe The Thirsty Meeple. Should be a lot of fun, so expect a full (and likely exhausted!) report tomorrow.