One of my favourite sections of Private Eye is Pseuds Corner, in which various choice titbits of textual over-importance are held up to national ridicule. There's clever writing and there's overblown tosh, and sometimes the border between the two can be very thin. I have a particular dislike of the people who write pompous notes to accompany classical music ("The flute melody is accompanied by gentle, unobtrusive semiquavers, retaining the tranquility of the movement while fleshing out the score with a particularly romantic view of sonority.") I loathe reviews of literature that pontificate in depth about themes which the authors almost certainly never put there in the first place. ("The abandonment of metaphysical foundations establishes the context of Murdoch's particular interest in existentialism, and the essential Nietzschean assertion that modern man is trapped by a process of imagined self-determination.") But I reserve my deepest hatred for the art critic.
(before continuing please click here to take a look at a piece of art, thankyou)
If you pick up a free London Underground map this autumn you'll see that the front cover features a specially-commissioned piece of art by EmmaKay entitled You Are in London. Essentially it's 12 concentric rings, each the colour of a different tube line. I like it, it's simple, clever and effective. However, Transport for London have let an art critic loose on reviewing it, and the result is pure bollocks.
(before continuing please click here to read a pile of crap, thankyou)
It takes particular skill, or bravado, to waffle so effusively about so little. It takes an unlikely leap of faith to suggest that the target motif "playfully combines the Tube line colours with art historical references, graphic design and our collective memory". And it takes a complete jerk to describe a few coloured rings as "compelling", "deceptive" or a "memory audit". When wandering around art galleries I often have to refrain from gasping out loud at the utter drivel that art critics have written about the works on display. Can't they just shut up and let us read what we want into the images that we see? "12 rings, nice." Much better. (I'm glad to see this morning that Annie agrees with me too).
Of course, there's a far better work of art to be found on the Underground map leaflet, and that's the map itself. For those of you who are interested (and I suspect that's most of you) the BBC are screening a 30 minute documentary tomorrow (BBC2, 7:30pm Thursday) about the history of the map and its creator, Harry Beck. His sublime topological distortion transformed society's mindscape to reduce London's amorphous physical environment to an interconnected psychogeographical clarity. It's bloody clever, too.
20 years ago computer games were very different to the slick violent action games we have today. Graphics, if there were any, were sparse and chunky. There were no handsets with special buttons to press, you just hammered your spacebar to jump and used Z and X for left and right. With only a few kilobytes of memory available, gamesdesigners were forced to concentrate on playability instead of special effects. This meant that many of the games were ten times better to play than they actually looked, which is the exact opposite of most of the £40 no-brainers released today. One particularly basic example of the genre was the text adventure, which normally went something like this:
YOU ARE STANDING OUTSIDE A SMALL CAVE.
ON THE GROUND IS A GOLD COIN.
THE SILENT KNIGHT BLOCKS YOUR WAY.
PATHS LEAD NORTH, SOUTH AND WEST.
>
The cursor would flash at you, expectantly, waiting for you to type your next instruction. Vocabulary was rather limited so it was important to type exactly the right words - for example take coin instead of pick coin (SORRY I DON'T KNOW HOW TO 'PICK'). You also had to try follow the twisted logic of the game designer, so it could ages to try to work out which of the many game objects you needed to use in a certain situation and precisely how to use it.
> enter cave
THE SILENT KNIGHT BLOCKS YOUR WAY
> talk to knight
THE SILENT KNIGHT BLOCKS YOUR WAY
> kick knight
THE SILENT KNIGHT BLOCKS YOUR WAY
> scream
THE SILENT KNIGHT BLOCKS YOUR WAY
> give obscure-artefact-I-picked-up-three-rooms-back
THE SILENT KNIGHT SAYS "THANK YOU" AND STANDS ASIDE
> enter cave
Sometimes the puzzles were so difficult that you'd get stuck in the second room and give up on the entire game, unable to proceed any further. There was no internet on which to look up the answers in those days, just playground gossip and various 'cheats' printed in monthly magazines, but it always felt good to complete even one part of the puzzle unaided without resorting to any of the above. Memorable text adventure games of the era included Zork, Philosopher's Quest, Granny's Garden (still selling well after 21 years) and the surprisingly good L - A Mathematical Adventure.
> follow abbot
And now one of the all-time greats has been resurrected to celebrate the launch of the third series of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The BBC website is playing host to a 21st century version of Douglas Adams' classic text adventure, a game which sold a third of a million copies back in 1984 (probably on ropey cassette tape) but which you can now play online for free. The plot is twisted (but always just-about logical) and it certainly helps to know something of the storyline of the original series. Douglas described the game as "user-mendacious", which means that you tend to die quite frequently, but at least in such circumstances you can restart and try again. Highly improbable, but not impossible.
> give sandwich to dog
The dog is deeply moved. With powerful sweeps of its tail it indicates that it regards this cheese sandwich as one of the great cheese sandwiches. Nine out of ten pet owners could happen by at this point expressing any preference they pleased, but this dog would spurn both them and all their tins. This is a dog which has met its main sandwich. It eats with passion, and ignores a passing microscopic space fleet.
The game is here, there are some hints here, and there's plenty of time to play while you wait for episode 2 of the latest series on Radio 4 tonight. You might even want to load my saved game to see if you can advance the position a bit... > restore > dgeezer
Have you seen what that has said now? I couldn't believe it when I it in my favourite . It's so ! How could anyone believe this ? The guy is ! I, however, am . I understand this particular issue better than everyone else. Everyone else is . How could anyone support this point of view? Well, apart from the usual crowd of . Our is clearly under very serious threat. I know that you agree with me, dear reader. No sane person could disagree, could they? Now read on, as I about this issue, just like I did ...
6 for Sunday • Touch Graph - see webpage connections in graphical form, and which other blogs are most associated to your own (via Blue Witch)
• The Number 1 Lyrics Site - lyrics to every one of the nearly-1000 Number 1 UK hit singles since 1952.
• Test your pop-up blocker - how many pop-up ads can your browser stop? (Firefox performs brilliantly)
• The Invisibility Game - can you weave your invisible cursor through each maze without touching the sides? (via Madness Temple)
• Wordcounter - a useful tool to help authors spot if, of course, basically, however, there are any words they use far too often.
• The Open Guide To London - an in-depth, and ever-growing, wiki guide to the capital.
Seen in local supermarket: Mince pies with a sell-by date of October 25th.
