The Lair of the SlowFox

I didn't get very deep (no pun intended) into Bioshock, having only borrowed the game for the 360 from Colleague N at work, but was deeply impressed with what I saw.

Well, dude here went the full 9-fathoms in recreating not only a big-daddy costume, and getting his fiancée to dress up as one of the Little Sisters, but in then arranging a photoshoot in an aquarium to complete the experience.

Creepy, yet awesome (kinda like the game).

I got accompanied by a kitten for a short while on my walk back from Castle Fox just now!

She was a very cute white/tabby, and came bounding up to me when she saw me walking along, and demonstrated that she could walk to heel better than Mali can.

Whilst, obviously, an office cat would have been a desirous outcome of this happy meeting, I suspected that teh kitteh's owners might've had a different view of her kidnapping.

So there then followed a protracted play 'n hide 'n chase game where I tried to entice the kitten back into the garden from whence she'd sprung (whether that was her true abode I know not). She was too large to stand in the palm of my hand, but was quite happy to sprawl out along my forearm, and was very purry.

In the end, we had a bit of an attack game with me wielding a twig which she was trying to kill dead, and when she was fully absorbed, I flicked the twig over the wall out of sight. She gamely bounded after it in hot pursuit, and I made my getaway, sight unseen.

I wouldn't be without a dog, these days, but I do like my cats.

Set in the siege of Leningrad during World War II, this is an absorbing book which follows the travails of Lev and Kolya, two guys who happen to end up in prison on the same night, as they try to work off their debt, as it were.

Anyway, what happens is this: Lev and Kolya are hauled before a colonel, expecting summary execution, but instead are tasked with procuring a dozen eggs, so that the colonel's daughter can have a cake for her wedding a week hence, as is proper. As set-ups go, this is a pretty good one - the population of Leningrad are starving, quite literally, and are eating sweets that are made from the spines of library books, because there's protein in the binding glue. Finding a single egg would be the stuff of legend, just cause for a banquet for the discoverer - to find twelve? But then again, it's challenge that's tantalisingly plausible, and besides, the alternative is death, against which all options probably look enticing.

Benioff is a Hollywood screenwriter, and I think this shows through in how the crucial scene plays out (even if, for argument's sake, the German general accepted the challenge, it's unlikely that all three of the Good Guys would've been present, when only one was required). The plot has a slight tightness to it (an almost-dormant aptitude that one of the characters is noted as having turns out to be utterly pivotal later on) which clearly lends itself to a screenplay, but perhaps there's not that much Hollywood interest in a film set in WW II, in Leningrad, telling a story from a Russian perspective...

Nonetheless, I thought it was a good story, well told.

The Lost City of Z tells the story, simultaneously, of both Colonel Fawcett's expedition in the 1920's to find the fabled city of El Dorado in the Amazon, and the author's attempts to find out what happened to Fawcett, one of the greatest explorers of the age, who disappeared along with his son and his son's best friend, who had both gone along for the ride, so to speak.

The book paints a fascinating picture of the whole pursuit of knowledge thing that was going on at the time (late 19th, early 20th Century), and you really do marvel at the feats accomplished. At the same time, there's a certain cold-bloodedness inherent in the way that the explorers seemed to view their entourages as expendables during the course of their journeys, simply accepting that loss of life was the cost of increased knowledge of what lay in the blank areas of the maps.

Anyway, having given us a potted history of Fawcett's accomplishments, the narrative also tries to paint the backdrop to Fawcett's developing obsession over the Lost City of Z, and in so doing also explains how against the backdrop of such miraculous technologies as radio and phonographs, people's credibility with regard to mediums, the supernatural and the mystic also increased, even amongst such people as the rationalists as trained by the Royal Geographic Society.

The Lost City would prove Fawcett's undoing... or at least, it'd prove to be the cause of his disappearance. Grann, some 80 years later, does a fair bit of research to try and find out what path Fawcett would've taken (the explorers at the time guarded such information jealously, so as not to lose discoveries to rivals), in an attempt to piece together the party's fate.

And the explanation that he arrives at seems pretty credible. And also bittersweet.

Good book.

I have finally managed to get around to starting S4 of Battlestar Galactica. To get in the correct frame of mind, I dug out the final episode of S3 (that's the Watchtower ep, which may or may not have been prompted by yesterday's posting of the vids to Michael Hedges' covers of said), and remembered all over again why I like this show.

S4, the box set, starts off with Razor on a single disc. I actually bought Razor separately, but hadn't ever managed to get around to watching it, and now I discover that I possess two copies thereof. This time I am seeing it through, though, but given that I was expecting to be nibbling away at S4 perhaps a couple of episodes at a time, and I'd already watched that S3 ep, I've had to stall part way through.

In other news, I feel cold: so much so, in fact, that I'm wearing a scarf. Indoors.

Well, not really been up to much today, but am taking advantage of having got most of the domestic administrivia out of the way so as to go to the cinema this evening to be assaulted by watch 2012.

I haven't exactly got high hopes, but will go in with a vacant an open mind and see what I make of it by the close.

re location: yes, but I'm only passing through

Mali is fed a special diet - although he does his best to supplement it with assorted burger and kebab remnants as left thoughtfully on pavements far and wide in this fair city, the basic staple is Burns Fish and Brown Rice (since you asked).

Which, if I may lapse into pet-food ambassadorial mode for a moment, is great stuff.

And until today, I didn't think it was that pricey, either - a 7½kg bag does us (well, actually, just Mali, since I don't partake) for a month, and normally hits me for £23.

Imagine my mild consternation earlier today, then, when the shop assistant rang the new bag through at £22,109.99! This was one occasion where I decided to shelve the standard-issue British reserve (part of the standard complement of functions gifted to those of us born in this green and pleasant land, alongside the legendary stiff upper lip^*, a fabled Sense of Decency™ and an alleged fondness for a peculiar game known as 'cricket') and query the charge.

The second attempt was more to my liking, at £2.99, but the shop was less thrilled at this (being an 87% discount - I mean, I'm a good customer of theirs, but I'm not that good).

So it was a case of Third Time Lucky (and incidentally, I've noticed in fics of US-origin, that people seem to favour 'third time's the charm' in the colonies, whereas such sounds distinctly odd on this side of the pond), and I thus avoided having to re-mortgage Castle Fox to keep Mali in the type of lifestyle to which he has become accustomed.

* - my own stiff upper lip is not so stiff, being as I arrived with it in kit form, so to speak

It's the Residents' Association AGM this evening - for the 2008/2009 year; yes, it's a tad late, principally because the initial such was abandoned when hardly anybody turned up. My hopes for a significantly higher turnout today are not that great; once the one-way system had been implemented around the Dukeries, interest in the Residents' Association didn't so much dwindle as collapse.

Somewhat over-busy at work - I do find, though, that in general I'm more productive over here in Work II than in the former location, and that's no bad thing, for sure.

Have made a start on Haruki Murakami's After Dark, which seems pretty good, so far, and has the same feel as Hard Boiled Wonderland, A Wild Sheep Chase and some of the others.

Because I need to remote desktop into work machines from home, and work don't support doing so from within Linux, I've had to install Windows 7 on Ione, the home nettop/pc, which is basically a netbook masquerading as a desktop PC. Work only had the Windows 7 upgrade media - the trick with a clean install, then, is to do an initial clean install from the upgrade disc, but not to type in the product key.

Log into Win 7, then run the installation's Setup from the DVD, to 'upgrade' your Windows 7 installation to, er, Windows 7. And then you put in your product key. So far, this seems to have worked, but I haven't risked online activation yet - I want to see whether Ione actually has enough power to realistically run 7 before committing the product key to it.

ETA: props to glittertine for the linkage, Top Gear S14 Trailer is AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D :D :D

Not much to say - busy couple of days at work, more of the same coming up.

Have managed to exhaust my dog-walking podcasts for the day, though, so I need to find some more listening material to pad out the week (tend to get a glut of things in the later half of the week, but given that I tend to go on something of a listening/Mali-walking splurge on Sunday evening, by Tuesday I'm all out).

Got a note through the door of Castle Fox from a courier company - they couldn't deliver a parcel today, so I contacted them to arrange picking up from the depot.

Except, I discover, that the depot is in York, and is only open from 9am to 7pm. No way can I get there in that time frame, so I'm going to try postponing the next delivery attempt to next Monday, and take said day off. All the time that the courier depot is in Hull, home delivery's not too much of a hassle, but trekking out to York and back isn't my idea of 'home delivery', somehow :-/