Been A While...

Just checking in.

Let's see...

Oh! The last thing I blogged about was progressing in Tomb Raider: Underworld to Level 5: Southern Mexico. If you're interested, I'm now on Level 6: Jan Mayan Island/ Part 2: Valhalla. Not bad progress, but I'm kind of bored with the game again.

I also scored a discounted copy of the PS2 version of Alone In The Dark, which SEEMS like it would be a cool game, but... It has the playability of a brick! It's this terribly cumbersome thing that is basically a movie that forces you to press buttons every once in a while, and forces you to die A LOT, which requires you to re-watch that section of the movie again and press the arbitrary buttons all over again, and the whole thing is just about as boring as you can imagine it being. It's like the game is simply designed to teach non-gamers to how pushing buttons works.

Very boring.

I mean, Silent Hill isn't much different, if I'm honest, but the atmosphere is creepy enough to keep me pressing buttons for an hour or two longer than Alone In The Dark. There is at least a great deal of wandering and exploration you can do in the Silent Hill games I've played.

Blah.

So gaming hasn't been a huge part of my past week. Rather, I have been doing a lot of reading. I finished Niel Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors short story collection, and last night I just finished The Graveyard Book, which is AWESOME! :D

I'm also about to finish up Brad Steiger's Shadow World, and am debating on which to begin next: Steiger's Beyond Shadow World or Barry FitzGerald's and Dustin Pari's The Complete Approach: The Scientific and Metaphysical Guide to the Paranormal. I'm stoked about reading more Steiger, but The Complete Approach just arrived in the mail today, and it's pretty short! So I can gobble that up in a couple of days, then dive back into Steiger's work.

I may do that.

I'm at work now, but I have this stupid movie feed, and I have to babysit the damn thing. Normally, I would be doing my normal work right now. But because of this movie, and the way I'm supposed to catch it, I can't do my regular shift work. :( I have to let it pile up until the movie is complete, then I'll spend the rest of my shift racing to catch up. I may even find myself staying a little late. :(

Bitter?

Nah. Just bellyaching.

HOWEVER...!!! I heard from my Gnomey Goddess today!!! :D That's always a joy! xoxoxo If I do find myself staying late to finish up my work, I'll keep thoughts of her in mind, and the work will go faster! :)

(She's a hotty, if I haven't mentioned it before.)

Did you celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day this past Saturday? Brian and I kinda/sorta did. We basically wished each other Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day in pirate-speak... And that's pretty much it, lol.

The highlight of my Saturday was meeting up with the Texas Spirits folks and catching up on things. I missed that one investigation that (I believe) I blogged about, and then the next weekend our investigation got rained-out (NOT complaining about rain, mind you!), and then the client canceled this past weekend, too. But several of them got together after a Reveal (that's the tongue-in-cheek name for the post0investigation consultation with the client, so named because that's what that segment of the Ghost Hunters show is called) and invited me to join them.

So that was groovy! I hadn't realized how much I was missing just hanging with these folks. GOOD people, they are! :D

And there's the possibility of finally doing this oft-belayed investigation this coming weekend. That will be cool, too, if it happens! :)

Okay, I should probably sign off for now. I need to go babysit the stupid movie until I can do some of my actual work. (Well... actually, the movie is my "actual work", too, but I'm just disgruntled because a shift that could have flowed with smoothe efficiency is now going to be a herky-jerky wild race to cram too much stuff into too little time. I'm bitching again; I'll stop.)

Hope your Hump Day is pleasing!

:)

Level 5: Southern Mexico/Part 4: Land of the Dead

I made some headway in Tomb Raider: Underworld this weekend! :D

When I got the game a couple of months ago, I got stuck early on in the room with the Krakken. (Level 2 of 8) With the Tomb Raider games, I'm used to going into a room and, pretty much, just hopping around and climbing things until I finish the level. I usually solve the puzzles without any help. But that Krakken room just stumped me.

So I took a break from the game for a month or so, and replayed Anniversary or Legends whenever I found myself in a Tomb-Raider mood.

But last week I finally broke down and got some help from Tomb Raider Chronicles, and then...

I am currently on the last part of Level 5!!! :D

It's seriously crazy!!! :D

I got past this one problem (the problem was that I was supposed to go into a different room first, not the Krakken room) and I leaped ahead 3 levels!

I'm stuck again, so I headed back to Tomb Raider Chronicles to figure out what I'm doing wrong. (It can't be going to another room or finding another concealed place; I've exhausted every visible possibility.)

I think I should complete this game before too long! :) (I am a simple man, and I have simple pleasures, lol.)

A two-day investigation got rained out this weekend.

Which is fine. I was excited to discover that I could be helpful the very next week after I missed the previous weekend's investigation, one the one hand, but we're supposed to investigate next Friday and Saturday, so it's not like I have to wait a whole month or anything to get back in the saddle.

Plus, Austin NEEDED that rain!!! OMG we needed that rain!

So instead of investigating, I read some more of Brad Steiger's Shadow World, which is a great book, and Steiger is a great writer! :) He's been researching claims of the paranormal for 5 decades now! And what's cool about his writing is that he's clearly got a very sort of wide perspective of all this stuff, as well as a practical attitude about it.

Very illuminating!

We (Brian and me, not that empirical "We") also got Steiger's Beyond Shadow World, which is kind of a polar oposite to what he's talking to in Shadow World. In Shadow World, Steiger is kind of warning us about the "extra-dimensional" perils out there that a consientious investigator should not be incautious of. (I'm just 3 chapters or so into the book, but that seems to be what it's about.) In Beyond Shadow World Steiger relates his experiences with the extra-demensional beings that actually help us along this journey we know as physical reality.

I've always been a spiritual cat, so I actually have had more (a lot more, I'm thankful to say) experience with divine oddness than I do with the malicious sort. So I'm looking forward to Beyond Shadow World quite a bit! :)

I also did some writing on a personal project I'm working on, too! Not much, but I'm happy with what I've got so far. (In case you're keeping track, the last solo (that is, non-collaborative) project I may have reported working has morphed -- again -- into something else, and this is what I worked on this weekend.)

Finally, because of the rain, I was able to spend an inordinate amount of time revisiting a section of my childhood (1982 & '83) watching Tales of the Gold Monkey!!! :D

As an adult, I have been able to re-watch several of my favorite childhood TV shows thanks to the miracle of DVD. The greatest American Hero, The A-Team, 21 Jump Street, and the outcome is always predictable: The shows just aren't nearly as good as I remember them, lol.

On a couple of occasions, I've even been able to re-watch shows that, for whatever ineffable reason, that weren't released on DVD, thanks to die-hard fans/entrepreneurs who create websites and cobble together collections of the best possible quality they can manage. (One such collection is The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley. Which is still cute, if not the comedic genius I recall from my teens.)

I am happy to announce that Tales of the Gold Monkey is actually just as good as I remember!!! :D

I mean, it has its technical flaws. Due to budget constraints, for instance, the producers were forced to use stock footage that would be replaced with CGI nowadays. But the sets, costumes, cinematography are all great.

And, most importantly, the stories are great fun!

It's like (for me, anyway) rewatching Star trek: The Next Generation in that any flaws in the acting or dated technology are easy to overlook because you're really drawn into the story!

I seriously can't imagine why ABC canced Gold Monkey. Unless it was just too expensive to continue. But if that were the case, why didn't they try to make some of that money back by releasing it in syndication and, now, DVD?

I don't get it. It's a great show! I mean, maybe not The Twilight Zone great, but definitely high-quality for its time and enjoyable even today!

But, I've got it now, so I can watch each episode as much as I want! :D

And the quality of some of the episodes is surprisingly good! Like, you can tell that many of the episodes were transfered from VHS, but there are a few episodes that seem to be transfered from professional-grade Beta (like the stuff we still use here at work)!

Speaking of work...

It might be a good idea for me to get back to it. ;)

Well, That Didn't Go As Planned...

So, the highlight of my weekend was supposed to be an investigation Saturday night.

You caught the "was supposed to be" part?

My alarm was set for 5:00pm so that I could get ready, eat breakfast and meet up with the team at 8:00pm.

I woke up at 10:00pm to voice messages, the last one simply concerned about my well being!

I have found that when I oversleep and alarm, it might be a cold or something.

This proved, very quickly, to be the case. I spent Saturday night and all of Sunday in bed, sleeping and blowing my nose. :(

I don't know if it was a cold or severe allergies or what, but it wasn't really a flu. It was pretty much by body getting rid of... um... fluids... that it didn't want, and exhaustion.

But IT SUCKED, all the same!

I mean, yeah, sure, I'm thankful that it wasn't anything worse and that I was able to come into work tonight and all that, blah, blah... But I missed an investigation!!! How often do people invite you to haul your equipment into their potentially haunted home?

Yeah, okay, we get invited fairly frequently. More to be thankful for, and I am, but just...

Wah!

I wanted to go!

Am I being immature and selfish now? Yes. But I believe I am allowed to be.

Plus, I totally flaked on my teammates!

I mean, I have an excuse... But I let them down, just the same! :(

Okay, whining done. (For now.)

So the upside of my weekend wasted in bed?

MY BABY CALLED ME!!! :D

I actually got to talk to my Gnomey for quite a while Sunday!!!

She's had a lot going on in her life recently, so getting some actual phone-time with her was a coupe!

I love that woman! She just RULES!!! xoxoxo

A much lesser up-side to my lost weekend was re-watching most of Season 1 of veronica Mars. That really was an excellent show! The DVD player in my room only plays certain discs, so I was limited as to what entertainment I could pop in and let run for hours and hours while I alternated between watching and dozing, and Veronica Mars is one of the few TV shows I can watch in there. And I had actually forgotten just how great that show is! I mean, I remember loving it, but a lot of the details and nuances are lost to memory. Plus, I've only watched most episodes once, in order, so the way I remember the show is the way it ended. (The last season wasn't really quite as strong as the first 2.)

So that's a positive.

And, honestly, talking to my Gnomey is a much preferable highlight to the weekend than an investigation. :)

But BOTH would have been REALLY great!

My Stupid Games...

I got caught-up on my stupid MySpace and Facebook games. :P Talking Pirates: Rule the Caribbean! and Street Racer.

I've been leaving them be for days on end lately because I've been doing other stuff. You know, things other than sitting at the computer all day! (Reading books, writing, all kinds of stuff, lol.) But every few days I'll log on and spend an hour or so getting caught-up.

And on MySpace I couldn't help revisiting the Ghost Hunter game. And I thought I'd take you through a round of play (without the graphics, sadly, even though... well, it's not really that different without the so-called game graphics, lol.)

Okay, this is what it's like playing Ghost Hunters... here we go:

I log in, and look for a new mission.

You got a call that a haunted cabin to making scary noises and scaring the neighbors

Alright! It's on! Hang on to your drawers!

Do It

That's me clicking on the "Do It" button. Exciting, right? So I click on the "Do It" button and am taken to this screen:

In Progress
You Attempt to catch the ghost of the dark cabin
1 minute, 51 seconds remaining

Now, we wait.

Exciting, right? This is just an amazing game. I click a button, wait for 2 minutes... There isn't a countdown timer as part of the display, either, so I'm literally watching the clock to see when I can check my progress.

By the way, while we wait, I'd like to point out that the bolded text is an exact replica of game play. The misspelling and weak grammar is copied exactly as it appears in the game.

Not certain, but I don't believe English is the first language of whomever created this game, lol.

Okay, 2 minutes is up. Let's see how we did...

You Successfully de-bonked this story. Finding out it was a skeaky door in a Echo room.

Rewards
XP: 120
Cash: 9

Woo-hoo! 120 experience points and $9 cash!

Makes it all worth the wait, right?

So, apparently part of the point of this game is to de-bonk things. Which is sad, really, because there are some cool games at this one Flash site that has games where you try to bonk things... So it's weird playing a game in which I'm trying to un-bonk them.

(I'm not even commenting on the "Echo room".)

Okay, this Missions are kind of boring, so let's go back Home and see what else we can do...

Recruit more people to your squad to make your attacks more powerful.

Hmm...

Okay, let's see what the Battlefield page looks like. (I've made the joke in an earlier blog entry about how odd it is to have a Battlefield and Attack option for a supposed ghost hunting game.)

Get a larger Hunters!!!

Well, let's see about getting a bigger Hunters...

Okay, this takes me to a page with others playing the game and gives me the following options for interacting with them:

Attack or Spy

And on that note, it's time to leave, lol.

You know what sucks is that with some simple random-number generator programs and even simplistic graphics (researched by someone who actually knows what paranormal investigation is) and you could do a really cool ghost hunting game! Think Clue-ish. You know, using deductive reasoning to interpret clues and come to a conclusion.

That would be AWESOME!

If I knew how to write Html and/or Java I would SO create this game!

Who knows, I might even make a killing off it!

Or not... But it would be fun, and it might be popular! Not, like, Mafia Wars popular, true. But maybe, like, Street Racer popular.

Okay, I should get back to work. It's my "Friday" and it would suck to leave my workweek on a negative note because I'm not paying attention. ;)

If I don't blog tomorrow, HAVE A SPECTACULAR WEEKEND!!!

:D