Zzzz

I did try to write more over the holidays, but somehow there was never time even though we were never actually doing anything. This will probably become one of those situations where I cheat the LJ system and write about things in the past and then go back to move their dates around.

To summarize, we're back in Boston now, KLM did not lose our bags this time, and I'm exhausted.

Oh, happy new year, by the way. Now I'm going to have to get used to writing '2008' on everything, and I'd only just got used to putting '2007'.

Information

Information. The Christmas special (or series 4 episode 0) of Doctor Who was on Christmas evening. Information. It didn't look anywhere near as much like an episode of Power Rangers as last time. Information. I was actually rather frightened that the Heavenly Host would be a rework of the Weeping Angels from "Blink", but despite the similar appearance they really weren't anywhere near as good. Information. Getting them to talk like this all the time was all right at first, and was a rather drawn-out setup for what was eventually a funny line, but keeping it going after that was just irritating, as you can see. Information. Russell T Davies seems to be good at doing this to viewers, especially in that frankly stupid Max Headroom Whateverhisnameis death scene. Information. I'd rather like Steven Moffat to write more, because he came up with the Empty Child and Weeping Angels and apparently still hasn't been allowed to use the idea that he really thinks is frightening. Information. He's got three episodes in the coming series, so things might be a bit better. Information. Information. INFORMATION. Who are you? The new number two. Who is number one? You are number six. I am not a number! I am a free man! Bwahahahaha. Bzz, thump.

On the first day of Christmas KLM gave to me...

...some luggage that had been sitting in the airport since it arrived on Monday but had had all the tags ripped off it, so nobody thought to give it a second look when it was abandoned in the corner of the courier office and we eventually had to send a party to the airport to get it off their hands. They're getting a bundle of receipts from us to make up for our emergency Tesco clothes shopping. The incompetent idiots. Merry Christmas!

Flight Into Terror

I hate planes. It's something that I've been realizing over the last couple of years after they started becoming a regular feature and problem in my life - before that I had got over my fear of flying at 16 when we travelled by plane to Germany, and I had had no problem with occasionally flying before then. Not even when I spent ten or eleven hours on them flying to California, because at least that was a special event that didn't happen very often. Now, Whitney and I live three thousand miles away from both our families, exactly in the middle between the West coast of America and the Northeast coast of Scotland, and the only way to see either of them is to endure seven or so hours of airborne unpleasantness.

Our journey this Christmas involved going from Boston Logan to Amsterdam Schipol, and then on to Aberdeen Dyce (-With-Death Every Time You Land Here) from there. We were flying with KLM operated by Northwest Airlines, which I was only informed were known as "Northworst" well after we had to phone them up and convince them to seat us together instead of at opposite ends of the plane. Our first flight was at 7pm, and the trip was eventually to end at what would be 5am for us the next day.

To be fair to it, the longest leg over the Atlantic wasn't bad at all as far as flights go. I had loaded up my laptop with Lucasarts games beforehand, and we spent the time playing Curse of Monkey Island, or at least what I could remember of how to complete it because I'm otherwise useless at point and click adventures. And Ratatouille was on, which I hadn't seen before and completely destroys my idea that 3D animation can never have as much charm and character as traditionally drawn artwork.

After seven or so hours of that, we landed in Schipol, and it was there that I began to break down. After a seven-hour flight in a cramped seat breathing air already breathed in by everyone else and in a timeless vortex suspended between night and day (perhaps this is going a bit far), doing it again for any length of time seems like a worse idea than just swimming the English Channel and taking the train up. And it's made worse by Schipol's bizarre security. Instead of one large secure area with the gates behind it, each gate has its own individual security station that comes complete with a massive queue in front of it. After you've trudged to the scanner and had your belongings inspected like some sort of criminal, you turn the corner only to realize that you're trapped in a glass box with no escape route and more people piling in behind you. After a while, a pair of gates at the other end open, and much like a livestock market, the passengers are herded into a tunnel and down to the plane.

And I sat down, closed my eyes for a moment and suddenly realized that we were in the air. I've never slept through a takeoff before, and I thought that it would be a fairly difficult thing to do, but the exhaustion of the day made me achieve something that I never thought possible. But the disadvantage of letting yourself fall asleep is the awful feeling you get when your sleep is cut short, and I felt mildly to critically ill throughout descent (a feeling that wasn't helped by the captain announcing that the runway was a bit shorter than they'd expected so they'd have to slam on the brakes). After landing in wind and rain and going through customs, the journey was finally at an end.

At least, it would have been if KLM hadn't lost both of our bags. We waited at the luggage carousel for a while, with Whitney getting increasingly worried about the lack of bright red holdalls and suitcases coming round. I said not to worry because of the large group of people still waiting, and it was at that moment that the luggage people turned off the lights and went home. It wasn't just our bags that they'd lost - they'd failed to forward the luggage belonging to everyone with a connecting flight.

Now we're sitting at home watching the Top Gear presenters night, and I'm wearing the pair of jogging trousers that I've had on for thirty-six hours along with a dressing gown and "Thing 2" T-shirt scavenged from the bottom of a drawer. Whitney's been out to Tesco already and has returned with some rather decent inexpensive clothing (something that America has in very short supply, by the way). Also among the missing items are a few Christmas presents that we have to wrap, and rather importantly, my levothyroxine pills. The only effect of missing them for a couple of days will be to make me a little more tired and irritable, but at this point I doubt you'd be able to tell.

Heavy Metal Christmas

I haven't been terribly good at updating this recently, because work has been increasingly mental as we had to get three separate customizations of our software finished for three different legs of the company that we sort-of-now-work for. And this isn't going to be an informative entry either, because soon we're packing up our bags and going to Scotland.

A couple of years ago (but I honestly thought it was just last year), for a Christmas music special I brought you an offensively manic J-pop version of "Let It Snow". To balance that out, here are some unusual versions of Deck The Halls/Joy to the World and Little Drummer Boy by Matt Smith (ace). Unfortunately his band is called Theocracy and he's from Georgia, which most anyone would agree is a combination that indicates worrying madness.

And if you're not in the mood for Christmas music, you could always listen to Skeletor Goes to Mars instead.

Forever

I just genuinely had to check whether I'd fallen asleep for half a year and woken up on the first of April. But I haven't, and it looks like something unthinkable has happened. They might just be... close to... well, finishing it.

The thought is genuinely beyond my comprehension. I have an issue of PC Gamer from 1998 with a "near-finished" preview of that. Tune in tomorrow at noon where we'll discover just how far and wide 3DRealms' server has exploded from the entire world hitting it at once.

MMORPGs in disguise

It had to happen eventually. I had avoided them for so long, but as of last week, thanks to so many people on the Clickteam chatroom playing this, I have finally been bitten by the MMORPG ferret. This caught me by surprise because this is an RPG disguised as something else - it's Nexon Kartrider, which is what I'd politely describe as being "inspired" by Mario Kart (but it's still not quite as much of a ripoff as the blatantly plagiarized Crash Team Racing). So as it's just a racing game, everything's OK.

I should warn you in advance that it's impossibly cutesy and manages to be even more bubbly than Windows XP, but if you can get past that without being sick, it's easy to see that it's clearly an RPG underneath. It starts off in the tutorial mode, where you're shown the basic controls (left turns you left, right turns you right, hooray) along with the difficult-to-master "drifting" technique that you'll waste hours of time on before realizing it's mostly faster to just hold Up. Then you're left to run riot, either going straight into the multiplayer mode or trying to complete certain scenarios first.







The scenarios are well worth doing because they give you a decent amount of cash and "RP" (experience points, or "Race Points", possibly). I say "scenarios", but the game's still in the beta stage and there's only one of them at the moment - it tells, in rather broken English, the story of somebody with a rugby ball for a head called Dao who one day wants to become a championship kart driver by using his weird disembodied eyebrows and habit of ending most sentences with a tilde for some reason. It's played out in a visual style that's frankly worryingly similar to Strong Bad's Japanese cartoon, though the game is actually Korean - it's strange how as a country (or rather two countries) they got into online games so much.

Sooner or later you're nudged in the direction of multiplayer, either through your own choice or through scenario missions that tell you to practice your driving against other players. This is where things start to get interesting. The disadvantage with the game, as with all MMORPGs, is that you're forced to compete with semi-literate American skateboarder types. The advantage, as with all MMORPGs, is that you can beat them. After a while, anyway - you're only allowed on the lower skill level "channels" at first, and have to get a sense of where to be cautious and where to zoom ahead holding both middle fingers up behind you before you start to get significant amounts of experience from finishing in a respectable place. More experience gives you access to the higher-level channels, more driving tutorials for advanced techniques, more scenario missions which reward you with experience, and the whole unstoppable cycle continues until you realize you've been playing it for eight hours and everyone else has gone to bed.

There are several different game modes. You can opt to play individually or in teams - the team mode gives you slightly fewer points overall, but might be more lucrative if you get into a good team even though you're rubbish. More importantly, you can either play Speed mode or Item mode. Speed is a pure race - there's nothing but you and other drivers, and your position in the race is determined by your ability to pick the right spots to slide round corners and use your limited boosts wisely (or, failing that, your ability to swerve in front of other faster players and get them to crash into your cheating backside). Item Mode, just like Mario Kart, gives you the standard array of banana skins, water bombs and various other items of warfare with which to irritate the other players. Most of them have the effect of slowing them down to a halt several different ways so that you can cruise past them while they wave their fists at you Dick Dastardly-style, but there are a couple of more interesting ones like the Magnet which can be used to give you a great advantage if you fire it just at the nanosecond where you can see the race leader ahead of you on a long straight.

You'd think that the monotony of it would be a problem after a while (there are, at a guess, about fifteen tracks, five of which are decent) but it isn't - it's the promise of the ever-closer Level Up and, after a few of those, the next "Glove Colour" to show off to people that come with them that make it addictive. Not to mention that with just a couple more first places you might have enough money to buy the new kart that you've had your eye on. MMORPGs represent a world in which what our parents taught us to ignore now matters the most - material gain and being measured by no more than a number. I'd recommend that you create an account and download it yourself, but obviously you're above that level. Aren't you?

Unbelievabili-T

This morning, two of the trains on the line I take to work managed to excel themselves beyond all expectations and hit each other. So after taking the Green Line as far as the underground section starts, where we were moved to another train that got two stations before giving up as well, and being redirected to a shuttle bus that eventually weaved its way through traffic to Park Street, I decided to give up and go home. Particularly as there's meant to be a bit of snow this afternoon and they've never been very good at dealing with that either.

And Charlie was looking as optimistic about it as ever.


I'll write about something more interesting than trains soon, honest.

Insani-T

I know that you're going to think I'm a bit sad, but I've been recording the train arrival times at Park Street on my way home from work for the last couple of months, for the benefit of those awful bigheads on the community (and please remind me to edit this bit out before I cross-post this there). Basically, the Green Line is split off into four sections designated by letter, and everyone thinks that their train is always the last to arrive. So I've been putting this together to see what really happens - as you'll be able to see, my travel time back from work is fairly arbitrary, so hopefully this will give a decent impression of train times across the evening. My train is the C-line.

Date									Arrived	Left At	Waiting
26 Sept 2007	B	D	E	C					19:00	19:08	00:08
x:fmla="=A2+1">27 Sept 2007	D	B	D	D	E	C			18:45	18:58	00:13
x:fmla="=A3+1">28 Sept 2007	C								19:11	19:12	00:01
01 October 2007	B	D	B	C					18:56	19:03	00:07
x:fmla="=A5+1">02 October 2007	D	C							18:52	18:55	00:03
04 October 2007	D	B	C						19:20	19:26	00:06
x:fmla="=A7+1">05 October 2007
06 October 2007	B	D	C						19:07	19:13	00:06
09 October 2007	C								18:55	18:56	00:01
x:fmla="=A10+1">10 October 2007	E	B	C						19:10	19:13	00:03
11 October 2007	B	D	C						19:22	19:26	00:04
12 October 2007
15 October 2007	B	E	C						19:03	19:05	00:02
16 October 2007	C								18:59	19:12	00:13
17 October 2007	E	C							19:15	19:18	00:03
18 October 2007	B	D	E	C					19:25	19:31	00:06
19 October 2007	B	D	E	B	C				19:36	19:42	00:06
22 October 2007	C								19:06	19:07	00:01
23 October 2007	D	E	D	B	C				18:53	18:58	00:05
24 October 2007	C								19:08	19:11	00:03
25 October 2007	D	D	B	C					19:20	19:26	00:06
26 October 2007	D	B	E	C					20:04	20:12	00:08
29 October 2007	B	C							19:20	19:24	00:04
31 October 2007	D	C							17:24	17:28	00:04
01 November 2007	B	E	D	C					19:26	19:32	00:06
02 November 2007	D	C							19:22	19:27	00:05
05 November 2007	C								21:18	21:21	00:03
06 November 2007	B	D	B	C					19:11	19:18	00:07
07 November 2007	C								19:05	19:05	00:00
08 November 2007	C								18:49	18:50	00:01
09 November 2007	B	C							19:33	19:40	00:07
10 November 2007	B	C							19:36	19:38	00:02
13 November 2007
14 November 2007	B	D	B	B	E	D	D	C	18:49	19:00	00:11
15 November 2007	D	B	C						18:15	18:20	00:05
27 November 2007	C								18:37	18:39	00:02
28 November 2007	D	C							19:19	19:22	00:03
29 November 2007	E	B	D	B	C				19:15	19:22	00:07
30 November 2007	C								19:02	19:03	00:01
03 December 2007	C								20:13	20:13	00:00
04 December 2007	E	B	C						19:58	20:06	00:08
05 December 2007	B	E	C						19:01	19:04	00:03
06 December 2007	D	B	E	C					19:18	19:21	00:03

I apologize for the utter abominability of the table HTML, but Excel spits it out like that and it's rather difficult to go through and correct. Basically, from this lot, several things are apparent...

1. The rotation of trains is actually remarkably fair - 32 times out of 40, none of the other trains arrived twice while I was waiting.


2. Similarly, C arrived first 11 times out of 40. That seems fair enough to me.


3. Everyone thinks the B train arrives more than the others, and this seems to be right (it arrived first 14 times out of 40) - this is logical because that line has a stop every four inches and it takes hours to get to the other end. It's not a huge difference, though - both C and D are close behind with 11 first arrivals each.


4. The E-train passengers are the ones who should be annoyed, as their train arrived first only four times so far, and has never arrived twice while I've been waiting.


5. The longest I've ever been waiting was 13 minutes, during the times when the train is stuffed with people in red shirts going to watch the baseball, and the average wait for me is just under five minutes.

So in conclusion, we've really nothing to complain about. Apart from those three mysterious gaps you see in the table - those are the times when the red line train failed completely and I never got to Park Street at all. (Once because of a small fire in a bin, the second time because of a "police investigation" at Kendall, and the third time because I just couldn't stand it any more.)







But we've now reached winter again, and I'm anticipating the T having as many problems with a millimetre-thick layer of snow on the line and some slight dampness as they did last year. I'll make sure to keep this going and see if there's as much of a difference as I think. Of course, they try to reassure us that everything is all right in their adverts (this one from a billboard a couple of years ago).

It could be just me, but I don't think that they noticed the tone that I get from that advert - doesn't it seem that the model is actually trying to hold back laughter at looking at the claim that the T's winter schedule is in any way reliable? Additionally, the train is on the right hand line, which means that it's actually leaving rather than arriving (something all too common in the mornings when five trains limp past in the wrong direction for you before the first one you saw comes back). The rather large chasm between this and what actually happens was enough to convince people that the MBTA were in fact living in an alternate reali-T.

If you friend this community I'll stop going on about it

There's a new article on that might interest anyone who was as traumatized by Sierra-style adventure games as I was. And still am.

Overdone meme #94

What's in your copy-paste buffer at the moment? Hit Comment, hit Ctrl+V and submit the resulting gibberish to me. Just if you feel like it. I found this on a Google search for myself (shut up) and the results are often entertaining. And probably entirely fabricated.

If you're wondering, mine contains "Darkpaw". I don't know why, either.

Are you prepared to fly on a magic carpet?

I think that the recent downtime on FA (three completely separate issues within half an hour of fixing each other at last count) has driven one of the forum admins insane.



Just a theory.

I'll get you, Ben Croshaw

NOTE: The cutscenes in this game are VERY gory and bloody, so this game is not for the squeamish. Alternatively, you could read the walkthrough before you play the game, so you won't be surprised.

I can't begin to describe how little of the mood of the game this shows.

All things considered, I should probably have heeded that warning. I had known about the 5 days a stranger series (or, as it actually seems to be called, the Chzo Mythos) for a while, but when mentioned that they had been created by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation (who is very funny in a Marcus Brigstocke kind of way) it got my interest up enough to play it. And I have now been severely traumatized by an innocent-looking point and click adventure game.

The first in the series isn't too bad on the nerves. It's a bit tense at the same "ooh, this is a bit strange" level of most episodes of Doctor Who (i.e. those not written by Steven Moffat) but isn't likely to generate nightmares. You start off as a cat-burglar planning to loot an old mansion. Little does he know, however, that it's actually a DOOM HOUSE that is possessed by the ghost of what will later become known as John DeFoe - who takes the form of people when they touch an idol kept in the living room and gets them to kill others while wearing a welding mask and apron. And the warning on the download is slightly misplaced, as there are a couple of deaths, a body at the bottom of a swimming pool and a small amount of blood, but nothing like the wanton carnage that you're asked to prepare for.

This is a bit more like it.

Then I moved on to 7 Days A Skeptic. Unusually for a direct sequel, this game is set four hundred years after the original and on a spacecraft, which led me to believe that it would be entirely different from the first game. I was wrong. Shortly after the game begins, the crew recover John DeFoe's remains, which were shot into space shortly after the events of 5 Days A Stranger, and roughly the same thing starts happening to them. One of Yahtzee's favourite tactics, it seems, is to show your characters having nightmares. He's done this four times so far in the series, and the annoying thing is that I have not seen a single one of them coming.

The first part that really got me was just after the obligatory section where the hero is accused of the murders and locked up. In the middle of your protests, the possessed body of the captain wanders in behind your captor, breaks her neck and sets you free. Through some frantic clicking, you eventually force the monster into the cell where you were trapped and close it up. And then you wander off to warn the others. Except I went the wrong way, into the maintenance decks by mistake. Realizing my error, I turned around, opened the door and he appeared right in front of me. A scream and a shock cut to my character being strangled, and it was Game Over.

Once Whitney had peeled me off the ceiling, I somewhat foolishly decided that I would be able to continue, after looking up a guide to tell me exactly how to avoid things like that happening. But Yahtzee hits you with three things in a row. After the encounter with the possessed captain, the others decide that it's probably a good idea to escape, and go to sleep while the only available pod is refuelled. (Quite why an emergency escape pod needs a few hours to warm up is never really explained adequately.) In the morning, unsurprisingly, only two of the three remaining crew members turn up. Your character goes down to investigate the doctor's room, and finds what can only be described as a slaughterhouse, with a stitched-together torso abomination on the floor and spare limbs neatly arranged on the bunk bed. You would think that the similar scenes in Silent Hill would have been worse than this, but there's something about the clear pixelled artwork here that disturbs me immensely.

So after seeing that, you grab the key, run out of there as fast as possible, get back to the escape pod, open it up to discover that it is no longer there and are sucked out into space. I died here, and as my last save was before I went into the doctor's room, I decided I'd better stop. Then checked around the flat before going to bed in case anything was just around the corner with a machete.

However, I decided to face my fear and play it again on the way to work today. Passing all those scenes quickly, I got very near to the end, knew exactly what I had to do, approached the door to the captain's room, and the Welder burst out of it and stabbed me to death in much the same way as the captain had earlier. I'm not playing it again.

Recovering from Holiday

I have somehow survived the Thanksgiving week, and I'm now working at home taking a break to get over the holiday. I finally got to see again during the last day we were there, which was just about the only span of more than an hour that I had to myself over the past week and a half, but it was slightly marred by the nagging thought that I would soon have to get on a plane for six hours overnight. Daytime flights seem to waste more time, but there's something about knowing that you won't really be able to sleep with any degree of comfort for at least 24 hours that makes flying at night seem a dreadful idea starting the day before it happens.

So when the time finally came in the evening, we packed the van, climbed in and began reversing out of the driveway, whereupon the car instead shot forwards and demolished the garage door, which was a bit of a surprise. After some attacking it with a hammer and some pliers to get it back into a reasonable shape, it was eventually straight enough to close again and the journey went ahead otherwise as normal. My time waiting for the flight was spent wandering the entire length of the airport in search of Vitamin Water, which was eventually found in the shop opposite where we were sitting in two of its most revolting flavours.

Despite being overnight, the flight back was rather more comfortable than the flight there. This is largely due to my small, yellow and slightly illegal friend Temazepam - with its aid, I was able to go into a hypnotic sleep for about four hours, during which I unfortunately experienced the aural illusion of Dragonforce's entire first album being played in my right ear. I can't describe to you how nice a feeling it is when you wake up from a half-asleep stupor, half your hands numb from lying on them because the only comfortable sleeping position is slumped forwards dead on the tray table, look at the monitor and see your plane landing.

However, I won't be able to experience that in Britain, because temazepam is a class B drug there and I'll have to once again attempt to sleep unaided on the plane in a month. I can't understand why it's one of the most abused prescription drugs, as all it does is send you to sleep, with some unpleasant side effects such as memory loss, motor impairment, headache, muscle weakness and memory loss. The jetlag has hit me in full force today, but strangely, throughout yesterday I found myself perfectly alert, able to play the guitar rather better than I had previously and didn't experience any of the confusing hallucinogenic side effects of temazepam at all. Then I swallowed the television and went to bed.

On holiday - Part 5

Whitney's family have very strict and unbendable traditions for Thanksgiving (the day that the British give thanks that several boats pushed off and gave the rest of them some more room). It begins with a potato and egg breakfast, followed by a film, then a board game, then a traditional dinner of... seafood stew. Because they're vegetarians, you see.

This year, after altogether far too much debate about the subject because there really weren't any good Thanksgiving films out this year (whatever a good Thanksgiving film is), we went to see Hitman. Now, it's true that I share my dad's taste for really stupid films (Independence Day, Van Helsing, Mortal Kombat, and so on) but I genuinely think that the reviews for this film have been rather harsh. I would actually go so far as to say that it's the best game to film conversion so far, although let's be honest, competition in this field is not fierce. And I haven't played the game for more than about ten minutes over at Craig's when we were in sixth year of school, so I don't really know anything.

I had only been aware of Timothy the Oliphaunt since Die Hard 4, in which he was rubbish. But here he somehow works, because much like Roger Moore he is only capable of one expression - that of mild annoyance - and that translates rather well into being totally emotionless. The plot involves Scottish Bloke, English Bloke and Russian Bloke attempting to find Agent 47 as he performs various hits, but beyond that is not incredibly coherent. And it's not as if he would be very difficult to trace. "Tall. Bald. Barcode on head." It's true that the film is just one gunfight after another, but you couldn't expect any more, really.

The board games came out next, and in a variation on the traditional theme, they were both DVD-video games (something that I hadn't seen since the likes of Atmosfear about fifteen years ago). These were Scene-It and Jeopardy.

On a technical level, I was quite impressed with the Jeopardy game. It uses three infra-red "buzzer" units which communicate via IR to a large battery powered "game unit" that doesn't appear to contain anything at all, which passes on signals to the DVD player via an IR transmitter that is velcroed to the DVD player's IR receiver. Understand that? Keep going, it gets better. I'm not certain of the memory on DVD systems - I had thought that they were just flowchart-style menus with very little room for actual variables, but this keeps score and keeps track of subjects chosen from a six-by-six grid throughout the game.

However, where it falls down is how they've chosen to ask the questions. The only quiz game that did it competently was Trivial Pursuit on the Commodore 64, which was brave enough to rely entirely on the judgement of the other players to decide whether you'd got a question right or not, which was perfect - otherwise you're working with parsing hundreds of multiple possibilities and deciding whether a misspelling is close enough. This goes for having multiple-choice answers - and while that's not disastrous in itself, the possible answers they've chosen make even the difficult questions extremely easy. For example:

This composer wrote Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. What is...
a) Mozart
b) Beans
c) An abdominal muscle

Osiris was the Egyptian god of this.
a) The afterlife
b) Biscuits
c) Hairdos

So the best way to win the game became the "Stab furiously at the buzzer until it recognizes you" tactic, followed by ticking the obvious answer. Although there were a few bombs in it where you were supposed to know the height of a dam in Kazakhstan or the like. The other disadvantage to this game is that when we opened the DVD player drawer it was no longer there, and said player is now out on the table with the disc presumably lodged in its innards until someone can find whatever star-shaped tool is needed to unpick the insane star-shaped screws on the sides.

Scene-It is actually much better - it has a far simpler DVD system than Jeopardy did (and I'm glad I've got that out the way, because it's an incredibly awkward word to spell), relying on just a menu to select different categories from, from which questions are chosen at random. And the correctness of an answer is decided by the other players, with tie-breaker questions also provided. It's a quiz about films, which I don't really know much about (see opinion of Hitman, above) but has enough observation-type questions to make sure that pretty much everyone has a chance.

Then there's the meal in which everyone eats far too much, then bed, followed by tree-hunting the next day. I may write something about that, but seeing as I'll be on another six-hour flight within twelve hours my capacity for writing entertainingly is not fantastic.

Back from Los Angeles

By the way, I should probably mention that all the entries I'm going to post over the next couple of days are from the past - I've spent a few days at Whitney's grandmother's house without Internet, and it's amazing how isolated it makes you feel when you normally rely on it so much for communication. So I'm going to get around to answering any emails (which I need to do, at great length) soon.

On holiday - Part 4

Today, I got up (not through choice) at about 6am in worry about the coming car journey. Scavenging the house for food again, I found some fat-free milk and half a decaying sandwich from yesterday. Then, at about half past nine, we set off - six people in the car, Whitney and I relegated to the back seat as something approaching cargo because nobody else can fit there, and four hundred miles ahead of us.

I don't think that I've ever had a car journey that lasted more than about two hours since my family used to drive all the way down Britain to catch the ferry over to Germany, but strangely, it didn't really feel that long. Californian roads have a strange speed limit that is something like the average between the actual posted speed limit and whatever everyone is actually doing, unless an obvious unmarked police car is nearby in which case everyone goes as slow as possible. So, at a more or less constant 80 miles an hour, the distance flew past. This journey is something that Whitney's family do quite regularly, but I wouldn't care to experience it again if I can possibly help it.

This is the route.

Now we're finally at Whitney's parents' house, where they're constantly stressed about their increasingly stupid builders - they're having their bedroom rearranged, and this involves moving a couple of other walls around. Whitney's cupboard has moved across the room and everything is coated in a thick layer of dust that we've just about got through. We'll have about two days with nothing incredibly hectic on the horizon, then a trip to get a Christmas tree, which the brothers are always incredibly picky about (it absolutely must be an inch above arm's length to be the right height for the ceiling) and involves a lot of struggling and falling over. This would be a strong contender for the most stressful holiday ever if my own family hadn't insisted on going down to St Andrews most years when I was in primary school and packing six people into a caravan.

On holiday - Part 3

Good morning grass, good morning coconuts. After some confusion as to the plans last night, Whitney and her parents have run off to Disneyland leaving me and rest of the Geriatrics Club behind (Cameron has twisted his ankle, Drew has a cold, and I am slowly going mad and can't cope with lack of proper Scottish food such as meat, fat and gristle). The trouble is that in a house owned by someone who survives entirely on yoghurt drinks, there isn't really any actual food - I did attempt to scavenge some breakfast from upstairs, but I can't recall quite how many years the Cheerios I found were out of date.

It appears that we're going to spend the day watching the worst television in the world - at the moment Jerry Springer is on and has a lot of people with silly accents standing around forgetting their scripted lines and occasionally hitting each other with chairs, but not quite enough for it to be entertaining. And then there's four straight hours of Home Improvement.

Added at 6pm: In the middle of the Transformers film. Send help.

Life in the city, living in L.A.

I've just realized several things. I'm in Los Angeles, surrounded by rather obscene wealth. Somehow, this has made me realize even more that nothing is the same as it is in Britain - the Scotch pies I used to like from Fisher and Donaldson are unknown (in fact someone had to ask me what "pie 'n' chips" were the other week - I was unable to begin explaining it to someone who had no idea of the concept). Nobody here understands what cricket is, and I've no idea about the rules of most American sports - American football in particular seems like a large-scale violent version of Backgammon. And I'm constantly lamenting how rubbish American television is compared to what I miss in Britain, particularly now the writer's strike is set to eliminate all the virtually identical police dramas that fight off all the virtually identical vote-off-by-week reality programmes.

In other words, I've become the Sherrif of Huddersfield.

On holiday - Part 2

I think it's fair to say that nobody in the family was particularly enthusiastic to go to a cocktail party for the over-80s, but it wasn't too bad an experience - in particular, it featured the most expensive-looking buffet that I am likely to see in my entire life, and we all stuffed ourselves with the gigantic pile of sashimi.

And today, we went down to an all-you-can-eat brunch buffet, where everyone made themselves ill and then had to suffer the indignity of the Toilet Attendant. This is something I haven't experienced before - he hangs around outside the cubicles, sprays your hands with soap when you approach, hands you some paper towels and then expects a tip for it. I can't describe to you just how incredibly awkward it is.

One of the advantages of Whitney's grandmother's house is having a pool outside, and we swam during the evening, with me discovering that I can now just about manage twice my official badged swimming length - five metres. Never really having learned to swim is quite embarrassing at this stage, seeing as if you fell into the water while dead you would probably float five metres faster that I can swim it.

Tomorrow we were going to go to Disneyland, but nobody feels up to it any more. We might even drive up back to Whitney's parents' house instead. Five and a half hours on the road - you couldn't drive anywhere near that length in Scotland, you'd fall into the sea. And I wouldn't be able to swim.