Superbowl=fun. However, in two weeks I’ll have forgotten about the game and won’t be able to tell you who played. I’ll still be able to tell you about the fresh lemon/limeade we enjoyed, burning out my decade-old juicer in the making. Those are my priorities and I’m sticking with them.
Now that that is done with, let me offer something fun to take the place of all those football games you barely cared about:
It’s 1754, Covent Gardens, London. John Fielding has just hired you as his newest Bow Street Runner–in a city filled with crime of every sort, Fielding and his now-deceased brother Henry are trying to form a police force of sorts. It’s a dangerous job, and no one believes it’ll work, but if you can solve crimes and bring criminals to justice, you just might institute a new social order.
Such is the setup for Bow Street Runner, a free online flash game created as a companion to the TV series City of Vice. And where most flash games are goofy animation of one sort or another, this is a live-action mystery game, with real actors and excellent costuming. Hell, they even have professional lighting.
You, as the newest runner, are given a murder to solve. Is it a simple robbery or is it something more? You click around the screen to find clues, interview bystanders and defeat simple puzzles (mainly by clicking a tracing shapes on screen to represent feats of dexterity like picking locks or pockets).
It’s not perfect. You can’t leave a scene until you’ve collected all the necessary evidence, and the game environment is so rich that it can take a while to load (note the subject header of this post). It’s tremendously fun, though, even if it is a little grim ‘n’ gritty. If you get stuck, though, you can find a walkthrough here.
Really, this is impressive in many different ways.
Caution: not kid-safe. If you want kid-safe, play Aether, which is beautiful and fun.
And now I’m off to stimulate the economy. Also, still waiting to get notes about my proposal.
Superbowl Sunday is tomorrow, but there’s still time to make this epic snack!
The picture has to be seen to be believed.
First, a link: Donald Maas’s The Career Novelist is now available as a free download. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but it looks pretty interesting, despite being from 1996.
Second, my editor asked me to hold off working on Man Bites World until we can straighten out the proposal. She has some concerns with it. Which is fair and, you know, that’s why she reads the proposal. She wants to make sure that the fantasy thriller I’m supposed to write isn’t going to be a daring homage to my two favorite movies, PORKY’S 2 and THE BICYCLE THIEF.*
But I worked on it anyway. It was just a few hundred words, but I couldn’t leave it alone.
And, because I’m not trying to meet a daily or weekly goal at the moment, I took some time to finish the book I’m reading. After three or four false starts, I dug into Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe (a pseudonym for Donald Westlake). It’s a mystery novel written in the mid-sixties, with all the racial and gender issues that implies, but the writing was appealingly bleak and the protagonist engaging. I’m tempted to dig up the rest of the books (I know there are only five, with a personal closure of sorts) to see if and how he deals with his personal demons.
And now I have to sign off, do some research here at the library (my wife found some green mold growing on the wall behind a piece of furniture, and I need to research the best way to deal with it. Seattle, you annoy me.) and then hit a couple of stores. I need to buy a couple of things for the Superbowl/Puppybowl party my son and I will have tomorrow, but not so much that I leave a bunch of food lying around the place.
See, on the Monday after the game, my wife and I will be doing a fast. It’s not one of those crazy lemon juice and cayenne fasts I used to do (she hates those); it’s this thing with specific foods you’re supposed to eat and so on. Anyway, I don’t do these to lose weight (although that happens). I do them because it’s a stark way to look at the way I eat and my emotional connections to food. The first fast I ever did was a revelation, and I’m curious to see what insights I’ll get this time.
I plan to write about it over the next week and a half, though, so be ready to skim if that sort of thing doesn’t interest you.
Off to the reference shelves. Hope you guys are having a nice day.
* Quick note: I haven’t actually seen either of these movies.
A routine traffic stop in Florida turned up a man who faked his own death in 1989. He isn’t being charged with a crime and claims to have abandoned a fiancee and a child twenty years ago because he has grown paranoid about his “narcotics-related activity.”
Two men in New Zealand, after being convicted and sentenced, were being taken to jail when they made a break for it. Handcuffed together, the men fled across a parking lot, only stopping when the men tried to run on opposite sides of a light pole.
There’s video at that site.
The men had been pepper sprayed in their escape attempt, so I’m guessing they were running blind.
And, watching SUPERNATURAL, I realize I have no interest in seeing Sam and Dean’s high school years.
Finally, I just listened to Michael Pollan talk about healthy food and healthy eating. Interesting stuff, and not the usual “low carb/low fat” dumbosity.
Chris Sims writes The Internet Writes Batman.
For them what weren’t around back then, a few years back I and my family were in tough financial straits. Basically, my wonderful wife needed shoulder surgery, and the only health insurance we had was a Mastercard.
So, yeah. You know where this is going, I’ll bet. We came close to bankruptcy, and only avoided that by being insanely frugal. When we came out the other end (weirdly, it happened a month before I signed with my agent–everything turned around in those few weeks) my marriage was stronger than ever and I was determined to see health care reform in this country.
Anyway, those frugal habits have been very hard to break. Eating at restaurants. Buying books. Shopping for organic foods again.
And turning on the heat. We didn’t turn on our heat at all the last couple of winters–getting by on found scrap wood in the fireplace and cooking lots of roasts and bread.
But earlier this week, I’d had enough. I was honestly sick of it. I hated being cold all the time. I hated wearing a knit cap and neck gaitor inside, and sleeping under four blankets and two unzipped sleeping bags.
So, this afternoon, my son and I cleared the furniture away from our baseboard heaters. Then we took out all the paper airplanes, flower petals, number 2 pencils, yellow highlighters and paraffin candles that had fallen onto it over the past few years.
And I turned on the heat. I swear, I can not even express to you what a tremendous relief it is to be in a 62 degree apartment.
I wonder what other habits I still need to deprogram.
This is very much how I’ve tried to live my life and solve my problems. It’s not easy. In fact, sometimes it feels almost shameful to continually adjust adjust adjust.
But it works.
We opened the Alton Brown ginger ale at dinner tonight, and… yeah. There was no fizz, and I know it’s not because the recipe was flawed. It was because we don’t turn on the heat in our apartment. It’s always in the mid-50’s around here, and yeast really wants higher temps than that.
Still, as flat soda, it was pretty amazing–not very sweet, but the ginger flavor was fresh and sharp. I’ll try it again in the spring when things are warmer around here.
And I managed 1,800 words today, which is a hugely productive day for me. I’d love to be able to write 9K in four hours, the way some writers do, but no. I finished my 1.8K in four hours (and they were difficult words, too), and I’m glad. More tomorrow.
I’ve started Man Bites World a few times now, and it doesn’t work.
I should rephrase that. It hasn’t worked so far. It’s been a little frustrating because–as I’ve mentioned so many times around here–I have to give the book to my agent in July. That’s not a lot of time for me.
Anyway, I think I figured out why the opening doesn’t work. Tomorrow, I’m going to rustle myself out of bed before dawn and rush out to the Starbucks. With any luck, I’ll make a good start on this book.
I have a good feeling about this one.
Aaaaaannnnd, I’m going to try the LJ-cut again from my WordPress blog. If the cut shows up, there won’t be anything behind it.
testing testing.