Finally watching Inside No 9 series 2. “12 days of Christine”… I’m speechless.
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My name is David, and I am addicted to caffeine
I’m a regular tea drinker. By regular I mean betwen about 8 – 12 cups a day on average. This drinking is more out of habit of breaking up the work day, which is another word for addiction.
Whenever I don’t have tea I find myself feeling the usual symptoms like headache, sickness and general grumpiness. This is not good.
There are two ways of removing caffeine – cold turkey or weaning. I’m going cold turkey. Completely cold turkey. I did this once before a few years ago and felt the benefits within a week afterwards. The problem is the hell I went through getting there. Constant headache and inability to concentrate on work.
This is when you know you have a problem.
So today, Saturday 4th February 2017, is the day I stop drinking caffeine. And tea altogether. I have had 2 so far today but no more. I will probably do a quick write up each day to present my experiences and any positive, as well as any negative, effects I experience. In case anybody else wants to do the same thing.
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I don’t think I’ve ever been to a zoo or garden centre where the hot tap had any hot water.
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Whenever you are offered something for free, always ask how that company makes it’s money. Then ask if you can still ethically use it.
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Bought a second 1tb drive today to have a RAID 1 backup setup for my home Nextcloud server. The things I do to say #GoodbyeGoogle
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Review of Tomb Raider 2013
For my 14th Christmas I was bought an original Playstation along with a copy of the newly-released Tomb Raider 2. On boxing day I sat there, transfixed to the screen, trying to work out how to traverse the Great Wall of China with two tigers hot after my blood.
After a good few hours of working my way through that first level I finally made it out and was soon following the next clue to Venice. Ever since Lara first dropped down into the streets of Venice, gaming was never quite the same for me again.
This was the first time I remember being swept up in the magic of a gaming world. The winding waterways of Venice; the sunken wreck of the Maria Doria; the trippy, other worldly nexus of the Floating Islands; and finally the last ditch effort by Bartolli’s men on Lara’s home. Lara Croft was, and remains to this day, my favourite gaming hero.
After Tomb Raider 4: The Last Revelation I kind of lost interest in the series. I was moving on to other things in life and gaming sort of fell behind. I never actively searched out any of the newer releases since Tomb Raider 4. That was until the rebooted Tomb Raider (hereafter referred to simply as “Tomb Raider”) was released in 2013.
Tomb Raider 2013
Tomb Raider completely blew me away from the get go. Lara was finally a real flesh and blood woman. She came alive right in front of me and wasn’t actually a battle-hardened raider of tombs yet. She was a scared young woman, who I would come to follow through to discovering her destiny on the island of Yamatai.
During Lara’s journey across Yamatai, she encounters a range of adversaries: armed soldiers; huge, demonic Storm Guards; sneaky forest wolves. All are out for blood, and all you will need to fight through at some stage. People have mentioned to me how they were disappointed by the focus being more on the fighting than on the actual raiding of tombs. While it’s true if you just follow where the story nudges you, you may find puzzles at a minimum. However there are many tombs located across the island and are there for you to try and solve, should you want to. So it’s not that there are less puzzles as such, only that you can choose if and when you want to attempt each tomb. I find this is actually more realistic than previous games as these hidden tombs would be just that – hidden. In fact I am currently on my second play through and have discovered a whole portion of the Mountain village that I had missed on my first play through.
Lara’s seemless progression across the island make this one of the most immersive games I’ve played, and one that I keep wanting to return to. I never feel that I’m just in a game, only that I am fighting my way through a living, breathing, deadly landscape where everything from the wildlife to the patrol guards are out to get me.
For me, Tomb Raider is a welcome addition to the family; the big shot of adrenaline the series needed. It also serves as probably the best origin story for Lara too, along with 2015’s Rise Of The Tomb Raider, which follows on.
Tomb Raider can be picked up dirt-cheap on Steam now for both Windows and Linux and you really should experience it.
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Bring home the bacon – A review of the game Virginia
One of the marks of a great game is its ability to stay with you long after you’ve finished playing it. Even more so is it’s ability to imprint specific memorable scenes into your mind – surrounding them with feelings that help to bind that scene to your memory. Usually these memorable games are pretty long in length, having time to build up into those moments, however this is not the case with Virginia.
A small game with great depth
Virginia is probably the shortest game I’ve ever played in terms of start to finish, but it’s also one of the games to stay with me the longest after finishing it. One of the many things that Virginia does so well is it’s ability to contain so many iconic scenes compacted into its relatively short time span. And please don’t think I’m mentioning the time span of Virginia as being a negative thing – quite the opposite. The way you need to think of this game is as an interactive film / novel. The story is set and 99% of the actions are inevitable, however giving you full control over performing those actions puts you completely in the mind of the main character.
I have previously praised the music of Virginia, expertly written by Lyndon Holland, so I wont go too much into that again here. All I will say is that the music of Virginia is the game’s heartbeat; it’s skeleton; its very being…
…It kind of has to be when there are no words spoken in the whole game. That’s right, no words are spoken throughout the whole game! The story is driven forward, and the characters thoughts and feelings implied, by the aforementioned music coupled with the unique animation style used.
Virginia’s Exceptional Style
The artwork for Virginia is just as beautiful as the music that scores it. As you can see from the image above, the game’s scenes are very vibrant-looking with an almost painted aesthetic. It didn’t take much playing until I was wanting real life to look like this – simply put, it is gorgeous. Even the dark dream sequences are full of colour. The use of the photographer’s dark room red is exceptional in one of the games first dream sequences.
The story itself gets trippy and quite cryptic towards the end, in fact most of the game contains cryptic imagery, but it feels cohesive through it’s confusion. Like Twin Peaks, from which Virginia has lovingly taken much inspiration, so too does the story of Virginia not have to be completely understood first time round. Instead it is more than enough to simply soak up the dream-like atmosphere and let the game conjure up whatever feelings it does within you.
Virginia is a unique offering and a great accomplishment for the developers at Variable State, and I eagerly await their next offering.
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