Articles – Page 86

Busy Busy Busy

It’s going to be one of those weeks. I can tell: I haven’t finished stuff I was going to do on Monday morning yet. It’s not helped by the fact that we’ve had various computers fall over and we’ve got two French students (as part of the Leonardo da Vinci scheme) who need leading-by-the-hand for a couple of days. So much to do!

Still; Knightmare Night tonight; that’s always a giggle, and we’ll probably get to the end of season 3 and start season 4, which is the first one with pre-filmed outdoor scenes, the “dragon flight” sequence, the eye shield, and Pickle.

Geek Night

Last night’s Geek Night was fab: thanks to everybody who came. I didn’t win a single game, but that’s not what it’s about at all, really, is it. Kings & Things was fab, and it was great to get to play Tigris & Euphrates again (and lose for a change, damnit, at it). It was also great to watch the Illuminati game opposite, in which Andy destroyed the United Nations and Sian (who seemed to quite enjoy it, the happy little conspiracy theorist that she is) fought to control “weird” groups, and then there was the Chrononauts game with Jimmy and Pete, and… it was a fab night, anyway.

In other good news, Andy‘s going to launch his version of my Dingbats Challenge, soon, I gather, having receive a little technical support from my version in getting it set-up. Watch this space.

And finally – people coming to Knightmare Night tomorrow: fear not! For time turns and season four is on it’s way… there shall be at least two more Knightmare Nights hereafter!

Right; back to it… but first, lunch.

Hollywood Pizza

Hey, I was just looking at Troma Night‘s last Hollywood Pizza receipt, and I’ve noticed that they’ve stopped writing the full address at the top of the receipt for the delivery driver. Now they just write “Cambrian Place”.

After 75+ Troma Nights, we’ve finally managed:

To be their only customer in Cambrian Place: or, at least, their only customer worth mentioning on a Saturday night.
To get them to regularly bring the pizza straight in and up to the living room, if we leave the door unlocked and put a sign on it requesting this, and tip the delivery driver.
To know who we are based on the size and time of our order, and so not have to state the address, sometimes.

Goals for the next 75 Troma Nights include:

Improving upon point #2 – if we don’t call by 9pm on a Saturday, they should be at a point where they’re considering calling us. To help them in this, we will now always give them the landline phone number when we order.
To get a regular customer discount – we hear that the owner is particularly unlikely to provide this (a customer that orders several times a week hasn’t yet managed, but perhaps we can persuade him otherwise by mentioning that we’ve been approached by Pier Pizza (Pizza Royale) with a better offer… hmm, perhaps we should wait until Troma Night 150 first).
Getting them to suggest pizza based upon who is present (“Is Andy there? Okay, so that’s a Meat Feast…”) or, at least, to reverse this association upon delivery (“I’ve got a Vegetarian With Jalapenos On Half, umm… that for Sian and Ruth, right?” from the deliveryperson). Perhaps we could not take the pizzas from them until they’ve learned everybody’s names, and work up fromt here.

Dan’s Dingbats Challenge II – Results

Great turnout for Dan’s Dingbats Challenge II. Thanks for playing, all of you who did! Here’s the scoreboard:

Position	Player	Time Taken	Right Answers	Total Time
1	The Amazing Wonko Best score, great time to boot… beat Jimmy by just three seconds.	3mins, 42secs	13.5	4mins, 2secs
2	Jimmy Fastest overall time and a very good score. So very close to winning…	3 mins, 25secs	13	4mins, 5secs
3	Dimmer	3 mins, 51secs	13	4mins, 31secs
4	Claire	4mins, 36secs	12.5	5mins, 36secs
5	Paul	4mins, 41secs	12	6mins, 1sec
6	Gareth @ SD	5mins, 32secs	13	6mins, 12secs
7	JTA	5mins, 57secs	13	6mins, 37secs
8	Ruth Unfortunatley for her, her second attempt [total time 3mins, 1sec] doesn’t count)	3mins, 46secs	9.5	6mins, 46secs
9	Andy K	5mins, 6secs	10 (two half-marks)	7mins, 46secs
10	“scatman” (not me!)	4mins, 10secs	8	8mins, 10secs
11	Jen W	5mins, 52secs	8.5	9mins, 32secs
12	Matt @ SD	6mins, 24secs	8.5	10mins, 4secs
13	Hagen @ SD	10mins, 28secs	11	12mins, 28secs
14	Hayley	10mins, 51secs	9	14mins, 11secs
14	John K	9mins, 50secs	7	14mins, 30secs

Here are the answers. Click on any of the dingbat thumbnails to see the full-size versions:

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Just like the previous challenge, this one began with a particularly difficult puzzle. The words “bird” and “two” appear inside the words “hand” and “bush”, respectively, and the equals sign states that they have equal worth. Devillishly difficult, but an impressive number of people got it. Half-marks for “a bird in the hand beats two in the bush”, because it was so very nearly there.

Three cheers.
Finally, a dingbat that everybody can get.

Rock around the clock.
It’s a clock, with the word “rock” repeated around it. Well?

Drinkin’ to forget.
The word “drink” appears in the phrase “24get” (“to forget”), so “drink in 24get”. Anything vaugely close got the marks, but “some kind of low fat drink” didn’t, and neither did “24 hour drinking”. Difficult.

Head over heels in love.
The word “head” over two (different, just to be confusing) kinds of “heels”, inside a heart (love). Most people got this one, but “feel it head to heel” and “grr argh” remain the two most spectacularly wrong answers.

History repeats.
I thought this one was really easy, but apparently it isn’t. “History follows history”, “history is history”, “two versions of history” and “past” are all wrong answers.

Mixed vegetables / tossed vegetables.
Everybody saw the word “vegetables” in here, it seems, and even “chopped vegetables” is worth a half-mark. I thought it would be tougher to put the word back together than it obviously was.

Once in a blue moon.
Easy, again: the word “once” on a blue-tinted moon. I’ve had complaints from two colourblind participants, but they both got it right anyway.

Green with envy.
More complaints from colourblind participants, one of whom had to hold up something that they knew to be green and squint at them both together to be sure they were actually looking at something that was green.

Capital punishment.
The word punishment written, quite clearly, in capital letters. “Punishment takes a lifetime” is very, very wrong.

Backseat driver.
My favourite from this set. It’s the words “seat driver” written backwards. Many participants hunted for inner words, anagrams, and all sorts, not bothering to try to read it from right to left. My favourite wrong answer was “Argh! It looks like revision! Help!”

Tickled pink.
Unpopular again with the colourblind participants. Nonetheless, everybody got it right.

Big Trouble In Little China
The correct answer, which only a few people got, was “Big Trouble In Little China”: it’s the name of a film. “Big Trouble In China” and “Trouble In Little China” miss the bigger (or littler) picture, and only get half-marks, while “Trouble In China” gets none. Get over it.

No harm in trying.
My second-favourite in this set; one which many people got wrong. The word “harm” is being crossed out from the middle of the phrase “tryharming”, which of course leaves the word “trying”, with no “harm” in it: therefore, “no harm in trying”. Wrong answers included “self harming”, “out of harms’ way”, and “trying to disarm”.

So, thanks again to everybody who participated, and big congratulations to The Amazing Wonko! Congratulations also due to Jimmy (great fast time – if only you could have shaved three seconds off it or got one more half-mark you’d have one) and Dimmer. Also well done to all those who participated in this and the last one, and got better as a result of the practice.

I’ll leave things there for awhile, but I think that Andy may be working on his very own “Dingbats Challenge” (or something like it) in the near future. Watch this space.

Dan’s Dingbats Challenge II

Hot on the heels (that’d make a good dingbat!) of Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I (results and answers here) comes Dan’s Dingbats Challenge II! The dingbats are, on average, a little easier (and a little more logical), but the penalty for skipping one or getting it wrong has been increased to 40 seconds added to your time. I’m the only person who’s seen them this time around, so Claire is allowed to compete this time.

Will Suz, Andy and Paul struggle to steal first place from one another again? Will Statto or Ruth jump in and take the lead? Will Hayley and Gareth pull their respective fingers out? There’s all to play for…

Play Dan’s Dingbats Challenge II!

Paul Is The Most Fucking Random Person In The World

Paul M: fucking nutter. The most random person you’re ever likely to meet. But you’ve got to love his sincerity.

This morning, I’m happily sat at my workstation, staring, as I do, at program code and pausing from time to time to check the RSS feeds of the usual crew, when the phone rings: Matt answers it; it’s Technium reception – they’ve got a parcel for us. Ooh; that’s exciting, but Matt’s deeply involved in some code so I offer to go and collect it. The arrangement here among us lazy folks is that the receptionist puts the parcel in the lift, and one of us toddles along the corridor and takes it out of the lift on this floor.

I stood outside the lift and listened as it came up to the first floor. The door opened, and I lifted out the parcel… and that’s when I noticed the first strange thing: the parcel was addressed to me, personally (which is very unusual) and the address was written entirely in marker pen (rather than being a printed label, as most goods delivered to us here are). I’m not expecting anything; least of all at work: I never give my work address to anybody. Who could have sent this?

I opened it and laughed out loud. It took just a second to realise what was going on, as I recalled a conversation in the RockMonkey ChatRoom yesterday lunchtime…

[11:38] * Ava_Work goes to nuke food
[11:38] <Ava_Work> Hmm… spaghetti hoops on toast for me, methinks…
[11:39] <Pacifist_049> You’re microwaving spaghetti hoops?
[11:41] <Ava_Work> Yup.
[11:41] <Ava_Work> Why?
[11:41] <Pacifist_049> Philistine
[11:41] <Ava_Work> So…
[11:41] <Ava_Work> …how else can I do it?
[11:41] <Ava_Work> And think carefully now…
[11:41] <Pacifist_049> Pan
[11:41] <Ava_Work> A pan. Which I don’t have. But let’s pretend I did. How would I heat it?
[11:41] <Pacifist_049> I know you don’t have a cooker at work, but that’s not the issue here. It’s the principle, damnit!
[11:42] <Ava_Work> So; as it pisses YOU off so much, feel free to bring me a pan and a cooker. Then I’ll do it your way, which is – in the end – preferable.
[11:42] <Ava_Work> However, it doesn’t piss ME off enough that I’ll go hungry rather than nuke spaghetti hoops.

Click on images for larger versions.

The parcel, as shown above, contains a pan, wooden spoon, loaf of bread, tin of spaghetti hoops, and a strangely familiar electric hob.

Which is a fab gesture, although if I use it for my lunch today I’ll have to do so on the sly, on account of the fact that the Technium facilities manager is in today and this particular piece of electrical equipment has not been electrically safety-tested.

Electrical safety test sticker.

What the fuck. Thank you, Paul!

Some Pictures From My Phone

Some pictures I just extracted from my phone:

ASSA are branching out. Not just (experi)mental music, they do locks, too!

This sticker was found in the ladies toilets underneath the library on Llanbadarn Campus. I think it might be a little out of date… look at the phone number!

Paul & his dragon. I’m not sure whether or not the person who sent me this picture wanted it to be put online, so I’ll assume that they did…

Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I – Results

I’m glad to see so many people took part in Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I; hope you all had fun. As promised, here are the results (and the answers). Don’t forget, the total time is the time taken plus a 30 second penalty for every wrong answer or skipped question. I did award a number of “half marks” for things, as explained further down, each costing only 15 seconds. Here we go:

Position	Player	Time Taken	Right Answers	Total Time
1	suz Slipped in at really, really the last minute.	3mins, 2secs	7	6mins, 32secs
2	andyr Slipped in at the last minute.	4mins, 26 secs	9	6mins, 56secs
3	The Pacifist Surprisingly, considering his negativity to it, almost won, ’til andyr slipped in while I was collating the scores.	3mins, 50secs	7.5	7mins, 5 secs
4	Statto & Chloe	4mins, 52 secs	9	7mins, 22secs
5	Ruth	3mins, 45secs	6	7mins, 45 secs
6	Dim	5mins, 46secs	7	9mins, 16secs
7	Jimmy	5mins, 37secs	6.5	9mins, 22secs
8	John K	4mins, 55secs	3	10mins, 45secs
9	Hagen	7mins, 10secs	6	11mins, 30secs
10	Sundeep	7mins, 53secs	5	12mins, 43secs
11	Matt In The Hat	9mins, 10secs	6 (two half-rights)	13mins, 30secs
12	Hayley	8mins, 39secs	4 (two half-rights)	13mins, 59secs
13	Knobcheese (Gareth@SD	11mins, 58secs	4.5	16mins, 8secs
14	Claire Disqualified because she saw some answers early	3mins, 28secs	14	3mins, 28secs

Here are the answers. Click on any of the dingbat thumbnails to see the full-size versions:

Pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and start all over again.
Only one person got this right, but, to be fair, it’s perhaps the toughest of the set. For those that need an explanation, the letters to the left read “pick your self” (upwards), the middle letters read “dust your self” (downwards), and finally there’s a picture of the word “again” with the word “start” all over it.

Looking back over my shoulder.
“Looking over my shoulder” isn’t good enough: there’s got to be an effort to point out that the word “looking” is spelt backwards. Most folks who didn’t fall into this little trap got this one right, though.

Beauty (is) in the eye of the beholder.
One of my favourites. “Beauty and the bees” scores no marks. Explanation: the word “beauty” is “in” the letter I (“eye”) of the word hive, which is, of course, a “bee holder”. Sickeningly kick-yourself-afterwards.

Little Italy
Almost everybody got this one.

An inside job.
Hideously difficult: I didn’t get this one when first I saw it. The word “an” appears within the word “job”, but it’s hard to see because they’re both very short words. Other dingbats in this style try phrases like “BOPUSSOTS” (puss in boots), which are longer, or use colour or case to differentiate between the words. Keep an eye out for ones like this, only a couple of people got it. Things about banjos aren’t even slightly right, but I can see where you’re coming from.

Just around the corner.
I accepted “Just on the corner.” and “Just in the corner.”, too. Pretty simple, afterwards, but a pain in the arse when you have to guess it.

Letters of the alphabet.
Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I promise never to do one this bad ever again. Surprisingly, a few people got it, and not just ones to whom this phrase is an in-joke with me (for several days on end, I found the phrase “lettuce of the alphabet”, and the image it conjured, hilareously funny). “Alphabet lettuce” gets half a mark, ‘cos I was feeling nice, but “The sweedish alphabet” (what?) and “Cabbage with white letters on it” aren’t worth any. Sorry again.

Lioness.
It’s the word “lie”. On the letter “S”. Lie-on-S. Could it be any simpler? Apparently so, as only about half the people who participated got it.

Low Fat Milk.
Didn’t come out as well as I’ve have hoped, so I happily gave half-marks for “skimmed milk”, “condensed milk”, and “reduced milk”.

Blackout.
The word “out”. In black. Might have been easier if most of the word you’d seen weren’t in black, but what the hell.

Potatoes.
Another of my favourites. It’s a pot, followed by eight “O’s”. Incorrect answers included “A binary gardener gathers no moss” (what?) and “Planting seeds”.

Scrambled Eggs.
I’d also accept “Broken eggs” (‘cos it’s a better answer), “Eggs – beaten”, or a million and one other similar things. Lenient.

Just a tick.
You might have thought that the clue, “…hang on a minute…” might have been a giveaway here, but apparently it wasn’t. Anything even remotely similar to the phrase “just a tick” got through, and “one tick” got half-marks. “I should have said I was Sian” doesn’t get any, I’m afraid, Andy.

What goes up must come down.
In a similar vein to the first dingbat in the challenge, this one had the word “what” upwards and the word “must” downwards. “What must” definately didn’t get any points.

So, congratulations to Suz, who slipped in at the last, last second, while I was adding Andy‘s score to the board, who had slipped in at the last second, while I was collating the scores, prior to which, Paul was winning. I really hope nobody else is submitting results right now, ‘cos I’m sick of re-collating the table (checks). No, they haven’t: big thanks to whoever they aren’t. And sorry to Claire, who’ll take part next time. Now that I’ve seen the patterns in the results, I’ve realised that the penalty needs to be larger (to increase the time people spend on individual dingbats, and to reduce the problems caused by people who “pass” fast), but hey – there’s always next time.

Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I

Think you can think laterally: think again!

Remember Dingbats, that board game with the cards with the phrases on them, expressed through cleverly laid-out words and pictures (a bit like Catch Phrase, that old TV show [is that still running]). Well, anyway, it involves pictures a bit like this:

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

The picture shows the word “somewhere” mysteriously suspended over a sylised rainbow. So what’s the phrase: “Rainbow under somewhere?” Not quite… it’s obviously “somewhere over the rainbow.”

So I’ve set up a challenge: 14 puzzles to challenge your lateral thinking. You’re against the clock, and you sacrifice 30 seconds for every wrong answer or passed question, so you’ve got to judge the challenge to suit you. I’ll publish the answers – and the high scorers – here in a day or two.

Go try Dan’s Dingbats Challenge I

Enjoy.

Build Library Here (Or Else!)

This last few days, Claire and I have been listening to a hell of a lot of the new Pagan Wanderer Lu album, Build Library Here (Or Else!). And it’s such an impressive album that I’ve decided to write a little about it here, in the hope that some of you who’ve never heard of PWL before will take enough interest that you’ll download a few tracks (or persuade me to pirate some in your general direction), that you might enjoy them and the world will be a happier place. Oh; and so you might actually buy a copy of Build Library Here (Or Else!), ‘cos the artist is a great guy but is somewhat penniless:

Build Library Here (Or Else!) touches upon a combination of things going on both inside the songwriter and in the bigger picture, all put forward through a combination of intelligent lyrics, guitar, keyboard, and electronic/synthesised music. The Ending Makes What Came Before A Story is a slow acoustic piece with a soft chorus, which always reminds me of quite how easy it is to find pattern in something that you want to; whether in superstition or self-confidence. Or perhaps it’s about finding closure in hindsight. Good Christian/Bad Christian is a very danceable electronic affair: “I come to you with plans to be your leader – I come to you sing I’m a believer: Good Christian/Bad Christian… Baghdad can’t tell the difference,” sings PWL, in this politically and religiously fired-up song, challenging the link between state and religion that’s more obvious than ever in our terrorism-fuelled God-fearing Western democracies, with undertones of the association people mistakenly make between religion and morality. Keep The Weather Out is happy and bouncy; telling – on the surface – the story of a young couple buying a house for the first time and “settling down”, and the things that they consider important to making their house a home… with obvious references to tabloid-inspired xenophobia. Claire plays concertina in the background, and a strange synth drum-slapping session two and a half minutes in acts as a reminder that you are still listening to Pagan Wanderer Lu… in case you’d forgotten…

(Sick of) Playing Solo is, as Claire put it, possibly the bluntest, least-subtle Lu song ever. So far as anybody can see, there’re no deeply hidden meanings to go digging for; no clever run-on concepts to trip your brain up on; no second-listen “magic”. It is, essentially, an advertisement: but it’s a really, really good advertisement. Right from the start (and players of The Game will hate the second line) it presents a catchy, listenable tune, with frequent breaches of the fourth wall as the musician makes reference to his absent band and the things he’d love for them to be doing right now – with demonstrations. It’s fascinating to think that, owing to the complexity of the track, we may never see it played live ‘solo’, and the meaning is somewhat lost played with a band. I laughed out loud the first time I heard this song.

The Memorial Hall is my favourite song on the whole album. Even it’s musical peculiarities are remarkable and fascinating, such as the fact that it changes from 3/4 to 4/4 time some way into the song, without an awkward ‘jump’. These two parts each carry their own musical style: sombre and slow, and happy and disco-ey. It talks about the reasons for war, the arguments resulting from them, and the reactions of the people ‘left home’ in times of conflict, and comes to the startling realisation that the only valid purpose of modern warfare is to allow folks to dance at their local memorial hall disco. It makes reference to The Ending Makes What Came Before A Story, and leaves a catchy tune in your head that’ll soon take over your life in the way that (You And Me And) Winston Churchill, an earlier Pagan Wanderer Lu song, did before. It’s a remarkable song.

Show Me Yr Knuckles is worth a listen, 2 Bullets is good, although I can’t help but feel I’m missing something when listening to it, O Peter! (Won’t You Hear My Mournful Strum?) is an unusually deep-sounding, dramatic track, At The Hairdressers… is a masterful song about life, and death, and the triviality of it all in the eyes of anybody else, Harp & Chainsaw is an enjoyable experimental-sounding romp, and Yr On My Shoulder is a spectacular dive into personal ethics on which Claire and I are undecided whether the author is concerned with justification of his actions to himself (in a Marillion “Uninvited Guest” style ballad) or to somebody else: the lyrics could be read either way. Either way, it’s a stunning song.

Jabita Nu-Orleenz and Goodnight / Nos Da are both a little… weird, even for me. They’re still quite listenable, but there are perhaps boundaries in experimental up-and-coming music that even I’m not quite ready to venture into.

All in all, a fab CD.

All Looks Well

I can appreciate how Andy feels: all seems pretty ‘well’ in my little corner of this little corner of the world.

Friday’s Geek Night involved a four-hour long, six-player game of Knights & Cities Of Catan, which Andy won, perhaps contributing to his good mood.

On Saturday, Troma Night was particularly laid-back and relaxed. This was, of course, partially a result of the server outage last week, as a result of which we had not been able to plan what to watch. But I suppose it’s also because a lot of the people present had recently completed large academic projects, including, in some cases, their dissertations. We watched a 1928 silent movie, an anime action film, and “Blood Gnome“, perhaps the least awful of the awful films I’ve ever seen, despite the unforgivable mistakes in framing shots, continuity, acting, plot… nice gore effects, though. And next week’s Troma Night looks promising, too. Or “radical”, or “hot”, as I probably should say, considering it’s theme.

Tonight, of course, is Knightmare Night, and tommorrow Claire and I are off to see The Australian Pink Floyd Show in Birmingham NIA (thanks Dad!)… so it’s lined-up-to be a fun little week.

Knightmare Night

The plan for this evening, for all those that are interested:

Knightmare Night will be running from 8pm to about 11:15pm: we’ll be watching season 2, episodes 10 through 16. BYOB, etc. I’ve even tidied the flat… a little. And Claire‘s done the washing-up.

But before this, at 7:20pm, we’ll be doing a “bottle bank run”, to dispose of (in an environmentally-friendly manner) about 400 glass bottles which are consuming space in our home. If you’re planning on coming to Knightmare Night anyway, please consider coming a little early and helping us move several bin bags full of bottles down the road to the bottle bank, in exchange for which (a) you get to smash them to pieces… that lovely breaky sound, and (b) you don’t have to sit on a pile of them later on.

Those of you who use the RockMonkey ChatRoom are advised that it has moved servers. If you use the applet version of the chat room (on the web site), you won’t notice the difference (except that Iggy is a little less annoying), but users of real IRC client programs will need to reconfigure them slightly.

Big.McLargeHuge Lives

Nobody on Earth, not even Gareth, knows or understands what happened to cause the server problems on Big.McLargeHuge yesterday, but, as usual, everybody’s blaming me. My apologies to everybody who was inconvenienced by the problems. It’s amazing how much damage can be caused by a MySQL server going down… almost all the sites on McLargeHuge are database-powered, not to mention the DNS server (the death of which caused problems accessing a certain other server I run [I’ve put in a few backup systems to help with this kind of thing in future]) and the mail server (which caused a ripple effect of delaying e-mails across the network)…

In any case; despite having no idea what caused the fault in the first place, steps are being taken to ensure that so much damage can not be caused again. Those who need to know know who to ask. Thanks to Gareth for all his help.

Another Knightmare

Peter and I, this time joined by Matt, JTA, Ruth, Andy R, Sian, and Katie watched another eight episodes of Knightmare (the first half of the second series) last night. Highlights include:

First ever winning team: they sucked up, they bribed, and they otherwise twisted the NPCs around their little fingers. Having seen this technique work, they tried being friendly to everything, with almost disastrous effects in level 3. Still slightly dozy, though: when they discover themselves on the nose of a large reptilian-looking creature, breathing smoke, they guessed it was a “crocodile”.
Wall Monster (giving riddle): This prince of Islam held all of Christendom at bay;
To them he was known as Salah al Din;
But how is it that we know him?
Dungeoneer: Buddha?
First ever Asian dungeoneer (guided by three particularly stupid girls) comes across a giant, and Tregard says they need to “persuade it that they aren’t good to eat”. Matt chimes up: “Don’t eat me… I taste of curry!”
As Ruth describes: Dungeoneer’s guides repeatedly fail to mis-spell “shroud” (i.e. spell it in the wrong order), despite having just had it spelt for them on-screen.

After Knightmare, Pete, Matt, Katie and I sat up ’til about 2ish and debated religion, literature, philosophy, and 80’s television, in approximately the opposite of that order.

Knightmare again… next Tuesday!

“Spellcasting: Y-E-R-M-U-M.”

Spellcasting: A-L-C-O-H-O-L

Last night, Paul, Claire, Pete and I sat down, beer and gin and Dooley’s to hand, and watched the entire first series of 80’s kids TV game show Knightmare, taking a drink every time:

Team gives directions to dungeoneer that they can’t possibly follow. (“Go through the door.”)
Team gives wrong directions to dungeoneer. (“Turn left… no; I mean right…”)
Dungeoneer forgets how to differentiante between left and right. (“Take a small step to the right… I said RIGHT!”)
Dungeoneer gets to the next level.
Dungeoneer dies horribly.
Dungeoneer dies as a result of having not picked up a particular item in a previous room, but having been given no clue that they should have. (“You brought the silver bar, but you should have brought the gold bar; idiot.”)
Dungeoneer picks up an obvious red herring. (“On the table is a key, a ruby, and a small red fish.” “Take the fish! The fish!”)
Dungeoneer does something patently stupid. (“I know I can carry two items, but let’s not bother – let’s leave the obvious clues right here in this room we can never come back to.”)
Particularly clever riddle; one which none of us manage to solve.
Merlin.
Knight brutally killed by magic.

This, coupled with a gratuitous amount of shouting things like “Spellcasting! M-O-R-O-N!” whenever teams did anything particularly stupid lead to a fun evening for all.