Weeknotes 37

The Double Fine Productions remasters of classic LucasArts’ adventure games “Day of the Tentacle”, “Full Throttle” and “Grim Fandango” (as well as Double Fine’s own, more recent adventure game “Broken Age”) are all free on the Mac App Store this weekend.

When I was a child, my mum came back from PC World with a copy of “The Lion King” video game on 3½-inch floppy disks. Sadly, I had broken my disk drive when the sliding metal shutter from a diskette got stuck inside. My mum returned to the shop and swapped it for “Day of the Tentacle” on CD-ROM and my love of adventure games began.

In the words of the mechanics from one of my personal favourites:

We shoot you now like an arrow into the wind. May you pierce the heart of the wind itself, and drink the blood of flight.

The latest episode of Adam Buxton’s podcast where he discusses the recent death of his mother with Joe Cornish is worth your time.

Reading Una Kravets’ “Ten modern layouts in one line of CSS” drives home how woefully out-of-date my CSS knowledge is.

I caught C as he toppled backwards in surprise while sat on his mat and, without pausing, E said: “tell your mum I saved your life.”

Hillel Wayne’s “The Frink Is Good, the Unit Is Evil” introduced me to Frink, a “special purpose [language] for dealing with units”.

There’s a web-based interface to Frink available and it supports a dizzying number of units. As someone who often has to convert American recipe quantities, it will come in very handy indeed.

Of course, it was named after Professor John Frink:

I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.

After an intense week at work, I feel somewhat out of sorts and so decided to take a long, meandering walk and catch up on some podcasts while E took C to visit her aunt.

I made it as far as the local reservoir before a group of people gathered in my path made me turn back. Turns out I’m neither good at meandering nor staying outside the house for longer than half an hour.