Polymath

The Neverhood

I saw The Curse of the Were-Rabbit last night, and afterwards we were talking about claymation. I was reminded of The Neverhood, a little known PC adventure game that came out in 1996, just before the Nintendo 64 hit US shelves.

So I dug out my copy of the game and tried to install it.

The Neverhood requires:
Pentium 75 mhz
8 Mg RAM (16 recommended) 
1 Mg VRAM 
SVGA monitor 
Quad speed CD ROM
8-bit sound card & speakers  (16-bit recommended) 
10 Mg available hard disk space for Installation
Mxcrosoft Wxndows 95.

Unfortunately I'm running 2000, and the installer insists on 95 (though I bet 98 would also work).

About Me

If you look to the left on the main page you'll see a little box titled "About Me". If you click the link you can read my short biography.

To go with the new bio, I am planning on changing the name of this blog to "Polymath". It is a more positive term, and more descriptive.

weblog usability

I thought I would do a self-evaluation of my blog, as per Jakob Nielsen's Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes, or as I like to call it: "blusability" (pron. blue-za-bill-it-ee)

1. Author biography: Hm, nope, don't have one. This is pretty much a personal blog, though I do use it for self-promotion. I probably should provide some kind of bio.

2. Author photo: Don't have one of those either. My bad.

Art Attack

A fantastic new poster by Robbie Conal has started to appear in the city -- George W. Bush's skeletonized body floating in the sepulchral floodwaters of New Orleans.

Conel's website: www.RobbieConal.com

influence

I recently came across the Internet Book List, a community driven book database which aspires to be as comprehensive for books as IMDB is for movies.

Picking a book at random, I did not find Dickey's Deliverance in the database. I was hoping for a useful research tool for my 20th Century handicapping project, but it is not quite there yet.

Novel Handicapping, version 0.3.5 (update)

Another minor update to the 20th Century Novel handicapper.

- New category type: adaptations - includes screenplay, musical, and computer game
- New category: Laurels: MacArthur Fellowship - the "genius prize", not a writing-specific prize, but there are a few important ones on the list.
- New category: Titular features: Eponymous title - books named after the protagonist
- Numerous data corrections, proper flagging of female authors, living authors, other missing flags.
- Flagged more books as "banned", using the American Library Association's Most Challenged Books list as a reference.

So if you're looking for something to read, and prefer award winning novels that feature pirates and have been made into computer games, give the gizmo a spin.

Reading for September, 2005

A more fruitful month for reading, though I didn't finish those books which were previously unfinished.

Carol Shields, A Fairly Conventional Woman. There were two copies of Happenstance at the library, and one was twice as long as the other. I took the longer copy, which was a dos-a-dos bound copy of two Shields novels. A marketing gimmick, I guess. So I read The Wife's Tale, which was actually the more recently (1982) written of the two novels.