Category: Silly

I used to love playing the Infocom adventure games on my Commodore 64. Yes, they had no graphics and no sound. But they did have excellent text and the cleverest, most infuriating puzzles. Also the games had an excellent parser, that could even understand input like “Put the x in the y using z” (hot stuff back then, when many adventure games only accepted input formatted like “verb noun”).

There’s also a lot of humour in there. One of the games had you running around a maze of walls (actually many of them did). In this case if you got desperate enough to try “listen to the wall” the game came back with “Ah, a Pink Floyd Fan.”

My absolute favourite is Planetfall where you’re a lonely ensign third class from the Stellar Patrol Ship Feinstein, stranded on a deserted planet. You need to find a way home, before you run out of food and water. Click more to see an example of the kind of things I relly liked about the Infocom games.
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Red meat is weird, wacky, gruesome and black. Here are a few of my favourites: Ball bearings in the butter tub, the white-hot cure for sticky valves, drool string ukulele, apocalypso facto or the ebullient egg-sac of ennui.

Enterprise Systems had their 2nd. annual halloween pumpkin carving party yesterday. Kids and adults both had a great time, and you can see the results here. I did this one and I’m kinda proud of it, it’s only my third pumpkin ever.

I’m an avid fan of online comics, from Dilbert to Doonesbury. But one of my favourites is a relatively unknown strip called “Staggering Heights“. It chronicles the lives and trials of a sleazy barfly named Jake, and a highly irregular cast of costars (my favourite is Murray – your average 300-pound truck driver turned woman).

The humour in the strip has both depth and variety, and the artwork is among the very best I’ve seen in any strip – online or offline.