*Contains adult themes and material which some people may find offensive*
Date: Wednesday 15th April 2020
Quarantine: Day
Location: Come off it, you know more about where I am than I do.
Specifically: Ditto
Real World: Driving down the motorway in Hymie. Great fun! I’m like........ swerving around all over the road, scraping along the hard shoulder sending showers of sparks up into the night sky (despite it being 2.00 p.m. in the afternoon!) ramming trucks off the road, reading ‘Science Fiction Suspense’ and scoffing a cheese sandwich with a pickle....... nothing on the road anyway (Well there isn’t now!).
Virtual World: Lost Voyage/Chernobyl
Lost Voyage
I don't like total or near total darkness or at least I don't like it in Virtual Reality Games. It's put there by programmers a) because it's pretty much expected in adventure stye gameplay (like booing the baddy in a pantomime or shouting "Oh no it isn't") because they think it sets a challenge to gamers - in order to get through a particular section you have to navigate through the dark first. This usually involves wandering around trying to find some sort of lighting source. Not too difficult most of the time, there's usually a torch lurking near by, a lamp or a box of matches. Occasionally they go bananas, as in a game I played recently where you are expected to find an oil lamp (a bloody empty oil lamp at that) but then had to hunt around for oil to put in it, tapers to light it with and matches to light the tapers! Now that is just taking the piss!
I have hit such a section in Lost Voyage. An area so dark you can only see a few feet in front of you, the rest is pitch black. You then have to stumble through this blackness avoiding enemies in the form of a large red spider and a couple of zombies so dozy they make traditional zombies look like members of Mensa. I see them off with a quick burst of my laser powered weapon, liberate the head from a skeleton - just for the hell of it because I don't know what else to do - and watch as a flame rises up and floats off down the corridor. Well. Then it's back into the darkness.
To add insult to injury, whilst searching online for a way of cheati... er to look for a review of the game I discover that it is 'a game where the puzzles are easy'. Talk about kicking a man when he's a clown eh!? If I get any bright ideas about how to get out of this I'll report later. Until then let's see if Chernobyl is any easier to negotiate.
Chernobyl
Chernobyl isn't a game it's more of a VR documentry about the a nuclear accident that occurred on Saturday 26 April 1986, at the No. 4 nuclear reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukraine.
Fatalities are difficult to estimate due to the long term effects of radiation poisoning but it’s believed that two staff members died in the initial blast followed by 28 people in the months following the accident. To date there have been less than 100 deaths attributed to the disaster but this figure could rise significantly to as high as 16000 if people from Europe are included in the total number of people affected.
If you’re one of those people who gets a kick out of visiting abandoned and derelict places (as I do) I guess Chernobyl would be high on your list of priorities. Well the good news is that Pripyat is now accessible to the general public (I won’t say ‘open’ since this gives the impression that the area has turned into a holiday resort with; guided tours, B&B’s and gift shops selling tat like; plutonium flavoured rock with ‘Chernobyl’ going through the middle, Factor 100 ‘Eastern Blok’ Sun Screen, Snow globes that ‘rain’ nuclear fallout and T Shirts printed with slogans like; “Chernobyl was a blast”, “Two heads are better than one’, and “I went to Chernobyl and all got was this scorched T Shirt’.
I would love to go actually but wandering around the virtual version was a remarkable experience. Looking around a school, the community centre, a typical flat that would probably be classed as poverty level in the UK but was considered a luxury in Russia and the Chernobyl Power Plant itself.
But the thing that left the most lasting impression was the fairground, I think it was probably the irony; a place of wonder, joy, excitement and thrills galore, visited by excited children, parents in need of respite, thrill seeking teenagers and couples experiencing the sexual thrill of the where rules about healthy eating can be relaxed in favour of crappy comestibles and entrance families and children, of fun amusement, the broken and rusting machinery, forlorn looking rides like the dodgems, Imagine if students
could access virtual technology in schools!
FACEBOOK MURDER
....not in the sense of murdering, as in putting an end to, Facebook itself; though I admit it’s tempting especially when you’ve been ganged up on for the umpteenth time for daring to have a difference of opinion. No, I refer to ‘friends’.
Just to clarify. A friend in the Facebbok sense is anyone you might have ran into at a party, met at a sporting event (football, rugby, sheep hurtling etc), looked at in the street or tripped over on the way to the shops.
In closer friendships it’s usual for some sort of greeting to be exchanged;
”Oh do excuse me I seem to have caught my hand in your husband”,
”would you be good enough to pass the toilet paper and a shovel“
”how are your haemorrhoids this evening?”
On Monday morning I had almost 3000 friends. Facebook friends that is; which (if you haven’t already gathered from the above) carries about as much credibility as boasting that you own 3000 broken toasters.
Alex was puzzled by this number “how come you have about 3000 friends and I’ve only got about 200?” Well I will tell both him and you how I got 3000 friends.
I have achieved so much fame and fortune (maybe not so much the fortune) in my role as a steampunk artist and trader that everyone I meet wants to feel they are connected to me in some way. They want to follow me on Twitter, interact with me on Instagram and, of course, friend me on Facebook! Oh the pressures of famousnous!
Brrrrrrrrrring!!! (alarm clock - just in case you thought it might be the door bell!)
Eh???? OMG is that the time? I better get on with some writing!!!
Yes, so as I was saying before I gregariously discontinued myself. How I got 3000 Facebook friends (sounds like a good title for an essay!)
Because I started to run before I could walk. I began writing my blog before I knew how to use the web design software. Since I was keen to start getting things on line I set up the ‘Captain Victory’s BIG Steampunk Adventure‘ Facebook page. Because I needed numbers I took advabtage of ‘friend’ suggestions and sent masses and masses of friend requests. Most people would ignore them but a sizeable number would accept. All I needed to do then was get them to ‘like’ the blog page. Result 750 likes/followers in no time.
Stupid
Who was I kidding? Myself of course. Just because someone ‘likes’ a page don’t mean they're going to bother with it. I myself have liked about 200 pages. In practice I use about four of them.
Then there’s my friends - real friends that is. I wasn’t seeing posts from the people I wanted to see posts from. I wasn’t catching up with their news, I wasn’t interacting with them. I was missing them,
Time to commit premedicalated murder!!! Hah!
My friends list currently stands at a much more manageable 289. Most importanly they are people who are known to me, who are familiar and with whom I have things in common. Some are very close friends while some (the majority) are more distant. But all my friends are valuable. There is no such thing as an unimportant friend.
TODAY’S FACEBOOK HUMOUR
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