Fort Awesome

Today, I learned, is Pancake Day. This is in celebration of St Pancake who died of eggs. Some people say the day is also to celebrate Shrove Tuesday and the start of some kind of something called Lent, but I’m not so sure about that. In any case, I normally spend the week running up to Pancake day in anticipation, occassionally having a Pre-Pancake-Day Pancake Day. But this year has been different. I’ve been oddly detached from world events, in particular ones involving food. What has happened to me? If it weren’t for Natalie reminding me, the day could have passed by me completely. This would have been catastrophic for obvious reasons.

So we’re all making pancakes tonight, hurrah, except for Moses who is working late, hahah never mind. What do you take on your pancake? Sugar? Lemon juice? Jam? Honey? Maple syrup? Nutella? Jam? Ham? A fine liquor? Thatch?

It is also a New Moon tonight, which is the exact opposite of a Full Moon in darkness terms. I wonder if perhaps, in the same way that some people turn to wolves during a Full Moon, will some wolves turn into humans tonight? Raising onto their hind legs, to perform menial day-to-day tasks? Have you ever seen a wolf use a photocopier? Keep your eyes open, for tonight you may.

Or is that a decifit. It depends on whether you’re looking at the intention, or the actual output. Recently my creative gland has been secreting its special endocrines into my bloodstream, giving me the urge to make things. This could be building a shelf, drawing a picture, making an animation, filming a movie, writing a computer game, painting a shelf, drawing a movie, filming a picture… any of those. All of them, in fact. That’s part of my problem: I want to do all of these things so much that I can never settle on getting started with just one.

Now you might say, “come on Nick, you’re a scientist. Get back in your labcoat and titrate this acid solution.” You are partly correct, except I forgot anything to do with Chemistry years ago. While I may be a coding fiend, I am also other kinds of fiend too. I’m a fiend of all trades.

I want to be disgustingly good at drawing. I’m currently alright at doodling, but nothing epic. These people who can whip out their sketchbook and 3B pencil and knock up a fantastically detailed drawing of a dragon grabbing burning peasants and smoking them like cigars (or whatever)… they’re amazing. I want to be that good, and I realise that this takes years of practice. So why haven’t I been practising? I don’t know. I do a bit and then move on to something else. So while I know I could get really good at something if I put in the time, I never do, and thus, nothing is created, and the world supply of commas runs out at the end of this sentence.

Making a computer game is within my abilities now, but it takes a lot of time and it was disheartening when I tried recently and came across a show-stopping bug with the engine I was using. I might try again sometime with a different engine.

The other endeavours - movie making, animation, even plain old writing - are all things that could benefit from a little practice. I don’t mean to be arrogant but I think I could make something really good if I stuck to it, and occassionally I have. Enough people have informed me that I’m an intelligent individual, so I’m quite clever, whoop de doo. That just makes me harder to please mentally (oh, the trials of being a white middle-class male. I’m such a dick!). I really want to make something that people see and think, “that’s cool”. I want to make a name for myself. Being “Nick who hasn’t made anything” or even “Nick who has a job but nothing in particular to show for it” doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t want to just get through life without rolling 3 doubles and going to jail. I want to leave stuff behind that I made. “Remember that guy, the one who made this thing?” “No.” “Ahhh, but look at it. It’s all… dusty. Brilliant.”

So my point is that I need to set myself some goals, and things to do every day. This is probably an ideal time of my life for it, as I am freelancing from home and have spare time to draw and play. Note to self: playing Zelda on the Gamecube doesn’t count.

Ever in search of innovation, we’ve added a menu on the left where you can select different skins for the site, depending on whether you like a black or a white background. Have a go! Still trying to fix the menu being all fallen-down on Internet Explorer, by the way. We’re on it!!?

Tonight, we will be mostly going to Crash. Most of us are. Some of us aren’t.

I’ve been looking at the Fort Awesome website, and pondering on what is missing. We wanted it to be a sort of portal for excellency and a place where we can put funny things, but at the moment it’s little more than a blog, and blogs are so 2005. I’ve jazzed it up a little by putting in that Flickr photo bar so that we can put up our photos (at the time of writing I’d uploaded 4 wonderful pictures of ‘Moses’ being wonderfully drunk, and grinning like a wonderful idiot).

Any ideas? I think the blog thing should have less focus, and just be a little column with headings which people can peruse. Perhaps a dedicated area for putting funny pictures and sounds that we make. What could be better!

Comments people, comments.

Yeah, you remember, don’t you? Playing those old games on an arcade machine; perhaps at the bowling multiplex, perhaps on a rainy day at Blackpool pier. Boop… boop… boom, aaand you’re dead. Another 50p in the slot, ker-chunk, 1 credit, would you like to continue, yes please I would. Repeat until pockets are empty.

Now take that experience, and remove the bit involving money, and increase the density of arcade-machine/m². Now put it in a cricket pavilion with a bar. You are imagining what we were doing all last Saturday, because we went to the Retro Ball. Let’s not be under any illusion, it’s not that kind of ball with dinner jackets and dancing, it’s essentially a large area filled to bastardry with classic arcade machines, pinball machines, and consoles, which are all free to play all day. The best fun was found in trying out these old games you’d never heard of but were immensely fun, though it also had its fair share of classics such as Time Crisis (the one with the light-gun) and Street Fighter 2 Turbo (the one with the fighting). They even had an old computer running Lemmings.

After all this of course, we were even more into retro arcade games than before, which was quite a lot to begin with anyway. Jeff and I in particular have been raving about a game called Metal Slug (which I’ve just managed to get on my computer - a very productive day is ahead of me, proven possibly by the fact that the first half of this sentence was written about 8 hours ago).

It won’t be long before we start getting retro-style controllers like this awesome pants thing:

Followed by a full-blown arcade machine standing where the oven used to be, while we resort to cooking pasta in the kettle. It’s only a matter of time!