The Musings of the Kat

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 14 Nov 2006 12:16:00 GMT

I had an afternoon of sitting down enjoying myself on Sunday. Theatre, arcade and cinema respectively.

Firsly I went to see a Gate Theatre of Dublin production of Waiting for Godot at the Moore Theatre in Seattle. I'd not seen the play before, though it's reputation as a masterpiece of absurdist theatre had not escaped my attention.

The performances were highly memorable and thoroughly engaging. The play has moments of humour, pathos and tragedy, exploring memory and companionship. I can only say that I'm very pleased that I saw this particular production and I'd thoroughly recommend it.

I followed high culture with pop culture and spend a couple of hours in an arcade playing amongst other games OutRun 2 SP - which I completed on the two easiest levels. Seems a little easier than the original Out Run

Next I settled down in the Cineplex to watch the new movie Flushed Away, which is a fantastically entertaining film. It brings together the production quality of Dreamworks with the great characterisation and humour of Aardman Animation. This really does feel like an Aardman film, the wide mouthed characters are clearly related to Wallace and Grommit. Take your kids to see this movie and if you don't have kids, steal someone else's - you won't regret it (at least until you get arrested).

Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 13 Aug 2006 17:45:00 GMT

Bought a black Nintendo DS Lite along with Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training and New Super Mario Bros. The idea was to get Penny into playing video games - she'd shown some interest in Brain Training.

It's a lovely unit, nice bright screens (about twice as bright as the old DS), though it didn't come with the strap and thumb stylus that came with the original. It's black and shiny like the PSP, but the build quality is nothing like as good.

New Super Mario Bros. is pretty much the same as the SNES Super Mario Brothers. The only new features are Giant and Tiny power-ups that make Mario about the same height as the screen or half the size of normal Mario respectively. The tiny power-up allows Mario to fit through small holes and reach otherwise inaccessible areas.

Dr. Kawashima is quite a phenomenon, breaking the usual mould for best selling games. I have already noticed an improvement in my mental arithmetic and it is particularly enjoyable playing with more than one user, as your daily efforts are comparable with your friends'/family's.

The DS is a great toy and I've spent a lot of this weekend playing Mario.

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 06 Jun 2006 11:42:55 GMT

Discovered that XMAME now has a parameter -grabkeyboard that fixes the problem in my last post.

When XMAME runs from MythTV, it grabs the keyboard focus, instead of leaving it on the paused MythTV interface... Hooray, I can play OutFoxies again!