Paperghost.com

I decided to go with Twine because it's (fairly) easy to pick up, and it reminds me of making way too many text adventures in BASIC on a Commodore +4. I knew going in that it was (in theory) mainly designed for interactive fiction, and you had to sort of bash things into shape in another direction if you wanted to make a game - or at least something people more readily associate with a game. First time around, I just couldn't work out how to make it do what I wanted. When I returned, there were now multiple versions galore. The default version, Harlowe, seemed to have more features. I just sort of vaguely assumed it would now be very easy to add additional elements like audio and visuals. Whoops. As it happens, I realised about 40 locations deep that actually I should probably be using the version called Sugarcube. Why search desperately for code that allows me to save and load games, which may not even work anymore, if it does this in Sugarcube by default? Why struggle with au...

 It actually does have a title, but I'd rather reveal it with a nice logo and not some terrible web font. It's taken me a good few years to getting round to making a game, because putting it off indefinitely is easy. All 6 of you reading this can rest easy that if all goes to plan, there'll be an actual finished game out there in the wild...eventually. One of the biggest time wasters was figuring out which platform to make the game on / with. I know my way around some code, but I'm certainly not a coder. I can do visuals (rusty visuals, because I'm very rusty). I can do music. I like stringing together narratives that have a definite end point but include a lot of wiggle room for doing something entirely unrelated. About eight years ago I had a play with Twine, decided it couldn't do quite what I wanted it to, and continued to not make a game. Now, at the grand old age of a lot, I'm back and digging it out again. I could spend forever messing with the innard...

I have indeed decided to leave Twitter for the time being. It's going in a direction I can't say I'm massively enthused about, and Mastodon seems like the better alternative for the time being. If there's a dramatic about face in terms of leadership, or some sort of solid sense the whole place isn't going to collapse then I expect I'll return at some point. For now, I'll see you round.

Who knew it'd take Twitter going down in a ball of fire to get me back to posting on a blog. Anyway, welcome to the very distant past. I don't even remember how to change the incredibly dated template to one of a dozen other incredibly dated templates, so good luck with that.

I pretty much stopped posting after realising Blogger were possibly never going to enable HTTPs on custom domains, because I figured what's the point when I'm gonna be shunted out of search results? No reason to be penalised by Google for not having HTTPs when they wouldn't let me use the damn thing. Anyway, TL;DR is they finally enabled it as an option and after some fritzyness, I'm back and ready to post nonsense about junk. Hooray.

I've now completed Mass Effect: Andromeda, and here's my follow up post to this . Do I still like it? Got bored? Fed up with a thing? Time to find out! Random thoughts ahoy, no major spoilers but maybe some mild ones: * The final mission(s) was great. No spoilers, but everything major you worked towards in some way paid off - or not - throughout the long last leg, and made for a dramatic conclusion. * The story does, eventually, move on from "help us live on all these planets" but even then, you'll still be better equipped to deal with the finale assuming you keep on with the whole Pathfinding thing. Part of me wishes writers wouldn't rely on magical ancient space alien tech as the quick fix for a story (good thing you ended up in a new galaxy with gigantic terraforming / atmospheric processors everywhere, huh), but having said that, you don't need to use them to make the planets habitable. Still, this feels like a missed opportunity to go in har...

Yeah, I saw all the bad reviews and laughed at the hilarious wonky animations. I've discovered ways to make Ryder either do a crab-walk shuffle or look like she's on rollerskates. Sometimes I load up the Tempest and she's vibrating up and down while team mates stand on tables. My biggest concern was that after having played an hour or so of Andromeda's demo, I didn't like it. The introductory planet feels wanky, with vision obstructing grass and awkward to climb rocks all over the place - not what you want when trying to get to grip with a new game and its mechanics. The combat seemed like some weird throwback to ME1 where everything is floaty and underpowered. Once you get past the first not particularly well done first hour or so, the game opens out into something I'm finding to be hugely enjoyable. It's gonzo ME1. It's all those Mako planets from the first game, but jammed with stuff to do on them. If the original ME, which felt like a lost s...

No Man's Sky has had a rather large update after months of silence. I've been playing around with it, and here's what I think so far: 1) Every single action in the game now has a lot of weight behind it, and I mean every...single...action. The first half dozen planets I spawned on before giving up were all extreme temperature / weather conditions. If you don't craft your scope quickly and *really* look in every direction before setting out, you're going to run out of life support and die. If you don't zig zag looking for the smallest outcrop of rocks overhead in order to ward off radioactive / cold / heat effects, you're going to end up exposed and die. If you make the wrong choice in terms of the elements you pursue first, you're going to die. If you stagger your last to the one single chunk of heridium on the planet so you can take off, only to realise it's a thin outcrop laid over a regular one and you fall short by like 6 units...you'r...

I recently picked up the doctor who graphic novel humble bundle  forgot to post this blog an absolute age ago, and was particularly looking forward to " The girl who loved doctor who ". The short version of the story is the doctor of the comics crosses over into our universe and is mistaken for Matt Smith,  goes to a convention and spends most of his time with a ten year old called Emma. It comes out in the wash that she's being bullied by a rather large douchecanoe, and of course we're expecting to see him get his just desserts at the end. Imagine my surprise when - spoilers - the "solution" to this problem is that Emma lures him to a nearby house and has him punch her in the face really, really hard. The idea is that the school head lives there, sees this take place and kicks him out of school. In practice, we see a really rather shocking panel of this girl getting a right old fist in the face which is totally at odds with the whimsy of the previous 3...

I realised today that it's 20 years since my tinnitus first kicked in. 20 years is a long time to put up with anything, and tinnitus is definitely at the higher end of the "what a pain in the arse" scale. What follows is a ramble about how much pain my arse is in. Uh, or something. Hi, have some tinnitus. No backsies [20 years ago title card, set to royalty free MIDI music because I'm cheap] I was going about my business when I first noticed a slight hissing in one of my ears. I didn't listen to loud music; I didn't walk around with headphones jammed on my head. Oh, that's odd, I thought to myself and decided to ignore it as it'd be gone by tomorrow. Except it wasn't gone, not the day after or the week, or indeed month / year / decade after it either. The first time I really felt the burn from my newfound companion, tinnitus - some six months after it became clear that it wasn't going away but was "sort of" okay to deal wi...

Unlike half the twenty somethings screaming about how the new Ghostbusters movie "ruins their childhood" despite not actually being around at the time the original film was showing, I can actually lay claim to being someone who went to see it first time around. Additionally, I was a child at the time and - shocker - it was the first movie I was taken to the cinema to see. I still have hugely fond memories of the trip to and from the cinema, the queue around the block, the weird black and white printed booklet sized "magazine" which was a small insert about the film and pages of local shop advertisements. The actual movie, I don't remember so much - but the moment the Librarian did her thing is deeply etched into my brain and will probably never leave. Unrelated side note, but the only other film I went to see which had the same level of festival around it on a personal level was Batman 89, except stretched over an entire Summer. Anyway, chalk me up as ano...

It's an incredible thing to strip out all the mods from Fallout 4 and have a pop at the vanilla version. The settlement stuff feels empty, deep armour customisation choices have gone out the window and those poor old Minutemen go back to being...uh...really good at hammering the same spot of wall for six hours at a time. There's no contest as to which version of FO4 wins, and modding has never been so fun - or so complicated. See, the settlement additions to the game has pretty much turned things into House Builder 2016 (or is it Hobo Simulator 2016? I forget) and brought with it a number of very specific modding complications. As a result, it's easier than ever to absolutely shatter your game and saves into a thousand non-functional pieces. I've tallied up a good 600 or so hours in the wastes of Boston, and a fair chunk of that has been rolling around in a pile of the very best mods FO4 has to offer. I'm here to guide you through the perils of a fully ...

Dealing with immigration is exhausting. It's literally exhausting. I don't mean you think you feel a bit run down or whatever - your body goes into full sensory shutdown, your muscles ache, your migraines are never ending and you develop all new forms of lethargy that you didn't previously think existed. It's just a drain, man. UK spouse visas are in the news  due to an impending tightening up, and a common opinion is "Good, they have it easy". I'm here to tell you that this couldn't be further from the truth. Below is a very condensed rundown which doesn't go into the real nitty gritty, because honestly, you'd be here all day. Setting the scene: someone in the UK wants to end up with someone from outside the EU. Ideally, they want to live in the UK. If you're from Europe and move to the UK, your spouse can be from anywhere in the World - Brazil, Africa, America, whatever. Doesn't matter. You can come to the UK from Europe w...

Hello! Today I'm giving a workshop at BSides London called The Writey Writer's Guide to Writing Writerly, and this is the temporary landing page for a shortened URL. In the near future, this will serve as a handy resource link for those who attended. Nothing to see here (yet), but there will be very soon...

You need to repair the fence before raiders trash it. A quarter of your group is sick with food poisoning. The one science guy you have needs to make antibiotics for the infected members of your team, but you're low on ammo so he needs to sort that out instead. The car broke down so you're on foot for today, but if you walk to the nearest supermarket to pick up as much food as you can carry you won't be back until after midnight and hit a fatigue penalty. That one racist guy is picking a fight with the kid ready to up and leave and take half your stuff with him. There's a militia at your gate asking for food in return for a safe evac within a month, assuming you can last that long. DEAD STATE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. This turn-based combat zombie apocalypse sim has gobbled up 90+ hours of my time this year, and I'm surprised to see only one other person on my Steam friends list who owns it (and that was because I bought it for them). Staggering out of a bur...

Steam updated the look and feel of the Store page , along with some fairly major revisions to how things work. Some things to note: 1) A while ago, Steam altered the tabs on the front page. In terms of what was on sale,  you used to see the new releases tab before anything else , then could dip into best sellers. At some point, they changed it so you'd  see top sellers first . This used to grind my gears for a number of reasons, and it has been  covered extensively elsewhere . The way the tabs function has now changed again, so you default to "POPULAR new releases". To see what are presumably not high selling new games, you have to scroll to the bottom of the game tiles then click the "See all new releases" button. You're then taken to a feature-bare page of games, but at least you'll see new games which aren't AAA blockbuster pre-orders. As a final note, things like daily deals are currently way down the page. This all seems like a really...

Many moons ago I took part in an episode of Gamespot's Reality Check, on the subject of Watch_Dogs and videogame hacking . Out of that came a shorter segment based around good and bad examples of hacking in videogames. Fair warning: it mainly looks at the trend of turning hacking into minigames, instead of titles which are primarily all about hacking like Uplink. A couple of games not mentioned up above were given a shout-out in a  spinoff blog from way back when. And yes, I really did sit there for an age trying - and failing - to figure out the hacking minigame in Alpha Protocol. Bonus points for mastering this on a PC with mouse and keyboard. The (rather distracting) mouse pointer which controls the right box often ends up moving outside the terminal screen, resulting in two eyeballs trying to track two boxes and an increasingly distant pointer crawling across a sea of flashing green letters and numbers. The frequent reward for managing to not get a migraine in the fi...

I didn't intend for the face to face meetup I had with the BBC to turn into some sort of  gonzo summing up of the last ten years of my life, but looking at it - with pictures of Batman and giraffes as you scroll down the page alongside tales of Chunkylover and the Nigerian Astronaut it's difficult not to feel that your life is pretty weird. Ten years in infosec is nothing, really, given many people have done it for that length of time three times over or more. But when you thought you'd be getting paid money to make bad movies or paint pictures riffing on the best aspects of high renaissance art via comic book sensibilities, it feels a lot longer. I'm a "Veteran" now! I'm old! I might grow a beard! I'm still pretty new to the infosec scene, but I think I earned my blogger Vet stripes thrashing it out with all those incredibly rich Adware companies of old at a time when hardly anyone else was, and in very public fashion I might add. I also managed...

Hooray! Google have finally dropped their idiotic names policy on G+. Unfortunately it's a massive hack job and fails in almost every way imaginable. I'd much rather be called "paperghost" than "Christopher Boyd" on G+. With that in mind, it should be a piece of cake to change it, right? The first problem is a total lack of clarity on the part of Google with regards how to change your details, what works and what doesn't. A quick look at the Google posts on this one [edit - I had links but in keeping with the G+ tone they've fallen off and don't want to stick] and you'll see the first issue: people simply don't know what to click on to change the public facing name.  You'd think this rather basic info would be right there on the Google posts about this brave new world of customisation, but nope...nothing. First port of call is trying to change the name in the custom url pop up, seeing as it's likely the first name related ...

The best of the best from the recent Steam Sale. I bought a lot of stuff, but I'm only mentioning things I've played since picking them up. 1) One Finger Death Punch All you do is hit left or right. "All you do". If you think your reflexes are up there with Neo then feel free to give this a shot. It's like Space Channel 5 with punching. 2) Doom 3 BFG Edition You have to understand, playing this game all those years ago freaked me the hell out, even while running it on an underpowered Pentium 2 (or whatever it was). I never managed to get more than a few hours in before saying "nope" loudly and doing something else instead. Weirdly it feels like I'm cheating in the new edition due to being able to wave the torch and the gun around at the same time. I'm too fast. I should be more sluggish. Maybe that's just the Pentium 2 talking. 3) Ghost Control Inc. Okay, a bit of a cheat here because I don't remember if I bought ...