For people who grew up on DOS games and don't want to try to forget about them, I've just posted an attempted overview turned running commentary on the EGA adventure Hugo 2: Whodunit over on videogame_tales.

I don't usually announce them, but on this occasion my relentless droning managed to break Livejournal's post character limit, an achievement of which I'm unnaturally proud.

Unlikely as it might seem for me to be saying this, I'm now at the stage where I'm putting the finishing touches on to a demo version of Crystal Towers 2, after being spurred on by a suggestion that it should go on to Clickteam's monthly disc. Previously I've been able to release things to testers with provisions that "this doesn't work right yet" or that things will be finished later, but I don't have those excuses now, so I've spent the last couple of weeks polishing up things so that they're presentable. And the results are looking pretty encouraging so far.

The only thing that's getting to me now is the storyline section - there's a visual joke that I quite like and want people to see, but it's really a direct choice between taking the time to do an entire intro or just putting a quick slide in to explain the story for the demo, and I'm not sure I have the drive (or graphical ability) at the moment to do the whole thing up. We'll have to see about that.

Otherwise, I'm at the stage where I'm comfortable putting little finishing touches in. This is something I like that I wasn't sure I would be able to do, but it turned out to only need a couple of hours' work thanks to PHP's versatility - signature images for player accounts. So you can put an img tag on to a page and link to your account's URL, and have it update as you play through the game - it's all very dynamic and Web 2.0 and... all that. With any luck, you should be able to see it happening here as I test it now.

It's been a continual source of bafflement to me that whenever I try to act like one of the real human beings, the world just refuses to work in the same way for me as it does for everyone else. Take the example of scraping together some lunch - feeling slightly stingier than normal today I decided to go up to the big kitchen on the sixteenth floor at work and get something edible from there rather than spending any money or interacting with the outside world. Given previous experience it might have been better to abandon this idea at its inception, but I pressed on nonetheless.

The sixteenth floor kitchen had been entirely changed round since the last time I was there, so it took me a while to find anything, but from what I could tell it still manages to provide a selection of items that are mostly entirely separate, cheap and/or calorific, and can't really be combined to form anything resembling lunch. The closest I got was some English muffins (which aren't English and don't resemble muffins) sliced in half with blocks of cheese spread around on the top, which I intended to transform into cheese on toast with the nearby toaster oven. Putting it all in on a paper plate, I set the timer and waited. If I had kept things at this sort of level then there would have been no trouble and I would have escaped in the five minutes that they would take to toast.

But while I was wandering around waiting for those five minutes to pass, I read some of the posters on the wall, one of which was the instruction sheet for what the CIC calls the "soda fountain" - a collection of giant alchemical-looking flasks on a rack full of luminous liquids. I don't like carbonated drinks so it was probably a mistake to try it out at all, but something drove me to investigate anyway with the vague intention of finding out if Fanta with normal water was all right. Now, what you do with these things is simple and was written in a set of easy steps up on the wall - you put a cup under the spout coming off the bottle of syrup, you unscrew the handle a few turns, wait for a modest amount of the stuff to pour out, then spin the handle in the other direction to completely close it, after which you go off and fill the cup the rest of the way with carbonated water. It's simple and works fine for any normal person.

Not for me. I confidently pulled a cup off the pile, held it under the nozzle and gently turned the handle, which promptly fell off, clattering into the bottom of the cup followed by a mercifully slow but steady and relentless syrup torrent spewing forth from both the remainder of the spout and the hole in it where the handle had been stopping it from getting out.

I picked the orange-covered screw-like tube out of the bottom of the cup with my fingers and tried to re-insert it into the handle, but without any success - screwing it in in either direction didn't help, because it required more pressure than it was really possible to give it with one hand occupied holding a cup that was creeping closer to full by the second. In a smooth Indiana Jones-like manoeuvre I pulled another cup off the pile with my increasingly sticky hand, put the first cup down on the counter while simultaneously shoving the second one under the nozzle, and continued the effort, looking round at the deserted kitchen for any sort of stopper or wad of Blu-Tak or anything that might help.

Eventually a man with a beard arrived, and I mentioned the slight soda fountain related problem to him as he walked past. Helpfully he immediately ran out to get a technician before I could say that all I needed was a hand on the back of the flask to screw the handle back in, leaving me still stuck there with a growing assembly line of cups filled with bright orange glutinous stuff. By this time the level in the bottle was almost below the handle, which would have released me from syrup-catching duty and allowed me to sort the problem easily.

But just before it ran out due to the natural force of gravity, which my family have had a talent for since the 17th century so it's something even I can't mess up, I finally managed to get the screw to catch and spun the handle back in at the same moment that the man from before came back apologetically saying he couldn't find anyone. I thanked him for his help anyway, poured the luminous contents of the cups back into the bottle, recorked it, washed my hands and then went back to the oven to get my lunch, which the toaster oven had baked almost solid to the plate during the time I was distracted by the soda fountain at the opposite end of the room, and was now on a uniformly brown plate that had been white when it went in. I got some yoghurt to go with it.

This is why Whitney cooks in our house.

I don't think I'm very good at Halloween. I could blame this on coming from a country where it isn't really a big thing at all - it seems to be getting a little more Americanized each year, but for the most part I remember that you just noticed it was the end of October and then spent the evening pulling your teeth out while trying to eat biscuits off the washing line or pushing your friends' heads under a basin of water (and increasingly, presumably, dribble) until they grabbed one of the submerged apples in their jaws.

Most of that doesn't seem to happen here, and instead you're meant to hand out gallons of sweets to marauding children dressed up as various horrors as they come round to your house. Except that doesn't happen here either - even though we live in a block of about sixty flats with plenty of children around, the place is always almost completely silent.

It doesn't stop us from making a small effort just in case, though - we carved a face out of a pumpkin a week ago (which whinknee gave a recessed eyepatch and then expected people not to think it was a pirate pumpkin, but everyone who saw it did, so that's what it was) and it sat on my desk for a week decaying slightly more by the day. By the 29th it was entirely full of cotton wool, so I scraped it all out with a rubber glove and then used hairspray on it in the hope it would preserve it and not instead cause it to spontaneously combust. And in an attempt to invite wandering three year olds to take some of the sweets that we have that neither of us like, I put the smelly artifact outside our door (though as we don't have a doorstep I had to create one out of a leftover flat-pack lamp box), where it glowed a bit and probably drove more people away than it attracted.

We did get two groups at the door, though, which is double the number from the last two years. Last year, I answered the door to a three year old while I was dressed in a hockey mask and a knife finger glove, which only served to scare the hell out of her. So I tried to tone it down this year and instead got an outrageously gigantic 80s metal wig that I'd got for $6 at the pharmacy, and answered the door with that and a Guitar Hero controller. This also scared the hell out of everyone, only more so. So after they'd gone I concluded the evening by taking a bag out and smashing the pumpkin into a small pile of putrid debris (as you do) to fit it into the bin. That was the most satisfying part of the whole day.

Over the last couple of weeks I've finally been updating my personal page - it was something that it had needed since it was made, really, mostly because it used to be just a big table of stuff that I threw together at random and tried to arrange so that people could find the actual worthwhile bits. I've now replaced it with a list of games I've made (probably the most worthwhile section), music and writing (mostly taken from this journal), categorized to make it easier to pick through.

The new, shorter, still cheap-as-free redirect URL is:
http://www.davidn.co.nr
All comments are welcome.

Some of the other things that were on the old page might make it up eventually, but I've tried to keep to the things that are actually presentable for now. For example, I'm not sure if the older mini-games like Kommon Room Kombat will ever go up - mostly in that case because that one would now probably be counted as personality theft to add to the photo theft that made the game possible. And image sharing sites were invented just after I put together the wedding photo album, so that'll probably be entirely replaced as well.

Indeed, most of the content comes from RSS feeds - the journal on the front page and entire music section are both CSS shells around content made up from feeds from elsewhere. Therefore, the entire Internet is now my database and I am truly one with the Matrix.

With my birthday and therefore an excuse to get over my aversion to buying things for myself coming up at a frankly terrifying rate, I've been thinking of replacing my current second-hand Strat copy with something new. After some searching around on the Guitar Center site, I think I've picked out the one I'm most likely to choose:


This is an Ibanez RG350DX, and seems to come very highly recommended by everyone for whom white guitars don't immediately spark terrible flashbacks to Dieter Bohlen.

The important question is: is this any good? The vast majority of reviews for it say that it's the best guitar they've ever owned and that it's good both physically and... sonically for metal, but on every site that invites comments there is always one review that is about 200% as long and 2000% as pompous as the others saying that everyone else doesn't know what they're talking about and that it's actually terrible unless you replace the pickups with new ones that cost just about as much as the entire guitar. So I'd appreciate any first-hand information, or just advice from anyone who can tell at a glance.

With a remarkable sense of timing I noticed yesterday that my Stealthplug has now reached that stage that audio hardware gets to where it only works if it's sitting at exactly the right angle, the sockets aligned to the nanometre and you hold your head on one side, so I'll be replacing that as well - I have my eye on the Pod XT at the moment, although I'm honestly not entirely sure of the practical difference between any of the bubbly pieces of hardware that you can see along the top row of the site. Again, any recommendations would be very welcome.

I'm going to see if I can try them both out along at the Guitar Center this weekend.

I know you were eagerly awaiting being bored to death by these and everything, but somehow I never got around to posting the photos from our cruise to Mexico at the beginning of the month. There were three Mac users' cameras present, resulting in a large number of pictures distributed among all of them:

Parents-in-law's(?) camera - 422 photos
Brother-in-law's camera - 500 photos
More brother-in-law's camera - 60 photos that wouldn't fit in the gallery above
Our camera - 309 photos

For obvious reasons I wanted to pick out some highlights rather than just giving those out and expecting people to trawl through them, so here are some of the best ones in a rather lazy presentation.

( Selected photos, height/width forced in HTML, just View Image to expand )

Even though I technically have the means to, I don't really keep up with the news from home very much. The most I know are general things about the rest of Britain - I think the three major news stories of the last couple of months are that the BNP are ruining the country by gaining inexplicable legitimacy, that the current Prime Minister is driving the vote more and more certainly back to conservative again at the next election, and that Psycho Mantis over here surprised everyone by correctly predicting the results of the lottery.

The most I hear about the local things around Inverurie - a town name which nobody here can say, but at least I didn't grow up a few miles away in Balquhain with a silent Q - is during the Skype calls with my parents during the weekend, where I'm told what's closed down, who's moved away and who's died. Sometimes there's more interesting news, like this photo I was sent yesterday:



That is not, as it might seem, a picture of a mile-wide lake - it is, as far as I can recognize, part of the golf club that I used to work on, with the road leading around it now transformed into a slipway. It seems there's been a small amount of rain, causing the river to burst its banks over an enormous area (most of that water should be under the bridge that you can see at the back left corner of the top picture of this article). I only saw it anything approaching as bad as that once - and when that happened there were still people out there playing golf.

Brighter and sunnier holiday photos will be up eventually - they're already online, I just have to go through the thousand or so that exist and pick out the highlights.

Wonderful and unusual news - I had a dream that wasn't terrible last night. If you can discount the way that I was apparently working with the Nazis for a minute, but still.

The dream opened in an empty high street shop with two sofas forming a seating area at the front - think of a strangely comfortable dentist's reception. I was in a group of three people who were quietly sneaking inside, led by Herr Flick (I imagine that like a lot of British series, the description will make no sense unless you already know where he's from anyway). The other one besides me might have been Von Smallhausen, I'm not sure. Quickly, we moved to the back of the room behind the counter, where there was a safe set into the wall.

Herr Flick opened the safe, which apparently contained secret documents important to the French resistance, and attached a bomb and timer device to the inside of the door, then closed it again and we retreated. (Yes, I know - quite why we needed to blow open a safe that we already had access to was never made clear in the dream). For some reason the timer was displayed on an LED counter on the front of the safe - it had been set to explode at 1 o'clock, so we waited until then, but nothing seemed to happen.

As the others went back to the bomb to check it, I went outside and wandered up and down the street - I noticed that there was a lot of interference on all the televisions in the window of an electronics shop on the corner, and realized that we must have been using a silent electomagnetic pulse bomb by mistake. (They must have been the secret Gestapo variety.) Before I could go to tell the others, a couple arrived - the only other people on the high street - and looked around confusedly.

"Are you here about the interference with the... Rhondium crystals?" I asked. Somehow they understood what I meant, and offered to help them look for the source of the disturbance, leading them to anywhere that looked likely and wasn't the place we were hiding, in order to stall them from discovering our nefarious scheme. Eventually, the abandoned dentist place was the only shop that we hadn't been into, and I walked the couple up to the whitewashed door with me at the front of the group. Carefully, I opened it, hoping that the others had seen us wandering around outside, realized what I was doing, and that I'd given them enough time to hide the evidence that we were up to no good.

I walked a few steps into the room as the others came in behind me. Inside was a picture of artificial innocence - the two of them were sitting nonchalantly opposite each other on the sofas, feet up on the table and reading magazines that they'd found on its bottom shelf. I began to wonder where they'd managed to hide the bomb, when my eyes were drawn to what else was on the coffee table.

They had hidden the bomb inside a potato, with a smiley face drawn on the front with a Biro in what I can only assume was an attempt to make it look more friendly and innocent. After a quick look around the room from the entrance, my two companions decided there was nothing suspicious at all in the room and that they had better leave.

"Nice potato," one of them commented on his way out. And they both walked off down the street, leaving us to continue in our attempts to obtain whatever secrets we were stealing from the French resistance - except by this time I was laughing so much in my sleep that I'd woken myself and Whitney up.

A lot of the work day yesterday was spent installing a new fan assembly for my laptop, which my boss had ordered online to preserve his own sanity and everyone else's in the office - the computer had been making noises like an annoyed zombie with stomachache for some months. The process of getting into the computer was rather more involved than I had thought, involving the use of a screwdriver, a pen magnet to extract loose screws, a second screwdriver to use in conjunction with the first for unplugging tiny little fragile components, thermal paste, compressed air to blow away the dust because it was like Raiders of the Lost Ark in there, and old-fashioned brute force. Unsurprisingly my mind didn't stop when the operation was eventually successful, and on the new and improved quiet laptop this was soon produced:



(Don't use the magnet anywhere near the hard drives or you'll get up to 10 points of... data loss.)

To explain the middle item on the right, this came from an easier procedure that was performed a few months ago, following a recommended fix for getting around a design flaw of IBM's laptops. Some of the fan assembly went over the graphics chip and I could probably have left the now-baked-solid stack of paper out if the fan provided the necessary pressure itself, but it's still in there to be on the safe side.

Now it's much quieter, and seems to be running cooler as well - I keep on having to check that the fan is still actually spinning as I'm not used to it working with any degree of subtlety.

A couple of links that I found as a result of posting that gameplay video yesterday led me to discover that I was on this list of independent game makers, and I'm rather proud to be even mentioned on the same page as names like Ben Croshaw, Joakim Sandberg, Nifflas and a whole lot of other people even though you haven't heard of them.

David K Newton
Primarily a game developer in Multimedia Fusion, David is most famously responsible for Treasure Tower.

I didn't know that I was famously responsible for anything at all, but the web in general seems to have decided that Treasure Tower is my magnificent octopus out of the three main releases I've made so far. I'm not sure if it's for being particularly good, or more an infamy gained through its frantically irritating nature and my decision to score the game entirely with Scott Joplin ragtime pieces (which some people enjoyed but probably led to a greater number of keyboards through monitors than was strictly necessary - the choice of words "responsible for" is quite appropriate). Maybe it's because it feels like a game that's quicker to play than the other two, even though it took about a year to think up two hundred different screens for it.

So maybe I need to work on a follow-up to that next after the follow-up to Crystal Towers, trapping myself in a loop of sequelitis from which there is no escape.

I really need to update my site.

Boss monsters are usually a bit of a headache to write. You have to think up a cocktail of attacks, weak points and strategies that are balanced to be difficult to cope with at first but possible to learn through experience, and then write the whole thing's behaviour, which can often get quite complex. As evidence that I'm still working on the game, this is the seventh of the bosses I've made, and at the moment it's called Beam Stack.



The general approach that I'm using for bosses in this game is treating them as loose sort of state machines, with one string called State which is the main thing that decides how the boss should behave at any time, along with a heap of other variables on the object that describe more of the details of those behaviours. By making at least one of the possible actions in each state being to change the contents of State to something else (and having what it changes to possibly dependent on other conditions), the boss can move between behaviours in sequence.

( A more in-depth explanation of how it all works, for the benefit of those interested, coders, ZZTers, and the insane )

And all of that goes together to form the thing that you see in the video. After I first set it up it took me ages to get past it the first time, but now I can do it fairly reliably - if other people find the same thing, then that's just the right difficulty of boss I'm aiming for.

In all the talking about the excursions into Mexico that I was doing last week, somehow I forgot to describe the ship that we were living on as we went down to Mexico and back. We were on the Silver Shadow, one of the ships run by Silversea Cruises, on a nine-day sail down the coast of Mexico and back paid for by Whitney's grandmother that we'll probably not be able to afford again until retirement. I took a heap of photos of it while wandering around on the last day we were there, with the plan to stitch them together into a Myst-style slideshow exploration, but after I got to the 150-photo mark I realized the complete impossibility of it. Listing them offhand, it included a pool, about five places to eat, several lounges of various degrees of pretentiousness, a fitness centre, spa, casino, golf cage, library, and probably a lot of other things that I'm forgetting.

Our room was fairly near the top of the ship on deck 8 of 10, right next to the door to the outdoor pool (complete with bar and grill in the corners) which was where we spent most of our time, and not just to stave off seasickness as I've described the physics of before. The other place that I spent a lot of time was in the observation room at the very top, which was a quiet library atmosphere with a view out towards the rolling sea (and I spent time there at first because I could sit roughly in the horizontal centre of the ship and experience less wobbling). In our own room we had a veranda to ourselves where we could watch the sun rise and the ship docking, and when we were away from it, it seemed that at least one of the staff always sneaked in to refill the mini-fridge with drinks or to rearrange the bedclothes - I don't know how they managed to always stay unseen, but it was slightly like having elves.

I think that we were the youngest couple on the entire ship - it's worth highlighting that the review that I linked to above considers the "youngish passengers" to be those in their mid-40s - but we weren't short of things to do. Most activities and meals are included in the cost of the cruise, and for those that aren't, you have $500 of starting shipboard account to yourself, which you'll never realistically run out of unless you buy any of the particularly customs-dodging stuff from the shops boutiques dotted around. As I mentioned I quickly got classified as one of the golfers, and was at the putting competition most evenings where I was consistently mediocre, apart from the second-last time when I got nothing and going out with a good run at forty-four. The points accumulated from activities like this over the course of the cruise could be redeemed at the end for prizes of various degrees of tattiness, and our collection netted us a small silver money clip that I think they just put their logo on after getting it from a Marks and Spencers Christmas cracker.

There are a number of choices of places to eat - three full restaurants, one sensibly called The Restaurant, and two next to each other further up the ship called La Terraza and Le Champagne (both requiring reservations and Le Champagne being exclusive enough to be the only non-free one). In addition to that there was the grill bar next to the pool, and also a 24-hour in-suite menu detailed in the leather-bound room booklet (and masterfully translated on the German pages simply as IN-SUITE MENÜ) where you could call the room service with your order and soon afterwards one of the waiters would appear with a tray that he then laid out on your coffee table. All of those options featured the choices you would expect of soup in a tower, various arrangements of seafood and several species of vaguely posh animals. Most meals were made up of at least four courses and it was unusual to leave any of the restaurants feeling completely able to walk unaided.

Towards the end I went to one Spanish lesson where everyone else was rather above my level - I had no idea about even the basic sentence structure, and whenever I attempt to speak in any foreign language that I don't know, my brain ends up defaulting back to German, which gives me possibly the most international dialect in the world. There's nothing like beginner language lessons to make you feel completely non-absurd talking complete gibberish to strangers - during the course of the lesson the most complete sentence I learned how to say was "My castle is yellow and in the centre of England", just in case the need ever arises.

And in an attempt to remove some of my permanent high level of stress, Whitney suggested I book an appointment at the ship's spa while she was out doing a tour of wineries with her mother. This took place in the afternoon of the last day we were on the ship, and while waiting for the time to come I made the mistake of thinking "I'll just have a couple more goes at Aletheia first". Fifteen minutes later, twitching all over, I arrived in the waiting room and had to fill out a questionnaire about my current stresses (on which I rated myself a 9 out of 10 and ran out of room for the recent medications). Throughout the procedure, she kept saying she was finding colossal knots in my back and upper arms, and had to compensate for my incredible ticklishness by using her lower arms instead of hands in some places, but there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon than lying blindfolded naked on a table and being oiled by a woman from Brazil - and all this without having to keep it from your wife, either.

We came back to our flat to find that fruit flies had moved in in our absence - not a Biblical infestation of them, but just little swarms hovering around the bins and sink area. This happens to a lot of homes in Boston at the end of the warm months, and I think our being away for a whole week added to the problem. So fly spray was among my list of things to get from the supermarket the day after we arrived.

I haven't dealt with the need to get rid of more than one insect at a time before, and I had been expecting to just get a little sort of can of it, like the things that you bring with you to repel them when something possesses you to go camping in the middle of a jungle. But what the supermarket actually had was an entire section full of gigantic canisters festooned with various warning signs, showing the product being left in water to detonate in a little mushroom cloud or to spray a ton of white gas around while everyone else in a five mile radius evacuated the area. It took me a while to find one that didn't promise to obliterate with the force of a nuclear warhead, and even it shows a fly corpse in an upside down warning triangle being shot with a lightning bolt.

As I looked at the back, reading over the substantial list of warnings to wash your hands before, after and during use, to never get the stuff on your skin or come anywhere close to breathing it, it dawned on me that what I was buying was an instrument of genocide. I don't consider myself a colossal hippy or anything, but traumatic as it is, I use the glass and paper method to get rid of spiders and various other nasty things rather than outright killing them (besides, you'd never be able to do that after watching the spider episode of Mio Mao) because I don't think I have the right to just drop a coffee table on small things with loads of legs that have accidentally wandered into my field of vision while looking for other smaller things with slightly fewer legs.

It is absolutely necessary to get rid of pests for our own survival, and we're not a virus like Agent Smith says for doing so because killing is very much part of nature's great inexplicable chain anyway, but we're the only species who have the ability to be quite so proud of it - if you think about it for too long, the way that the sheer efficiency of mass death is promised by these things is a disturbing notion indeed.

Then I thought "Sod it, they're only flies" and went home and massacred them.

We're back in Boston now, though I still have to put up some entries that I wrote on the cruise. We both keep expecting the floor to move about.

I came back to find this in my inbox:



...and will be knackered within a week due to flying remotes, I think. As I have said before, I think I work in the best IT building in the world - I think my current average of getting in on two and a half days a week might be about to go up.

Not today, though - we got to sleep last night at something past one in the morning. Our flight out of Los Angeles was delayed because the wind was so high that it had to land and get some more fuel on the way out to us (not when we were on it. I would have had an aneurysm.) But the same wind helped us across the country in four and a half hours when we eventually took off. I'm now no longer completely white, and neither of us have yet exhibited any signs of coughing, sneezing or deadness.

I'm going to have to get some essentials today. Maybe also install a balcony, as I'm already missing having one right outside our bedroom.

Limited Internet access has just allowed me to discover terrible news from the mainland - I've just seen an article from an Australian girls' magazine (and have copied the four pages of it to my own space with very obvious filenames starting here) that seems to have the sole purpose of turning nauseating adolescent Twilight fans into nauseating adolescent furries. To be fair to it, it's actually very unusual to have the fandom portrayed in a remotely positive light and read something that concentrates on it as people just doing something objectively a bit weird and having a good time, so it's one of the most polarizing articles I've ever seen.

But I think the greatest problem with the presentation of it, as much as I never thought I'd be saying this, is that it isn't weird enough - it's presented as this very innocent and fluffy thing (that someone took her dad along to!), which to be fair it can be to many people, but as it's for an audience of sixteen year olds it completely ignores the very real atmosphere of mild to colossal deviance that inevitably goes along with it. I can guarantee that anyone who actually visits the wiki suggested in the article is going to run into some fairly horrifying stuff within the first three minutes, so it seems sort of... misleading in the other direction, somehow.

Incidentally, I should point out that the little glossary on the last page is not, as advertised, how the remotely tolerable people within the community actually talk - I think both insiders and outsiders would agree that they're instead a concise list of words that make it your moral duty to hit someone on the nose if you ever hear them say any of them. And what is this about "coming out"? It's about as necessary and admirable as "coming out" as a Magic: The Gathering fan - this kind of thing leads on to a misconception common to some of the more unstable members, where they feel the need to broadcast things that don't come up in everyday conversation to everyone around them (and I'm talking about far more disturbing things than just dressing up in ears a bit).

The boxout on the right of the first text page is quite interesting, actually, because that's pretty much how it infected me as well. However, there are several things that I (and it) are not, and one of those is an "OMG trend"! That's like saying it's somehow fashionable like... yoga or the Atkins Diet or something, rather than something that a large group of people over the world just happened to be interested in and a comfortable insanity that the Internet was ideal for channelling.

For that reason it reads like the best attempt yet at one of my greatest fears as expressed to somebody or other all the way back in 2002 or so, when I was first discovering all this, that the cycle of very arbitrary things suddenly becoming trendy would eventually sink its claws into the fandom with its full destructive force. I don't honestly think that that's going to happen due to one article, but I'm fairly certain the result would be morbidly hilarious if it did. "My character name is Skye and she's a winged wolf" in the last boxout is not the worst initial impression by far, but it's enough of a warning sign - I have the feeling that Angel Eye is going to keep on happening for a long, long time.

I've grown to be able to ignore most of the rocking of the boat, actually. Of course, it helps that we're only really moving about during the night now because we're reasonably stable in the ports during the day, but I actually find it quite soothing when lying down. It's a bit strange when walking around, though, having to weave about in the corridors as the force of gravity gradually moves from one side to the other - it's rather like what I imagine being drunk to be like. Can someone verify this?

During the last couple of days we've been out on the excursions that the cruise line offers when we're docked. Yesterday was the "Exclusive Vallarta Yacht" at Puerto Vallarta, where the leaflet told us we'd be taken out on a sail around the bay. As the smallest cruise liner (which is still a bit like saying "least annoying Chuckle brother") in the port, we were docked at a place a decent walk away from the marina across a sort of gravel desert, and when we finally got a dinghy out to the yacht, first impressions were rather disappointing. I had pictured more the sort of Peter Stringfellow definition of the word, rather than the alternative of a plank with a sail on it, which this was decidedly closer to - nevertheless, we were greeted by two extremely happy tour operators, and motored into the bay. I think that as we were setting out, with me wearing a linen shirt, palm tree swimming trunks and the awful hat I had bought the day before, bobbing up and down on the water with La Chucaraca-whatever you call it playing over the boat's speakers, I felt like the most despicable American tourist in the universe.

We were out for about five hours in all, and the sun was beating down on the uncovered surface making it honestly painful to walk about, though when the sail went up that gave us a bit of shade. Across the bay we stopped and were let into the sea with snorkels, which was another new experience for me - if you ignore every survival instinct you have and sort of plant yourself face down in the water, you can breathe through your mouth and watch the surprised-looking fish swimming about and eating the bottom of the boat. Wearing flippers gives you unnatural swimming ability, as well - kicking my feet a little, I thought I had gone for about five metres face down until I looked up and saw the boat was miles away. An astonishingly well put together lunch (considering the kitchen had the floor space of a postcard) was served as we drifted back across the bay, and when we got back to our ship (by going past it in the yacht, then past it again in the dinghy from the marina, then walking all the way around to get to it) everyone immediately dived into the pool. Miraculously I seem to be the only one without severe sunburn, perhaps because I'm so paranoid about it and hid under a towel for most of the journey - I feel a bit of burning on my legs this morning, but it's nothing compared to the tomato red patches that have developed on other people's skin.

And this morning, it was the "ATV Beach and Jungle Adventure", only undertaken by the men of the family. The tour leaflets seem to fabricate a lot of details from thin air, as our luxurious "open-air safari coach" was in fact a moderately knackered bus that crawled us through the harbour and up a mountain at about twenty miles an hour while the world's most bored driver droned to us about the trees, and I didn't think anything could be worth getting up for before seven in the morning when we were meant to be on holiday - but once that was over with the couple of hours we spent out there were well worth it.

The cruise had advised us to bring sun-tan lotion and hats, but it was strangely cloudy outside and we had to wear helmets anyway, so I gratefully handed the tourist hat over in exchange. After a brief demonstration that I couldn't understand a word of because I have such difficulty with accents, we were also given goggles and handkerchieves to tie over our mouths like steampunk bandits, and saddled up to head down the path into the forest like pollutant-spewing ducklings behind the leader's vehicle, some more shakily than others.

I used to go quadbiking many years ago when I was about twelve, each year when places opened up for a week during the summer as advertised in the unpronounceable Garioch newsletter, and I'd forgotten just how enjoyable it was - all the unprotected speed of being on a motorbike with only 90% of the risk of falling off and dying. (Someone fell off and ran himself over the first time I went. That's still an unmatched achievement.) It seems that if you put me on one of those for a couple of hours my usual personality disappears to be replaced with a Clarksonesque lust for horsepower, speed, and damage to the immediate environment. The operators were very accommodating of people's differing abilities and speeds, with one group going on ahead, a sort of long straggle in between, and the more tentative people being helped along at the back.

I had some trouble with the gears at first, because I don't think I'd ridden one that even had gears before - the lever is under your left foot, and you have to hook under it to shift up and stamp on it to shift down - it's easy to confuse the two because your instinct is to floor your foot to go faster. I just went along largely by luck at first, after a couple of stalls at the very start, but had a revelation after the first couple of corners that the lever was more like a toggle than an actual gear lever, and just memorized by current gear from then on. (Later I found out there was meant to be a display in the middle of the handlebars, which wasn't working on mine. The most I had was an indication whether I was in neutral or not neutral.) After that, and getting used to the speed at which I should change gears so that using the lever didn't result in feeling like I'd been booted up the exhaust, I slowly worked my way past other people up to the front.

After a while on the forest road, we turned on to a very narrow jungle path, ducking low branches and experiencing exotic plants close up as they smacked us in the face. I think someone crashed into a tree, but I was at the very front by that point and was trying to keep up with the leader. It wasn't long after that before we got to the beach, which was the best part because we could just open all valves and scream along as fast as we dared. After jumping about on some sand dunes, watching some people fall off their bikes and probably horrifying environmentalists everywhere, we headed back through some quite welcome rain and went back on the bus to only just make it back to the ship before they folded away the walkway.

This is our easternmost destination - now we're starting to head back, going into Cabo San Lucas tomorrow. I'll keep the photos coming if it's one of the places that the tour operators don't recommend only viewing from a distance.

I have to wonder about the use of the international weather reports in the morning news leaflets here. I'm somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, why do I care if it's raining in Johannesburg or not? But they're delivered according to your nationality and I have the British edition, which says that it's sixty degrees in Aberdeen, and that's impossible at this time of year - I wonder if an oil rig exploded.

Today is the first day that we're in port in Mexico - we're docked at Mazatlan, which is famous for its department store furniture pottery. We were welcomed to the country by an announcer stumbling Boris Johnson-style through an unintentionally hilarious summary on the ship's live broadcast channel, saying things to the effect of "I don't want to sound racist or anything, but, um, er, leave your jewellery on board because, um, the Mexicans will probably steal all your stuff", followed by quite a large list of everything in the country that was likely to kill you, including the food, water, people, insects, animals and sunlight. (To be honest, Britain isn't the best at cultural sensitivity, and my own mental image of Mexico was pretty much this, perhaps the most blatant example of casual stereotyping in TV's recent memory.)

An entourage from the ship left to go up into the mountains this morning and watch some bricks being made, but being unable to stand the excitement I stayed a little closer and wandered around the town near the harbour instead. When you get off the ship you're transported across the harbour on a covered sort of tractor trailer, and walk through the terminal building into what looks like a militarized zone with an overpopulation of taxis. It was only after dithering about here for a while that I realized that you were actually allowed out on foot, and crept past the guards out on to the main road.

I took some photos as I wandered around the streets - the actual Mazatlan looks reasonably like a flatter version of the areas I've been to in California, with a lot of flat blocky houses painted in bright contrasting colours and giving the city the appearance of being built out of Duplo. I was particularly impressed with an enormous bright orange one until Whitney told me it was green. With the sun beating down on to my conspicuously white head I didn't go very far even though I had on sun-tan lotion about an inch thick, but I got some photographs of the rainbow of houses, a little outdoor swimming pool in a nook of one of the streets, a building that I think was the Immigration Centre (and which looked rather better than the American variety), and a neighbourhood of dogs that quickly barked me away as I walked into their cul-de-sac.

The other primary experience I had in the city was of the taxis, which circle around the main road in droves like large white mechanical sharks. After the fiftieth time that I had declined a lift to see the senoritas, I was beginning to feel like I was single-handedly ruining the country's economy, so I instead walked into one of the craft shops and bought a straw panama hat that might as well have a neon sign saying "TOURIST" on top of it. I completely failed to be confident in bartering like I'd been told to and paid the full price of $7 instead, but it'll be worth it for keeping the sun off (and so far there seems to be an overwhelming amount of it).

After I stepped off the sort of tractor-shuttle on the way back to the ship, I was interviewed by a Mexican TV channel - I was stopped by a short man with a giant camera and a tall man with a giant smile, and asked if I could say a few words to them. I agreed as long as I didn't have to wear the hat, and talked into the camera about how colourful the city was and the enthusiasm of its taxi drivers for a few moments, then sort of nodded along at likely-sounding words as the taller man interpreted what I'd said. Seeing as I speak no Spanish, he could have completely changed what I said, so I hope he wasn't saying something enormously offensive that I was then smiling at in agreement.

With the boat stable in the port, the view of the city from the air-conditioned observation lounge at the top of the ship is just lovely.

The last time I slept overnight on a boat was when we were going to Germany, crossing on a ferry to mainland Europe when I was about ten. I remember that my mum assured me that the feeling of the waves was just like being rocked to sleep - something that I was later to find out was misguided optimism by vomiting most of the morning afterwards. I was quite confident when we were in the port in Los Angeles because we couldn't feel the faintest tremor from the sea, but despite all reassurances about stabilizers and the size of the boat and how I wouldn't feel a thing, we've been in a constant nauseating pendulum motion ever since we set off at six yesterday evening. It's not so much like being rocked to sleep as trying to sleep on a bed that's being pushed along San Francisco's ninety-degree angled hills.

This is the second day that we spent on the ship with a collection of botox- and silicon-based life forms, and all the stabilizers available can't disguise the way that we're powering along with a couple of giant engines on top of a great big blue wobbly thing. I felt quite ill in the middle of the day, but taking either dramamine or sugared ginger soothes it a bit (the former is preferable as the latter is disgusting). It also seems to help to stay somewhere near the middle of the ship, as the laws of physics tell me that movement is likely to be at a minimum there. Another thing that helps is being in the swimming pool, which is located almost literally right outside our room - it's filled with chlorinated sea water that's pumped in overnight, so it's cold at first when you get in, but becomes very welcome in the heat - and as the water moves along with the rocking of the boat you're completely unaware of it when you're in there.

Pretty much everything on the boat is provided as part of the total cost of the cruise (which I don't actually know as I never saw the booking for it, but I'm told that it's a figure beyond my comprehension), so there's no chance of boredom as activities are put on throughout the day. Somehow in my wanderings between them I have become classified as one of the golfers, even though I hadn't really touched it since I was about fourteen - there's a golf cage at the back of the boat, and a putting contest held every evening, where I'm the youngest by about half a century, and so far the two women have consistently outclassed the male rest of the group by about fifty points.

The meals are also included in the cost and are as posh as you would expect, with everything being served in microscopic portions on top of stacks of at least four plates arranged like the Towers of Brahma. As far as the normally ludicrously expensive stuff goes, so far I've discovered that caviar is all right if overly salty, but I've never understood the appeal of foie gras. I've had that twice in my life and both times were by accident, I promise. For those who don't know, you obtain it by shoving a cork in a goose and then force feeding it until it explodes, then picking up the pieces that are left over, which gives you a sort of blobby wad of not-very-nice pate that's smeared across your steak if you forget to ask for it without.

I thought I'd use some of the time at sea to do up my personal site again, so with the limited Internet time over the satellite (it's about 35 cents a minute out here, and that's if you pay for four hours in advance), I tried to download and set up PHP with IIS for myself, but I'm too stupid, so I'm doing it in Javascript instead.

Are two topics that don't appear to be possible for me to experience. With everything that seems to happen during something that's meant to be as uneventful as a cruise, it's no wonder that I have the resting heart rate of a hamster.

We got into Los Angeles after about six hours on a flight that I didn't particularly enjoy - I haven't felt that bad on a flight for a while, though I did manage to sleep for some of the time. That isn't something I do a lot, because I usually end up more tired and non-functional than I was before if I sleep for short periods during the day, but I felt I had to take advantage of it while I had the chance because the flight was only about half full. And it was worth it when I stumbled upright and saw that we were already over Wyoming on the map.

After about four hours of sleep in the maid's room next to the boiler in the basement of Whitney's grandmother's house, we came up into daylight again and waited around for the minibus-taxi hybrid that had been ordered to transport us and several tons of luggage over to the harbour. It was during this wait that the problems started - Whitney's dad got up from the sofa rather overconfidently when starting to move the mountain of suitcases out into the garden and dragged his jacket over a vase of flowers, a couple of photos and some ornamental roses on the way. When picking up the roses, I felt a slight jab and first thought it was weird that someone would have modelled thorns quite so faithfully on a glass flower, but then turned it around and realized that I had stuck a reasonably-sized spike of broken glass into the end of my finger. But Grandma's care giver (whose name I don't think I can spell) was on hand to provide first aid and make sure that I didn't die immediately.

We had tickets for early embarkation, which allowed us to turn up at half past ten in the morning and experience the crew and security at their most disorganized. After getting off the taxi and nearly injuring Grandma in the process of lifting her down, we were shown into what I had imagined would be an airport-like terminal but which was instead a sort of giant empty aircraft hangar. Then we were shown back out again, along to a rolltop door, which was then closed by the security people, so we had to be moved yet again. Apparently there was some sort of problem with the X-ray machine and them... playing Musical Chairs with it or something. Eventually we got in, had to go through an X-ray station, and were given a form each to declare that we weren't already suffering from any flu-like symptoms.

Finally we made it through to the space in front of the ship, where Whitney's mother was almost arrested by an irate security woman for taking a photo of the boat from the outside. Fortunately I got two of them that weren't noticed because I don't take about two minutes to set up and pose everything and everyone before taking them (the way that I always look half-asleep or dead in any posed group photograph having no bearing on this dislike of them at all). Here is the great national secret of what the Silver Shadow looks like. You may never see me again.

We climbed a steep ramp that I'm surprised anyone over my own age could ascend, and were shown into the bar with some apparently quite cheap champagne. We had to wait a while for the rooms to be prepared, then were photographed individually for the ship's records, given our identifications which double up as card keys for the rooms, and were taken up on the lift by an eager steward. After some futile struggling at the suite door, it turned out the keys to the room that Whitney and I were staying in didn't work, so I had to go downstairs again to get them to re-magnetize them or something before we could get back in after closing the door. As we picked through the ship's leaflets in Grandma's room, we presented her with a rather nice and expensive wine glass that Whitney and her mother had picked out while in Boston, as a monetarily inadequate gesture of thanks from us all for paying for us all to take the cruise. With the settling in done with, I was assured that like I'd said to myself in the morning, now that we were on the ship that was to be our home for the next week we could relax and everything would be fine.

Half an hour later, Grandma fell and cracked her head on the tiled floor of the bathroom. I was looking at the map of the ship in the corridor outside at the time, and just heard a tremendous thump from through the wall. The nurse was called up to... suture and bandage and use the antibiotic gel or whatever it is that real nurses do, and she's still very much alive and coherent, especially for someone who is 93 years old, but now has a blue sort of star-shaped bruise around her eye and has to wear a bulky dressing on her head. I'd almost thought that we were going to have to disembark and spend a week hanging around the hospital instead.

But we gave her a while to sit and then went down to have lunch in the restaurant, where I realized that I could have meat on demand for the next week. We noticed that there was a life-jacket demonstration at five, and went to our individual rooms to sleep a little and wait until then. It emerged through the ship's PA system that the lifejacket demonstration was in fact an evacuation drill, but when the alarm went off ten minutes later I was surpised at the calmness of it. Perhaps I had just lived in student halls too long and was expecting deafening sirens and red flashing lights, but it was the most relaxed evacuation I'd ever been on - just three pinging noises over the public address system and then the captain coming on to say "Hello, excuse me, if you wouldn't mind abandoning ship, just depending on how you're all feeling, thank you very much" as we descended the stairs in our bright orange lifejackets. After getting to our muster stations we were herded into the theatre, with the crew lined up on the stage like they were about to burst into song, and the one of them known as the Master gave us the safety talk with an appropriately Tom Baker-like voice.

There had been no movement of the boat noticeable when we were docked, but now that we're off we have a continuous see-saw motion that I'm rather afraid might make me rather ill during the three days that we're spending at sea before our first port of call. After having stuffed myself far too much at lunch I'm going to forget about dinner and just go to bed - I can't wait to see what happens to us tomorrow.