Scrabble turns (still sober)

 

On occasion my darling wife and I take to Scrabble. Some of these episodes have involved the strict rules of the game, with proper challenges and the feverish memorizations of the serious amateur. One really should know all the legal 2-letter words, for instance, if one is going to be playing Scrabble. But my head is full of French these days, so we play a looser version of the game.

Speaking of French, one of our Scrabble episodes took place in Nice, where we played with a French Scrabble set. Yes, they have these- with different letter values and quantities of letters to fit the French frequencies. Obviously we are madly far from the ability to play with French words, but our play in Anglais was given a fun twist by the set. I feel like the "Y" was a deliciously valuable letter.

And if one wonders that we might have squandered the exploration of the city on Scrabble, au contraire, mon frere. We retreated from the streets fairly late in the evening to our Scrabble, I with a cognac and usually some fancy patisserie scooped up early or late for the occasion. All of this was after the interests of Nice had largely faded to its late night partying atmosphere, which was less than appealing.

And so, a couple years later, here we are playing Scrabble again, at home. Curiously I even have a cognac at my side, which I love to sniff, but have yet to take a sip of. It's so intense! And, of course, in the relaxed style of play we are currently working with, there are no time limits on anyone's turn.

Which, of course, is how I could write this.

Pictures from other worlds

 

A week or two ago I put together some pictures here in which different game worlds were mashed together. I'm not sure how much they meant to you who are not familiar with any of these game worlds. In that case I suppose the pictures then succeeded or failed largely on their own merits.

Currently I am playing a computer game in which, alone on a planet, I go around bringing the planet to life. Blue skies have come, and even recently rain fell, and the barren valleys are now lakes. I am currently planting flowers. It's a nice game. I don't have a great way yet to take pictures in game of that one, but I do have a few other game pictures that have been accumulating on my phone. Perhaps taking pictures inside games keeps me going until I can wander around outside again without risking death by misadventure on ice.

The first picture below is... complicated, but I've decided to include it because the landscape is from the game I was telling you about; Planet Crafter. 

The other mixes follow. 

Pictures from mixed worlds

 

Maybe as a result of being so cabin bound by a rough Winter, and reading so many stories, watching so much TV, and playing video games, Worlds are starting to mix up in my head. I've been trying to assemble these into a more coherent series of pictures, but what I've ended up with, probably due to my lack of focus, and talent, is a more random collection of photographs along these mixed fantasy lines- Worlds are colliding.

My sources include a Tomb Raider game taking place in Peru, my local river, a game called Atomic Heart that takes place in a science fictiony past Russia, my library, and a few other random elements pulled from here and there.

Treadmill

 

We're almost there with the technology.

It is minus 11 degrees out, and icy. I'm not going outside if I can help it.

This presents some problems. But the two main ones I can see are:

1. How do I get exercise?

2. How do I partake of my nature photography hobby?

For the first we bought a treadmill. It works. I like it. And it is very, very, very boring, which explains the metaphorical use of "treadmill" in our lexicon.

For the second, I go out into video games and instead of stabbing and shooting people (sometimes), I take nature pictures.

Here are some more examples of that one:

I have one of those VR things you strap to your face, and it is very impressive. One can get into some very interesting environments, though none yet so well realized as those above. The dream, of course, is being able to walk on an omni directional treadmill in an environment like this above. It's not quite all there yet, but I feel it would be a fairly complete solution to the Winter problem.

Although Winter may disappear altogether, so it could be a wash.

Unadulterated

 

Yesterday I made an elaborate point of how, as interested as I am in my video game tourism, I won't be showing any of my straight up, unaltered and unadulterated pictures of these impressive game worlds. Then, today, in a game called Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, I made it to the part of the game taking place in England in the 900's. 

And it's beautiful, at times like an old painting by Corot or Constable. 

So I took a bunch of in game pictures, prepared them to be tampered with...

and then I thought:

Maybe I'll just show you some of these before I mess with them.

These really are a fair representation of what this game looks like most of the time.