A friend of mine emailed me a link to this movie today, telling me to watch it. Being the obliging person I am, I did so. And I’m glad I did. My friend described it as ”subtly terrifying”, and she was right! But it’s intriguing and a pleasure to watch at the same time. As well as being cute. See what she meant?
I don’t normally play online games, but I came across this one a few days ago and was struck by its animation and appearance. It’s called Machinarium and centers around a little robot. It’s really quite fun! And (bonus!) it’s not one of those insane, mindless ‘shoot everything that moves’ games. Rather, it’s a ‘point and click’ adventure whose story line involves a series of what I’ll loosely term ‘riddles’. I’m just sad the entire thing isn’t free—I’d like to play more than the small free demo. Anyway, it’s worth checking out!
May 17, 2010, update: We were assigned to write a portrait of a bedroom for English and this is what I came up with. It’s hard with this kind of thing to walk the line between painfully boring and Gossip Girl dramatic and I guess I decided to err on the side of the drama. Looking back I wish that I had taken the challenge of making a boring room interesting, but too late now.
The window bangs open against the wall behind it, letting in a gust of wind which swirls through the room, ripping a few old newspaper clippings from their places on the wall. The wind subsides and as it does the curtains fall back into place and the clippings come to rest under the bed, whose sheets and blankets are twisted and hanging off the side.The clock on the bedside table flashes 12:00, though the sky outside clearly indicates otherwise. One wall of the room is occupied by an enormous map of Canada with red, blue, and green pins peppering it. The lower left hand corner of the map curls up hiding Vancouver from view. The remaining space on that wall is taken up by a myriad of yellowing and torn newspaper clippings all seemingly completely random—sports scores from twenty years before, an earthquake in Chile, the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker showtimes, an interview with the author of a bestseller, stock market reports from every month since October of 2013, a story detailing the success of a movie released November 13th, 2009.
On the opposite wall above a cluttered desk, hangs a mirror whose face is turned to the wall. Flanking it, are two framed blueprints of what look like The Whitehouse and La Défense. Thrown carelessly across half the desk is a street map of London with a bold red line traced on it in Sharpie. A closer look shows that this line follows Downing Street. The rest of the desk is mess of old gum wrappers, broken pencils, crumpled bits of graph and lined paper, torn computer printouts, several calculators, and a toppled stack of newspapers in several languages. The topmost headline blares: Nuclear Bomb D—but the rest is covered by a long cold cup of coffee in a mug which reads World’s Best Dad on the side.
The desk chair is not in its place before the desk, but instead leans haphazardly against the opposite wall, a crumpled black rain jacket on its seat. Lying beneath one of the chair’s wheels is an eighteen month calendar open to April. Every day before Monday the 27th has a neat black X through it, while the 27th bears a hurried squiggle. A note sticks out from between the pages of a paperback novel which lies face down upon the first week of April.
I don’t normally play online games, but I came across this one a few days ago and was struck by its animation and appearance. It’s called Machinarium and centers around a little robot. It’s really quite fun! And (bonus!) it’s not one of those insane, mindless ‘shoot everything that moves’ games. Rather, it’s a ‘point and click’ adventure whose story line involves a series of what I’ll loosely term ‘riddles’. I’m just sad the entire thing isn’t free—I’d like to play more than the small free demo. Anyway, it’s worth checking out!
