Resistance Is Character-Forming - posted by Cargo Cult on Thursday April 4 2013

Already posted over on the other blog, but ... personal hero Iain Banks has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He's likely got less than a year, perhaps just months to live. I learned of this last night, in a typically matter-of-fact, no-holds barred statement brought up by my RSS news reader.

I discovered his science fiction books while not having an especially fun time in life - the sheer escapism, pitch-black humour and leftist sensibilities helping me rebuild my mind into something much sturdier. I promptly devoured everything that Iain M. Banks had written, then started picking at Iain Banks' oeuvre, eager for more.

He's someone I've never met, and likely never will - but I've spent about thirteen years exploring and inhabiting worlds of his devising. And to learn that there's a door now permanently closing is ... painful.

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Minerva - where is she now? - posted by Cargo Cult on Tuesday December 4 2012

You might think you could find useful information in this 'ere brand-new interview on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but the truth is - she's all around us.

Edit 2012-12-06: second part of the interview is up!

Witness.

Our transport networks are now hers to control. via fstanchina

She's abstracted whole streets from our cities, for her nefarious purposes. via Bob

Even New Zealand retail establishments are repurposed for reasons of high-energy-physics. via laura

Only operate this switch in the event of the Combine arrival. She is ready for them. via BenA

And finally, I never did find who placed this all-too-conveniently-named bike outside my front door in Brussels. I have my guesses. But wasn't she supposed to be fictitious?

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Five years - posted by Cargo Cult on Tuesday October 2 2012

Unbelievably, it's been five whole years since the final MINERVA: Metastasis was released. I've been up to a couple of things since then, none of which MINERVA - but I hate to leave plot points dangling forever.

As is traditional on such events, I went rummaging around in the archives and dug up some more documentation that could prove ... illuminating to the more astute amongst the Acolytes.

The first Acolyte of the Anniversary award potentially goes to Robert Yang for his port of Someplace Else to Black Mesa Source. Oh, by the way, Black Mesa was released! Blimey.

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Welcome to the world of ... yesterday? - posted by Cargo Cult on Monday June 18 2012

The particularly astute and/or observant amongst you may have noticed the forum got disabled comparatively recently (hah!) - due to an outbreak of spammers somehow getting past my hacked-in ReCAPTCHA support. I've finally got round to re-enabling it again - this time with logins and registrations completely disabled. So much so that the appropriate files got deleted.

For any would-be digital archaeologists, go enjoy wading through long-forgotten plot speculation, flame-wars and suchlike here.

If you do somehow succeed in logging in, well done. phpBB doesn't seem to have an official way of disabling logins, so I just hacked away at it until logins no longer worked...

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Welcome to the world of tomorrow! - posted by Cargo Cult on Saturday June 2 2012

Essentially, if you liked my Google Reader interesting things feed but were annoyed by (or weren't aware of) Google removing my ability to add things to it, you may be interested in the gloriously progressive BaaBaa-BlogSheep™ v2.0.

Featuring things! And other things! And perhaps yet more things!

I'll probably occasionally update v1.0 with particularly game-related whatsits, but future tedious blogging activity shall be directed towards the entirely* new blog-beast. Wonders shall truly never cease.

Before anyone asks, no, I still haven't got round to writing a password retrieval thingy for user accounts. I'll do it one day, honest!

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