Saturday 19 December 1998
Pic of the day: Office, my chaos node away from home.
Went to town today. Looked at the people for a while, and
then to the office for a couple of hours. But before that,
I bought "Knights and Merchants", a strategy game by Interactive
Magic. It is a rather unashamed clone of Bluebyte's Settlers
series (the first of which is known in the US, I think, as
"Serf City", which probably counts for its relative anonymity).
K&M isn't up in the same class as Settlers III with regards to
game options or, for that matter, graphics. And it does only
support two screen resolutions, 800x600 and 1024x768. Whereas
the only one supported by my system is 640x480. On the other
hand, Settlers III never made it as far as into the game proper
before hanging up on my machine, whereas K&M can be played, sort
of, on part of the monitor, while looking very closely. :)
But I suspect the part of it I'm going to use most is the medieval
style music tracks on the CD, which can be accessed just like an
audio CD.
Bought myself a traditional Norwegian yuletide dinner. It consisted
of muscle tissue from innocent animals, artificially decomposed to
various degrees of anonymity by mechanical destruction and cooking,
served with cabbage (also heavily destroyed) and cooked potatoes,
all covered with a fat brown sauce.
This is what it looked like and also how it tasted. I managed to eat
most of it, though I gave up on the most identifiable muscles.
It wasn't like the idealized memories I had of it. Obviously I
have changed during the later years.
(I'm not arguing that it's morally wrong to eat higher animals, or that
it's not healthy in moderate quantities. I'm just disgusted when the
food is left in a corpselike state so that I can't look at it without
thinking "this could have been me". And I don't find the taste of meat
appealing in itself, either. Tastes obviously vary.)
As for the office, I guess the picture almost speaks for itself.
Probably no one will be surprised to learn that this particular
workplace is mine...
Oh, and paid rent for January. I know I'm going to spend more money than
I have this Christmas too, but this should help some. I still have enough
left to buy a few clothes, if need be, and perhaps some small piece of
jewelry, if there is any demand for that.
Visit the Diary Farm for the diaries I've put out to pasture until they
buy the farm:
November 1998